Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Accept Deny

GoGreenNation News

Learn more about the issues presented in our films
Show Filters

Thames Water faces court claim that £3bn bailout is ‘poor, short-term fix’

Campaigners to argue in court of appeal that plan is not in public interest and special administration is best optionEnvironmental campaigners will challenge the granting of a high-interest £3bn emergency loan to struggling Thames Water at an appeal on Tuesday, arguing the “eye-watering” costs for a short-term fix are not in the public interest.With protests planned outside the court of appeal, Charlie Maynard, a Liberal Democrat MP who represents the campaigners, will argue in a three-day hearing that the public and consumer interest is not served by the debt package, which comes with a bill of almost £1bn in interest payments and financial adviser fees. Continue reading...

Environmental campaigners will challenge the granting of a high-interest £3bn emergency loan to struggling Thames Water at an appeal on Tuesday, arguing the “eye-watering” costs for a short-term fix are not in the public interest.With protests planned outside the court of appeal, Charlie Maynard, a Liberal Democrat MP who represents the campaigners, will argue in a three-day hearing that the public and consumer interest is not served by the debt package, which comes with a bill of almost £1bn in interest payments and financial adviser fees.Thames, which has 16 million customers and 8,000 employees, has been on the verge of collapse for months with debts of about £19bn.The company was given approval for a £3bn debt package by the high court last month, but campaigners who have been fighting its plans won the right to take the decision to appeal.Represented by a legal team that is working for free, the groups, including Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, the Rivers Trust, the Angling Trust and We Own It, say the approved restructuring plan is a “poor, short-term fix” that “aggravates rather than mitigates the Thames Water doom loop”. Taking the company into special administration, which is a power contained in the 1991 Water Industry Act, would be cheaper and in the public interest, they say.Thames, Britain’s biggest water utility company, said the emergency loan was needed to stave off an imminent cash shortfall and as a bridge to attracting new equity for wider restructuring.But the loan carries a 9.75% annual interest rate and will cost £898m over six months in consultancy fees and servicing interest. This includes £210m Thames Water has paid financial advisers who helped draw up the bailout.These costs were described as “eye-watering” by Mr Justice Leech, and “deeply uncomfortable” when he approved the plan.Maynard, who is acting on behalf of more than 25 MPs, 34 charities and a number of individual Thames Water customers, will argue the judge was wrong to sanction the bailout.In court documents William Day, the lawyer representing Maynard, said the judge had accepted that the only alternative to the costly loan was to put Thames into special administration.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionDay will argue the cost of special administration would be less than half the costs of the bailout loan that has been approved. Day said Thames had offered no evidence that the emergency debt package would help it raise billions of pounds of additional equity to repair its finances over the longer term, and should not have been approved. “The company should not have been granted sanction simply by saying, ‘We will give it a go’, especially where the costs of taking a punt are so high,” Day said.Thames is raising average water bills by £31 a year, pushing the average household bill to £588 between now and 2030, to pay for £21bn investment into its treatment works and pipes, which the company admits are assets it has “sweated” for decades. But it is taking legal action to raise bills even higher than the 35% allowed by Ofwat, the industry regulator for England and Wales.The approved bailout would give Thames £1.5bn in cash, released monthly, plus up to £1.5bn more to see it through the fight to increase customer bills further.A Thames Water spokesperson: “The restructuring plan sanctioned by the high court is the best way to resolve the issues facing Thames Water. We remain confident in our plan and are focused on its delivery. It does not financially impact taxpayers across the UK or our customers, and it allows us to continue to invest in our network to improve critical infrastructure for our customers and the environment, without further delay. It is better than any other alternative course of action and we do not believe that the grounds for appeal meet the required thresholds.”

