California can now set its own emission standards under the Clean Air Act, the EPA announced today. The decision puts an end to a feud that began when automakers pushed the Trump administration to revisit fuel efficiency rules, which eventually led the former president to revoke California's waiver to declare its own standards in 2019. California is known for pushing stricter emissions requirements than the federal government, standards which have also been adopted by 16 other states and Washington, D.C. 

“Today we proudly reaffirm California’s longstanding authority to lead in addressing pollution from cars and trucks,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a statement. “Our partnership with states to confront the climate crisis has never been more important. With today’s action, we reinstate an approach that for years has helped advance clean technologies and cut air pollution for people not just in California, but for the U.S. as a whole.”

The EPA also confirmed that other states can once again adopt California's standards. As the LA Times reports, the EPA decision means that California can continue with its plan to ban sales of gasoline vehicles by 2035. In January, Governor Gavin Newsom announced a $10 billion plan to accelerate EV adoption, with a focus on making EVs more accessible for low-income consumers, building out more charging infrastructure and electrifying the state's fleet of vehicles.

Swaddled in wet wipes, ensconced in congealed cooking grease and able to transform into pipe-blocking masses so hard as to require excavation equipment to dislodge, fatbergs are truly the bean-and-cheese burritos of the sewage world. They can cause havoc on a town’s bowels, achieving lengths that outspan bridges and accumulating masses that dwarf double-deckers. Fatbergs are a modern problem that have civil engineers increasingly turning to tech in order to keep their cities’ subterranean bits clear of greasy obstructions.

Fatbergs — a portmanteau of fat and iceberg — are a relatively recent but fast-growing problem in the world’s sewers. They form when FOG (fats, oil, grease) poured down drains comes in contact with calcium, phosphorus and sodium to create a hard, soap-like material. This calcium soap then accumulates on non degradable flushed items like wet wipes, sanitary pads, condoms, dental floss, clumps of hair, chunks of food waste, and diapers as they travel through a municipal waste disposal system. Though their components may start off soft and pliable (albeit damp) once ‘bergified, they harden into a mass tougher than concrete, requiring sanitation workers to employ high-pressure water jets, shovels and pickaxes in order to break it up.

“These huge, solid masses can block the sewers, causing sewage to back up through drains, plugholes and toilets,” Anna Boyles, operations manager at Thames Water, told RICS in October. “It can take our teams days, sometimes weeks, to remove them.”

They can also offgas toxic compounds such as hydrogen sulfide. Forensic analyses of dislodged fatbergs have also revealed concentrations of all sorts of chemicals including bodybuilding supplements and the metabolites of illicit drugs — not to mention myriad bacterial species. Not only do these deposits constitute a direct health hazard to the workers tasked with demolishing them, fatbergs can cause pipe blockages and force wastewater to overflow aboveground where the contagion can spread.

A blockage in Maryland in 2018 caused more than a million gallons of wastewater to spill into local waterways (it cost $60,000 to clear the 20-foot obstruction) while a similar backup in Michigan flooded the University of Michigan with 300,000 gallons of the stuff.

These cholesterol-like deposits can reach monumental proportions if left unchecked. Thames Water, which manages sewers in both London and the Thames Valley, told the BBC last February that it spent £18m a year clearing 75,000 blockages from its systems. One of the largest bergs to date was pulled from beneath Birchall Street in Liverpool, UK in 2019. It measured 820 feet in length, weighed 440 tons and required more than four months to clear. The month before, a 200-foot long fatberg was discovered under Sidmouth, a popular coastal tourist location in Devon, UK.

“It is the largest discovered in our service history and it will take our sewer team around eight weeks to dissect this monster in exceptionally challenging work conditions,” South West Water director of Wastewater, Andrew Roantree, told The Guardian in 2019. “Thankfully it has been identified in good time with no risk to bathing waters.”

“If you keep just one new year’s resolution this year,” he added, “let it be to not pour fats, oil or grease down the drain, or flush wet-wipes down the loo. Put your pipes on a diet and don’t feed the fatberg.”

These obstructions are just as problematic on this side of the pond. In 2018, officials in Charleston, South Carolina pulled a 2,000 pound, 12-foot by 3-foot berg from the city’s sewers. The same year, officials in Macomb County, Michigan removed a 100-foot fatberg from one of its 11-foot diameter Lakeshore Interceptor pipes at a cost of $100,000.

"To put it simply, this fatberg is gross. It provides an opportunity, however, to talk with people about the importance of restricting what goes down our sewers. This restriction was caused by people and restaurants pouring grease and similar materials down their drains. We want to change that behavior," Public Works Commissioner Candice S. Miller said at the time.

