From ancient olive groves to root vegetables, foreign pests introduced via the bloc’s open import system are causing damage worth billions – and outbreaks are on the rise
The plants slowly choke to death, wither and dry out. They die en masse, leaves dropping and bark turning grey, creating a sea of monochrome. Since scientists first discovered Xylella fastidiosa in 2013 in Puglia, Italy, it has killed a third of the region’s 60 million olive trees – which once produced almost half of Italy’s olive oil – many of which were centuries old. Farms stopped producing, olive mills went bankrupt and tourists avoided the area. With no known cure, the bacterium has already caused damage costing about €1bn.
The world is on the verge of a climate abyss, the UN has warned, in response to a Guardian survey that found that hundreds of the world’s foremost climate experts expect global heating to soar past the international target of 1.5C.
A series of leading climate figures have reacted to the findings, saying the deep despair voiced by the scientists must be a renewed wake-up call for urgent and radical action to stop burning fossil fuels and save millions of lives and livelihoods. Some said the 1.5C target was hanging by a thread, but it was not yet inevitable that it would be passed, if an extraordinary change in the pace of climate action could be achieved.
The Guardian got the views of almost 400 senior authors of reports by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Almost 80% expected a rise of at least 2.5C above preindustrial levels, a catastrophic level of heating, while only 6% thought it would stay within the 1.5C limit. Many expressed their personal anguish at the lack of climate action.
“The goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C is hanging by a thread,” said the official spokesperson for António Guterres, the UN secretary general. “The battle to keep 1.5C alive will be won or lost in the 2020s – under the watch of political and industry leaders today. They need to realise we are on the verge of the abyss. The science is clear and so are the world’s scientists: the stakes for all humanity could not be higher.”
Alok Sharma, the president of the Cop26 climate summit in 2021, said: “The results of the Guardian’s survey should be another wake-up call for governments to stop prevaricating and inject much more urgency into delivering on the climate commitments they have already made.” He said world leaders needed to get on and deliver on the pledge they made to transition away from fossil fuels at Cop28 in December.
Christiana Figueres, the UN climate chief who oversaw the landmark 2015 Paris climate deal where the 1.5C goal was adopted, said: “These climate scientists are doing their job. They are telling us where we are, but now it’s up to the rest of us to decide what this moment requires of us and [to] turn the seemingly impossible into the new normal.”
She said the world was on the edge of positive societal tipping points away from fossil fuels. “It doesn’t mean a utopian future – we know too much climate change is already baked into the system – but enormous positive change is coming. A world in which we pass 1.5C is not set in stone.”
The 1.5C target was initially proposed by the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis). Fatumanava Pa’olelei Luteru, the chair of Aosis, said: “Our islands are quite literally sinking as the temperatures rise. The lack of ambition on climate change from bigger countries is consigning our states to a reality of devastating loss. The [Guardian] report must be a wake-up call to the world.”
Mourners hold portraits of their loved ones during a prayer and mass funeral service for those who died in the Maai Mahiu floods.
Mohamed Adow, from Power Shift Africa, said: “It’s good to see the experts who follow climate most closely sharing their horror at the lack of action from governments. Those of us living in countries facing the worst effects of the climate crisis feel this too. My country of Kenya has faced its worst drought in 40 years and then last week saw hundreds killed in devastating floods. We wish leaders had the same sense of urgency as the climate scientists.”
Youth climate activists from around the world also shared the climate experts’ fears. “Crashing through the guardrail of 1.5C would be a death sentence for millions of people in the global south,” said Vanessa Nakate, at Rise Up Movement Uganda. “Unless we see immediate action no one will be safe.”
Disha Ravi, at Fridays For Future India, cited the dire impacts of India’s recent heatwaves: “The complacency of leaders is killing people. Temperature rises beyond 2.5C are not inevitable, but averting it requires genuine commitment and action from those in power.”
Policy experts, economists and business leaders responded to the Guardian findings with both frustration and calls for urgent change. Rachel Kyte, a professor of practice in climate policy at the University of Oxford, said: “It is desperately frustrating that our political, economic and social systems don’t know what to do with the science. We need … innovations in our democracy to give scientists the politics they deserve.”
Nicholas Stern, an eminent climate economist, said: “The Guardian’s results are a message from scientists that they lack confidence in our world leaders to take the necessary action to avert climate catastrophe. It’s not too late for political leaders to act but the scale and pace of change must be large and rapid.”
Helen Clarkson, the chief executive of the Climate Group, which runs a network of 500 multinational businesses, said: “The Guardian survey is a stark reminder of the gap between climate targets and action.”
‘Hopeless and broken’: why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair
Read more
The respondents to the Guardian survey identified lack of political will as the single biggest barrier to climate action. Harjeet Singh, at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said: “For decades, governments, especially in rich countries, have consistently prioritised the fossil fuel industry’s interests over the wellbeing of their people. We have a narrow window to avert the worst outcomes, but it requires urgent, transformative policies that prioritise the wellbeing of people and the planet over profit.”
