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The BREATHE Act would defund police — and fund environmental justice

As the U.S. enters another month of sustained protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality, organizers are working to turn the protests’ energy into legislative action. This week the Movement for Black Lives, a nationwide coalition of Black organizations formed in December 2014, released a summary of a new legislative proposal that aims to defund police police forces around the country and give funding and support to Black communities looking to create their own models of public safety. They’re calling it the BREATHE Act.

“We crafted this bill to be big,” said Gina Clayton Johnson, the executive director of Essie Justice Group and one of the act’s creators, during a virtual announcement event reported by New York Magazine’s The Cut. “We know the solution has to be as big as the 400-year-old problem itself.”

The proposal is divided into four sections that each address different approaches to sustainable public safety: The first two sections call for the divestment of federal resources from policing and incarceration, as well as federal grant programs for alternative community-led approaches to non-punitive public safety.

The proposal’s third section, however, demonstrates that environmental justice is central to the proposal’s vision. It calls for the creation of a grant that will fund solutions for environmental justice issues that affect Black communities around the country. The grant would fund “clear, time-bound plans” for states to ensure universal access to clean water and air that satisfies Environmental Protection Agency guidelines. The section also calls for for the creation of clear state plans to meet 100 percent of their electricity demand with “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” Funding for community-owned sustainable energy projects would be subsidized by the grant. Disaster preparedness would also be prioritized.

Environmental justice often intersects with other public health issues for Black and brown communities. In recent months, for example, it’s become clear that Black and Latino communities in the U.S. suffer higher mortality and hospitalization rates from the novel coronavirus. This May, Democrats in Congress introduced the Environmental Justice COVID-19 Act to look at the connection between air pollution and disproportionate COVID-19 outcomes for these communities.

The BREATHE Act has not yet been translated into actionable congressional legislation, but Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley both expressed their support for the proposal during a virtual meeting this week.

“The BREATHE Act is bold…. It pushes us to reimagine power structures and what community investment really looks like,” Tlaib said during a recent call with activists. “We can start to envision through this bill a new vision for public safety. One that protects and affirms Black lives.”

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The BREATHE Act would defund police — and fund environmental justice

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The Book of the Moon – Maggie Aderin-Pocock

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The Book of the Moon

A Guide to Our Closest Neighbor

Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: April 9, 2019

Publisher: ABRAMS

Seller: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.


Have you ever wondered if there are seasons on the moon or if space tourism will ever become commonplace? So has Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock. In fact, she earned her nickname “Lunatic” because of her deep fascination for all things lunar. In her lucidly written, comprehensive guide to the moon, Aderin-Pocock takes readers on a journey to our closest celestial neighbor, exploring folklore, facts, and future plans.         She begins with the basics, unpacking everything from the moon’s topography and composition to its formation and orbit around the Earth. She travels back in time to track humanity’s relationship with the moon — beliefs held by ancient civilizations, the technology that allowed for the first moon landing, a brief history of moongazing, and how the moon has influenced culture throughout the years — and then to the future, analyzing the pros and cons of continued space travel and exploration. Throughout the book are sidebars, graphs, and charts to enhance the facts as well as black-and-white illustrations of the moon and stars.  The Book of the Moon  will be published for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

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The Book of the Moon – Maggie Aderin-Pocock

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Here’s how coronavirus affected carbon emissions in every state

The pandemic is far from over, but some states are opening back up again, creating a situation where life is going back to some semblance of normal in some areas of the United States and staying eerily quiet in other places. A new analysis in the science journal Nature Climate Change sheds light on what happened to emissions during the months when the U.S. was maximally locked down.

Previous estimates of emissions reductions due to COVID-19 said the pandemic would take an 8 percent bite out of global emissions this year. This study, published Tuesday, is the first to analyze and quantify emissions drops on a day-to-day basis across 69 countries and state by state in the United States.

