Une équipe de chercheurs de de l’Institut géologique américain a collecté des échantillons à plus de 700 endroits à travers le pays.

Près de la moitié de l’eau du robinet aux États-Unis contiendrait un ou plusieurs PFAS, connus sous le nom de “polluants éternels”, selon une étude relayée par CBS News.

L’U.S. Geological Survey a testé l’eau du robinet, entre 2016 et 2021, à la recherche de 32 substances perfluorées et polyfluoroalkylées différentes, dans 716 lieux à travers le pays, dont 269 puits privés et 447 sites d’approvisionnement publics. Résultat, des PFAS ont été détectés dans au moins 45 % des robinets.

Liés à certains cancers

“C’est la première fois que des chercheurs testent et comparent les niveaux de PFAS dans l’eau du robinet provenant de sources d’approvisionnement en eau privées et réglementées par le gouvernement”, relève CBS News.

Il existe plus de 12 000 types de PFAS, note la chaîne américaine. Ces “polluants éternels”, qui ont été largement utilisés pendant des décennies, persistent dans l’environnement pendant de longues périodes, d’où leur surnom. Les PFAS ont été associés à toute une série de problèmes de santé, y compris certaines formes de cancer.

Les recherches montrent que plus de 95 % des Américains ont des “niveaux détectables” de PFAS dans leur sang, rappelle CBS News.

World Opinions – CBS News

L’article Santé. Aux États-Unis, 45 % de l’eau des robinets contaminée aux PFAS, les “polluants éternels” est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

La communauté internationale s’est réunie en Uruguay cette semaine à l’occasion d’un sommet consacré à la pollution plastique. Le point sur ses enjeux dans la chronique “1 planète, des solutions”, réalisée par NOWU en partenariat avec France Info.

Le sommet de Punta del Este, lancé le 28 novembre en Uruguay et qui devrait se conclure ce vendredi, est le premier d’une série de réunions mondiales dédiées à la création du tout premier traité mondial de lutte contre la pollution plastique. L’ambition est d’aboutir à un texte contraignant d’ici fin 2024.

Pourquoi la pollution plastique est un problème majeur

Depuis sa généralisation au cours du XXe siècle, le plastique a envahi notre quotidien. Non-biodégradable, principalement fabriqué à partir de pétrole, il génère une énorme pollution : l’humanité produit chaque année 400 millions de tonnes de déchets plastiques, dont une part significative se retrouve dans l’océan. Il pourrait y avoir plus de plastique que de poissons dans l’océan selon un rapport du Forum économique mondial et de la Fondation Ellen MacArthur publié en 2016. 

Ces déchets plastiques ont un impact sur la faune sauvage, mais aussi sur l’Homme. Un adulte avalerait l’équivalent de 5 grammes de plastique chaque semaine via son alimentation, selon un rapport du WWF et de l’université de Newcastle publié en 2019. Des microparticules de plastique ont même été trouvées dans du sang et des poumons humains.

Quelles solutions contre la pollution plastique ?

Un premier levier d’action est de réduire son utilisation. Plus facile à dire qu’à faire, tant le plastique est absolument partout dans notre quotidien : vêtements, voiture, produits de beauté… Les emballages représentent, à eux seuls, un tiers de la production plastique mondiale.

Pour réduire ces emballages plastique, il existe des alternatives comme le vrac ou encore le système de consigne. “La consigne permet de changer de modèle économique, explique Diane Beaumenay-Joannet de l’association Surfrider Foundation Europe. On sort d’une économie linéaire, où on produit, on consomme, on jette, à une économie circulaire, où on produit, on consomme, on réutilise.”

“Ce type de système n’est pas simple à mettre en place. Il y a besoin d’un investissement important à la source pour pouvoir transformer toute la chaîne logistique : à la fois la livraison, l’approvisionnement, et la production de ces contenants réutilisables.”

Si le retour de la consigne ne se mettra pas en place d’un claquement de doigt, il serait cependant un atout majeur pour réduire le volume de déchets. Sa généralisation dans les cafés/hôtels/restaurants français permettrait d’économiser jusqu’à 500 000 tonnes de déchets d’emballage par an.

