pollution

Slashing prices, offensive festivals and nuclear Harvey + this day in history w/Lenin shot and our song of the day by Warm Digits on your Morning Monarchy for August 30, 2017.

About 90% of all lung cancers are caused by cigarette smoking. Smoking kills 7 million people a year, speeds aging, destroys the heart and cardiovascular system, and leads to asthma and COPD. But cigarettes don’t just wreak havoc on the human body; they also wreak havoc on the environment through deforestation, pollution, and littering. [1] [2]

The news is awash with fire and brimstone warnings about plastic pollution, both on land and at sea. To help battle back against the trillions of pieces of plastic littering the planet, the National Park Service put a policy in place in 2011 encouraging national parks to end the sale of bottled water. It wasn’t an outright ban, but 23 out of 417 national parks went on to restrict bottled water sales. In mid-August 2017, the Trump Administration reversed the Obama-era policy.

Fracking giant Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. is suing Dimock, Pennsylvania resident Ray Kemble and his attorneys for $5 million after Kemble accused the gas driller of polluting residential wells in Pennsylvania. Cabot alleges that Kemble and his lawyers extorted the company through a “frivolous” lawsuit. [1]

A new study in Translational Psychiatry suggests that women who are exposed to air heavily polluted by vehicle exhaust and other sources of fine particulate matter have a significantly higher risk of developing dementia.

Ever since the dangerous consequences of natural gas extraction via hydraulic fracturing – popularly known as “fracking” — entered the national consciousness, the small town of Dimock, Pennsylvania has arguably been “ground zero” for water contamination caused by the controversial practice.

WOLFFORTH, Texas – As many as 63 million people – nearly a fifth of the country – from rural central California to the boroughs of New York City, were exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once during the past decade, according to a News21 investigation of 680,000 water quality and monitoring violations from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Living in a rural area has a multitude of benefits – cleaner air, less noise, and more relaxing surroundings, just to name a few. If you’re fighting cancer from a rural area of the country, your location may also boost your odds of survival quite significantly, research shows (though it may be because of the type of general practitioners (GPs) you’re more likely to find in the country).

In 1950, plastic was a rarity. Today, plastic is everywhere – in our homes, cars, streets, landfills, and oceans. Scientists recently calculated how much plastic humans have produced since that year, and the conclusion is mind-boggling: 9 billion tons, or 8.3 billion metric tons. [1]

Scientists from Scripps Oceanography say in a new report that tuna caught in industrialized areas of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans contains 36 times more pollutants than tuna caught in remote parts of the West Pacific. [1]