It found that the world is on track for the biggest emissions drop since World War II, or maybe even the biggest drop in history, depending on how long global lockdowns stay in place. (The study estimates that by the end of the year emissions could decline anywhere between 2 to 13 percent overall, depending on the nature and duration of governments’ lockdown policies.) During the peak of global lockdowns in early April, average daily emissions decreased by 17 percent compared to the 2019 average, hitting their lowest point since 2006. Nearly half of those emissions were from “surface transport,” like car rides.

In the U.S., emissions dropped by about a third for a couple of weeks in April, a development that Robert Jackson, a co-author of the study and a Guggenheim fellow at Stanford University, told Grist was “absolutely unprecedented.” On a national level, emissions decreased by about a quarter on average during each country’s peak of confinement.

Jackson and his fellow researchers created a “confinement index” to describe how locked down 69 countries were between the months of January and April according to three levels of confinement ranging from broad travel restrictions to “policies that substantially restrict the daily routine of all but key workers.” By examining six economic sectors — aviation, electricity, transportation, public buildings and commerce, residential, and industry — the study’s authors were able to determine to what extent economic activity, and the carbon dioxide emissions that accompany it, slowed as a result of which lockdown measures. The 69 countries they analyzed represent 97 percent of global CO2 emissions.

In the U.S., the study showed some major differences between states’ daily maximum emissions reductions. Washington state, for example, saw a more than 40 percent drop in emissions during its peak confinement, whereas the pandemic swallowed up just under 18 percent of Iowa’s emissions during its peak. Jackson says there’s a fairly straightforward reason why some states saw such big emissions deficits. “In general, states that are more rural acted much more slowly than states with big cities,” he said. In a few months’ time, those differences between states could deepen even more as the easing of lockdown restrictions in some states spur an increase in emissions.

Clayton Aldern / Grist

For the most part, the emissions decline will only last as long as the lockdowns. “Previous crises have not dented emissions very much,” he said, referencing the 2008 financial crash that decreased emissions globally by 1.5 percent for a year. By 2010, emissions had come roaring back, increasing 5 percent globally. “We’re forcing people to stay at home,” Jackson said. “That won’t last. If they hop back in their cars and consume at the same levels things will go back to normal.”

But Jackson says the pandemic has provided an opportunity for people to rethink transportation, at the very least. Sitting in an hour of traffic to get to work doesn’t sound super appealing after months of commuting 30 seconds to the dining room table. “That could jolt us into a longer-term drop in emissions,” he said.

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Here’s how coronavirus affected carbon emissions in every state

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Can’t eat gluten? Pesticides and nonstick pans might have something to do with it, study says

It seems like everyone knows someone with a sensitivity to gluten — a protein mixture found in cereal grains, like wheat and barley. A third of all Americans say they avoid products with gluten in them, and grocery store shelves are overflowing with gluten-free products that didn’t exist a decade ago.

For roughly 1 percent of the planet’s population, eating gluten triggers a genetic immune response called celiac disease that has wide-ranging consequences. The disease’s symptoms range from mild, like diarrhea, fatigue, gas, to severe. Think nausea and vomiting, osteoporosis, infertility, neurological problems, and even the development of other autoimmune diseases.

The root causes of celiac disease have largely stumped epidemiologists. But a study out Tuesday by researchers from New York University establishes a link between the disease and two groups of manmade chemicals: pesticides and a compound known as PFAS, which is often found in products around the house. It might help explain why some people who are susceptible to celiac disease end up developing it when others don’t. The researchers analyzed the levels of toxic chemicals in the blood of 90 children, 30 of whom had recently been diagnosed celiac. They found that those with high levels of pesticides in their blood were twice as likely to develop the disease.

“Our study establishes the first measurable tie-in between environmental exposure to toxic chemicals and celiac disease,” Jeremiah Levine, a coauthor and a professor of pediatrics at NYU Langone Medical Center, said.

Ben Lebwohl, director of clinical research at Columbia University’s Celiac Disease Center, said the results should be treated with caution. “There are a number of limitations that prevent us from drawing sweeping conclusions,” he said in an email to colleagues on Tuesday. He pointed out that the study only looked at children who had already been diagnosed with celiac. “Children who get diagnosed are likely different in important ways related to health care utilization and socioeconomics, which may be associated with these pollutant levels.”