World Opinions – France info

L’article Pollution plastique : début des négociations pour un traité mondial est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

n every conflict over the living world, something is being protected. And most of the time, it’s the wrong thing.

The world’s most destructive industries are fiercely protected by governments. The three sectors that appear to be most responsible for the collapse of ecosystems and erasure of wildlife are fossil fuels, fisheries and farming. In 2021, governments directly subsidised oil and gas production to the tune of $64bn (£53bn), and spent a further $531bn (£443bn) on keeping fossil fuel prices low. The latest figures for fisheries, from 2018, suggest that global subsidies for the sector amount to $35bn a year, over 80% of which go to large-scale industrial fishing. Most are paid to “enhance capacity”: in other words to help the industry, as marine ecosystems collapse, catch more fish.

Every year, governments spend $500bn on farm subsidies, the great majority of which pay no regard to environmental protection. Even the payments that claim to do so often inflict more harm than good. For example, many of the European Union’s pillar two “green” subsidies sustain livestock farming on land that would be better used for ecological restoration. Over half the European farm budget is spent on propping up animal farming, which is arguably the world’s most ecologically destructive industry.

Pasture-fed meat production destroys five times as much forest as palm oil does. It now threatens some of the richest habitats on Earth, among which are forests in Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Myanmar. Meat production could swallow 3m square kilometres of the world’s most biodiverse places in 35 years. That’s almost the size of India. In Australia, 94% of the deforestation in the catchment area of the Great Barrier Reef – a major cause of coral loss – is associated with beef production. Yet most of these catastrophes are delivered with the help of public money.

The more destructive the business, the more likely it is to enjoy political protection. A study published this month claims that chicken factories being built in Herefordshire and Shropshire are likely to destroy far more jobs than they create, wrecking tourism through the river pollution, air pollution, smell and scenic blight they cause. But none of the planning applications for these factories has been obliged to provide an economic impact analysis. Planning officers, the paper found, are highly dismissive of the hospitality industry, treating it as “non-serious and trivial”. By comparison, the paper found, “attitudes to farming were very different; described as serious, ‘proper’ (male) work”. The “tough”, “masculine” industries driving Earth systems towards collapse are pampered and protected by governments, while less destructive sectors must fend for themselves.

While there is no shortage of public money for the destruction of life on Earth, budgets for its protection always fall short. According to the UN, $536bn a year will be needed to protect the living world – far less than the amount being paid to destroy it – yet almost all this funding is missing. Some has been promised, scarcely any has materialised. So much for public money for public goods.

The political protection of destructive industries is woven into the fabric of politics, not least because of the pollution paradox (“the more damaging the commercial enterprise, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it’s not regulated out of existence. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the most damaging commercial enterprises.”) Earth systems, by contrast, are treated as an afterthought, an ornament: nice to have, but dispensable when their protection conflicts with the necessity of extraction. In reality, the irreducible essential is a habitable planet.

In 2010, at a biodiversity summit in Nagoya, Japan, governments set themselves 20 goals, to be met by 2020. None has been achieved. As they prepare for the biodiversity Cop15 summit in Montreal next week, governments are investing not in the defence of the living world but in greenwash.

The headline objective is to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. But what governments mean by protection often bears little resemblance to what ecologists mean.

Take the UK, for example. On paper, it has one of the highest proportions of protected land in the rich world, at 28%. It could easily raise this proportion to 30% and claim to have fulfilled its obligations. But it is also one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. How can this be? Because most of our “protected” areas are nothing of the kind.

One analysis suggests that only 5% of our land meets the international definition of a protected area. Even these scraps are at risk, as scarcely anyone is left to enforce the law: the regulators have been stripped to the bone and beyond. At sea, most of our marine protected areas are nothing but lines on the map: trawlers still rip them apart.