Water
Pollution

Majority of the World's Population Breathes Dirty Air, Report Says

Most of the world has dirty air, with just 17% of global cities meeting WHO air pollution guidelines, a report Tuesday found

BENGALURU, India (AP) — Most of the world has dirty air, with just 17% of cities globally meeting air pollution guidelines, a report Tuesday found. Switzerland-based air quality monitoring database IQAir analyzed data from 40,000 air quality monitoring stations in 138 countries and found that Chad, Congo, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India had the dirtiest air. India had six of the nine most polluted cities with the industrial town of Byrnihat in northeastern India the worst.Experts said the real amount of air pollution might be far greater as many parts of the world lack the monitoring needed for more accurate data. In Africa, for example, there is only one monitoring station for every 3.7 million people. More air quality monitors are being set up to counter the issue, the report said. This year, report authors were able to incorporate data from 8,954 new locations and around a thousand new monitors as a result of efforts to better monitor air pollution. But last week, data monitoring for air pollution was dealt a blow when the U.S. State Department announced it would no longer make public its data from its embassies and consulates around the world.Breathing in polluted air over a long period of time can cause respiratory illness, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer, said Fatimah Ahamad, chief scientist and air pollution expert at Malaysia-based Sunway Centre for Planetary Health. The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution kills around 7 million people each year. Ahamad said much more needs to be done to cut air pollution levels. The WHO had earlier found that 99% of the world’s population lives in places that do not meet recommended air quality levels.“If you have bad water, no water, you can tell people to wait for half an hour a day, the water will come. But if you have bad air, you cannot tell people to pause breathing,” she said.Several cities like Beijing, Seoul, South Korea, and Rybnik in Poland have successfully improved their air quality through stricter regulations on pollution from vehicles, power plants and industry. They've also promoted cleaner energy and invested in public transportation.Another notable effort to curb severe air pollution was the Association of Southeast Asian Nations agreement on transboundary haze pollution. Even though its had limited success so far, ten countries in the region pledged to work together to monitor and curb pollution from large forest fires, a common occurrence in the region during dry seasons.Shweta Narayan, a campaign lead at the Global Climate and Health Alliance, said many of the regions witnessing the worst air pollution are also places where planet-heating gases are released extensively through the burning of coal, oil and gas. Slashing planet-warming emissions to slow the heating up of the planet can also improve air quality, she said.Air pollution and climate crisis “are two sides of the same coin,” she said. ___The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Pollution
Climate
Energy

Only seven countries worldwide meet WHO dirty air guidelines, study shows

Annual survey by IQAir based on toxic PM2.5 particles reveals some progress in pollution levels in India and ChinaNearly every country on Earth has dirtier air than doctors recommend breathing, a report has found.Only seven countries met the World Health Organization’s guidelines for tiny toxic particles known as PM2.5 last year, according to analysis from the Swiss air quality technology company IQAir. Continue reading...

Nearly every country on Earth has dirtier air than doctors recommend breathing, a report has found.Only seven countries met the World Health Organization’s guidelines for tiny toxic particles known as PM2.5 last year, according to analysis from the Swiss air quality technology company IQAir.Australia, New Zealand and Estonia were among the handful of countries with a yearly average of no more than 5µg of PM2.5 per cubic metre, along with Greenland and some small island states.The most polluted countries were Chad, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India. PM2.5 levels in all five countries were at least 10 times higher than guideline limits in 2024, the report found, stretching as much as 18 times higher than recommended levels in Chad.Doctors say there are no safe levels of PM2.5, which is small enough to slip into the bloodstream and damage organs throughout the body, but have estimated millions of lives could be saved each year by following their guidelines. Dirty air is the second-biggest risk factor for dying after high blood pressure.“Air pollution doesn’t kill us immediately – it takes maybe two to three decades before we see the impacts on health, unless it’s very extreme,” said Frank Hammes, CEO of IQAir. “[Avoiding it] is one of those preventative things people don’t think about till too late in their lives.”The annual report, which is in its seventh year, highlighted some areas of progress. It found the share of cities meeting the PM2.5 standards rose from 9% in 2023 to 17% in 2024.Air pollution in India, which is home to six of the 10 dirtiest cities in the world, fell by 7% between 2023 and 2024. China’s air quality also improved, part of a long-running trend that saw the country’s extreme PM2.5 pollution fall by almost half between 2013 and 2020.The air quality in Beijing is now almost the same as in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The latter was the most polluted city in Europe for the second year running, the report found.Zorana Jovanovic Andersen, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the report, said the results highlighted some chilling facts about air pollution.“Huge disparities are seen even within one of the cleanest continents,” she said. “Citizens of eastern European and non-EU Balkan countries breathe the most polluted air in Europe, and there is a 20-fold difference in PM2.5 levels between the most and least polluted cities.”skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionGovernments could clean their air with policies such as funding renewable energy projects and public transport; building infrastructure to encourage walking and cycling; and banning people from burning farm waste.To create the ranking, the researchers averaged real-time data on air pollution, measured at ground level, over the course of the calendar year. About one-third of the units were run by governments and two-thirds by non-profits, schools and universities, and private citizens with sensors.Air quality monitoring is worse in parts of Africa and west Asia, where several countries were excluded from the analysis. Poor countries tend to have dirtier air than rich ones but often lack measuring stations to inform their citizens or spur policy changes.Roel Vermeulen, an environmental epidemiologist at Utrecht University, who was not involved in the report, said biases were most likely in data-poor areas with few regulated monitoring stations – particularly as satellite measurements were not used for the analysis – but that the values presented for Europe were in line with previous research.“Virtually everyone globally is breathing bad air,” he said. “What brings it home is that there are such large disparities in the levels of exposure.”

