organization:natural resources defense council

$87 million Flint water line settlement announced - World Socialist Web Site
▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/03/31/flin-m31.html

$87 million Flint water line settlement announced
By James Brewer
31 March 2017

In what the media is hailing as a “victory for Flint residents,” a federal judge approved a settlement Tuesday in which the state of Michigan will pay $87 million for replacing service lines in the city over the next three years. An additional $10 million is to be held in reserve for “unexpected costs.”

The lawsuit that led to the settlement was brought against the State of Michigan by several groups, including Concerned Pastors for Social Action, Natural Resources Defense Council, American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and Flint resident Melissa Mays, who heads the local activist group Water You Fighting For.

US District Judge David Lawson, who presided over the settlement, gave the following characterization. “In my view the settlement agreement is fair, adequate, reasonable and consistent with the public interest and it furthers the objectives of the safe water drinking act [sic].” The federal Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) establishes the standards for public drinking water supplies throughout the US. Lawson made a point of praising Michigan Governor Rick Snyder—who is responsible for the disaster in Flint—saying that without his cooperation the settlement would not have been possible.

#eau #flint #Pollution #environnement #états-unis

Still waters: U.S. to crack down on ocean noise that harms fish | Reuters
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-environment-noise-idUSKCN10A0CN

The ocean has gotten noisier for decades, with man-made racket from oil drilling, shipping and construction linked to signs of stress in marine life that include beached whales and baby crabs with scrambled navigational signals.

The United States aims to change that as a federal agency prepares a plan that could force reductions in noise-making activities, including oil exploration, dredging and shipping off the nation’s coast.

Réactions balancées (hum !)…

The NOAA proposal has critics on the left and right.

Michael Jasny, a marine noise expert at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said NOAA’s effort was a step forward from its current tactic of muffling noisy machinery.

“Current efforts are like trying to control air pollution by putting a fence around a smokestack,” he said.

The draft strategy has raised concern in the oil industry.

Andy Radford, a senior policy adviser for the American Petroleum Institute, said there was no science to support the idea of harm from the cumulative effects of underwater noise.

“We think it (is) unrealistic to try to return the seas to their prehuman condition,” he said.

Virginia, Ground Zero in Drilling Debate, to Learn Its Fate Soon - Bloomberg Politics
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-14/virginia-ground-zero-in-drilling-debate-to-learn-its-fate-soon

http://assets.bwbx.io/images/iQ0gHKp3D1bQ/v2/-1x-1.jpg

From the shores of Savannah, Georgia, to the Beaufort, North Carolina beachfront, coastal communities in conservative southern states have locked arms in opposition to oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic waters lapping their shores.

A different story is playing out in Virginia, where Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe and both Democratic U.S. senators support nearby drilling which they say could deliver jobs, new business, and money to the state.

“Virginia is the battleground state,” said Athan Manuel, director of the lands protection program at the Sierra Club.

The Obama administration opened the door to a new generation of offshore drilling along the East Coast in 2015, when it released a draft plan for selling oil and gas leases in 104 million acres of the mid- and south-Atlantic. Now, as the administration prepares to release the next version of its 2017-2022 leasing proposal, the penultimate step before finalizing it later this year, a big question is whether Virginia’s coastline will remain up for grabs.

The answer could come as soon as this week.

The stakes are huge for Royal Dutch Shell Plc, BP Plc, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and other companies whose U.S. offshore activity is largely confined to the Gulf of Mexico. The Interior Department has estimated that 3.3 billion barrels of oil and 31.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas could be recovered from the Atlantic outer continental shelf, based on data from the 1970s and 1980s, when energy companies drilled 51 wells off the U.S. East Coast.
[…]
For Obama, the issue is tied to his environmental legacy, following a historic climate accord struck in Paris in December, a rule slashing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, and a halt in leasing coal on public land. “There is no way that opening these areas is going to be seen as anything other than a contradiction” of the president’s climate goals, said Franz Matzner, a senior adviser with the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund.