All this is likely to become much worse. If the retained EU law bill goes ahead, the entire basis of legal protection in the UK could be torn down. Even by the standards of this government, the mindless vandalism involved is gobsmacking. To prove that Brexit means Brexit, 570 environmental laws must be deleted or replaced by the end of next year. There will be no public consultation, no scope for presenting evidence and, in all likelihood, no opportunity for parliamentary debate. It is logistically impossible to replace so much legislation in such a short period, so the most likely outcome is deletion. If so, it’s game over for rivers, soil, air quality, groundwater, wildlife and habitats in the UK, and game on for cheats and con artists. The whole country will, in effect, become a freeport.

Never underestimate the destructive instincts of the Conservative party, prepared to ruin everything for the sake of an idea. Never underestimate its appetite for chaos and dysfunction.

The protected industries driving us towards destruction will take everything if they are not checked. We face a brutal contest for control over land and sea: between those who seek to convert our life support systems into profit, and those who seek to defend, restore and, where possible, return them to the indigenous people dispossessed by capitalism’s fire front. These are never just technical or scientific issues. They cannot be resolved by management alone. They are deeply political. We can protect the living world or we can protect the companies destroying it. We cannot do both.

By George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist – theguardian.com

L’article Analysis. From the Amazon to Australia, why is your money funding Earth’s destruction est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Alors qu’une tribune appelle le gouvernement à améliorer la qualité de l’air dans les écoles, hôpitaux et maisons de retraite, où en est-on sur ce sujet aujourd’hui en France ? La chronique “1 planète, des solutions”, réalisée par NOWU en partenariat avec France Info, fait le point.

Déjà, une bonne nouvelle : la concentration de certains polluants (dioxyde de soufre, monoxyde de carbone, plomb…) dans l’air extérieur a diminué en France sur ces 20 dernières années. 

La pollution de l’air reste cependant un enjeu majeur, surtout en termes de santé. À l’échelle mondiale, 99% de la population respire un air qui dépasse le seuil de pollution maximale recommandé par l’Organisation Mondiale de la Santé. En France, elle est responsable de 48 000 décès prématurés chaque année et nous ferait perdre jusqu’à 2 ans d’espérance de vie.

Il ne suffit pas de partir à la campagne pour y échapper. Même hors des villes, la qualité de l’air est dégradée par d’autres sources de pollution, comme les épandages de pesticides.

Que faire pour améliorer la qualité de l’air ?

S’attaquer à la pollution de l’air implique de réorganiser les modes humains de production et de déplacement, qui sont aujourd’hui la source principale d’émissions de polluants.

Les villes peuvent agir en développant les transports en commun et le réseau cyclable par exemple (afin d’inciter les personnes à moins utiliser leurs voitures), en intégrant plus d’espaces verts, ou en créant des zones à faibles émissions (interdiction pour les véhicules les plus polluants d’accéder à certaines zones urbaines).

La “zone à très faible émission” créée en plein centre-ville de Londres en 2019 aurait ainsi permis de réduire les émissions de particules fines de 15% et les émissions d’oxydes d’azote de 35%.

Et chez soi ?

Un premier bon geste est d’éviter d’émettre soi-même des polluants. Donc par exemple en privilégiant la marche ou le vélo plutôt que la voiture pour les petits trajets, ou en s’abstenant de brûler ses déchets verts dans son jardin (c’est d’ailleurs interdit par la loi).

La clé d’une bonne qualité de l’air au sein du logement, c’est d’aérer : si vous avez une VMC, vérifiez qu’elle fonctionne correctement, et ne la bouchez sous aucun prétexte. D’une manière générale, il faut ouvrir ses fenêtres tous les jours pendant au moins 10 minutes (oui, même en hiver) pour renouveler l’air. 

Cette consigne reste valable pendant les alertes pollution : dans ce cas, il faut simplement adapter le moment d’aération, en ouvrant plutôt en début de matinée/soirée en cas de pollution aux particules ou milieu/fin d’après-midi en cas de pollution à l’ozone.