Health
Pollution
Technology

Lawmakers Urge Trump Administration to Cancel Owl-Killing Plan, Say It Would Cost Too Much

A bipartisan group of lawmakers urge the Trump administration to scrap plans to kill more than 450,000 invasive barred owls in West Coast forests in coming decades

A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Monday urged the Trump administration to scrap plans to kill more than 450,000 invasive barred owls in West Coast forests as part of efforts to stop the birds from crowding out a smaller type of owl that's facing potential extinction.The 19 lawmakers — led by Republican Rep. Troy Nehls, a Texas conservative, and Democrat Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a California liberal — claimed the killings would be “grossly expensive” and cost $3,000 per bird. They questioned if the shootings would help native populations of northern spotted owls, which have long been controversial because of logging restrictions in the birds' forest habitat beginning in the 1990s, and the closely related California spotted owl. Barred owls are native to eastern North America and started appearing in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. They’ve quickly displaced many spotted owls, which are smaller birds that need larger territories to breed.An estimated 100,000 barred owls now live within a range that contains only about 7,100 spotted owls, according to federal officials.Under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan approved last year, trained shooters would target barred owls over 30 years across a maximum of about 23,000 square miles (60,000 square kilometers) in California, Oregon and Washington. The plan did not include a cost estimate. But the lawmakers said in a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that it could top $1.3 billion based on extrapolating costs from a grant awarded to the the Hoopa Valley Native American Tribe in California to kill up to 1,500 barred owls.“This is an inappropriate and inefficient use of U.S. taxpayer dollars,” the lawmakers wrote. "This latest plan is an example of our federal government attempting to supersede nature and control environmental outcomes at great cost.”A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about the cost estimate and the owl removal program. The agency's plan called for more than 2,400 barred owls to be removed this year and for that number to ramp up to more than 15,500 birds annually beginning in 2027.Scientists for years have been shooting barred owls on an experimental basis and officials say the results show the strategy could halt spotted owl declines. As of last year, about 4,500 barred owls were killed on the West Coast by researchers since 2009.Killing one bird species to save others has divided wildlife advocates and is reminiscent of past government efforts to save West Coast salmon by killing sea lions and cormorants. Or when, to preserve warblers, cowbirds that lay eggs in warbler nests were killed. The barred owl removals would be among the largest such effort to date involving birds of prey, researchers and wildlife advocates said.Barred owls arrived in the Pacific Northwest via the Great Plains, where trees planted by settlers gave them a foothold, or via Canada’s boreal forests, which have become warmer and more hospitable as the climate changes, researchers said.Their spread has undermined decades of spotted owl restoration efforts that previously focused on protecting forests where they live. That included logging restrictions under former President Bill Clinton that ignited bitter political fights and temporarily helped slow the spotted owl’s decline.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Forests
Climate
Government

Long Island Wildfires Began With Backyard S’mores, Police Say

The wildfires began accidentally when someone in Suffolk County tried to light a fire to make s’mores, officials said. They were fully contained by Monday.