Some politicians backed the call for urgent action. Caroline Lucas, a UK Green party MP, said: “The world’s leading scientists are running out of words to describe the gravity of the climate emergency we face. Politicians need to wake up and treat this catastrophic threat with the seriousness and urgency it requires.”
Ed Miliband, the shadow climate change minister in the UK, said: “Every fraction of a degree matters to the survival of our planet for future generations. That’s why we need governments around the world to maximise climate action, rather than rowing back.”
In the US, Representative Chrissy Houlahan said: “[The Guardian report] should give all of us in Congress even more urgency to act swiftly and bipartisanly.” Bas Eickhout, a Green member of the European parliament, said: “I recognise the feelings of despair of the scientists very well. However, we simply do not have the option of giving up.”
Microplastics have been found in human testicles, with researchers saying the discovery might be linked to declining sperm counts in men.
The scientists tested 23 human testes, as well as 47 testes from pet dogs. They found microplastic pollution in every sample.
The human testicles had been preserved and so their sperm count could not be measured. However, the sperm count in the dogs’ testes could be assessed and was lower in samples with higher contamination with PVC. The study demonstrates a correlation but further research is needed to prove microplastics cause sperm counts to fall.
Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades, with chemical pollution such as pesticides implicated by many studies. Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory.
Vast amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water as well as breathing them in.
The particles could lodge in tissue and cause inflammation, as air pollution particles do, or chemicals in the plastics could cause harm. In March, doctors warned of potentially life-threatening effects after finding a substantially raised risk of stroke, heart attack and earlier death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microscopic plastics.
“At the beginning, I doubted whether microplastics could penetrate the reproductive system,” said Prof Xiaozhong Yu, at the University of New Mexico in the US. “When I first received the results for dogs I was surprised. I was even more surprised when I received the results for humans.”
The testes analysed were obtained from postmortems in 2016, with the men ranging in age from 16 to 88 when they died. “The impact on the younger generation might be more concerning” now that there is more plastic than ever in the environment, Yu said.
The study, published in the journal Toxicological Sciences, involved dissolving the tissue samples and then analysing the plastic that remained. The dogs’ testes were obtained from veterinary practices that conducted neutering operations.
The human testicles had a plastic concentration almost three times higher than that found in the dog testes: 330 micrograms per gram of tissue compared with 123 micrograms. Polyethylene, used in plastic bags and bottles, was the most common microplastic found, followed by PVC.
skip past newsletter promotion
“PVC can release a lot of chemicals that interfere with spermatogenesis and it contains chemicals that cause endocrine disruption,” Yu said. The human testes had been routinely collected by the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator and were available following a seven-year storage requirement after which the samples are usually discarded.
A smaller study in China in 2023 also found microplastics in six human testes and 30 semen samples. Recent studies in mice have reported that microplastics reduced sperm count and caused abnormalities and hormone disruptions.
When the Black Death struck Europe in the Middle Ages, the fundamental values that held society together broke down. Husbands and wives abandoned each other and mothers abandoned their children. This void of ethics that overtook the population is described in Boccaccio’s Decameron, considered a masterpiece of Italian prose and a documentary of life during that time. The book describes the sense of hopelessness that spread throughout the world, because it did not matter what stature one held in life or what one did or did not do to avoid the disease, all were subject to its lethality. Some implored their God in vain while others pursued a carpe diem spirit in an attempt to grab the last bit of pleasure from life when they were able. The common explanation for the indiscriminate devastation wrought by the Black Plague was God’s punishment for human wrongdoing. Nothing in human behavior has changed since then and I believe the ecological overshoot that man finds himself in today, manifested most prominently as climate chaos amongst a myriad of other threats, will cause humans to question the futility of life and their existence just as did those victims of the bubonic plague. A recent study has found that climate chaos is indeed worsening neurological diseases and mental health disorders. Another study found that people are denying climate change as a form of self-deception necessary to maintain their psychological health.
Since those Dark Ages, mankind has developed the ability to accurately track and predict our own demise. Vast networks of satellites and other data monitoring tools are informing us that the planet is becoming increasingly more inhospitable for the vast majority of life on Earth, yet we plod onward, ignoring another plea by the world’s scientists. A reassessment of the Limits to Growth Study and its World3 model using different calibrations was done 6 months ago and the results are the same, which is to say that humanity is still following business-as-usual and heading for collapse within the next two decades:
...the model results clearly indicate the imminent end of the exponential growth curve. The excessive consumption of resources by industry and industrial agriculture to feed a growing world population is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.
All the expertise and modern technology we possess will not be coming to save us; there is no techno-fix or deus ex machina remotely scalable to the planetary crises we face. Emergency atmospheric geoengineering schemes won’t save us at this point. Can’t we just suck the 900 billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere that we have spewed since the beginning of the industrial revolution? No. It bears repeating that the spiking Keeling curve is non-reversible on human timescales.
