SteveKLord

On Tuesday, service workers rallied at major airports in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Phoenix. They called for immediate action from employers to ensure their safety in the workplace, including adequate breaks and access to drinking water during periods of extreme heat.

In Phoenix, where earlier this year local officials enacted a heat ordinance mandating many of these protections, workers and legislators sounded the alarm that the ordinance has led to inadequate improvements, and questioned how the protections are being enforced. “Why is it after passing an ordinance we’re still asking for the basics? Water. Breaks. These are humans rights,” said City of Phoenix Councilwoman Betty Guardado at the rally. Later this week, laborers across the country will be taking a coordinated water break to signify the need for access to drinking water at work.

As human-caused climate change continues to make the planet hotter, extreme heat in the workplace is increasingly becoming a lethal threat. Organizers say “Heat Week” is also spurred by the recent sudden deaths of Wednesday “Wendy” Johnson, a postal worker in North Carolina, and Ronald Silver II, a sanitation worker in Maryland. Both Johnson and Silver are believed to have died, in part, because of on-the-job heat exposure, which kills dozens of workers every year.

Companies whose futures depend on plastic production, including oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on bags and other plastic items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.

They argue that “recyclable” should apply to anything that’s capable of being recycled. And they point to newer technologies that have been able to remake plastic bags into new products.

I spent months investigating one of those technologies, a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis, only to find that it is largely a mirage. It’s inefficient, dirty and so limited in capacity that no one expects it to process meaningful amounts of plastic waste any time soon.

Clayton Page Aldern is a former neuroscientist turned environmental journalist. He is currently a senior data reporter at the climate magazine Grist. His work focuses on the intersection of climate change and human health, particularly the neurological impacts of environmental factors.

Below, Clayton shares five key insights from his new book, The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains.

Scientists from across academic disciplines are extremely concerned about climate change. Many of them have already changed their own lifestyles or engaged in advocacy and protest, with even more being willing to do so in future.

This is evident from a large-scale survey of scientists from all over the world, conducted by an international research team led by the University of Amsterdam. The researchers not only looked at the views of scientists and the extent to which they are engaged in climate action, but also at how the involvement of scientists with climate change can be increased.

Researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) have discovered a new method to increase the efficiency of solar cells by a factor of 1,000. The team of scientists achieved this breakthrough by creating crystalline layers of barium titanate, strontium titanate, and calcium titanate, which were alternately placed on top of one another in a lattice structure.

A new climate change map shows predictions for just how devastated the future climate will be in various places around the world. The map, which is called The Future Urban Climates, allows interested users to explore how their home area’s climate might change going forward.

The data used to create the map comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and it was created by University of Maryland spatial ecologist Matthew Fitzpatrick to showcase the future of climate change up to 2080.

Of course, all of the changes showcased on the climate change map are just predictions based on current trends of extreme storms, fires, floods, droughts, heat waves, and cold snaps—all of which continue to hit us harder each year.

Some 175 years after the U.S. government stole land from the chief of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation while he was away visiting relatives, Illinois may soon return it to the tribe.

Nothing ever changed the 1829 treaty that Chief Shab-eh-nay signed with the U.S. government to preserve for him a reservation in northern Illinois: not subsequent accords nor the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which forced all Indigenous people to move west of the Mississippi.

But around 1848, the U.S. sold the land to White settlers while Shab-eh-nay and other members of his tribe were visiting family in Kansas.

To right the wrong, Illinois would transfer a 1,500-acre state park west of Chicago, which was named after Shab-eh-nay, to the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation. The state would continue providing maintenance while the tribe says it wants to keep the park as it is.

Scientists have long worried Earth’s rising temperatures could make fungi more dangerous to humans. Now, researchers in China may have stumbled on evidence to support that idea.

April 17 marks Palestinian Prisoner’s Day, established by the Palestinian National Council in 1974 as a day to honor the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli occupation prisons and to support their legitimate right to freedom. The date was chosen because it commemorates the release of prisoner Mahmoud Bakr Hijazi in the first prisoner exchange between the Palestinians and Israel. Accordingly, Palestinian Prisoner’s Day considers all those who have served time in prison as “icons of resistance,” thereby representing all Palestinians who have been under brutal occupation for the past 76 years.

In an interview with the New Arab, Charlotte Kates, Samidoun’s coordinator, confirmed that “Palestinians deeply value and honour the tremendous sacrifices that political prisoners have made for the liberation of their land. Each of their lives is precious to them.” She added that Palestinian prisoners are leaders of the resistance who have been detained because Israel understands that they are a threat to the settler colonial system and therefore wants to isolate them away from the world.

“From the earliest days of the Palestinian national liberation movement, imprisonment has always been a weapon used by the colonizer,” Kates confirmed, “and it has always been an inspiration for Palestinian resistance.” More than just the colonizer’s victims, she explained that prisoners are also “leaders, organizers and fighters. They organize behind bars and turn prisons into ‘revolutionary schools’ of the oppressed.” Because they are “central to the liberation movement,” their right to freedom must be part of the liberation struggle along with the isolation of Israel.

GAZA -- A man in the Gaza Strip is using solar panels to clean water for his neighbors – a seemingly small gesture that has large consequences at a time when the region is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis.

"Yesterday, I filled this car with clean water from the well, 6,500 liters, and distributed it among people in need of water," Mohammed Assalia told ABC News. "Some people use these wheelchairs to transport the water they fill, which is kinda sad but it does the thing."

As the resource becomes more scarce, Assalia said he is now looking for a way to reach more people in the most devastated area of the Gaza Strip, six months since Israel declared war on Hamas. The high costs involved with the project may hinder his ability to do so without help, he says.

"With the solar-powered well in my house, at least 1,000 people benefited and received clean water every day," Assalia said. "Now people from other neighborhoods have come to use it and we're trying to help more by operating as many wells as possible."

Researchers in China have reportedly developed a new technology similar to hydropanels for harvesting water out of thin air that is powered by energy from the sun. The device could be especially useful in dry, arid areas where water — but not sunlight — is hard to come by.

The findings from the research team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China were published in the scientific journal Applied Physics Reviews.

"This atmospheric water harvesting technology can be used to increase the daily water supply needs, such as household drinking water, industrial water, and water for personal hygiene," said Ruzhu Wang, one of the study's authors.

According to the study, the device is more efficient than other existing atmospheric water generators because it uses a "novel rotating operational strategy, in which one module works in the desorption, while the others work in the adsorption simultaneously … to keep the device harvesting water continuously."

The technology could also be used for purposes ranging from dehumidification to agriculture irrigation to thermal management for electronic devices.

We are excited to announce our upcoming West Coast speaking tour, Report from Rojava: Women’s Revolution, Direct Democracy & Social Ecology in North-East Syria, which will take place May 11th - 17th, featuring public talks led by ECR members Debbie Bookchin and Arthur Pye.

Tour Schedule:

Sat May 11: Bellingham, WA

Sun May 12: Seattle, WA

Mon May 13: Olympia, WA

Tue May 14: Portland, OR

Thu May 16: San Francisco, CA

Fri May 17: Oakland, CA