The wildfires that broke out on Long Island Saturday afternoon and spread over hundreds of acres appeared to be accidental, caused by a failed attempt to make s’mores in a backyard, local officials said on Monday.The preliminary determination came after detectives with the Suffolk County Police Department conducted an investigation into the cause of the fires, interviewing 911 callers and using drones and helicopters to determine whether arson had played a role.What started as a backyard fire in Manorville, near Sunrise Highway on Long Island’s South Shore, became several blazes as strong winds contributed to the embers’ spread, officials said at a news conference on Monday. The fires were under control by Sunday morning and were 100 percent contained on Monday, said Amanda Lefton, the acting commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.Kevin Catalina, the Suffolk County police commissioner, said that around 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, a person in Manorville was trying to make s’mores but was initially unable to light a fire because of the wind. The person used cardboard to light the fire, he said, and soon the backyard area went up in flames.That fire was put out within an hour, the commissioner said, but a few hours later, another fire was reported less than a quarter mile southeast of the initial fire. “The wind was blowing very strongly from the northwest, so that path makes perfect sense,” he said, adding that two additional fires were reported later.“It is believed that the embers from each fire traveled and continuously started more fires,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Conservation

In Another Climate and Money Withdrawal, US Pulls Out of Climate Damage Compensation Fund

The Trump administration has told world financial institutions that the U.S. is pulling out of the landmark international climate Loss and Damage Fund

Formalizing another withdrawal from both climate and foreign aid programs, the Trump administration has told world financial institutions that the U.S is pulling out of the landmark international climate Loss and Damage Fund.Climate analysts Monday were critical of the Treasury Department's decision to formally pull out from the fund designed as compensation for damage by polluting nations to poor countries especially hurt by the extreme storms, heat and drought caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas. A Treasury official said in a letter last week that the U. S. board members of the fund were resigning but gave no reason for the withdrawal.“It’s a great shame to see the U.S. going back on its promises," said Mohamed Adow, founder of Power Shift Africa and a veteran of United Nations climate negotiations. "This decision will result in great suffering for some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. These people have contributed the least to the climate emergency they are now living through.”The Treasury did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.When the fund was agreed upon in 2022, then-President Joe Biden pledged that the U.S., the world's biggest historic carbon dioxide emitter, would contribute $17.5 million. A dozen countries that have polluted less — Australia, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom — and the European Union have pledged more than the U.S.The two biggest pledges — $104 million — came from Italy and France. As of January, the Loss and Damage Fund had $741.42 million in pledges, according to the United Nations.“The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Loss and Damage Fund is yet another cruel action that will hurt climate vulnerable lower income nations the most," said Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The richest nation and the world’s biggest contributor to global heat-trapping emissions is choosing to punch down and walk away from its responsibility toward nations that have contributed the least to the climate crisis and yet are bearing an unjust burden from it.”Poorer nations, often in the global south, had long framed the fund as one of environmental justice. It was an idea that the U.S. and many rich nations blocked until 2022, when they accepted the creation but insisted it was not reparations.“Three long decades and we have finally delivered climate justice,” Seve Paeniu, the finance minister of Tuvalu, said when the UN climate negotiations established the fund. “We have finally responded to the call of hundreds of millions of people across the world to help them address loss and damage.”The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Climate
CO2
Energy

How nature organizes itself, from brain cells to ecosystems

McGovern Institute researchers develop a mathematical model to help define how modularity occurs in the brain — and across nature.

