President Donald Trump is about to sign an executive order restarting coal leasing on federal lands while classifying coal as a critical mineral. 

Social media critics, and academics being quoted in media, are declaring the end of the world due to American pollution. Are they correct?

When the Proposition 65 referendum, the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, was being debated, concerns about abuse and high cost were dismissed by the lawyers behind it with the assurance that lawyers wouldn't decide what products would be deemed carcinogens, the state would abdicate that to France's International Agency for Research on Cancer.

A French team conducted experiments using sparrow chicks and write in Environmental Research that their tests led to slower growth, with females impacted most. 

They targeted the common fungicide tebuconazole, popular on food crops because it can stop everything from necrotic ring spot to blights, mildews, and smuts. They compare it to the popular weedkiller glyphosate, which they claim has caused a decline in birds in Europe, despite scientists showing the top reason for bird population changes in various areas has been land use changes and not the use of pesticides lacking an Organic™ label.

When asked about an effort to ban fluoride in drinking water, Utah Governor Spencer Cox said, "It’s not a bill I care that much about” but he still signed it, despite the health benefits being well-established and claims of harm being the kind of slimy epidemiology that claims "risk" of BPA, weedkillers, PFAS, and too many products to count.

Utah wants to be the California of the right-wing; ban things because it matches the politics of their voters and science will be marginalized.(1)

Greenpeace is facing bankruptcy after a $667,000,000 judgment. For the first time ever, the number of U.S. federal employees declined. Democrats have begun to consider they might be wrongly defending terrorists. They even became pro-vaccine for the first time this century. 

The best thing President Donald Trump may have done for science and political sanity is to switch from Democrat to Republican and bring Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk along with him. It forced Democrats, who are nearly 90% of career government employees, to suddenly defend things they had opposed for decades.(1)

Like nuclear energy. Which means we could usher in a new Golden Age of Science.

The only real way to wipe out H5N1, the bird flu that has been ruining egg prices since last year, is to kill off all the wild birds. That is not practical but what we can do is stop buying raw pet food. All of it. Now. And never start again. You will kill your cat if it is transmitted in that food. And stop buying raw milk. All of it. Now. And never start again.