But Lebwohl said the research added to a growing body of work that suggest that environmental factors increase the risk of gluten intolerance. The study, he said, “mandates follow-up work.”

Levine and the other researchers also tested for toxic chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances found in nonstick cookware and fire retardant and have been linked to multiple types of cancer and other harmful diseases. The study was conducted on subjects under the age of 21 because children and young adults are uniquely vulnerable to chemicals that may disrupt immune function.

They uncovered some surprising results. Young females exposed to higher-than-normal levels of non-stick chemicals like PFAs were five to 9 times more likely to have the disease than children exposed to lower concentrations of those chemicals (women make up a majority of celiac cases worldwide). Young males with elevated blood levels of fire-retardant chemicals were twice as likely to be diagnosed with celiac compared to children with lower levels of fire retardants in their blood.

Some of the chemicals have been out of commission for years. “We found that kids were susceptible across the board to a particular pesticide that had already been phased out of most uses,” Leonardo Trasande, a co-author of the study and a professor of environmental medicine at NYU, told Grist. “That speaks to the fact that we have legacy effects of synthetic chemicals that were used decades ago.”

Trasande said more research and a larger sample size is needed to determine whether those chemicals directly cause the disease and whether they’re linked to other autoimmune disorders. But the study lends more support to those calling for stricter regulation of toxic chemicals and pesticides.

“We do need a more rigorous structure for regulating these chemicals in the first place,” Trasande said.

In the meantime, he suggests a few steps to help reduce exposure at home: Open the windows and use a wet mop to collect organic pollutant dust from furniture and electronics that might still carry flame retardants. Avoid using non-stick pots and pans. Trasande suggests replacing them with cast iron or steel. And finally, avoid athletic wear that’s over-treated with chemicals. “You don’t really need oil-resistance in athletic materials,” he said, “you just need to repel sweat.”

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Can’t eat gluten? Pesticides and nonstick pans might have something to do with it, study says

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Science Matters – Robert M. Hazen & James Trefil

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Science Matters

Achieving Scientific Literacy

Robert M. Hazen & James Trefil

Genre: Reference

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: December 1, 1990

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Knowledge of the basic ideas and principles of science is fundamental to cultural literacy. But most books on science are often too obscure or too specialized to do the general reader much good. Science Matters is a rare exception-a science book for the general reader that is informative enough to be a popular textbook for introductory courses in high school and college, and yet well-written enough to appeal to general readers uncomfortable with scientific jargon and complicated mathematics. And now, revised and expanded for the first time in nearly two decades, it is up-to-date, so that readers can enjoy Hazen and Trefil's refreshingly accessible explanations of the most recent developments in science, from particle physics to biotechnology.

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Science Matters – Robert M. Hazen & James Trefil

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Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose – Deirdre Barrett

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Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose

Deirdre Barrett

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: February 22, 2010

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


How our once-helpful instincts got hijacked by our garish modern world. Have you ever wondered why some men choose pornography over actual women? Why so many people watch Friends instead of going out with their own buddies? Why a person would “feed” a plastic Pocket Pet while shirking real duties? Why both sides of every war see the other as the aggressor against whom their “Department of Defense” must respond? Harvard evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett explains how human instincts—for food, sex, or territorial protection—developed for life on the savannah ten thousand years ago, not for today’s world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. Evolution, quite simply, has been unable to keep pace with the rapid changes of modern life. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects—from candy to pornography to atomic bombs—that gratify outmoded but persistent drives with dangerous results. In the 1930s Dutch Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen found that birds that lay small, pale-blue eggs speckled with gray preferred to sit on giant, bright-blue, plaster dummies with black polka dots. He coined the term “supernormal stimuli” to describe these imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and, oddly, exert a stronger attraction than real things. Obviously these hard-wired preferences pose a danger to a species’ survival. Barrett’s singular insight is to apply this phenomenon for the first time to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment. Her book adroitly demonstrates how supernormal stimuli are a driving force in many of today’s most pressing problems, including obesity, our addiction to television and video games, and the past century’s extraordinarily violent wars. Man-made imitations, it turns out, have wreaked havoc on how we nurture our children, what food we put into our bodies, how we make love and war, and even how we understand ourselves. Barrett does more than pull the fire alarm to show how these unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. There is a hopeful message here as well. Once we recognize how supernormal stimuli operate, we can craft new approaches to modern predicaments. Humans have one stupendous advantage over Tinbergen’s birds: a giant brain. The message of this book is that this gives us the unique ability to exercise self-control, override instincts that lead us astray, and save ourselves from civilization’s gaudy traps.