Look around, and you’ll see it everywhere: the way trees form branches, the way cities divide into neighborhoods, the way the brain organizes into regions. Nature loves modularity — a limited number of self-contained units that combine in different ways to perform many functions. But how does this organization arise? Does it follow a detailed genetic blueprint, or can these structures emerge on their own?A new study from MIT Professor Ila Fiete suggests a surprising answer.In findings published Feb. 18 in Nature, Fiete, an associate investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and director of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center at MIT, reports that a mathematical model called peak selection can explain how modules emerge without strict genetic instructions. Her team’s findings, which apply to brain systems and ecosystems, help explain how modularity occurs across nature, no matter the scale.Joining two big ideas“Scientists have debated how modular structures form. One hypothesis suggests that various genes are turned on at different locations to begin or end a structure. This explains how insect embryos develop body segments, with genes turning on or off at specific concentrations of a smooth chemical gradient in the insect egg,” says Fiete, who is the senior author of the paper. Mikail Khona PhD '25, a former graduate student and K. Lisa Yang ICoN Center graduate fellow, and postdoc Sarthak Chandra also led the study.Another idea, inspired by mathematician Alan Turing, suggests that a structure could emerge from competition — small-scale interactions can create repeating patterns, like the spots on a cheetah or the ripples in sand dunes.Both ideas work well in some cases, but fail in others. The new research suggests that nature need not pick one approach over the other. The authors propose a simple mathematical principle called peak selection, showing that when a smooth gradient is paired with local interactions that are competitive, modular structures emerge naturally. “In this way, biological systems can organize themselves into sharp modules without detailed top-down instruction,” says Chandra.Modular systems in the brainThe researchers tested their idea on grid cells, which play a critical role in spatial navigation as well as the storage of episodic memories. Grid cells fire in a repeating triangular pattern as animals move through space, but they don’t all work at the same scale — they are organized into distinct modules, each responsible for mapping space at slightly different resolutions.No one knows how these modules form, but Fiete’s model shows that gradual variations in cellular properties along one dimension in the brain, combined with local neural interactions, could explain the entire structure. The grid cells naturally sort themselves into distinct groups with clear boundaries, without external maps or genetic programs telling them where to go. “Our work explains how grid cell modules could emerge. The explanation tips the balance toward the possibility of self-organization. It predicts that there might be no gene or intrinsic cell property that jumps when the grid cell scale jumps to another module,” notes Khona.Modular systems in natureThe same principle applies beyond neuroscience. Imagine a landscape where temperatures and rainfall vary gradually over a space. You might expect species to be spread, and also to vary, smoothly over this region. But in reality, ecosystems often form species clusters with sharp boundaries — distinct ecological “neighborhoods” that don’t overlap.Fiete’s study suggests why: local competition, cooperation, and predation between species interact with the global environmental gradients to create natural separations, even when the underlying conditions change gradually. This phenomenon can be explained using peak selection — and suggests that the same principle that shapes brain circuits could also be at play in forests and oceans.A self-organizing worldOne of the researchers’ most striking findings is that modularity in these systems is remarkably robust. Change the size of the system, and the number of modules stays the same — they just scale up or down. That means a mouse brain and a human brain could use the same fundamental rules to form their navigation circuits, just at different sizes.The model also makes testable predictions. If it’s correct, grid cell modules should follow simple spacing ratios. In ecosystems, species distributions should form distinct clusters even without sharp environmental shifts.Fiete notes that their work adds another conceptual framework to biology. “Peak selection can inform future experiments, not only in grid cell research but across developmental biology.”

Nature
Animals
Forests

Major ship collision in UK waters sparks fears of toxic chemical leak

A cargo ship carrying sodium cyanide collided with a tanker transporting jet fuel – scientists are warning of potentially severe environmental impacts

