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John's of Bleecker Street general manager Kevin Jackson details changes the pizzeria must make to comply with new green energy regulations. #FOXBusiness

For those who don’t believe in a bureaucratic deep state, look no further than the outrageous conduct this week of the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Air Quality Control Board. Just who do these people think they are? Despite the majority of the air board being publicly fired Monday night by the Albuquerque City Council, the unelected air board is merrily moving along this week with a proposed regulation that advocates consider the “holy grail of environmental justice organizing,” but which business leaders consider a job-killer, military folks consider a national security threat and many others simply consider environmental extremism. The so-called Health,...

More than 55 million people across the Northeast, Midwest and mid-Atlantic in the US are under air quality alerts as wildfire smoke originating from Canada shrouds major US cities. Officials in Philadelphia urged residents to remain indoors and avoid strenuous activities outdoors, and public schools in New York City and Washington, DC, canceled outdoor activities due to poor air quality. More than 9 million acres have been charred by wildfires in Canada so far this year — about 15 times the normal burned area for this point in the year. You can track the wildfires and look up the air...

The Biden administration is apparently looking to ban gas stoves, calling them a “hidden danger”. But while that sounds bad enough, a deeper dive shows – as usual – it’s not really about what they say it’s about. Talk of banning gas stoves and “unregulated indoor air quality” could be a Trojan horse designed to get even more “smart” monitoring technology into your home. Let’s jump in.

A new study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by “la Caixa” Foundation, provides robust evidence that COVID-19 is a seasonal infection linked to low temperatures and humidity, much like seasonal influenza. The results, published in Nature Computational Science, also support the considerable contribution of airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission and the need to shift to measures that promote “air hygiene.” A key question regarding SARS-CoV-2 is whether it is behaving, or will behave, as a seasonal virus like influenza, or whether it will be equally transmitted during any time of the year. A first theoretical...

Before you read any further, take a long, slow, deep breath. Congratulations! If you’re sitting in a typical American home, office building, or school, about 3 percent of the air you breathed in recently came out of the lungs of the people in the room with you right now. Breathing in one another’s air is kind of nasty when you think about it. We would never drink from the same cup of water that every one of our co-workers had just sipped out of. But something very similar happens all day long in our offices, schools, homes, buses, and even...

Lago Vista School Board meeting 6/24/21. Parent demonstrates air quality control monitor on his daughter.

A remarkable situation is evident right now. Fires over the western U.S. are producing a dense veil of smoke that moved across the continent and then descended over the East Coast. And there is a great irony in all this: most of the West Coast has excellent air quality while the air is unhealthy over the northeast U.S. To illustrate this strange situation, here is the latest AIRNOW air quality map showing the air quality based on PM2.5, small particles that can move deep into your lungs. ( I want to acknowledge UW Bothell professor Dan Jaffe, who brought this...

I live near Denver and my phone has been going off a lot more from my weather app complaining about "air quality" alerts. I go outside and the air is fine, no smog cloud, etc... Are they conditioning us to stay inside ( like COVID )?

California said on Monday it will halt all purchases of new vehicles for state government fleets from GM, Toyota and Fiat Chrysler and other automakers backing President Donald Trump in a battle to strip the state of authority to regulate tailpipe emissions. Between 2016 and 2018, California purchased $58.6 million in vehicles from General Motors Corp, $55.8 million from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles $10.6 million from Toyota Motor Corp and $9 million from Nissan Motor Co. Last month, GM, Toyota, Fiat Chrysler and members of the Global Automakers trade association backed the Trump administration's effort to bar California from setting tailpipe...

In a move President Trump said will reduce car prices but will also anger environmental groups, the administration is revoking California's authority to set strict fuel economy standards. Trump announced the move Wednesday, saying the decision was made “in order to produce far less expensive cars for the consumer,” while making cars safer at the same time.