“We sadly continue to break records in the CO2 rise rate,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at Scripps. “The ultimate reason is continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels.” ~ May 8, 2024
The rate of ocean warming has nearly quadrupled since the late twentieth century, doubling since 1993. In the last twelve month, ocean heating has been on a tear, shattering records consistently. The world is currently undergoing the fourth global coral bleaching event on record, the second in the last decade, and the Great Barrier Reef is suffering its worst bleaching event in recorded history. This year’s hurricane season will likely be a record-breaker. The oceans are starting to release all that thermal energy we have been unceremoniously dumping into them. At one time, oceans seemed like an endless sink for the emissions from humanity’s nonstop consumption of fossil fuels, but that appears to be coming to an end. The world’s rivers are warming and losing oxygen even faster than the oceans. In contrast to those grim stats, humanity is set to consume more resources in the next 30 years as we have since the dawn of civilization. We have already consumed the future and are now, as they say, eating the seed corn.
We have breached tipping points and set in motion positive feedback loops that are accelerating non-linear ecological changes. Six of nine major planetary boundaries have been broken. Our unintended and haphazard experiment with complex Earth systems will unleash a Pandora’s box of deadly consequences. The current rate of CO2 change is unprecedented for the past 50,000 years. We have already passed the 1.5C warming threshold set by the Paris Agreement to prevent the irreversible and worsening effects of climate change. A recent study warns that as we add more and more CO2 to the atmosphere, its potency for warming is stronger at higher atmospheric concentrations than an equivalent increase at lower atmospheric concentrations. The polar regions are warming four times faster than the rest of the planet and have been undergoing fundamental changes to their ocean/ice system which will affect all life on Earth. An ice-free Arctic is just around the corner. In a warming world, pathogens will be looking for ways to exploit the fast-changing environment, potentially creating the next global pandemic for people or destroying our food supply. The tree line, as well as animals, are expanding northward as the climate heats up and the ice melts. Nearly a third of all tree species are now endangered by our radically changing environment. The clear blue waters of Alaskan rivers are turning orange and rusty brown by the heavy metals being released from melting permafrost. The oceans are also turning green due to the shift in phytoplankton population from warming waters.
The insurance industry, the backbone of the global economy, is beginning to buckle: “I believe we’re marching toward an uninsurable future.” As is typical of our modern-day society, the hypocrytical insurance industry is heavily invested in fossil fuels while simultaneously warning about the looming destruction from climate change. Billion dollar disasters are increasing while the time between such disasters is decreasing. This continual rebuilding that needs to be done more often would be another doom-loop cycle for our crumbling civilization, considering the carbon emissions required in such repair and reconstruction. Compound extreme weather and climate events, combinations of two or more extremes (hazards) that occur concurrently or sequentially, are also increasing and expected to grow many fold over in the future. These compound weather events will inevitably create a perfect storm that will one day permanently destroy supply chains and economies by acting as a constant disruptor to stability. It would have the same effect as a monster cyclone, or hypercane, traveling the globe in perpetuity, waxing and waning in strength but never dying, and leaving a path of destruction wherever it roamed. A stable climate no longer exists to support the reconstruction of what once was. Walden Thoreau’s words seem very prescient today: “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” With corporations also gobbling up single-family homes to monopolize the real estate market in America, we can officially say that the American dream of owning a home is dead. George Carlin always said you had to be asleep to believe anything about the American Dream.
I have been hearing about the need to abandon fossil fuels since President Carter put solar panels on the White House 45 years ago. I am still waiting for the techno-optimists to explain to me how they will save us from this new age we have created, known as the Pyrocene or Age of Fire; rest in peace, Holocene. We could also call our modern-day clusterfuck the Plasticene or Age of Plastics. Scientists are finding the stuff in every nook and cranny of the planet, including Antarctic krill, men’s testicles, and throughout the human body. If you drive a vehicle, you are contributing to the primary source for microplastics in the environment, tires, which account for 78%. Just as they lied about their knowledge of the catastrophic effects from burning their fossil fuel products, so too did the oil and plastics industry lie about their greenwashing fraud called recycling.
I never get an adequate, rational answer to our conundrum, because there is none. ChatGPT provides no better insight than the techno-optimists. The problem of a planet overrun by humans will resolve itself in short order and be recorded in the geologic fossil record after we put a cherry on top of this fossil fuel orgy, flattening the planet into a glass parking lot with nuclear weapons. That is another part of human nature that we will never escape…warfare. We seem to be one twitch away from WWIII and the next Stone Age. In fact, there are nearly 200 armed conflicts raging around the world right now, the largest number in decades. This marked uptick in violence could be an ominous sign of a violent new era. From the 2023 Armed Conflict Survey:
“The accelerating climate crisis continues to act as a multiplier of both root causes of conflict and institutional weaknesses in fragile countries…”
We are on the verge of authoritarian rule as global conditions break down and people embrace centralized solutions. Xenophobia will grow and borders will be shut down, sources of food and energy will be fought over and secured, and rationing of resources will be enforced.
After studying our ecological overshoot for several decades, I have some observations that must be accepted as fact:
• “Renewable” energy is not displacing our massive fossil fuel consumption at all, but only serving as a small addition to the total global energy consumption.