Fire and rescue services douse fires after a collision between an oil tanker a cargo ship carrying sodium cyanideGetty Images Europe Scientists fear a major collision between a cargo ship and a fuel tanker in the UK’s North Sea could cause a huge leak of toxic chemicals into delicate marine habitats, with potentially devastating consequences for local wildlife. A tanker called Stena Immaculate was moored off the coast of Hull, carrying 18,000 tonnes of jet fuel, when it was struck by the container ship Solong on 10 March. The Solong was carrying 15 containers of highly toxic sodium cyanide, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence. Both ships will also have been carrying tanks of bunker fuel to power their journeys. Ernst Russ, the owner of the Solong cargo ship, said in a statement that both vessels sustained “significant damage”. Huge fires spewing clouds of black smoke immediately broke out on the ships. One crew member from the Solong is still reported missing. “We are extremely concerned about the multiple toxic hazards these chemicals could pose to marine life,” Paul Johnston at Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter in the UK, said in a statement. The crash happened in waters that are home to internationally significant populations of breeding seabirds, such as gannets, kittiwakes and puffins. Harbour porpoises and grey seals breed nearby, and the location is also on migration routes for wading birds and waterfowl. “Chemical pollution resulting from incidents of this kind can directly impact birds, and it can also have long-lasting effects on the marine food webs that support them,” said Tom Webb at the University of Sheffield in the UK in a statement. “We have to hope that any spills can be quickly contained and pollution minimised.” Crowley, the US-based firm managing the Stena Immaculate, told the Financial Times that jet fuel has leaked into the North Sea from a ruptured cargo tank. Jet fuel is made of light hydrocarbons and will therefore evaporate relatively quickly, potentially limiting its environmental impact. But the release of bunker fuel will have longer-lasting effects, said Alex Lukyanov at the University of Reading in the UK, in a statement. “Marine diesel can smother habitats and wildlife, affecting their ability to regulate body temperature, potentially resulting in death,” he said. “The environmental toll could be severe.” The release of sodium cyanide could also pose severe danger to aquatic life, as it inhibits oxygen uptake. It is not yet clear whether any sodium cyanide has entered the water. Johnston called on UK authorities to take urgent action to contain the release of toxic substances from the ships. “We must hope an environmental disaster can be averted,” he said. The UK government said it was working closely with the coastguard service to support the response to the incident. Speaking in the UK’s Parliament on 10 March, Baroness Sue Hayman, a minister in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said she was “shocked and concerned” at the news of the collision. She said work was underway to assess the scale and impact of any pollution from the collision.

Chemicals
Water
Government

Utah Will Be the First State to Ban Fluoride in Drinking Water

Utah's governor intends to sign legislation making the state the first to ban fluoride in public water systems

Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said he would sign legislation that bars cities and communities from deciding whether to add the mineral to their water systems.Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The addition of low levels of fluoride to drinking water has long been considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.“We’ve got tried and true evidence of the safety and efficacy of this public health initiative,” said American Dental Association President Brad Kessler, of Denver. Cavities could start emerging in children within months or years of Utah stopping fluoridation, Kessler said.“It's not a bill I care that much about,” Cox added, “but it's a bill I will sign.”Utah lawmakers who pushed for a ban said putting fluoride in water was too expensive. Its Republican sponsor, Rep. Stephanie Gricius, acknowledged fluoride has benefits, but said it was an issue of “individual choice” to not have it in the water. Cox said that like many people in Utah, he grew up and raised his own children in a community that doesn’t have fluoridated water — or what he called a “natural experiment.”“You would think you would see drastically different outcomes with half the state not getting it. We haven’t seen that,” Cox said in a weekend interview with ABC4 in Salt Lake City. “So it’s got to be a really high bar for me if we’re going to require people to be medicated by their government.”Already, some cities across the country have gotten rid of fluoride from their water, and other municipalities are considering doing the same. A few months ago, a federal judge ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate fluoride in drinking water because high levels could pose a risk to kids’ intellectual development. A Utah teenager who urged lawmakers to pass the bill described suffering a medical emergency when the fluoride pump in Sandy, Utah, malfunctioned in 2019, releasing an excessive amount of the mineral into the drinking water. The fluoride sickened hundreds of residents and led many in Utah to push for its removal.It’s rare to find high levels of fluoridation in water, according to the National Institutes of Health. The agency said it’s “virtually impossible” to get a toxic dose of fluoride from water with standard levels of the mineral.Kessler said the amounts of fluoride added to drinking water have been reduced over time and are below levels considered problematic. “The science proves that it is effective at reducing cavities with little to no risk of other problems,” he said.He added that a ban in Utah could have a domino effect with other legislatures being encouraged to follow suit with fluoride bans in their states.Opponents warned it would disproportionately affect low-income residents who may rely on public drinking water having fluoride as their only source of preventative dental care. Low-income families may not be able to afford regular dentist visits or the fluoride tablets some people buy as a supplement in cities without fluoridation.Fluoridation is the most cost-effective way to prevent tooth decay on a large scale, said Lorna Koci, who chairs the Utah Oral Health Coalition.Utah in 2022 ranked 44th in the nation for the percentage of residents that receive fluoridated water, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About two in five Utah residents served by community water systems received fluoridated water.In February, the city council in Riverton, a Salt Lake City suburb, unanimously passed a resolution to remove fluoride from the city’s public water systems. Voters in Brigham City, 59 miles (95 kilometers) north of the capital city, struck down by a large margin a measure in 2023 that would have removed the mineral from its public water supply.Out of the 484 Utah water systems that reported data to the CDC in 2024, only 66 fluoridated their water, an Associated Press analysis showed. The largest was the state’s biggest city, Salt Lake City.Rodney Thornell, president of the Utah Dental Association, began practicing dentistry in a Salt Lake City suburb before the city added fluoride to its water. His adult patients who grew up locally continue to get lots of cavities but younger patients who grew up with fluoride in the water get fewer, he said. “If we’re going to keep eating sugar, we need fluoride.” Thornell said, noting that Utah residents consume more than the national average of candy and sugary drinks.Brown reported from Billings, Montana.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Water
Government
Science

