Heres Why There Is Still So Much Lead Pipe in Chicago

Even though lead in drinking water damages children’s development, the Environmental Protection Agency has forced very few cities to replace their lead pipes.

Consider Chicago, with more water pipes made out of lead than any U.S. city, some 400,000. About 7% of homes that requested sampling last year exceeded federal limits, and in at least 73 homes, it was at least twice that much, according to an AP analysis of more than 3,500 samples collected using a method that’s more sensitive than the federal government’s.

Yet that many homes was never enough to trigger the mandate to remove pipes.
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That’s because EPA standards only say most homes – not all – can’t have dangerous amounts of lead.

Since Chicago was never forced to remove its lead pipe, it left most of it in the ground, relying on water treatment instead to lower the lead levels.

State and local officials say they had limited funds that needed to be used elsewhere. They also say local rules made removal work more difficult and more expensive.

WATER MAIN WORK

In 2012, the city began rapidly replacing its aged water mains. These are typically made of cast-iron, not lead. When road crews came across the lead pipes that branch off and serve individual homes, they only replaced a short piece near the water main with copper. Thousands and thousands of times, they reburied the junction and left the rest.

Just as the city was wrapping up that effort, the Illinois legislature made that method illegal.

Miguel Del Toral, a former EPA regulations manager who was also a whistleblower on the Flint, Michigan lead pipe disaster, said Chicago ignored the toxic effects of lead in drinking water.

“During the water main replacement program, there was no acknowledgement that there was an issue,” he said.

Del Toral was not the only one to object to the city’s actions. Two Chicago residents filed a proposed class action in 2017, arguing Chicago’s water main work increased people’s risk of lead exposure. They cited studies that said disturbing lead pipe and then leaving it in the ground can actually spike levels in tap water.

The next year, to protect against those spikes, the city finally started handing out water filters to residents in neighborhoods where public works crews were replacing mains. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.

CHICAGO’S OFFICIAL VIEW

The EPA has said replacing lead pipes during water main work is not only safer, it is also about 20% cheaper. But Chicago Commissioner of Water Management Andrea Cheng said that’s not true in Chicago. State rules there required expensive construction methods until last year. Only recently did the city start waiving permit fees that can add thousands of dollars to lead replacement costs, she said.

Cheng said old water mains can rupture, and slowing their replacement by dealing with all the lead pipes would have been irresponsible and could expose people to bacteria. She said Chicagoans face a bigger threat of poisoning from lead paint and the city is trying to fight that.

The city of Detroit found success when it pressured residents to let road crews onto private property to remove lead pipes. Rules like that are not in place in Chicago.

“Do you know how many people want their yard dug up?” Cheng said. “Not many.”

Since the legislature changed the law, most residents have allowed workers on their property to replace pipes, she said.

Today, Chicago offers a limited, free lead pipe replacement program for low-income households and daycares and recently started replacing lead pipes when they break — a common occurrence in a city with harsh winters. But the city says it will take decades to replace all of them. Residents will continue to be exposed.

So three decades after the federal government imposed lead limits for drinking water, the vast majority of lead pipe is still in the groundnot only in Chicago, but across the country.

Marc Edwards, a water treatment specialist at Virginia Tech, said proactive cities that replaced entire lenths of lead pipe are in better shape.

“You’re solving the problem once and for all,” he said. “It’s much more cost effective to do it all at one time than to just leave that problem for the homeowner to forget about and realize in 30 years that their kids have been lead poisoned.”

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Fassett reported from Seattle.

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source https://time.com/6293130/lead-pipe-chicago/

How the Silicon Valley Bank Crisis Boosted Banking Startup Brex

Not many people start multi-billion dollar businesses, and you can count on two hands the number of people who achieve that goal before they’re 30. Henrique Dubugras, 27, CEO of payments platform Brex, and his cofounder Pedro Franceschi, 26, are two of them. The pair came to the U.S from Brazil in 2016—after founding and selling fintech company Pagar.me in Brazil—to attend Stanford University, before dropping out after less than a year to start the company. By 2022, Brex was valued at $12.3 billion, and has now made 10 acquisitions.