• “Renewable” or alternative energy, such as solar and wind, is dependent on fossil fuels for its manufacture, installation, maintenance, and eventual disposal.
• The so-called “Energy Transition” away from fossil fuels is pure techno-hopium and will never materialize.
• The general public and many scientists don’t understand the math and physics involved in transitioning a $100 trillion global economy, dependent on hydrocarbons, to intermittent alternative energy sources.
• No such “Energy Transition” can be accomplished without radical reductions in resource consumption. This is antithetical to the basic biological urge for expansion by most organisms, including humans, and current trends illustrate this behavior. We also keep finding more ways to consume evermore energy. On top of this, the World Bank is urging faster economic growth for emerging economies in order for them to repay mounting debts.
• Governments are ill-equipped to deal with industrial civilization’s complex polycrisis because effective solutions would undermine economic growth.
The latest deadline to ‘save the planet’ is now two years from now, according to a UN Climate Change official. No doubt another arbitrary date given to justify someone’s job and department budget. According to Global Footprint Network’s calculations, humans have been in overshoot for over half a century. Others would say that we have been in overshoot since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, surviving only by mining the Earth’s soils. Like fossil fuels, the vast nutrient store of soils represents a unique one-time gift that has been squandered by agricultural erosion. Without petroleum and arable soils, the Earth will only support perhaps 5% of the present global population, as it did before the advent of agriculture. Considering that we are being constantly blindsided by faster-than-normal and worse-than-expected findings from scientists, I suspect there are far less food harvests left for us than we think. Hotter temperatures and pollution are hastening the destruction of topsoil. Our temporary extension of Earth’s carrying capacity for humans is coming to an end. Once Earth’s life support systems start to unravel, the grotesquely inflated human population will crash. In the meantime, “Memento moriturum; maxime faciunt vitae!”
My last post was in September 2023, and since then, the state of the planet has gotten considerably worse. I feel like the 2030’s will be the decade when the wheels start coming off this ride of industrial civilization. Until I speak to you all again, please enjoy those blue skies and store-bought food while they last. And remember, industrial civilization is a heat engine and it will suddenly break one day! source
In November 2022, the United Nations resolved that Russia should pay reparations for the losses, damages and injuries caused by its invasion of Ukraine. Now, some scientists say those payments should include compensation for climate damage, too.
The first two years of the war have produced at least 175 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new report by the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War, a network of scientists investigating the climate impacts of Russia’s war.
That’s the equivalent of about $32 billion in damages, they say.
Their calculation uses a figure known as the social cost of carbon, a metric designed to estimate the economic costs of greenhouse gas emissions. A recent study put that cost at around $185 per ton of CO2, which is the figure the new report used. That’s less than the Biden administration’s own estimate, which prices the social cost of carbon at $190 per ton.
“The Russian Federation can be held accountable for these emissions and the resulting damage to the global climate as, without its act of aggression, these [greenhouse gas] emissions would not have happened,” the report says.
But whether these reparations will ever be paid — and how those payments might be organized — remains unclear.
The U.N.’s 2022 resolution recommended that member countries create an international register to document claims of damage. But the specifics of when and how those claims will be addressed remains undecided. And under the original resolution, climate claims aren’t necessarily included.
Climate damage itself also isn’t specific to Ukraine — greenhouse gas emissions affect the entire planet when they go into the atmosphere. That complicates the question of who should benefit from any potential climate reparations.
“There are all sorts of ideas and discussions on how to distribute these reparations,” said Lennard de Klerk, the lead author of that report.
It’s possible that a portion of any potential climate reparations from Russia could go to Ukraine to help replant forests and restore other natural carbon-absorbing landscapes damaged during the war. Other portions could go toward international financing mechanisms, such as the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund, which was established to assist developing countries with climate change adaptation and mitigation.
These are all hypothetical ideas for now. But some European leaders already have recommended that Ukraine seek reparations specifically for environmental damages caused by the war.
A February report — co-authored by a group of European environment ministers, other European politicians and activists including Greta Thunberg — called for Ukraine to establish a high-level body tasked with documenting environmental damages, and that Ukraine should pursue reparations for these costs.
That report didn’t prescribe an exact mechanism for addressing climate damages.
But de Klerk said one of his priorities is pushing for any future environmental damage registries to also include “a subcategory focusing specifically on climate damage.”
A spotlight on military emissions
The latest report is the fourth installment in a series of assessments that de Klerk has worked on since 2022.
“I live in Hungary close to the border with Ukraine — I’ve lived in Ukraine myself, so I speak the language, I still have friends,” de Klerk told POLITICO's E&E News. “So we hosted quite a lot of refugees in the first weeks of the war when they were on their way to Europe.”
As the war dragged on, de Klerk started thinking of ways he could help calculate the damages Ukraine was suffering. Earlier in his career, he’d worked as an expert in greenhouse gas accounting and carbon markets, including a stint chairing the U.N.’s Joint Implementation Action Group, a carbon trading system established under the Kyoto Protocol.