Colorado Residents Now Have a Way to ‘See’ the Toxic Emissions They Live With

High-tech camera reveals the pollutants spewing into the atmosphere, providing evidence for the state to investigate gas and oil operators. The post Colorado Residents Now Have a Way to ‘See’ the Toxic Emissions They Live With appeared first on .

A tour of oil and gas sites encroaching on Denver’s eastern suburbs fell on a fitting day, with air so polluted that state health officials warned the elderly and children to stay inside. Participants were eager to see where these toxic gases come from. The group stood on the shoulder of a noisy frontage road with a panoramic view of operations that encompass the fossil fuel production lifecycle — the oil storage tanks, a compressor station and a drilling rig spread out on arid grasslands and emitting pollutants including nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. The gases react when heated by sunlight to create ground-level ozone. Inhaling the pollutant can exacerbate and contribute to the development of lung diseases such as asthma, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Methane, a colorless, odorless, heat-trapping molecule with 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, can also leach from equipment on the sites about eight miles south of Denver International Airport. These gases are invisible to the naked eye. Not today. Pollutants spewing out of tanks and other equipment on the sites materialized for the half-dozen tour participants in the lens of an optical gas imaging camera perched on a heavy-duty tripod nestled in the road’s shoulder amid broken glass and litter.  Technology inside the device reveals planet-warming hydrocarbons that are absorbing infrared radiation. The bright-blue plume streams out of oilfield equipment into the air against a multicolored landscape.  Storage tanks and an enclosed flare on a well pad in Watkins. Photo: Andrew Klooster. VIDEO The same storage tanks and flare recorded by an optical gas imaging camera. “Oh, wow,” public health graduate student Natalie Hawley said, as she pulled the brim of her baseball hat low over the viewfinder to block the vicious June sun. “I had no idea these sites are allowed to pollute as much as they do.” Hawley is among dozens of people who have joined Andrew Klooster, a thermographer at Earthworks, and organizers with 350 Colorado — both environmental nonprofits — on emissions tours at fossil fuel sites since early 2023. Earthworks purchased what’s known as an OGI camera a decade ago with the intent of partnering with residents to watchdog the expanding extraction activities in Colorado. Earthworks and 350 Colorado teamed up to offer the field trips to alert and educate communities about the health and environmental impacts of oil and gas operations, which continue to grow in the state. The number of active wells in the nation’s fourth-largest oil producing state grew to 46,591 as of Feb. 24, a 25% hike since 2009. Thermographer Andrew Klooster operates an optical gas imaging camera. Photo: Jennifer Oldham. The increase in production was fueled by a drilling technique known as fracking, which forces sand and chemicals down a pipe to free fossil fuels trapped miles underground in shale formations. As drilling rigs bristled near the expanding suburbs in the Denver metropolitan area, Earthworks’ mission to empower residents to hold energy companies accountable for the pollution they produce became ever more relevant.    It’s an opportunity “to educate people to be better advocates,” Klooster said. “The air permitting world — what is permissible and what isn’t, and what is a compliance issue — it’s way too complicated for the individual person to parse.”   Emissions from oil and gas sites comprise about 36% of the 253 tons per day of volatile organic compounds released in the region’s atmosphere, according to estimates from the Regional Air Quality Council. As the quality of air most Coloradans breathe has deteriorated over the last 15 years, a haze began obscuring the view from Denver of the towering Rocky Mountains in the summer. The worsening smog prompted officials to dub May 31 to Aug. 31 “ozone season.” The region’s air is now so bad that state regulators issued air quality alerts for half of the days in that period in 2024. With Colorado’s population growing in tandem with operations in some of the nation’s most profitable oil and gas fields, traffic and the energy industry have become the main drivers of the nine-county area’s failure