However, the problem is apparently not universal. “The city of Atlanta does not have ‘fatbergs’ within our sewer system,” a spokesperson from Atlanta’s Department of Water Management told Engadget via email. “Fatbergs are common in other countries.” Any blockages that are encountered within the city’s sewers are disposed of using, “high pressure water and/or rodding equipment.”

This rodding equipment, commonly known as hydrojets, are high-powered versions of the pressure washers used to clean siding and walkways. They’re capable of producing pressures in excess of 4000 ppi and spray omnidirectionally so that they’ll blast detritus from the entire interior surface of a pipe as they’re fed forward. That fecally-caked slurry is then sucked out of the main using a truck-mounted vacuum system and stored in an onboard tank for later disposal – as you can see in the 2010 video from the City of Carlsbad, California below. It’s the same basic idea as the trucks that service Port-A-Potties but, again, a more robust version.

A major contributor to the fatberg problem are wet wipes which were first invented in Manhattan in 1957 by Arthur Julius. He went on to found the Nice-Pak company and, by 1963, had partnered with KFC to offer his company’s pre-moistened Wet-Nap towelettes as an after-meal hand sanitizer to the fried chicken chain’s greasy-fingered customers. In subsequent decades Nice-Pak expanded its offerings to include products such as baby wipes and EPA-rated hand and surface disinfectants. As of 2020, the global market for wet wipes runs an estimated $24 billion annually, according to a recent report from Grandview Research.

“Wet wipes may be convenient, but flushing them is a major cause of sewage blockages. On top of this they contain plastic and can find their way into our seas where they pose a threat to wildlife,” Friends of the Earth spokesperson Julian Kirby explained to The Evening Standard in 2019. “Wet wipe manufacturers should be required to make their products plastic-free and clearly label them as ‘do not flush’.”

While the Museum of London has seen fit to preserve part of the famed Whitechapel fatberg for posterity, most municipalities want them gone, flushed and forgotten, but the fatbergs have to be found first. Typically, that involves visually inspecting the sewer mains either by sending down crews or remotely operated cameras like the modular Rovver X from Envirosight or the IRIS Portable Mainline Crawler from Insight Vision. Alternately, the SL-RAT (Sewer Line Rapid Assessment Tool) from Infosense Inc, relies on sonar technology to check sewer lines for obstructions.

Relying on sound waves offers a number of advantages over conventional visual systems. The SL-RAT is set up at through the access points at either end of a length of sewer main.The transmitting unit blasts a series of tones through the pipe where the receiving unit measures the tonal differences between the two sets to determine the extent of any potential blockage. Since utilities don’t have to physically send people or drones into the pipes when using the SL-RAT, crews can inspect more of the sewer network in less time.

The city of Irvins, Utah, for example, used to expend 6,000 gallons of water daily to flush the entirety of its 50-mile wastewater system, done in order to dislodge blockages occurring in only about 5 percent of the network.

“Just to prevent one blockage, we were cleaning the whole system,” Ivins Public Works director Chuck Gillette told St George News in October. “You’re cleaning every pipe.”

With the city’s implementation of the SL-RAT system in 2020, city crews could more precisely locate clogs to dislodge. A process that used to take weeks and 1,100 labor hours is now done in a few days and 320 labor hours. “It’s less [noise] than the sound of a cleaning truck,” Gillette continued, “and there is zero water usage.”

While municipal authorities beg people to help prevent fatbergs from forming in the first place by following the 3Ps — as in, the only things that should go in the loo, are pee, paper and poo — a team of Canadian researchers are looking at converting the ‘bergs into biofuels once they’ve been harvested from sanitation pipes.

“This method would help to recover and reuse waste cooking oil as a source of energy,” University of British Columbia researcher Asha Srinivasan told Smithsonian Magazine in 2018. The UBC team’s method involves first heating a fatberg chunk to between 90 and 110 degrees Celsius to loosen everything up, then adding hydrogen peroxide to break down organic components and free trapped fatty acids, then breaking those acids down into methane using anaerobic bacteria. This is similar in methodology, albeit on a much smaller scale, as to how some wastewater treatment facilities produce natural gas from methane captured during the cleaning process.

After a week of negotiations in Nairobi, the United Nations has agreed to start working on a first-ever global plastic pollution treaty, Reuters reports. It's not projected to be completed until 2024, but according to the UN it could end up being as important as the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the most significant global effort to curb climate change yet. In 2019, the organization found that humanity is damaging nature at an "unprecedented" rate, with plastic pollution growing by more than ten times since 1980. Heck, we've even found microplastics in the Arctic, one of the most remote areas on Earth.

The real question, of course, is how UN members plan to address the scourge of plastics. As the New York Times reports, the agreement would involve coming up with legally binding measures to clean up plastic waste. But crucially, it would also involve limiting plastic production, a move that's certain to face industry pushback.  