Si vous êtes un adepte du bricolage, vous pouvez aussi vérifier l’étiquette « Émissions dans l’air intérieur » qui figurent sur certains produits (colle, peinture, vernis…). Le concept, qui rappelle celui du Nutri Score, permet de voir rapidement à quel point un produit va émettre des polluants dans l’air. Le mieux est bien sûr de favoriser le score A+ qui correspond à un faible niveau d’émission !

World Opinions – France info

L’article Quelles solutions contre la pollution de l’air est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Today is Earth Day, which should provide us with an opportunity to pause and confront the awful predicament humanity faces. We eat microplastics, breathe pollution and watch other life-forms decline to extinction. We face intersecting poverty, health, climate and biodiversity crises. Our global predicament is that consumption by the wealthy is driving us towards planetary disaster, yet billions live in poverty and need to consume more to live well. In this cycle, any version of “success” only hastens catastrophe.

Solving this conundrum requires much more than merely reducing the impact of high-consumption lifestyles. Similarly, if we focus on increasing efficiency this tends to increase resource use: make cars cheaper to run and people drive more. The core of any response that truly rises to this challenge will be interlocking policies that drive society on to an equitable and sustainable path.

Here are four policies that work together to maximise people’s welfare and freedoms, drive essential technological innovation, and allow society to operate within Earth’s limits. At their heart is human dignity coupled with breaking the dynamic of ever-greater production and consumption. Together they could quickly reorient the doomsday machine that is today’s global economy.

The first policy is universal basic income (UBI) whereby a financial payment is made to every citizen, unconditionally, at a level above their subsistence needs. UBI is needed to break the link between work and consumption. Critically, there is a constant awareness that we all need to be ever more productive at work, otherwise someone else will take our job. In response we have all said: I work hard, so I deserve that fancy meal, new gadget or long-haul holiday. Increased consumption is the reward for being ever more productive at work. Indeed, it makes little sense to curb our consumption when we know we will have to be ever more productive at work, regardless of our choices.

Fears that UBI may lead to laziness are unfounded: small-scale trials of UBI show people work hard and are typically more entrepreneurial. Crucially, those UBI recipients had lower anxiety, stress and health problems. UBI allows people to say no to undesirable work, unless it is well-paid enough. People can also say yes to opportunities that often lie out of reach, as they can study or retrain. And clearly there is an immense amount of work to do, from caring for others, to producing what we all need to live well. With UBI we would increasingly choose work that we thought mattered, rather than working ever harder to consume ever more.

The second policy framework is what I call universal shared services – others have argued for universal basic services, but what’s needed must be far beyond basic. Many countries have some of these, from healthcare to education. These are the services everyone needs and their delivery has society-wide effects. Core are health, education, energy, housing and leisure services. Providing these universally lowers financial costs due to economies of scale, and can substantially lower environmental costs. Such universal services make societies more equal and drive them towards more sustainability if two further policies are enacted.

The third policy tackles the climate emergency via legally binding ever-declining carbon budgets. This framework exists in the UK, following the 2008 Climate Change Act. The government must reduce UK carbon emissions to within a carbon budget. These five-year budgets decline to a zero allocation by 2050. This act also created an independent statutory body that analyses data and advises the government on how to achieve each successive carbon budget. The advice results in new legislation for specific sectors and drives technological innovation as the zero emissions long-term destination is clear. As a result the UK is world-leading in reducing carbon emissions.

With political pressure and these smart policy goals, a new sense of the common good could be within reach

The fourth policy uses the same declining budget principle, but tackles material use rather than energy generation. Similarly, declining “plastic use budgets” can set society on a pathway to eliminating plastic pollution. The same principle can tackle metal use to limit the damage from mining. A budget for the total amount of land used to produce the food a country consumes can limit the footprint of agriculture, central to halting biodiversity loss. As with carbon emissions, scientists can now track the production and use of plastic, metal and food. Scientific monitoring and new “declining budget” policies could keep material use within Earth’s limits.