So he decided to try and calculate the impact of the war on Earth’s climate. The first report was presented in November 2022 at the U.N.’s 27th annual climate conference in Egypt; it estimated emissions from the first seven months of the war.
The studies have grown more sophisticated over the last two years. The second installment added new emissions sources to the tally, and the third presented a monetary assessment of the climate costs for the first time.
The latest assessment evaluates six major emissions sources. The most basic is carbon produced by warfare itself — including fuel, ammunition, equipment and fortifications. The other five sources are fires, damage to energy infrastructure, aviation, reconstruction efforts and the movements of refugees.
Reconstruction accounts for the largest share of war-related emissions, the report finds, followed closely by warfare.
Estimating the amount of fuel consumed by both militaries is the most challenging part of the assessments, according to de Klerk. Because their activities are classified information, the team has had to develop alternative ways of making these estimates, such as studying the amount of fuel Russia has transported to the front line.
“I don’t conceal that these are just estimations,” de Klerk said. “Probably only when the war is over we will be able to get more precise data on this particular point.”
De Klerk’s initiative isn’t the only one focused on war-related emissions. Organizations like the U.K.-based Conflict and Environment Observatory also are working to shed more light on military emissions, including conflict-related emissions.
Military carbon footprints are historically difficult to quantify. Their activities are often classified, leaving scientists with little public data to study. And the U.N. does not require nations to report their military emissions, making it something of a blind spot under the Paris Agreement.
But de Klerk hopes his initiative might provide a framework for future studies of war-related emissions. He’s currently working on a methodology for exactly this purpose, which he hopes to present at the next U.N. climate conference in Azerbaijan this November.
Abstract
Ambitious biodiversity goals to protect 30% or more of the Earth’s surface by 2030 (30x30) require strategic near-term targets. To define areas that must be protected to prevent the most likely and imminent extinctions, we propose Conservation Imperatives—16,825 unprotected sites spanning ~164 Mha of the terrestrial realm that harbor rare and threatened species. We estimate that protecting the Conservation Imperatives would cost approximately US$169 billion (90% probability: US$146—US$228 billion). Globally, 38% of the 16,825 sites are either adjacent to or within 2.5 km of an existing protected area, potentially reducing land acquisition and management costs. These sites should be prioritized for conservation action over the next 5 years as part of a broader strategy to expand the global protected area network. The expansion of global protected areas between 2018 and 2023 incorporated only 7% of sites harboring range-limited and threatened species, highlighting a renewed urgency to conserve these habitats. Permanently protecting only 0.74% of land found in the tropics, where Conservation Imperatives are concentrated, could prevent the majority of predicted near-term extinctions once adequately resourced. We estimate this cost to be from US$29 billion to US$46 billion per year over the next 5 years. Multiple approaches will be required to meet long-term protection goals: providing rights and titles to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) conserving traditional lands, government designation of new protected areas on federal and state lands, and land purchase or long-term leasing of privately held lands.
Key points
• There is an urgent need to prioritize the conservation of habitats of rare and threatened species as part of a larger global biodiversity strategy.
• Conservation Imperatives offer a solution to conserving the last unprotected sites harboring rare, range-restricted, and threatened species and should be a central component of the ambitious goals to protect at least 30% of the Earth’s surface by 2030.
• The Conservation Imperatives identified in this study are highly concentrated, requiring only ~164 Mha globally to avoid extinctions; this equates to only 1.22% of the Earth’s entire terrestrial surface and 0.74% of land in the tropics.
• Targeted investments to prevent extinctions in parallel with the conservation of carbon-rich regions are necessary as the world sets about expanding the protected area network from 15.7% today to 30% by 2030.
• Conserving Conservation Imperatives is achievable and affordable, especially in the tropics, as the purchase of the tropical subset of • • Conservation Imperatives costs about US$169 billion (90% probability: US$146–US$228 billion), or US$34 billion (90% probability: US$29.2–US$45.6 billion) per year over 5 years.
• As Conservation Imperatives represent the most biologically important and threatened places to protect, they can be thought of as “anchor points” to design regional-scale conservation planning efforts under 30×30.
Like a nightmarish, post-apocalyptic plot, rising temperatures are causing fungi to mutate in ways that not only make them hyper-infectious but drug-resistant, too.
This is deeply concerning as our world warms, Nanjing Medical University researcher Jingjing Huang and colleagues warn.
"The danger and importance of new fungal pathogens is believed to be seriously underestimated," they write in their new paper.
"Temperature-dependent mutagenesis can enable the development of pan-drug resistance and hypervirulence in fungi, and support the idea that global warming can promote the evolution of new fungal pathogens."
Fungal infections already cause around 3.75 million deaths annually, despite most species preferring much lower temperatures than those found within our bodies.
But previous research suggests that forcing fungi to adapt to warmer environments can completely alter their physiology.
Scientists recently identified the first known fungi likely to have emerged as a pathogen due to climate change: Candida auris. As other fungi become more heat tolerant like C. auris is thought to have, more species will find mammalian bodies a temptingly protective shelter within which they can flourish.