As you'd expect, different countries also have different priorities. While major plastic producers like the US and Japan objected to language in the agreement, developing nations stressed the need for more involvement. In particular, the agreement highlighted the importance of waste pickers, who work long hours sorting trash, all the while breathing in toxic fumes.  

Many of Amazon's attempts at fighting climate change have revolved around policy promises and investments, but now it's focusing more on the goods it sells. The company has launched an Aware product line devoted to eco-friendly items like bedding, clothing, home essentials and skincare. In every case, they're made with "bio-based ingredients," recycled materials and other more sustainable elements.

All Aware products have received at least some form of independent environmental certification. Skincare products are certified as free of "chemicals of concern," for instance. Bed and bath products, meanwhile, are verified as made in "socially responsible working conditions" on top of their reduced ecological footprint.

Amazon has long been accused of contributing to waste through its dominance of online shopping. In 2018, it accounted for 5 billion out of 165 billion packages shipped in the US — that's a lot of cardboard, foam and other packing materials. The company has taken steps to minimize its impact, such as insisting on efficient packaging and developing reusable boxes you can turn into cat condos, but many of its own-brand products haven't been designed with the environment as a top priority.

Green products like the Aware range might be necessary, though. Amazon has made much ado about its Climate Pledge target of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. While the company can reduce the impact of its facilities, packaging and transportation, it might have a harder time reaching that goal if its catalog doesn't make a similar pro-climate shift.

Tesla Superchargers close to the Ukraine border will offer free electric vehicle charging to support those leaving the country following Russia's invasion. Owners of Tesla and non-Tesla EVs will be able to use stations at Trzebownisko, Poland; Košice, Slovakia; and Miskolc and Debrecen (both Hungary) at no cost for a limited time. It's unclear whether Tesla plans to expand the program to other Supercharger sites.

"We hope that this helps give you the peace of mind to get to a safe location," Tesla wrote in an email to local owners, according to Elektrek. It's said to be the first time Tesla has offered free charging to owners of third-party EVs.

Tesla doesn't currently operate in Ukraine, though some people there are said to have imported its EVs and the company wants to open Supercharger sites in the country (it's not clear how the conflict may have impacted those plans). The company has offered free charging during other times of crisis, including when hurricanes struck the US.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has reached a settlement with Tesla after the agency found that the automaker violated the Clean Air Act at its factory in Fremont, California. In particular, the EPA determined that Tesla violated the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Surface Coating of Automobiles and Light-Duty Trucks from October 2016 to September 2019.

Tesla, the EPA said, failed to develop and implement a work practice plan to minimize air pollutants emissions from the storage and mixing of materials used in vehicle coating. It also failed to correctly perform the monthly calculations needed to prove that its coating operations complied with the federal standards for hazardous air pollutants. Finally, Tesla apparently failed to keep required records of the calculations for its air pollutants emissions rate. "People living in communities that are near sources of hazardous air pollutants may face significant risks to their health and environment," the agency wrote in its announcement. 

According to CNBC, the paint shop at Tesla's factory in Fremont suffered several fires within that period. The news organizations talked to employees back in 2018 who claimed that the company pushed to hit production goals at the expense of fire and environmental considerations. (If you'll recall, Tesla was struggling to hit Model 3 production goals at the time.) Those employees claimed that months before a fire in April that year, the shop's sprinkler heads were clogged and were coated with at least an inch of thick paint. Exhaust systems that were supposed to carry clean air in and out of the building were allegedly coated with thick paint, as well. 

"Today's enforcement action against Tesla reflects EPA's continued commitment to ensure compliance with federal clean air laws," EPA Pacific Southwest Regional Administrator Martha Guzman said in a statement. Tesla will only have to $275,000 to settle its violations, however, which is a drop in the ocean for a company that reported a $5.5 billion in net income last year.

While we humans can't agree where we stand on tracking devices, one group of birds assertively came out against the technology. In The Conversation, Dominique Potvin, an Animal Ecology professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, said he and his team recently witnessed a mischief of magpies display a rare cooperative “rescue” behavior when they attempted to track the birds.

As part of their study, Potvin’s team developed a seemingly ingenious way of collecting data on a group of five magpies. They developed a lightweight but tough harness the birds could wear like backpacks and carry a small tracker with them as they went about their daily lives. They also created a feeding station that would wirelessly charge and download data from the trackers. It even had a magnet for freeing the birds of the harness. “We were excited by the design, as it opened up many possibilities for efficiency and enabled a lot of data to be collected,” Potvin said.

Unfortunately, the study fell apart in mere days. Within 10 minutes of Potvin’s team fitting the final tracker, they saw a female magpie use her bill to remove a harness off of one of the younger birds. Hours later, most of the other test subjects had been freed of their trackers too. By day three, even the most dominant male in the group had allowed one of his flock to assist him.