Lately, things have been strange in Silicon Valley, even by the standards of fresh-faced finance moguls. High interest rates have slowed the tech industry’s venture capital lifeblood from a torrent to a trickle. Then came the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, which threatened not only the fortunes of high-flying tech companies, but the country’s broader banking system as well. Brex had a front row seat to that drama—the company provides corporate credit cards and expense-management software, and acts as a bank for startups. And as the finances of the tech world teetered, more than $3 billion came gushing into Brex’s accounts.
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TIME spoke with Dubugras about Brex, the banking crisis, and the upsides of working in a bad market.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How is Brex different from a typical credit card?

So, a good way to think of Brex is that we are a mix of a fintech and a software company. Credit cards were the first version of it. We’re replacing the corporate American Express [account] and Concur [the expense tracking system] in the same place. We get the receipt for you, and submit it for you. That’s good for you because it saves you a ton of time. But it’s also good for businesses, because they have real time information into [their expenses].

The same thing we did with credit cards, we did with banking. You can open a business account in real time. We make payments super easy for you. But at the same time we have software that makes it super easy to pay your bills. So, for example, if you want to pay an invoice you just upload a picture of that invoice and we’re going to automatically find the bank account, we’re going to assign it to the right budget, we’re going to integrate it into your accounting software. We were able to open accounts for customers extremely quickly during the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) banking crisis, and were able to help them run their payroll super quickly, such that they wouldn’t miss a beat if the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) didn’t save the day.

Why did those companies come to you during the banking crisis? Why not just open a Chase account or something like that?

Chase would take a week, and you’d have to go to the branch. It happened on a Friday, and payroll was going to run on Monday. Brex was able to open accounts the same day so that they could operate and move their money. Also, we knew startups—we’ve been serving startups for a long time—which is a core SVB customer.

Tell me about that week. What did the banking crisis look like from your end as it was happening?

It was the craziest experience of my professional career. I could say that we knew exactly what was going to happen, and we had everything planned out, but the reality is we were just learning as we went through it. We woke up and we just saw that there was a lot of money coming into our accounts, and we didn’t know exactly why. Later that day, we talked to a bunch of people and we heard what was happening. We thought it was going to be fine. The people most interested in banking that we called said everything was going to be fine. Later, it became clear what was happening, that there was a bank run. And immediately customers are saying, ‘Hey, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have payroll to run on Monday. I have to pay my bills.’ And we immediately got into action and tried to come up with a payroll loan program to help these businesses make payroll on Monday while their money was stuck. But it was crazy. We had over a billion dollars raised by Sunday, but then the FDIC came and saved the day. I was never so happy to waste work in my life. But I would say we were working 18 to 20-hour days, both days, to make it happen.

How is the broader Silicon Valley slowdown affecting your business?

I don’t know if you know Brazil, but interest rates there go from 2% to 12% on two-year cycles. Inflation is something that we’ve lived with since the 1980s. It’s almost funny to me in the U.S. how astonished [people are]. Coming from Brazil we’ve just seen this so many times. It creates some opportunities and some challenges. On the challenges side, customers are spending less, and we make money when people spend money. So that’s a challenge, but an opportunity, too, because we have this deposits business, and we increase our revenue when interest rates go up on our deposits. And when we go to businesses, [to get them to switch to our service] in a world where only growing revenue matters, they might not think that’s that important. But in a world where controlling cost matters a lot, looking at alternatives that can save money actually becomes really important. So, I would say that the important thing in my view, one, is understanding that these are cycles, they come and go, they’re not here forever. Number two is understanding what the opportunities are, and doubling down on the opportunities. The challenges are there anyway, so just handle them, but focus on what you can get done during this period, and where the good parts are, and double down there.

source https://time.com/6292852/brex-ceo-henrique-dubugras-silicon-valley-bank/

How The Horror of Dolores Roach Puts a Twist on Sweeney Todd

The idea of cannibalism as a metaphor for gentrification was a lightbulb moment for the writer and director Aaron Mark. Looking around Washington Heights—a historically Dominican area in upper Manhattan—where he lived for 10 years, Mark, a self-described gentrifier, saw such rapid change, it felt like the neighborhood was devouring itself. His next thought was about Sweeney Todd, the play and musical about a barber who slits victims’ throats and a meat pie shop owner who bakes them into pastries.