So scouring records of fungal infections from 96 hospitals in China between 2009 and 2019 Huang and team identified a group of fungi that had never been known in humans before. Rhodosporidiobolus appeared independently in two unrelated cases.
Strain NJ103 was isolated from a 61-year-old immunosuppressed man, who died of multiple organ failure despite fluconazole and caspofungin antifungal treatments. Strain TZ579 was isolated from an 85-year-old man who died of respiratory failure after treatment with fluconazole.
Including those two strains and others from environmental sources the researchers isolated eight different Rhodosporidiobolus species and exposed them to the average human body temperature of 37 °C (98.6 °F) in the laboratory. The species R. fluvialis and R. nylandii both tolerated the heat well – in R. fluvialis, the hot environment even triggered a switch from a single cell yeast form to a more aggressive colonial pseudohyphal phase.
Both species thrived similarly when they were injected into mice.
In its pseudohyphal form, R. fluvialis not only thrived in warmer conditions but were more resistant to immune macrophage cells, killing more of them rather than being killed by them. Both R. fluvialis and R. nylandii are also resistant to three of the most commonly used antifungal medications – fluconazole, caspofungin and amphotericin B.
"R. fluvialis is sensitive to 5-fluorocytosine; however we found that R. fluvialis was able to rapidly generate 5-fluorocytosine-resistant mutants," explain the researchers. "The speed of complete resistance in R. fluvialis was remarkable."
Huang and colleagues did find one substance that Rhodosporidiobolus didn't seem to adapt to as easily: polymyxin B – an FDA-approved bactericide. Unfortunately, this drug is toxic to neurons and kidney cells.
As global temperatures warm, these morphological changes could increase our risk of encountering dangerous fungi in the future. More fungicide options are urgently needed.
Abstract
Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and reducing air pollution represent two pressing and interwoven environmental challenges. While international carbon markets, such as the European Union emissions trading system (EU ETS), have demonstrated their effectiveness in curbing carbon emissions (CO), their indirect impact on hazardous co-pollutants remains understudied. This study investigates how key toxic air pollutants—sulfur dioxide (SO), fine particulate matter (PM), and nitrogen oxides (NO)—evolved after the introduction of the EU ETS with a comparative analysis of regulated and unregulated sectors. Leveraging the generalized synthetic control method, we offer an ex post analysis of how the EU ETS and concurrent emission standards may have jointly generated sizable pollution reductions in regulated sectors between 2005 and 2021. We provide an aggregate assessment that these pollution reductions could translate into large health co-benefits, potentially in the hundreds of billions of Euros, even when bounding the effect of emission standards. These order-of-magnitude estimates underscore key implications for policy appraisal and motivate further microlevel research around the health co-benefits of carbon abatement.
Toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” are widely added to pesticides, and are increasingly used in the products in recent years, new research finds, a practice that creates a health threat by spreading the dangerous compounds directly into the US’s food and water supply.
The analysis of active and inert ingredients that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved for use in pesticides proves recent agency claims that the chemicals aren’t used in pesticides are false.
The researchers also obtained documents that suggest the EPA hid some findings that show PFAS in pesticides.
About 14% of all active ingredients in the country’s pesticides are PFAS, a figure that has doubled to more than 30% of all ingredients approved during the last 10 years.
The increased PFAS use in pesticides is “disturbing”, said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official now with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility non-profit, and a study co-author.
“We should be eliminating PFAS from all products, but particularly pesticides because you’re spraying them on crops, and there’s not a more direct way to expose the population than that,” Bennett said. “We should not be going in this direction.”
PFAS are a class of about 15,000 compounds typically used to make products that resist water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and accumulate, and are linked to cancer, kidney disease, liver problems, immune disorders, birth defects and other serious health problems.
PFAS are added to a range of pesticides, including those used on crops, to kill mosquitoes, or to kill fleas on pets. The compounds are likely used as surfactants and to help the chemicals disperse or be absorbed.
The true level of PFAS in pesticides is likely much higher, Bennett said. The estimate works off the EPA’s unusually narrow definition of what constitutes a PFAS, and omits organofluorines.
Most regulatory agencies in the US and around the world consider organofluorines to be PFAS. When organofluorine is added to the tally, at least 60% of active ingredients approved for use in common pesticides over the last 10 years are PFAS, and about 40% overall.
Moreover, companies are not required to disclose when PFAS are used as an inert ingredient, so the paper likely missed some. The chemicals have also been found to leach at high levels from plastic containers in which many pesticides are stored, and that is not accounted for by the EPA.
Among chemicals in pesticides are PFOA and PFOS, two of the most dangerous PFAS compounds. The EPA has found virtually no level of exposure to the two chemicals in drinking water is safe. PFOA is likely leaching from the pesticides’ containers, Bennett said, but PFOS appears to be added for unknown reasons.
About two years ago, an EPA research fellow identified PFOS in pesticides and raised the alarm. The EPA responded last year by taking the highly unusual step of publicly criticizing the research, and put out a paper attempting to discredit the findings. The EPA wrote it “did not find any PFAS in the tested pesticide products”, including PFOS.