to meet federal air quality standards for the last two decades. For the group standing alongside the frontage road on that hot, smoggy summer day, Klooster explained how he filed a complaint with state air quality regulators about one site visible on the horizon that he visited the day before the tour. “There was a ton of emissions coming off of that drilling rig yesterday for about a half an hour while I was filming it and I couldn’t identify the exact source,” he said, adding there are limitations to what his $100,000 camera can document. It cannot help him identify which chemical compounds are being emitted, or how much of them is venting into the atmosphere, he added. However, he can use the videos as evidence to prompt state regulators to investigate. Documenting where the emissions came from on the drilling rig site was made more difficult because various types of equipment were used on the site on a temporary basis, the thermographer told tour participants.  A well pad in Watkins. Photo: Andrew Klooster. VIDEO The same well pad recorded by an optical gas imaging camera. Klooster taught those on the tour how to file similar complaints with the state’s Energy & Carbon Management Commission and the Department of Public Health and Environment when they suspect toxic pollutants are leaking from faulty equipment on fossil fuel sites. Registering concerns with the right agency means understanding who regulates what and who is responsible for enforcing the rules. These nuances include this unsettling fact: Energy companies are permitted to vent pollutants from oil and gas sites for safety reasons. These teaching moments are already garnering results: Residents who live on the Rocky Mountains’ western slope filed complaints with the health department’s Air Pollution Control Division regarding possible air quality compliance issues in September. The Grand Valley Citizens Alliance used videos from Klooster’s optical gas imaging camera as evidence after the group visited numerous oil and gas facilities in Garfield County, roughly 150 miles west of Denver. The effort ultimately prompted the state to ask the operator of the Williams Parachute Creek gas plant to investigate. The firm worked with the manufacturer of equipment that burns off excess gas, known as a flare, to fix a leak that had led to emissions documented by Klooster as far back as 2021, the Earthworks thermographer wrote on his blog in October. “We can report that on a subsequent survey, the flare appeared to be operating more efficiently than it has on any of our previous observations,” he wrote. Yet only 35% to 40% of the complaints he files with the state result in an operator making a fix, Klooster said. Energy companies are required by Colorado law to conduct leak detection and repair inspections at their facilities. State and municipal inspectors also pay periodic visits to monitor equipment for leaks.      At the end of the emissions tour, Earthworks and 350 Colorado staff told participants how they can comment on planned oil and gas projects in Denver-area communities, as well as on industry-related bills proposed at the state Legislature. This additional information has prompted some tourgoers to volunteer long term, said Bobbie Mooney, a coordinator with 350 Colorado. “Several participants have been joining in committee meetings and writing comments and producing communications projects for us,” she said. Klooster said he hopes the events will help catalyze a nationwide movement of neighborhood groups seeking to hold oil and gas companies accountable for pollution created by equipment used on drilling and fracking sites. “I’ve started thinking of it as a potential model,” he said, “that we could translate to other places.” A few days after the tour, state regulators informed Klooster that they had resolved the complaint he filed with the Air Pollution Control Division with video evidence of toxic gases flowing out of equipment near a drilling rig. The company, Civitas Resources, said it sent an inspector to the site three days after Klooster filed his report and that “the drilling rig had completed its operation and started to break down and be removed from the facility. At this point no emissions were observed.” Copyright 2025 Capital & Main.

Chemicals
CO2
Energy

No Results today.

Our news is updated constantly with the latest environmental stories from around the world. Reset or change your filters to find the most active current topics.

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.