These four policy goals together would drive people’s welfare up and our environmental impacts down. They are not new, nor are they very radical. We already, for example, assure incomes for pensioners in many countries, healthcare is universal in a number of countries, and declining carbon budgets are being used to help drive today’s energy transition.

But how to pay for it? The first response of the powerful to change is to argue that the costs are too great. They rarely are. After two decades of arguments about the high costs of tackling climate change, consultants to big business McKinsey now report that the cost of Europe reaching net zero emissions by 2050 is itself net zero. The investments literally pay for themselves. Revenue-raising options should also help to implement the four policies more cheaply; these could include taxes on rentiers financial transactions, and high energy or material use. Of course, without pressure from popular protest movements and political parties, nothing will change.

Yet systemic thinking on how to respond to global problems is increasing. The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a new seriousness by graphically revealing that there actually is no “outside” of society or the environment. When there’s no such thing as “outside”, the neoliberal mantra of avoiding taxes and regulations to keep wealth to yourself makes less and less sense. With political pressure and smart policies a new universality that breaks with centuries of exploiting people and the environment could be within reach. This is undoubtedly a very tough task, but we can’t afford to fail.

Simon Lewis is professor of global change science at University College London and University of Leeds

theguardian.com

L’article Four steps this Earth Day to avert environmental catastrophe est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

These are the only rational and humane conclusions to be drawn from dramatic events at a London coroner’s court this week, where it was recorded that exposure to air pollution was among the causes of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah’s death from asthma in February 2013 – a finding that has never before been recorded by a coroner with regard to the death of an individual.

The verdict is a victory for Ella’s mother, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, who, with the support of lawyers and medical reports, pushed hard for an earlier inquest verdict to be quashed. In the years leading up to her daughter’s death, Ms Kissi-Debrah lived with Ella and her siblings in Lewisham, within 30 metres of the South Circular road, where nitrogen dioxide emissions regularly exceeded national and EU legal limits. Ella was hospitalised 27 times in the three years before she died. Yet her mother was not warned by doctors, nor by any more general public health messaging, about the elevated risk to her asthmatic daughter from air pollution, the vast majority of it produced by traffic fumes.

Public understanding of the dangers has moved on as the issue of air pollution has risen up the political and environmental agenda; so have the government’s ambitions. In 2018 Michael Gove, who was then environment secretary, produced a clean air strategy that promised “comprehensive action”, after the government’s air pollution policy was ruled illegal for the third time, in a series of cases brought by the activist organisation ClientEarth.

This week’s ruling that pollution was a factor in the death of a nine-year-old Londoner, Ella Kissi-Debrah, must be a watershed

But ministers’ words, in this case, spoke louder than actions. Responsibility for new clean air zones was delegated to cash-strapped councils, which have deferred implementation. Deaths linked to air pollution in the UK are estimated to be as high as 36,000 a year, while current limits for particulate matter are two and a half times higher than the World Health Organization recommends. And while the greenhouse gases produced by air traffic have a much more diffuse environmental impact than the localised effects of road traffic, the government’s anti-pollution credentials are diminished by their refusal – so far – to rule out either a third runway at Heathrow (whose backers this week won a victory at the supreme court) or numerous regional airport expansion plans.

Last month’s announcement that the government will bring forward a ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2030 was a big step forward. So is the recent stronger emphasis on policies to promote cycling and walking. The unusual opportunity to experience quieter, cleaner cities was among the handful of positives to be salvaged from this difficult year of immobility and separation. To their credit, ministers have supported efforts to prolong the effects with the roll-out of low traffic neighbourhoods.

The government must now go further. Supporting schemes to make the roads outside schools car-free is one thing; confronting the motor industry and getting serious about the kinds of shifts in behaviour, culture and technology that are needed to substantially reduce congestion and pollution is another. Increasing the cost of driving relative to other forms of transport, and giving more space to people on foot and on bicycles, is not universally popular. But, as the photographs shared by Ella Kissi-Debrah’s family of their smiling, bright-eyed girl remind us, air pollution kills.

By The Guardian view

L’article View on air pollution risks: make Ella’s experience count est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.