The paper’s methodology was called into question, but the new research that shows the EPA has approved PFAS to be added to pesticides “contradicts the EPA’s statements”, Bennett said. Moreover, in a Freedom of Information Act request that was part of the new study, researchers found documents showing the EPA had in fact found PFOS in pesticides but omitted those findings from the final study.
“They were trying to quell fears and said: ‘No, there’s no PFAS in pesticides,’ but, yes, there are PFAS in pesticides,” Bennett said. “They found large quantities of numerous PFAS, so that’s a problem.”
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Siri Lawson and her husband live on a stamp of wooded, hilly land in Warren County, Pennsylvania, nestled in the state’s rural northwest corner. In the summer heat, cars traveling on the county’s dirt roads cast plumes of dust in their wake. Winter’s chill can cause a hazardous film of ice to spawn on paved roads. To protect motorists from both slippery ice and vision-impairing dust, communities across Pennsylvania coat these roads with large, cheap volumes of de-icing and dust-suppressing fluids. In Lawson’s case, her township had been using oil and gas wastewater as a dust suppressant, believing the material was effective.
But researchers have found it is no better at controlling dust than rainwater. It can also contain toxic chemicals and have radioactive concentrations several hundred times the acceptable federal limit in drinking water. Given the risks it poses to human health and the environment, Pennsylvania lawmakers and the state’s environmental agency disallowed this practice more than seven years ago.
But oil and gas companies have continued to spread their wastewater practically unchecked across the state, thanks to a loophole in state regulations. A Grist review of records from 2019 to 2023 found that oil and gas producers submitted more than 3,000 reports of wastewater dumping to the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP. In total, they reported spraying nearly 2.4 million gallons of wastewater on Pennsylvania roads. This number is likely a vast undercount: About 86 percent of Pennsylvania’s smaller oil and gas drillers did not report how they disposed of their waste in 2023.
Wastewater dumping is an open secret on Pennsylvania roads. At a legislative hearing this spring, state senators Katie Muth and Carolyn Comitta, both Democrats, said they witnessed companies spreading wastewater last fall during a tour of new fracking wells. Lawson, who has become a public face of opposition to wastewater dumping, experiences sinus pains and believes her symptoms are connected to living near roads coated with wastewater. Sometimes the pain has been so intense she’s had to leave her home “to get different air.”
She’s submitted multiple complaints to DEP over the years, but she says it has done little to drag the agency off the sidelines. “I am told [by DEP] to catch the truck,” Lawson said. “I’m told to be my own cop.”
Neil Shader, a spokesperson for DEP, told Grist that the department “is committed to responding to all brine/roadspreading complaints that are received from the general public” and that it investigates all complaints. “If/when a responsible party is identified, appropriate enforcement action is taken,” he said.
Lawmakers first banned the use of wastewater from fracking wells as a dust suppressant in 2016. Two years later, the DEP issued a moratorium on the use of wastewater from traditional drilling methods as well. But conventional oil and gas companies have found a loophole that allows them to skirt these rules with impunity. The DEP requires permits for wastewater disposal, but the agency grants an exception if the wastewater can be reused for a “beneficial” purpose. Any waste that is no more injurious to the environment and human health than a commercial alternative may be classified as a “coproduct,” a designation that receives less DEP oversight.
Under Pennsylvania law, companies can grant their wastewater coproduct status by conducting in-house analyses to determine whether their waste is harmful to human health or the environment. These tests do not have to include a radiation analysis, even though studies have shown radium from oil and gas wastewater—which often contains 300 to 560 times the acceptable levels of radioactive substances in drinking water—has made its way into roadside vegetation, fresh water, and up the food chain. A company is only required to submit its justification for using the coproduct status if asked by the DEP to do so.
The agency rarely asks. In 2021, the DEP requested justification for claiming coproduct status from 16 companies. Only 10 responded. The DEP told them that the materials they submitted were “inadequate.”
Any conventional driller who is audited and “roadspreads” in the absence of an approved coproduct determination from the DEP—and without updating or submitting a new coproduct determination—is technically violating the agency’s moratorium, putting them in murky legal territory. But without agency enforcement, these companies face no consequences.
“As far as I am aware, there have been zero notices of violations, compliance orders, fines, and penalties for anything dealing with rogue dumping of wastewater,” said David Hess, a former DEP secretary. “No one is enforcing the moratorium.”
Shader, the DEP spokesperson, told Grist that the coproduct term will no longer appear in waste reports because oil and gas companies “have been using the product type incorrectly,” likely misunderstanding the term’s purpose. The agency “investigates reports of unauthorized roadspreading of brine and will take enforcement action as appropriate,” he said. “DEP encourages members of the public who observe potentially unauthorized roadspreading of brine to report the activity to DEP.”
The agency’s decision to drop the classification can largely be traced to the work of Karen Feridun. Feridun is the co-founder of the environmental organization Better Path Coalition, and in 2019 she noticed that the DEP had newly listed “coproduct” as a waste type in its oil and gas reports, implying to her that the agency had tacitly issued a blanket approval of wastewater dumping on roads. She then filed a public records request, which led the DEP to request a meeting with her.