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Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose – Deirdre Barrett

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Amazon climate strikers demand stronger coronavirus protections for warehouse workers

The country is grinding to a halt, but Amazon warehouses are still churning out packages at a breakneck pace. Amazon employees at 19 different facilities have been hit by the virus. Workers in fulfillment centers and warehouses have been asked to follow new safety protocols, but masks and other protective equipment are in short supply, and the cramped nature of many of those facilities don’t allow for effective social distancing.

Despite all this, the tech giant owned by the richest man on Earth is only offering paid sick leave to employees who have been put into quarantine or have tested positive for coronavirus. Amazon is in the process of hiring 100,000 new employees to keep up with a surge in demand from Americans ordering stuff from the confines of their homes. To raise awareness about unfair working conditions for the company’s frontline workers, Amazon warehouse employees are organizing strikes and protests. “How can we be essential workers when our lives are not essential?” an Amazon employee at a facility in Chicago said in a video on Monday.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has responded to a global crisis with measures its employees deem inadequate. A group of tech employees within the company came together last year to put pressure on Amazon leadership to adopt a more aggressive plan to reduce the company’s carbon footprint and end web service contracts with oil and gas companies. When Jeff Bezos unveiled a plan to reach the goals of the Paris climate agreement 10 years early, employees with the group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, publicly criticized the CEO for not being aggressive enough, risking their jobs in the process.

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Now, some of those same employees are speaking out in support of the workers on strike. In a letter on Medium, the Amazon climate group drew parallels between the two global disasters. “This pandemic — like the climate crisis — stresses our society, its systems, and institutions. Both crises threaten everybody, but not equally,” the letter said.

“Climate Justice demands that we no longer view Earth and our fellow human beings as expendable resources to be exploited for the gain of a few,” said Maren Costa, a principal user experience designer at Amazon, in a separate statement.

The show of solidarity is a prime example of how the climate movement can uplift wider efforts to achieve justice for blue-collar Americans. Green groups have overlooked working-class people, especially minorities, in the past. That’s due in no small part to the fact that the environmentalism movement has historically had some racist strains. But lately, traditional green groups and justice organizations have been coming together more often to advocate for a more inclusive climate agenda. The momentum for a Green New Deal, an idea popularized by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is evidence of that progress (though even that initiative caused some friction between climate and labor advocates).

As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 5,000 Amazon corporate and tech workers had signed an open letter to Bezos calling for better protections for workers. They’re demanding paid sick leave regardless of COVID-19 diagnosis, childcare pay and subsidies for affected workers, hazard pay, and other measures. “While Amazon has made some limited coronavirus accommodations, it needs a comprehensive plan to ensure the safety of all of its workers and the larger public,” the letter said. Solidarity; you love to see it.

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Amazon climate strikers demand stronger coronavirus protections for warehouse workers

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Science dishes out an answer on the old handwashing vs. dishwasher debate

In my family of origin, there’s a parent who prefers to put all the dishes in the dishwasher and a parent who prefers to do everything by hand. (It just so happens that the parent who likes doing dishes manually is the one who’s worse at cleaning and therefore leaves a light grease sheen on dishes, but that’s neither here nor there.) We all have our own method for getting through what is objectively one of the worst household chores. But which method is best for the environment?