“If you open these offshore areas up for oil drilling, it’s telegraphing that you really don’t believe in our ability to achieve our climate goals,” Matzner said in an interview. “You’re saying in 20 or 30 years we will still be so stuck on fossil fuels that we can’t afford to take this oil off the table. If we can’t say no here, then we are in deep trouble.”

“Zombie” Servers and Inefficiency Drive Energy Waste at Data Centers
▻http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/08/140826-nrdc-data-center-energy-waste

The high energy demand of those servers is well documented, but up to 30 percent of them are drawing power without actually doing anything.

These “zombie,” or comatose, servers are among the examples of energy waste documented in a report about U.S. data centers released Tuesday by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). If those facilities were to cut electricity consumption by 40 percent—half of what is possible using the tools now available to improve efficiency—the electricity savings would amount to $3.8 billion and 39 billion kilowatt-hours, according to the report.

(...) Large companies such as Google, Facebook, eBay, and Microsoft are already highly efficient, a result of major resources and huge scale, but their share of electricity use is just 5 percent of total data center consumption in the United States.

“Our concern is more about the other 95 percent”

#énergie #datacenters #zombies

#FDA SEEKS TOUGHER RULES ON ANTIBACTERIAL SOAPS
▻http://bigstory.ap.org/article/fda-says-germ-killing-soap-could-pose-health-risks

Mieux vaut tard que jamais,

The FDA proposal comes more than 40 years after the agency was first tasked with evaluating #triclosan, #triclocarban and similar ingredients. Ultimately, the government only agreed to publish its findings after a three-year legal battle with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that accused the FDA of delaying action on triclosan. The chemical is found in an estimated 75 percent of antibacterial liquid soaps and body washes sold in the U.S., including some brands of Dial from Henkel AG & Co., one of the nation’s largest soap makers.

While the FDA ruling only applies to liquid hygiene cleaners, it has implications for a broader $1 billion industry that includes thousands of antibacterial products, including kitchen knives, toys, pacifiers and toothpaste. Over the last 20 years, companies have added triclosan and other cleaners to thousands of household products, touting their germ-killing benefits.

The FDA was tasked with confirming those benefits in 1972, as part of a law designed to set guidelines for dozens of common antibacterial cleaners. But the guidelines got bogged down in years of regulatory delays and missed deadlines. The agency published a preliminary draft of its findings in 1978, but never finalized the results until Monday.

...

Most of the research surrounding triclosan’s safety involves laboratory animals, including studies in rats that showed changes in testosterone, estrogen and thyroid hormones. Some scientists worry that such changes in humans could raise the risk of infertility, early puberty and even cancer.

FDA scientists stressed Monday that such studies are not necessarily applicable to humans, but the agency is reviewing their implications.

“We recognize that these are laboratory tests, and the challenge is to understand what they actually mean for effects on humans,” Kweder told journalists on a press call. She noted that the government’s National Toxicology Program is already studying whether daily skin exposure to hormone-altering chemicals could lead to cancer.

Other experts are concerned that routine use of antibacterial chemicals such as triclosan is contributing to a surge in drug-resistant germs, or superbugs, that render antibiotics ineffective.

In March 2010, the European Union banned the chemical from all products that come into contact with food, such as containers and silverware.

A spokesman for the American Cleaning Institute, a soap and cleaning product trade organization, did not respond to the FDA’s findings. The group represents manufacturers including #Henkel, #Unilever, #Colgate-Palmolive Co. and #Dow_Chemical_Co.

Business: Social costs of electricity from coal make it uneconomical, researchers assert — Wednesday, September 18, 2013 — www.eenews.net
▻http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059987412

the cost of producing electricity from renewable resources like wind and solar is lower than that of conventional coal-fired generation when factoring for the adverse costs of climate change and human health impacts.

That conclusion, derived from analysis on the “social cost of carbon,” is at the heart of a study published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences by Laurie Johnson, chief economist of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate and Clean Air Program, Starla Yeh of NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation, and Chris Hope of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

“Burning coal is a very costly way to make electricity,” Johnson said in a statement announcing the research findings. “And yet, there are no federal limits on the amount of carbon pollution our power plants may release. That’s wrong. It doesn’t make sense. It’s putting our future at risk.”

#énergie #santé #électricité