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    Trump signs order to bring back plastic straws claiming paper ones ‘explode’

    On Monday, Donald Trump took aim at a “ridiculous situation” that directly affects his daily life: paper straws.He signed an executive order that rolls back a Biden administration policy to phase out federal purchases of single-use plastics, including straws, from food service operations, events and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035.“It’s a ridiculous situation. We’re going back to plastic straws,” Trump told reporters at the White House as he signed the order. “These things don’t work,” he said, referring to paper straws. “I’ve had them many times, and on occasion, they break, they explode.”But Trump, such a fan of drinking Diet Coke that he has installed a button in the Oval Office in order to summon staff to deliver the drink, has long railed against any restrictions upon plastic straws. When attempting to gain re-election in 2020, his campaign sold reusable straws on its website claiming that “liberal paper straws don’t work”.View image in fullscreenWhile plastic straws have been blamed for polluting oceans and harming marine life, Trump said on Monday that he thinks “it’s OK” to continue using them. “I don’t think that plastic is going to affect the shark very much as they’re … munching their way through the ocean,” he said at a White House announcement.White House staff secretary Will Scharf, who presented the executive order to Trump, told him the push for paper straws has cost the government and private industry “an absolute ton of money and left consumers all over the country wildly dissatisfied with their straws’.’The order directs federal agencies to review procurement processes to allow use of plastic straws. “It really is something that affects ordinary Americans in their everyday lives,” Scharf said.The plastic manufacturing industry applauded Trump’s move.“Straws are just the beginning,” Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, said in a statement. “‘Back to Plastic’ is a movement we should all get behind.”The world is undergoing a glut of new plastic production, and a summit among countries last year failed to come to a deal to address this despite growing recognition of the harm caused by waste that takes hundreds of years to break down. Global annual plastic production doubled in the two decades since 2000 to about 460m tonnes and is expected to quadruple again by 2050.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenLess than 10% of this plastic waste is now being recycled. The rest invariably ends up in the environment, with the equivalent of one truck filled with plastic dumping its contents into the ocean every minute, according to experts’ estimates. Much of this trash is composed of single-use plastics, such as straws, which make up about 40% of plastic production.The result of this boom has been a world riddled with plastics, with large or microscopic fragments of the material found in every corner of the planet, even in the air. Plastics choke and throttle marine creatures and birds and microplastics have been found deep within the bodies of animals, including humans. Research has found plastics present in people’s brains, testicles, blood and even placentas.More than 390m straws are used every day in the United States, mostly for 30 minutes or less, according to advocacy group Straws Turtle Island Restoration Network. Straws take at least 200 years to decompose and pose a threat to turtles and other wildlife as they degrade into microplastics, says the group.“To prevent another sea turtle from becoming a victim to plastic, we must make personal lifestyle alterations to fight for these species,’’ the group said in a statement.Oliver Milman contributed to this report More

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    Trump falsely claims wind turbines lead to whale deaths by making them ‘batty’

    Donald Trump has launched a lengthy and largely baseless attack on wind turbines for causing large numbers of whales to die, claiming that “windmills” are making the cetaceans “crazy” and “a little batty”.Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, used a rally in South Carolina to assert that while there was only a small chance of killing a whale by hitting it with a boat, “their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. No one does anything about that.”“They are washing up ashore,” said Trump, the twice-impeached former US president and reality TV host who is facing multiple criminal indictments. “You wouldn’t see that once a year – now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”Trump has a history of making false or exaggerated claims about renewable energy, previously asserting that the noise from wind turbines can cause cancer, and that the structures “kill all the birds”. In that case, experts say there is no proven link to ill health from wind turbines, and that there are far greater causes of avian deaths, such as cats or fossil fuel infrastructure. There is also little to support Trump’s foray into whale science.“He displays an astonishing lack of knowledge of whales and whale strandings,” said Andrew Read, a whale researcher and commissioner of the Marine Mammal Commission, of Trump. “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that wind turbines, or surveying for wind turbines, is causing any whale deaths at all.”The US has been slow, compared with other countries, to develop offshore wind farms but several projects are now under way off the east coast, enthusiastically backed by Joe Biden as a way to boost clean energy supply and combat the climate crisis.Critics of this push, including some environmentalists, have warned that whales are being imperiled by work to install these new offshore turbines, but scientists have largely dismissed these claims. “At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could cause mortality of whales,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has noted.Read said that there are some “broad concerns” about the overall industrialization of the oceans, but that the main threats to whales come from their being hit by boats and becoming entangled in fishing gear, and from warming oceans due to the climate change.“The population of humpback whales, in particular, is recovering from being hunted and they are coming closer to the coast to feed on prey, which means they are being hit as they come into shipping lanes, or being caught up in nets,” said Read.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spate of dead whales that washed up along New York and New Jersey’s coasts earlier this year has fueled opposition to wind turbines, however, with Republicans in New Jersey attempting to halt construction of turbines.This opposition has been embraced not only as another culture war battle but also as a way to help businesses keen to stymie clean energy, with several rightwing groups funded by fossil fuel interests linked to seemingly organic community protests against wind farms.“It’s particularly sad to see well-meaning people who care about whales being persuaded that wind turbines are a risk to them,” said Read. “They are being manipulated by fossil fuel interests who see wind energy as a threat to those interests.” More

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    The animal species imperiled by Trump's war on the environment

    Climate countdown

    The animal species imperiled by Trump’s war on the environment

    A humpback whale breaches in the Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration has withdrawn regulations aimed at preventing humpbacks and other creatures from being entangled in nets off the west coast.
    Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

    Despite a grim outlook for American biodiversity, Trump has lifted protections for at-risk animals as part of his aggressive rollback of environmental rules
    75 ways Trump made America dirtier and the planet warmer
    by Paola Rosa-Aquino

    Main image:
    A humpback whale breaches in the Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration has withdrawn regulations aimed at preventing humpbacks and other creatures from being entangled in nets off the west coast.
    Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

    The prognosis for biodiversity on Earth is grim. According to a sobering report released by the United Nations last year, 1 million land and marine species across the globe are threatened with extinction – more than at any other period in human history.
    According to a recent study, about 20% of the countries in the world risk ecosystem collapse due to the destruction of wildlife and their habitats, a result of human activity in tandem with a warming climate. The United States is the ninth most at risk.
    Despite this desperate outlook, the Trump administration, as part of its aggressive rollback of regulations designed to protect the environment, has lifted protections for America’s animals. It has shrunk several national monuments and opened up a huge amount of federal land for oil and gas drilling, coalmining and other industrial activities – actions that conservationists warn could imperil species whose numbers are already dwindling and that are core to the health of our ecosystems.
    Here we look at some of the animals most at risk from Trump’s rollbacks.
    Wolverines More

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    'Selling off the future’: Trump allows fishing in marine monument

    Administration opening areas off New England coast up to commercial fishing, a move experts say will hurt the environment Commercial fishing boats docked in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Photograph: Wayne Parry/AP Donald Trump is easing protections for a large marine monument off the coast of New England, opening it to commercial fishing. But ocean experts […] More