Along with the actor Daphne Rubin-Vega, Mark took inspiration from the infamous demon barber of Fleet Street to create The Horror of Dolores Roach, a black comedy horror series coming to Prime Video on Friday. Starring Justina Machado in the titular role, Dolores Roach is an adaptation of a 2018 Gimlet Media podcast, written by Mark. The story began as an Off-Broadway one-woman play titled Empanada Loca in 2015, which starred Rubin-Vega, who also voices Dolores in the podcast and worked on the eight-part TV series as an executive producer and writer.
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The plot follows Dolores, a former weed dealer who is sent to prison for more than a decade for her crimes, which are non-violent apart from her assaulting a police officer in self-defense during the arrest. When she is released, lost and alone, the only thing that hasn’t changed in a rapidly gentrifying Washington Heights is her favorite empanada place, Empanada Loca. Dolores takes up residence in the shop’s basement and begins work as a masseuse, using skills she learned in prison.

But then, she accidentally-on-purpose kills the landlord (played by Marc Maron), and soon she has killed a few other people—those who figure out the scheme, those who she perceives as harmful, and eventually those who straight-up annoy her. The owner of Empanada Loca, Luis (Alejandro Hernandez), helps her dispose of the bodies in his wares, à la Sweeney Todd’s Mrs. Lovett. As the body count piles up, the cracks in their plan emerge, while a private investigator and the police close in on them.

Jasper Savage—Prime VideoLuis (Alejandro Hernandez), the owner of Empanada Loca, argues with his landlord, Gideon Pearlman (Marc Maron), who has been threatening to evict him.

Cannibalism drives the story in Dolores Roach and Sweeney Todd

The current Broadway musical (starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford) is a revival of the 1979 production, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical. The character of Sweeney Todd—a British barber jailed unjustly for 15 years who seeks revenge upon his return—first appeared in a Victorian era penny dreadful, The String of Pearls. Penny dreadfuls, popular in the 19th-century United Kingdom, were published in weekly installments of eight to 16 pages. Each one cost a penny, and the serial literature was aimed at the working class. Sweeney Todd, Mark says, has always been social commentary. Some feared the consequences of granting an increasingly literate working class access to fantasies of wealth and adventure.

Over its many iterations, Sweeney Todd has used cannibalism as a narrative tool to explore all kinds of extremes, Mark notes. The musical is about revenge, while the penny dreadful is about greed. In The String of Pearls, the barber is a villain who slits people’s throats to take their money and jewelry. The Horror of Dolores Roach, in turn, is about survival—especially at the margins. The New York City Dolores returns to is one where weed is now on the cusp of legalization; the white moms who have moved to her old neighborhood buy it to help them sleep. Dolores, for context, is Venezuelan, Barbadian, Jewish, German, and Mexican. “I’m from f-ckin’ everywhere, but I don’t belong anywhere,” she says in the podcast.

That line is a favorite of Rubin-Vega’s, who is Panamanian and Barbadian. She has known Mark for about 10 years, when he started writing Empanada Loca with her in mind. Jim Nicola, the former artistic director of New York Theatre Workshop, connected them, and Mark showed up at Rubin-Vega’s doorstep, draft in hand. They sat down on the actor’s floor with coffee and worked through every word together.

Speaking with TIME ahead of Dolores Roach’s TV premiere, Rubin-Vega and Mark considered the topic of cannibalism as it relates to gentrification—and discussed how it all connects to Sweeney Todd.

“It’s not feeding on itself,” Rubin-Vega says of the longtime gentrification in Washington Heights. “It’s being fed on, it’s being preyed upon. We colonize. Isn’t that what we do?”

“It’s less a neighborhood cannibalizing itself; it’s a species cannibalizing itself,” Mark counters. Like, ‘Oh, this is what human beings do: We feed on ourselves.’”

