CO2 Emissions Reach All-Time High Despite Recent COVID Emissions Drop
At the start of the pandemic, scientists were widely talking about a silver lining in a shut down of the economy: the massive drop in emissions. Emission decreases peaked in early April, showing a 17% decline in global greenhouse gas emissions.
China Nantong Energy’s coal-fired power station in Jiangsu Province, China /BARCROFT MEDIA VIA GETTY IMAGES
The continuing rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may sound surprising in light of recent findings that the pandemic, and the associated lockdowns, had led to a steep drop in global greenhouse gas emissions, peaking at a 17 percent decline in early April.
Despite the drop in emissions, CO2 levels are the highest they’ve ever been in human history. Until we reach zero emissions CO2 levels will continue to rise. Our annual growth of greenhouse gas levels was around 0.8ppm per year in the 1960s. The growth rate doubled in the 1980s and has reached 2.4ppm within the last decade’
“The buildup of CO2 is a bit like trash in a landfill. As we keep emitting, it keeps piling up,” said Ralph Keeling, who directs Scripps’s carbon dioxide monitoring program, and whose late father, Charles David Keeling, began measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 1958.
U.S. Court Cancels EPA Approval of Nayer’s Dicamba-Based Herbicide
The Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law when they approved Bayer’s XtendiMax dicamba-based herbicide system and revoked the approval of that product. They also canceled registrations for the additional dicamba-based herbicides, like BASF’s Engenia and Corteva Agriscience’s FeXapan. Sales of the herbicide have been stopped, and farmers planning to use the system this year will now be unable to.
Dicamba has been the subject of several lawsuits, including a $265 million verdict against Bayer earlier this year, due to the herbicide drifting onto nd damaging other plants when it’s applied. The decision by the federal court determined that the EPA underestimated the extent of dicamba’s drift when they approved Bayer’s (then Monsanto) XtendiMax.
We hold that the EPA substantially understated risks that it acknowledged and failed entirely to acknowledge other risks.”
The petition was brought to the Court of Appeals by the National Family Farm Coalition, Center for Food Safety, Center for Biological Diversity, and the Pesticide Action Network North America. The court’s verdict is a big win for environmental groups and farmers with pending cases against Bayer.
This is a massive victory that will protect people and wildlife from uses of a highly toxic pesticide that never should have been approved by the EPA. The fact that the Trump EPA approved these uses of dicamba despite its well-documented record of damaging millions of acres of farmland, tree groves and gardens highlights how tightly the pesticide industry controls EPA’s pesticide-approval process.”
Lori Ann Burd, Center for Biological Diversity
The decision also comes at a time that the current administration is strategically dismantling EPA policies designed to protect citizens and the environment from big business pollution.
New studies testing oral immunotherapy have shown that gut health may play a large role in allergies, and gut microbes may be the solution to food allergies. Oral immunotherapy involves taking small doses of whatever food causes the allergic reaction, every day or a few times a week. Scientists believe that imbalances in beneficial bacteria are the root cause of food allergies.
But oral immunotherapy has downsides. The regimen can be nerve-racking, since it involves daily consumption of food that could kill. It doesn’t work for everyone and does little to fix the underlying disease. Success mostly means gaining the ability to safely eat several peanuts, for example, rather than reacting to a speck of peanut flour.
Here at OLM, we’ve known about the connection between gut health and allergies for quite some time. Our experiences have shown that when the gut is healthy, allergies disappear. Check out this article to learn more about the connection between gut health and allergies, and information on how to heal the gut.
Sweden’s Approach To Coronavirus – Did It Work? What Should We Have Done?
As usual, it’s complicated.
Sweden did not impose strict limits on citizens’ rights. People went to work and ate at restaurants and faced very few restrictions. Children in lower grades attended school but highschools and universities utilized distance learning.
Businesses stayed open. Those who could work from home were advised to do so but no laws were passed and no orders were given telling people to stay home. The government did ask it’s citizens to refrain from non-essential travel and asked people to practice social distancing, hand washing, and considerable measures were taken to protect people over the age of 70.
This “herd immunity” approach is in stark contrast to its neighbors like Finland, which banned gatherings of 10 or more, declared a state of emergency, and closed all schools, restaurants, cafes, and bars. India imposed a lockdown for 1.3 billion people, and Germany banned crowds of two or more people. The herd immunity concept is where so many people contract the virus that the people develop natural resistance without the need for a vaccine.
Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, said Sweden’s approach is based on science, saying, “We are trying to slow the spread enough so that we can deal with the patients coming in.”
Mr. Tegnell says this approach relies on people’s self-restraint and sense of responsibility.
That’s the way we work in Sweden. Our whole system for communicable disease control is based on voluntary action. The immunization system is completely voluntary and there is 98 percent coverage.
You give them the option to do what is best in their lives. That works very well, according to our experience.
There’s a substantial difference between Sweden’s government and other governments. The country enjoys very high levels of trust in its government. Their Constitution is very clearly and specifically designed not to curb individual freedoms. Citizens have confidence in their government and in its public institutions. It’s also important to note that Sweden’s population density is less dense than many other countries and it is a very homogeneous society.