“We don’t know if it was the same individual helping each other or if they shared duties, but we had never read about any other bird cooperating in this way to remove tracking devices,” Potvin said. “The birds needed to problem solve, possibly testing at pulling and snipping at different sections of the harness with their bill. They also needed to willingly help other individuals, and accept help.”

According to Potvin, the only other example they could find of that kind of behavior among birds involved Seychelles warblers who helped their flockmates escape from sticky Pisonia seed clusters. Visit The Conversation to read the full story.

On Tuesday, the Biden administration established the country’s first-ever Buy Clean Task Force. The organization will work with federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Transportation, to source low-carbon construction materials from American factories. In part, it will do so by producing recommendations on incentives and technical assistance the federal government can provide to domestic manufacturers to better report and reduce their emissions. It will also help the government identify materials it should use as part of federally funded projects, and establish pilot programs to purchase those materials.

“Focusing on industry is a really big deal,” according to David Hart, a professor of public policy at George Mason University in Virginia. He told The New York Times the federal government had previously “neglected” to address greenhouse gas emissions produced by the “difficult and important” industrial sector. Part of the issue was that there was no single agency tasked with pushing companies that produce steel, aluminum, concrete and other important building materials to reduce their impact on the environment.

To that point, the US industrial sector is responsible for approximately one-third of all domestic greenhouse gas emissions. As the single largest consumer in the world, with an annual budget of approximately $650 billion to spend on goods and services, the federal government has a lot of buying power it can use to incentivize industrial players to change how they go about producing those essential materials.

With its landmark climate change legislation stuck in political gridlock, the Biden administration has turned to executive action to try and meet the president’s ambitious goal to cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. For instance, it recently announced new measures to clean up and harden the US power grid by investing money in transmission line upgrades and smart grid improvements. Those efforts have put forward meaningful climate policy, but the scale of the climate crisis demands support from all parts of the federal government, not just the executive branch.

The next PlayStation trophy you earn could provide more than just bragging rights. Sony has launched a "Play and Plant" program that will plant a tree when you earn a trophy in Horizon Forbidden West. Complete "Reached the Daunt" by March 25th and Sony will team with the Arbor Day Foundation to plant a tree as part of reforestation efforts in California, Florida and Wisconsin. You can save the real Earth while you save the virtual one, to put it another way.

The project won't please every environmentalist. Sony and the Arbor Day Foundation will halt donations when they reach the estimated 288,000 trees needed to complete the reforestation efforts. Given that Horizon Forbidden West is Sony's tentpole game for early 2022, the company could hit that milestone very quickly. Wouldn't it be kinder to the planet (and latecomers) to plant as many trees as possible?

Still, the plant-a-tree program represents a unique tie-in, and an experiment in pairing in-game achievements with real-world outcomes. You now have a material incentive to make progress. We wouldn't expect initiatives like this to become commonplace, but it's easy to see more of them in the future — if just to keep people engrossed in a game beyond its first few hours.

The Biden administration has announced a $5 billion plan to help states build half a million EV charging stations by 2030 — five times the current number. The goal is to allow EV owners to find a charging port anywhere within 50 miles of their location across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. "It’s going to help ensure that America leads the world on electric vehicles," Biden said. 

The idea is to build on the "Alternative Fuel Corridor" created by 40 states along interstate highways across the country. To oversee the effort, the White House recently unveiled a new agency called the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. The $5 billion will come from the new National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program, which will also distribute an additional $2.5 billion in discretionary grants later on. 

A total of $615 million will be distributed this year alone, with states having until August 1 to apply. The money can only be used for battery-electric vehicles only, not hydrogen or other alternative energy vehicles. States can team up with private enterprises to build and maintain the stations. 

Americans need to know that they can purchase an electric vehicle and find convenient charging stations when they are using Interstates and other major highways.

The aim with the charging network is to reassure potential EV buyers that they'll be able to charge their cars while travelling. "Americans need to know that they can purchase an electric vehicle and find convenient charging stations when they are using Interstates and other major highways," said Deputy Federal Highway Administrator Stephanie Pollack in a statement. 

The White House is also pushing for the charging stations to be built domestically. To that end, it touted a company called Tritium that plans to produce up to 30,000 DC fast chargers per year in Tennessee, creating 500 local jobs. The government will also direct 40 percent of funding to underserved and rural areas. The agency released a state-by-state disbursement plan that shows the largest funding levels going to Texas, California and Florida — the three most populous states.

It's all part of a larger plan to reduce US carbon emissions, as the transportation sector is responsible for a third of greenhouse gas pollution. To that end, the Biden administration wants half the vehicles sold in the US to be EVs or plug-in hybrids by 2030.