Nov 13, 2022 https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/13/multnomah-county-report-recommends-replacing-gas-appliances-to-reduce-health-and-climate-change-impacts/ highlights below: A new report from Multnomah County health officials recommends households transition from gas appliances to electric because research shows gas stoves release pollutants that pose high risks to human health and contribute to climate change. On Thursday, Multnomah County Health Department officials presented their findings to the board of commissioners and explained how gas stoves release …
What’s going on with particulate matter regulation?
Nov 2022 update. The World Health Organization (WHO) reduced exposure guidelines for PM 2.5 concentrations to 5 ppm in 2021. https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/what-are-the-who-air-quality-guidelines The World Health Organization maintains that clean air is a basic human right. Yet, air pollution continues to pose a significant threat to people worldwide – it is the greatest environmental threat to health and a leading cause of …
Dying from COVID robbed each American of about a decade of life on average. As a whole, U.S. life expectancy fell by two years — similar to the impact of air pollution
Most of us simply don’t know how many people die of various causes—or that it’s possible for fewer to do so. Our acceptance of those deaths never accounted for alternatives. “When was I offered the choice between having a society where you’re expected to go into work when you’re ill or having fewer people die of the flu every year?” Wrigley-Field, …
Climate change since 1980 is nearly twice as bad as previously calculated. Here’s why.
Measuring climate change: It’s not just heat, it’s humidity, Seth Borenstein, AP, January 31, 2022 When it comes to measuring global warming, humidity, not just heat, matters in generating dangerous climate extremes, a new study finds. Researchers say temperature by itself isn’t the best way to measure climate change’s weird weather and downplays impacts in the tropics. But factoring in air …
People thought they’d prefer hybrid work from home and going into the office, but 80% are finding it exhausting
Emerging data is beginning to back up such anecdotal evidence: many workers report that hybrid is emotionally draining. In a recent global study by employee engagement platform Tinypulse, more than 80% of people leaders reported that such a set-up was exhausting for employees. Workers, too, reported hybrid was more emotionally taxing than fully remote arrangements – and, concerningly, even full-time office-based work. …
The highest attainable standard of health is a fundamental human right
In countries like the United States, Brazil, and India we are seeing a major human rights violations… Each of these countries is a member of the WHO, whose Constitution, written in 1946, envisages ‘the highest attainable standard of health [as] one of the fundamental rights of every human being’. Two years later, the International Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25, asserted that ‘everyone …
San Diego’s Climate Action Plan – Mobility and Land Use Measures and Actions
The Climate Action Plan draft is now out: Climate Action Plan Draft The City of San Diego’s new Climate Action Plan establishes a community-wide goal of net zero by 2035, committing San Diego to an accelerated trajectory for greenhouse gas reductions. PDF: https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/climate_action_plan_draft.pdf or read and comment online at: https://sdclimateaction.konveio.com/strategies-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://sdclimateaction.konveio.com/plan-overview Related to building electrification it has: Strategy 1: Decarbonization …
The Frustration with Productivity Culture: Why we’re so tired of optimizing our work lives, by Cal Newport
In 1999, the management theorist Peter Drucker noted that the productivity of the manual worker had grown fiftyfold during the last century. “On this achievement rest all of the economic and social gains of the 20th century,” Drucker concluded. In other words, the increase in productivity is why today most Americans own a smartphone, while a century ago they didn’t have indoor plumbing. By Cal …
Costa Ricans Live Longer Than Us. What’s the Secret? We’ve starved our public-health sector. The Costa Rica model demonstrates what happens when you put it first.
By Atul Gawande, New Yorker, Costa Ricans Live Longer Than Us. What’s the Secret?, August 23, 2021 In the United States and elsewhere, public health and medical care are largely separate enterprises. Costa Rica shows the benefits of integrating the two—it spends less than we do on health care and gets better results.Photographs by Fred Ramos for The New Yorker The cemetery …
An Equity-Based Primer on Paying to Pollute
Nuts, Bolts, and Pitfalls of Carbon Pricing While carbon pricing and emissions trading schemes have been a part of climate policy discussions for decades, the concept has gained popularity in recent years. The term usually refers to two common policy mechanisms, “cap and trade” and a “carbon tax,” which are market-based measures that create a carbon market by putting a …