A new study in the journal Environmental Research Communications sheds light on the most energy and water-efficient way to do the dishes. It’s worth noting up front that the study was partially funded by Whirlpool, an appliance manufacturer, and the research was conducted in a “Whirlpool lab” of 38 Whirlpool employees, who were asked to manually wash dishes and load a dishwasher. (It seems safe to assume these employees probably load a dishwasher better than the average American). But the analysis was carried out by independent researchers at the University of Michigan, who also tested the conclusions of previous studies that found dishwashers were more efficient than manual washing.

They found that team “just put it in the dishwasher” is mostly right. In a majority of cases, using a new-ish dishwasher is more efficient than traditional hand-washing techniques. The main problems with dishwashers, the study shows, are pre-rinsing and heated drying. Eliminating those two steps from your dish-washing routine decreases the appliance’s greenhouse gas emissions by 3 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

According to the study, team “just do them by hand” is mostly wrong and should probably start loading the dishwasher more often. Typical manual washing, the kind of washing where you mostly leave the water running as you clean (sound familiar?), produced 5,620 kilograms of greenhouse gases over a 10-year period of washing 32 place settings per week. (The greenhouse gases associated with hand-washing dishes primarily come from the energy it takes to heat the water.) A dishwasher emitted 2,090 kilograms of emissions over the same period with typical use — less than half as much.

When it comes to water use, the difference between manual and machine practices was even starker: Hand-washers used 34,200 gallons of water to a dishwasher’s 16,300 gallons over 10 years. In short, a dishwasher that’s being used correctly emits 63 percent fewer emissions in its entire lifecycle — including manufacturing and disposal — than a typical sink.

However, there’s a silver lining for resource-savvy hand-washers. If you happen to have a two-basin sink, filling one basin with hot water and the other with cool water, and then soaking and scrubbing your dishes in the first and rinsing them in the second — and then letting them air-dry — was the least energy-intensive method out of all the techniques the researchers tested. The two-basin method only produces 1,610 kilograms of emissions over 10 years. Adopting this technique leads to a 249 percent reduction in emissions for people who wash dishes manually.

Still, 1,610 kilograms isn’t that much lower than the 1,960 kilograms a dishwasher produces when it’s being used right (i.e., without pre-rinsing and heated drying). More importantly, 80 percent of Americans own a dishwasher but 20 percent of us report using these appliances less than once a week. Why go through all the trouble and expense of buying a dishwasher if you’re just going to hand-wash your dishes? Dad, are you reading this?

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Science dishes out an answer on the old handwashing vs. dishwasher debate

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The report card is in: Green orgs are improving staff diversity, but still don’t reflect America

People of color are on the frontlines of the climate crisis: They live in areas disproportionately impacted by pollution, deadly heat waves, and extreme storms. So it stands to reason that the staffers and leaders of major environmental organizations should reflect the demographics of the communities most relevant to their work.

The Green 2.0 initiative, which was launched in 2013 to promote racial and gender diversity in the environmental movement, released its third annual diversity report card for the top 40 major non-governmental organizations and foundations on Wednesday. For the first time in its short history, the report brought good news: an overall increase in people of color and women on staff and boards of directors since Green 2.0 started collecting and releasing data in 2017.

According to the report, each green organization that provided data added 11 people of color to its staff between 2017 and 2019, on average. As for senior staffers, each organization added an average of two people of color to its upper ranks, while the number of women on senior staff remained unchanged over the same two-year period. (Overall, people of color constitute close to 30 percent of organizational staff; women constitute about 64 percent.) Each organization also added, on average, one woman and one person of color to its board. These improvements were determined to be statistically significant — though the numbers do exclude one unnamed outlier that skewed the results in a different direction.

Whitney Tome, the executive director of Green 2.0, said in a press call that the organization is “cautiously optimistic” after reviewing the findings. “We want the trend to continue and we want it to accelerate, so that it can match the racial demographics of the country,” she said.

Tome also highlighted the importance of further improvements to board composition. “When it comes to membership of the board, it is critically important that people of color sit on that stage,” Tome said. “The board needs to be as diverse as the country to ensure that its next leaders are people of color.”