Courtesy of Prime VideoDolores Roach (Justina Machado) contemplates her reflection in the mirror.

The show’s creators want viewers to take their own interpretations from the tale. Each version of the Sweeney Todd story is its own freestanding Rorschach test, they say, and Dolores Roach is ambiguous about its protagonist’s morality. “People see different things in this,” Mark says. “That extends to the kills themselves: To what degree are the kills justified? Do some kills feel justified and some kills don’t feel justified? To what degree do we forgive Dolores? To what degree do we identify with her behavior?”

“I would love to encourage not needing to come to a conclusion,” Rubin-Vega adds. “Because at least for me, when there’s a show that I love, when I see it again and again, after time, it lands differently. Because I’ve changed. And that’s huge. That’s the reciprocity of art.”

Dolores Roach is the latest in a recent spate of cannibalism content offering a range of social commentary. Chelsea G. Summers’ debut novel A Certain Hunger drew praise for its feminist depiction of the fictional food writer and convicted serial killer Dorothy Daniels, who eats men. Fresh, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan, portrays the rich as literally preying on young women. Bones and All, starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell, turns cannibalism into an all-consuming love story. Perhaps the most disturbing episode of the post-apocalyptic zombie drama The Last of Us centers not on fungal infections or societal collapse but on a preacher who feeds his congregation human flesh. The second season of Yellowjackets spawned a host of think pieces about what it means for young women to eat one another. Summers, the author of A Certain Hunger, says cannibalism is always symbolic and often a commentary on capitalism.

In art, rarely is cannibalism a sign of pure evil on the part of the perpetrator. Dolores Roach isn’t seeking bleakness or chasing death and demise, says Mark. “She’s looking for life,” he says, noting the irony for a serial killer. “Circumstances have put her in this situation where she finds herself behaving in this way that she doesn’t recognize.”

“She’s a roach for a reason,” adds Rubin-Vega. “Roaches are just like ladybugs, they’re just brown. They don’t have the privilege of being pretty. They have bad press, roaches. ‘An infestation of roaches,’ ‘a loveliness of ladybugs.’ Dolores is a roach, and she’s going to be here long after everyone else.”

source https://time.com/6292921/the-horror-of-dolores-roach-sweeney-todd/

How Threads Became One of the Fastest Growing Apps Ever

In the day after it launched to the public, Meta’s new text-based app Threads saw an explosion of new users unmatched by any other company aiming to rival the struggling social media platform—or almost any app in the past decade.

Within two hours of its launch on Wednesday evening, 2 million people had already downloaded the app, widely seen as a copycat to Twitter. By Friday morning, sign-ups had surpassed 70 million, a figure CEO Mark Zuckerberg said was “way beyond our expectations.” The Verge reported that users had already posted more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes, based on internal company data.
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The company’s early success has not been lost on Twitter and its owner, Elon Musk, who took to the platform to criticize the app on Thursday evening. Twitter’s legal team quickly threatened legal action over Threads, reportedly alleging in a letter that Meta had engaged in “unlawful misappropriation” of its trade secrets.

Who has joined threads?

According to data provided to TIME by Sensor Tower and data.ai, Threads was the most downloaded non-game app on a launch day in the past decade. As of July 6 it had amassed approximately 40 million worldwide downloads, according to Sensor Tower. While data.ai says Nintendo’s Mario Kart Tour was the fastest-ever growing app, Threads came in second and its launch outpaced those of popular apps like Pokemon GO and Call of Duty Mobile. Zuckerberg reported that Threads reached 30 million users in less than 24 hours. By comparison Instagram took 15 months to reach 30 million downloads, while TikTok reached the milestone in just under two years, according to data.ai. (ChatGPT’s app, released at the end of last year, is just shy of 18 million downloads, data.ai says.) But the early numbers are still dwarfed by the 368 million users who visit Twitter daily, according to the Business of Apps.

A major part of the platform’s appeal is the fact that for many, the communities they’ve built online are readily accessible—users are able to easily sign up through their existing Instagram accounts and transfer over their following from photo-based app. In addition, a large number of prominent accounts received early access to Threads to help populate the platform ahead of its launch. Early adopters included public figures like Bill Gates, Shakira and Oprah Winfrey, along with brands like Netflix.