Has Sweden’s Approach Worked?
Sweden reports fewer deaths than Italy. But Italy has a much older population, more people smoke, and people live more clustered together in close-knit, multigenerational households.
Nearly 4,500 Swedes are said to have died from coronavirus, putting the country in eighth place for the highest deaths per capita. Sweden says around half of the deaths were elderly people living in care facilities.
Swedish officials thought Stockholm, the capital, could be approaching “herd immunity,” but recent antibody testing in Stockholm found that only 7.3% of those tested had SARS-COV-2 antibodies. Anders Tegnell called the figure “a bit lower than we’d thought.”
An antibody test cannot tell if you are actively infected. It takes a few weeks from when one is infected to build up enough antibodies for the test to register positive. It’s also important to note that there are issues with inaccuracy of antibody testing that could cause lower or higher results than what is accurate. In addition, we don’t even know how long coronavirus antibodies last in our bodies ! Some speculate only two to three months. Sweden’s real numbers could be a little higher or a little lower, we don’t know. Regardless, 7% is much lower than they hoped.
The media is capitalizing on Anders Tegnell’s most recent comments, with news outlets reporting in a way to indicate that even Sweden admits its approach was all wrong. The epidemiologist said that in hindsight Sweden should have done more.
If we were to run into the same disease, knowing exactly what we know about it today, I think we would end up doing something in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done.
Yes, I think we could have done better than what we did in Sweden, clearly.
Anders Tegnell is clearly not saying that Sweden should have enacted draconian measures like that of many of its neighboring countries.
It’s also important to know that Sweden’s death rate is lower than the U.K., France, and Spain while the USA, Netherlands, and Ireland aren’t far behind.
Also, comparing any European country to the U.S.A is difficult. New York and New Jersey both have a death rate higher than any other country. The United States has pockets of incredibly dense urban living contrasted by vast areas of much lower population densities along with everything in between. Some states implemented strict guidelines, some states ordered people to shelter in place under threat of law, and some states did next to nothing.
And Sweden’s economy expanded while almost every other country’s economy has seen a drastic contraction.
The Netherlands took a similar approach. They show similar results. Brazil’s president Jair Messias Bolsonaro has largely been dismissive of coronavirus fears even going so far as to call it a “media hoax“. Now Brazil is looking at the second most coronavirus cases, second only to the U.S., with total deaths putting them in 4th place behind USA, UK, and Italy, but deaths per capita has Brazil in 20th place, below many countries that took the virus much more seriously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f91Q5FuoKs
What We Should Have Done
They say hindsight is 20/20 but we’re not at a place yet where hindsight is clear. We don’t know who the biggest losers will be until the dust settles, and with the economic impact yet to be fully realized, it’s impossible to even guess. We all know that death rates rise when economies collapse, but death rates also rise when economies grow. A stable economy preserves lives. A U-shaped, V-shaped, or lagging L-shaped economy will cause a lot of deaths.
We also have no idea how hard a virus is going to damage society until it hits a population, and the same virus can cause very different results in differing populations. It’s easy to say, “Look, see, we all overreacted!” when it’s all said and done, but it’s very difficult to know what would have been the results if we ignored the threat.
It’s also hard to know the truth when hospitals rely on government subsidies for using ventilators, testing is poorly done, the CDC mixes up test results, and processed food and big-pharma companies run the media (with a vested interest in keeping us unhealthy). The reality is that access to clean water, good plumbing, and a healthy diet does radically more to prevent and eradicate disease than any vaccine or lockdown or anything else we’ve ever tried.
Of course, we at Organic Lifestyle Magazine would like to see a radically different approach to pandemics that isn’t talked about at all in the media. But science is just starting to catch on.
The state of your gut bacteria is the best indication of your health that we know of, and a healthy gut microbiome equates to a stronger immune system. A recent study showed that people with prior gastrointestinal issues realize poorer outcomes. That’s not because Covid-19 hits the gut, it’s because a healthy gut microbiome supplies the entire body with beneficial bacteria. And when a person has a large enough and diverse amount of healthy bacteria in their body it’s difficult for pathogens to get a foothold (or a corona-hold in this case).
It’s not as simple as taking a probiotic, though that’s better than nothing. To heal the gut one needs to eat right in order to supply the gut with the right prebiotics to populate the gut with a diverse population.
If catching coronavirus (or the flu, or ebola, or any pathogen) concerns you, get your gut well. For more on this check out How To Heal Your Gut.
If we ruled the world (or a country) we’d ask our population to drink cranberry lemonade with stevia, eat lots of salads, take an antifungal fatty acid like SF722, and don’t smoke or use other drugs. The information from the aforementioned gut article would be mandatory learning for everyone in school. And we would see that people who choose to ignore their health are the ones who would be dying – but then again, that’s what we see now. While the media likes to cherry-pick the unusual case of a supposedly perfectly healthy child or athletic adult coming down with coronavirus and dying, it’s extremely unusual, and we cannot find a single case of a person dying from Covid-19 who actually was truly healthy. This is also true for the flu. We logically suspect it’s also true for any pathogenic illness because that’s just how nature works!