The American Lung Association (ALA) has revived its smear campaign against the Pittsburgh region’s air quality with the release of its latest hyped up “State of the Air” report. “Fear-mongering” and “disingenuous” is an apropos way to characterize the ALA’s annual exercise in misrepresenting and/or ignoring data to issue dire health predictions, says the president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy. “The problem for the ALA is that the health experience in states with widely disparate pollution levels does not match up with its rhetoric,” says Jake Haulk, also a senior advisor at the Pittsburgh think tank (in Policy...

Forest fires in California this year released carbon emissions equivalent to the amount produced to power the state's electricity for one year, according to a new analysis from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The wildfires, including last month's record-breaking fires in Northern and Southern California, released 68 million tons of carbon dioxide as they incinerated huge swaths of land and destroyed thousands of homes this year. That is roughly the same amount of carbon emissions typically produced to power the entire state for a year, according to a statement from the Interior Department on Friday. "We know that wildfires can...

Schools and tourist attractions across the San Francisco Bay Area were shut Friday and residents were urged to remain indoors as smoke from California’s deadliest ever wildfire — a three-hour drive away — produced air quality levels worse than in polluted megacities in South Asia. The closures came as the number of people missing from the giant Camp Fire, which has devoured an area roughly the size of Chicago since it broke out last week, soared to more than 600, with 63 confirmed dead. President Donald Trump is set to visit the tinder-dry state on Saturday to meet victims of...

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell 2.7 percent from 2016 levels, according to the EPA. Emissions on a per-capita basis hit a 67-year low last year, federal data shows, and supporters are touting EPA’s data as proof Trump’s agenda is working. EPA’s new data comes on news that, globally, greenhouse gas emissions are set to rise to historic highs by the end of the year, despite nearly 200 countries signing the Paris climate accord.

The White House on Monday rolled out a new plan that would allow higher blends of ethanol in vehicle fuels, amid concerns that the change could lead to more air pollution. The administration’s memo calls to extend the sale of E15 -- consisting of 15 percent of ethanol blended into gasoline -- year round. The fuel was blocked between June 1 and Sept. 15, as science shows burning ethanol in warmer temperature leads to heightened ground-level ozone pollution and smog. A senior White House official said the plan was part of President Trump’s free market plan. “This action is basically...

The Trump administration on Thursday moved to freeze fuel economy standards in what officials described as an effort to give drivers access to “safer” and “more affordable” vehicles, in the latest swipe at former President Barack Obama's legacy. The proposal comes just one day after the Trump administration announced major changes to health plans, providing consumers with more options to buy cheaper, short-term health insurance. The Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency proposed the vehicle change as the first formal step in setting new standards for model years 2021 through 2026. The plan would freeze the Obama-era requirements set...

The average emissions of six major pollutants in the U.S. remained unchanged from 2016 levels to 2017, the latest edition of the Environmental Protection Agency’s report on national emissions data reveals. The report tracks broad changes in air quality in the United States by calculating average emissions from the most common pollutants every year. U.S. emissions have declined significantly over time, about 73 percent from 1970 to 2017, according to the report released Tuesday.

A new emissions study based on testing methods that are supposedly "difficult-to-impossible to cheat" has revealed that even the latest models of European diesel cars are bad polluters. The first such analysis since the 2015 Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, the results show more than 4,000 vehicle models exceeding nitrogen oxides (NOx) levels set by the European Union. The new rating system is known as The Real Urban Emissions Initiative (TRUE). With a data set of 375,000 individual cars from across Europe, TRUE uses a beam of light to study a car's exhaust plume. European cars are broken into numbered groups...

The demonization of the “miracle molecule,” carbon dioxide, continued last week with the announcement that its concentration had reached 410 parts per million (ppm). Nearly all reporting of this noted that this was the highest level in 800,000 years and predicted a host of associated climate calamities. While the current concentration of this vital gas is about 40% higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution, unreported is that Earth has been suffering from steadily decreasing and perilously low concentrations of CO2. Until the consumption of fossil fuels began liberating this important gas from ancient rocks , the Earth...