During the discussion, agency representatives told her that its oil and gas division had added the term to its waste reports after an “oral request” from Pennfield Energy LLC, a conventional driller in Pennsylvania. The agency told her it had no paper trail of the communication.
Feridun was outraged. “I am convinced they knew exactly what drillers were going to do,” she said. To her, the agency had all but confirmed it had endorsed wastewater dumping.
The DEP has denied Feridun’s interpretation of its decision. The agency was attempting to “readily identify” which companies had already conducted waste toxicity assessments as a precursor to dumping their wastewater, Shader said. “The addition of this product type code was in no way intended to imply that the requirements [for safety and efficacy] did not need to be satisfied.”
The incident also appeared to indicate miscommunication within the agency. State waste codes are generated by the DEP’s Bureau of Waste Management, but oilfield oversight largely rests with the agency’s oil and gas division. Feridun wondered whether the oil and gas division had informed the waste management department of its decision to include a novel term in its records. Since the department told Feridun it had no paper trail, she said it could not give her an answer.
When asked whether the DEP’s oil and gas division communicated its waste report change to the bureau of waste management in 2019, Shader said that the divisions communicate “on a regular basis to discuss activities regulated by both programs.”
Lawson’s experiences, new research, and the findings from Feridun’s records request have thrust oil and gas companies’ behavior back into the state’s political spotlight. At a state Senate hearing in April, Bill Burgos, a professor of environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University, told lawmakers “there is no more research that needs to be done” to determine whether oil and gas wastewater is safe and effective for treating roads. Burgos has published several studies on oil and gas wastewater, including one recently that found the fluid is ineffective as a dust suppressant.
In early May, Feridun and a group of other activists delivered a letter to Gov. Josh Shapiro and members of the legislature asking them to ban companies from spraying roads with wastewater. Two lawmakers have since introduced dueling bills on the issue. Rep. Martin Causer, a Republican serving a swath of northern Pennsylvania, proposed to legalize the practice while Rep. Greg Vitali, a Democrat representing a region east of Philadelphia, moved to ban it.
Some of the public pressure appears to have paid off. In April, the DEP proposed amending coproduct criteria to mandate an assessment of a material’s efficacy, but it is unclear if this would include radiation testing, which would give the DEP—and the public—a fuller picture of oil and gas waste’s toxicity.
Earlier this month, the agency went a step further: At a legislative hearing in front of the state house’s Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, the DEP said it supported Vitali’s bill banning oil and gas companies from spreading their wastewater on roads and preventing the fluid from being treated as a coproduct by the department. The bill advanced out of the committee with support split along party lines, but it faces a steep climb to the governor’s desk, given that Republicans control the state senate.
Until something changes, people like Lawson continue to live near roads doused with toxic wastewater. She said the dumping has been more frequent lately. If the DEP is going to more aggressively regulate oil and gas companies, it needs to be better funded, said Hess.
“As long as [companies] can get away with it, they will,” he said. “That has been the history of their entire existence.”
Toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” that leach from landfills into groundwater are among the major pollution sources in the US, and remain a problem for which officials have yet to find an effective solution.
Now new research has identified another route in which PFAS may escape landfills and threaten the environment at even higher levels: the air.
PFAS gas that emits from landfill waste ends up highly concentrated in the facilities’ gas treatment systems, but the systems are not designed to manage or destroy the chemicals, and much of them probably end up in the environment.
The findings, which showed up to three times as much PFAS in landfill gas as in leachate, are “definitely an alarming thing for us to see”, said Ashley Lin, a University of Florida researcher and the lead author of the study.
“These findings suggest that landfill gas, a less scrutinized byproduct, serves as a major pathway for the mobility of PFAS from landfills,” the paper’s authors wrote.
PFAS are a class of about 16,000 compounds used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems.
... ... ...
Abstract
The undisclosed and ubiquitous use of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in consumer products has led to a growing issue of environmental pollution, particularly within the solid waste community, where the fate of volatile (neutral) PFAS in landfilled refuse is not well understood. Here, three municipal solid waste landfills in Florida were assessed for neutral PFAS in landfill gas and ionic PFAS in landfill leachate to compare the relative mobility between the two pathways. Landfill gas was directly sampled using a high volume, XAD-2 resin based sampling approach developed for adsorption and analysis of 27 neutral PFAS. Across sites, 13 neutral PFAS were identified from fluorotelomer alcohol (FTOH), fluorotelomer olefin (FTO), secondary FTOH, fluorotelomer acetate (FTOAc), and fluorotelomer methyl acrylate (FTMAc) classes; however, FTOHs dominated concentrations (87–97% total neutral PFAS), with most detections surpassing utilized calibration levels. Even under conservative assumptions, the mass of fluorine leaving in landfill gas (32–76%) was comparable to or greater than the mass leaving in landfill leachate (24–68%). These findings suggest that landfill gas, a less scrutinized byproduct, serves as a major pathway for the mobility of PFAS from landfills.