Floodwaters in Midland, Michigan Are Mixing with Toxic Chemical Storage Ponds
Midland, Michigan was recently heavily flooded as the result of a dam failure. Reports from Dow Chemical Facility have said that floodwaters were “commingling with on-site containment ponds” at Dow facilities. Floodwaters had the potential to release chemicals onto farmland and residential areas downstream, however, Dow reported that there were no product releases as a result of the flooding.
This May 28, 2008 photo shows the Dow Chemical Co. industrial site in Midland, Michigan
This is another example of the Trump administration putting vulnerable communities in harms way by sidelining science” said Carter. There was an Executive Order that called for Superfund sites to update their infrastructure to protect them from future extreme floods, but it was trashed by the Trump administration a week before Hurricane Harvey hit.
The flooding poses risks a large risk of spreading pollution throughout Midland county. The Tittabawassee River, which has long been subject to illegal dumping by Dow, is one of the most contaminated rivers in Michigan.
‘The catastrophic flooding we are seeing in Midland is a culmination of the impacts of the increased strange and severe weather events that are amplified by climate change,’ said Lisa Wozniak, Michigan League of Conservation Voters executive director ‘and this latest event highlights the importance of big thinking right now from leaders around how to plan properly with our changing climate to keep our families safe.’
Study Shows Half of Americans Would Get a Coronavirus Vaccine
A recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for public affairs shows that only 50% of Americans say they would get a Coronavirus vaccine. The poll showed that 31% of Americans were unsure if they’d get vaccinated while 1 in 5 people said they would refuse. Of those who say they won’t get vaccinated, 7 in 10 are worried about the safety of the vaccine, while 4 in 10 are concerned about catching the virus from the vaccine. Only 3 in 10 people who say they will not get vaccinated do not fear getting seriously ill from COVID-19
‘I am not an anti-vaxxer,’ said Melanie Dries, 56, of Colorado Springs, Colorado. But, ‘to get a COVID-19 vaccine within a year or two … causes me to fear that it won’t be widely tested as to side effects.’
A director of the National Institutes of Health states that safety is a top priority, but many Americans, even those who don’t consider themselves “anti-vaxxers,” are concerned about the safety of the vaccine. As many as 7 in 10 people who said they would be vaccinated are of the opinion that life cannot go back to normal without a vaccine. More than half of Democrats say a vaccine is necessary for reopening while only a third of Republicans believe this. Around 60% of democrats would get the vaccine compared to 43% of republicans.
Many are of the opinion that we should not rely on a vaccine to save us. A safe vaccine has never been developed in such a short time frame. Additionally, the coronavirus is a SARS virus, similar to that of the common cold, which would make it difficult to vaccinate against.
Update: Another poll from Washington Post and ABC News says that about 7 in 10 Americans say they would get a vaccine to protect against COVID-19 if immunizations were free and available to everyone.
Vaccination Before 1 Year of Age May Increase Odds of Developmental Delays, Asthma, Ear Infection – New Study
A new peer-reviewed study has been published in the journal SAGE Open Medicine that looks at health outcomes of vaccinated children versus children who are unvaccinated. The study looks at three pediatric practices located in the United States. The study concludes that unvaccinated children appear to have better health outcomes than those who are vaccinated.
The overall sample size, including children under 3 years of age, is 4821, of which 44.5% were unvaccinated, while 55.5% were vaccinated. Among the 3797 children over 1 year of age, 37.6% were unvaccinated and 62.4% were vaccinated. Considering children with continuous follow-up who were over 3 years of age reduced the sample to 2047 patients, with 52% males. Unvaccinated children by 1 year of age comprised 30.9% of the sample as compared to vaccinated children (69.1%). The most prevalent diagnosis was ear infection.
They looked at the medical records of children and results showed that children vaccinated prior to turning one were substantially more prone to developmental delays, asthma, and ear infections.
A separate analysis also showed that children who received more vaccines were also more likely to be diagnosed with gastrointestinal disorders.
“The results definitely indicate better health outcomes in children who did not receive vaccines within their first year of life.”
Currently, children receive up to 36 vaccine doses to protect against 14 different diseases by the time they’re 6 if following CDC’s recommended vaccination schedule.
Vaccination before 1 year of age was associated with increased odds of developmental delays (OR = 2.18, 95% CI 1.47–3.24), asthma (OR = 4.49, 95% CI 2.04–9.88) and ear infections (OR = 2.13, 95% CI 1.63–2.78). In a quartile analysis, subjects were grouped by number of vaccine doses received in the first year of life. Higher odds ratios were observed in Quartiles 3 and 4 (where more vaccine doses were received) for all four health conditions considered, as compared to Quartile 1. In a temporal analysis, developmental delays showed a linear increase as the age cut-offs increased from 6 to 12 to 18 to 24 months of age (ORs = 1.95, 2.18, 2.92 and 3.51, respectively). Slightly higher ORs were also observed for all four health conditions when time permitted for a diagnosis was extended from ⩾ 3 years of age to ⩾ 5 years of age.