The success of Threads

Meta already has a lot of the social media infrastructure in place and being a household name gives it a headstart. “It’s an advantage to be associated with a big brand,” Darrell West, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, told TIME previously. “Threads is not going to be a niche player.”

Threads is already having a nostalgic effect. Some users have compared the experience on the app to Twitter in its early days.

It remains to be seen if Thread’s success will continue, Kevin Driscoll, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Department of Media Studies, told TIME. “Some of the problems that have come up with both Twitter and Facebook, and are kind of endemic to these highly centralized platforms, [are that] their main focus is growth and scale and early user acquisition, and so there isn’t as much talk about long term sustainability.”

The app is still lacking some key features, such as a search function, hashtags, and a following feed. The company received some pushback for a policy that would require users trying to delete their Threads account to also delete their Instagram profile. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, said in a Threads post that the company is working on fixing it.

Meta also faces a challenge rolling Threads out in European Union countries due to regulatory concerns. The region is a big market for Meta. Europe accounted for roughly 22% of Meta’s $28 billion in advertising revenue during the first quarter of 2023, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Twitter’s Response

Amid the app’s early success, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, did not shy away from taking swipes at Threads’ main competitor. In a post, Zuckerberg said Threads would be “focusing on kindness”, something he implied had been missing on Twitter. “That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently,” he said.

The new app has been billed by many as a “Twitter-killer”, a threat to X-Corp, the company Musk created and merged with Twitter earlier this year, that it has not been taking lightly. Just hours after Thread’s launch, X-Corp’s legal team sent a letter to Zuckerberg– expressing “serious concerns that Meta has engaged in systematic, will, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” Semafor reported on Thursday.

In response, a Meta spokesperson reportedly posted: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”

In a series of Tweets Thursday night, Musk criticized the app, calling it a “closed source, algorithm-only system,” implying that could mean that the “manipulation of what information people see is essentially undetectable.” Replying to a Tweet about Meta’s social media dominance, he wrote that “Any social media monopoly is despair.”

For now, Meta is riding a win that follows a string of high-profile scandals and missteps in recent years, including mass layoffs and criticism from activists and regulators over how the company failed to protect users from harms on its platforms and mishandled user data.

“This is as good of a start as we could have hoped for!” Zuckerberg posted on Threads. “Feels like the beginning of something special.”

source https://time.com/6292957/threads-fastest-growing-apps/

Teens Are Increasingly Underestimating Their Weight

By many measures, teen obesity is an international public health crisis, with data showing that 340 million adolescents worldwide are affected, a number that’s risen tenfold in the last half century. The largest study to date of how teenagers perceive their own weight—encompassing 40 countries and 16 years—suggests that the same teens are increasingly underestimating how much they weigh.

According to Anouk Geraets, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg and the study’s lead author, the findings, published July 5 in the journal Child and Adolescent Obesity, help explain why so many countries’ attempts to course correct the rise of teenage obesity “don’t have the right effect that they want to have.” Geraets argues that the data suggest health care experts may be overlooking the importance of discussing body perceptions in conversations with adolescents about their health and habits—and highlight why we need to reconsider how weight and health are measured.
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Gareats’ team used World Health Organization data from longitudinal international school-based surveys, including 746,121 teens worldwide who had answered questions about weight perception between 2002 and 2018. “What’s very important is that the study has asked the same questions across the years,” says Geraets, allowing findings from each survey year to be compared directly.

Across all years and countries, teens underestimated their weight by about 13%. And that number is growing, with the global annual average of teen weight underestimation growing by some 33% between 2002 and 2018. On the other hand, the increase in underestimation was accompanied by a decrease in overestimation, mostly accounted for by changes in how girls reported experiencing their weight. Geraets believes both trends could be attributed to changing body ideals throughout the years included in the study. “In the ‘90s, there was this skinny body ideal, and we started in 2002,” when those standards were still fairly prevalent, she says. Teens in the 2010s “were maybe not comparing themselves to skinny models like [they were] the ‘00s.”