For three years, Green 2.0 has surveyed the top 40 environmental NGOs and top 40 foundations across the country. NGOs were generally more active and willing to share their data than foundations. In fact, the participation rate among the top 40 NGOs increased from 82.5 percent to 90 percent between 2017 and 2019. Green 2.0 specifically called out the Pew Charitable Trusts, one of largest nonprofits with a mission to improve public policy by collecting data for research, for declining to participate in the survey multiple times. “It’s hypocritical,” Tome said in the press call.

Meanwhile, the participation rate among foundations remains stagnant at 35 percent, making it difficult for Green 2.0 to provide a concrete set of trends on the demographic composition of foundations.

Foundations funnel money to push policies, grants, and other resources as part of the environmental movement, so diverse viewpoints among their staff members are leaders are of critical importance. Ironically, many foundations ask grantees for their own demographic data, Tome pointed out — but the foundations themselves are unwilling to disclose their own data to the public.

“We recognize the environmental movement hasn’t always been as attentive to frontline communities and communities of color throughout its history,” Tome said. “So we really want to continue to push and advocate for having people of color in those senior leadership places, and for them to hopefully have a tremendous impact in policies going forward.”

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The report card is in: Green orgs are improving staff diversity, but still don’t reflect America

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Antarctica’s glaciers are melting so fast, you can swim in them. In a Speedo.

Even as someone who spends most of her time thinking about climate change, it’s easy for me to forget about the looming danger of changes happening at the bottom of the earth. But Lewis Pugh, a British endurance swimmer and ocean advocate, doesn’t want anyone to forget about the melting glaciers of Antarctica, and to get our attention, he decided to go for a swim.

On January 23, Pugh, who’s 50, became the first person to swim in one of the supraglacial lakes of East Antarctica. These are lakes and rivers that form on the surface of thick glacial ice as it melts from above. A study of supraglacial lakes in Antarctica published last fall found more than 65,000 of them at the peak of the summer melt season in January 2017. Most of the lakes were spotted on the ice shelf, the part of the glacier that hangs over the ocean and is not grounded on the seafloor, making it more vulnerable to calving (i.e., falling off).

In nothing but a swim cap and a Speedo, Pugh dove into water that was just above 32 degrees F and swam for 10 minutes. As he navigated the channel, a chunk of ice cracked and sent an ominous “boom” through the water.

“I swam here today as we are in a climate emergency. We need immediate action from all nations to protect our planet,” Pugh told the BBC. The stunt was part of a larger campaign to create a marine protected area in East Antarctica.

Kelvin Trautman

Kelvin Trautman

Kelvin Trautman

Pugh’s icy swim wasn’t the only first near the South Pole this month. Across the continent, in West Antarctica, scientists deployed at the Thwaites Glacier made the first observations of a pool of warm water melting the ice from below. Scientists drilled through the ice right near the “grounding zone,” the boundary between the part of the glacier that’s resting on the seafloor and the part of it that extends over the open ocean, forming a shelf. They measured temperatures below the ice of more than 2 degrees F above the freezing point of the seawater.

“The fact that such warm water was just now recorded by our team along a section of Thwaites grounding zone where we have known the glacier is melting suggests that it may be undergoing an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea-level rise,” said David Holland, director of New York University’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in a press release.

The Thwaites Glacier, which is about the size of Florida, holds the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet together. The collapse of Thwaites alone could lead to about 3 feet of sea-level rise. If you, like me, don’t think about melting glaciers nearly enough, here’s a helpful tool from NOAA that will help you visualize what your neighborhood will look like if that happens.

In addition to the temperature measurement, scientists also sent a camera down to the grounding zone for the first time and captured footage of the ice melting from beneath. “There are a few places where you can see streams of particles coming off the glaciers, textures and particles that tell us it’s melting pretty quickly and irregularly,” Britney Schmidt, a glaciologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told the Atlantic.

Antarctica’s glaciers are melting from above and below, like a Popsicle that you just can’t lick fast enough to keep under control.

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Antarctica’s glaciers are melting so fast, you can swim in them. In a Speedo.

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