Almost 15 years ago, California’s Air Resources Board, known as “CARB”, passed a set of clean air regulations with assigned dates for implementation. Of those emissions rulings, the last to go into effect hits the trucking and bus industry the hardest, going into effect on January 1, 2023. It bans large trucks and buses built before 2010 from California Read More…
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U.S. Environmental Protection Agency responds to criticism of its chemical review process with a webpage
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is making its chemical review process more transparent. That’s in response to industry complaints that the agency takes too long to approve chemicals and environmental groups who complain the agency’s culture is too cozy with industry. The EPA used to only do full risk assessments on about 20% of new Read More…
EPA proposes new rule to crack down on deadly air pollution
For the first time since 2012, the US Environmental Protection Agency is proposing an update to the federal air quality standard for fine soot – a long-awaited step to reduce deadly air pollution. The current standard, which has been in place for more than a decade, limits the average annual amount of fine particle pollution to 12 micrograms Read More…
California Air Resources Board Adopts Updated Scoping Plan
After conducting a series of workshops over the last year and a half, the California Air Resources Board approved an updated version of their scoping plan in December 2022. The plan itself is essentially a roadmap on how the fourth largest economy in the world will achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 and reducing GHG’s by 48% by Read More…
Toxics Release Inventory List Now Includes Nine Additional PFAS
The EPA announced in early January which PFAS, also called forever chemicals, were added to the list. Nine per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as forever chemicals, have been added to the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) list. Under the TRI, facilities that use quantities of any of the nine PFAS greater than a specific Read More…
How many miles before an electric car is greener than a gas car
[Source: SlashGear News] Electric vehicles have often been hailed as the future. Major motoring companies are aiming to produce nothing but electric vehicles in the future, and some aspire to hit that target by the end of the decade. Cars that are traditionally seen as so-called gas guzzlers — like pickup trucks, muscle cars, and Read More…
The future of EV batteries could be found under the sea
[Source: AXIOS] All the battery metals we need to power a billion electric vehicles could be lying on the floor of the Pacific Ocean — but collecting them and turning them into EV batteries is a major challenge. Why it matters: It’s going to take a lot of batteries to replace the world’s gasoline-powered cars with Read More…
Antarctic ozone hole has closed in near-record time for 2019
[Sources: ESA | NASA Ozone Watch] Seeing the ozone hole permanently vanish won’t be for another decade, but for 2019, it has sealed itself up in near-record time. Just a month or so ago, the 2019 Antarctic ozone hole was declared the smallest seen since it was first discovered back in 1985. Now, data from Read More…
Growing corn is a major contributor to air pollution, study finds
[Source: Jonathan Lambert, NPR Science] You’ve probably heard statistics about how our diet affects the health of the planet. Like how a beef hamburger takes considerably more water and land to produce than a veggie burger or that around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions stem from food production. In fact, there are websites that can calculate the Read More…