Read more: Teens Are Taking Wegovy for Weight Loss. But Doctors Have a Lot to Learn

Additionally, about 60% of teens were correct in their own assessment of their weight, a measurement that increased or remained consistent over time in all but 8 of the 41 included countries—a trend also driven largely by girls.

Geography seemed to play less of a role. Geraets’ team found that, although teens in countries with higher obesity rates were generally more likely to misjudge their weight, when teen obesity rates in a given country went up, it didn’t necessarily correlate to changes in overestimation or underestimation far outside the country’s average rates. It’s possible, then, that the changing ways teens view their bodies could be the result of global cultural changes. Increased smartphone ownership worldwide, for instance, means that teens on every continent are now able to spend time in the same corners of the internet.

In the U.S. especially, where teens have to process messages about diet culture and body size from all sides, understanding where weight perception can play a more helpful role would likely mean doing more research that uses Geraets’ findings as a jumping-off point. As obesity rates have grown, so too has the number of teens affected by eating disorders, which pose serious health risks at any weight. A recent study of more than 5,000 teenagers with obesity across 10 countries found that caregivers and doctors were often unaware of self-managed attempts at weight loss. This type of miscommunication can strip teens of the opportunity to receive appropriately tailored health care and leave them open to messages about obesity that over- or under-stress the implications it has for their long-term health.

Messaging focused on obesity alone can also deny teens a nuanced picture of their health beyond Body Mass Index (BMI), which remains both the metric used to determine weight status and a standard in research. And though it can be useful when processing large datasets, there’s a large margin of error when using BMI as an indicator of anything on an individual level. Geraets herself prefers waist circumference over BMI, which her study was limited too, as a predictor of cardiovascular health. “If you really want to have the best measures,” she says, “you should look much further than BMI.” For these reasons and more, teenagers should never be left to deal with their weight and body image on their own, suggests Geraets. “If you want to lose weight, if you want to gain weight, I think it’s important to do this in a responsible manner and contact a doctor,” she says.

source https://time.com/6292901/teens-weight-underestimating/

The World May Have Just Missed Its Chance To Seriously Tackle Shipping Emissions

The United Nations has long been a powerful force in the fight against climate change. But the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the U.N. agency assigned to regulate the cruise liners, container ships, and bulk cargo carriers that operate on the high seas beyond the authority of any one country, has been another story.

Global shipping is responsible for about 3% of global emissions. But in the lead up to the Paris Agreement back in 2015, then-IMO Secretary-General Koji Sekimizu told world diplomats that the sector should not be subject to any overall emissions limits. “Such measures would artificially limit the ability of shipping to meet the demand created by the world economy,” he said. After pressure to address emissions intensified, the group’s member states came out with a 2018 agreement that would aim to cut emissions by half by 2050, a significant step, but still far from the complete decarbonization that scientists say will be necessary within three decades to avert catastrophic climate change.
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Now, at a follow up IMO meeting this month intended to revise shipping’s greenhouse gas strategy, international delegates have agreed to tighten the sector’s lax emissions goals, though not nearly as much as climate advocates say is needed. IMO members set a well-caveated goal to reach net-zero emissions “by or around, i.e. close to 2050, taking into account different national circumstances.”

Read more: The Ocean is the Next Frontier for the Carbon Removal Industry

Current IMO Secretary-General Kitack Lim called the agreement struck in London today “monumental.” “It is not the end goal,” he added. “It is in many ways a starting point for the work that needs to intensify even more over the years and decades ahead of us.”

But many observers in the international climate community were furious over the outcome, saying the IMO has failed to bring future emissions from the world’s oceangoing vessels in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement, particularly because their agreement lacks a firm 2050 deadline. The targets will be up for discussion again in five years, but many environmentalists say that by then it will be too late to change the sector’s emissions trajectory before 2050. Faïg Abbasov, Shipping programme director of European sustainability NGO Transport and Environment, called the deal a “wishy-washy compromise.” “Aside from FIFA, it’s hard to think of an international organization more useless than the IMO,” he said on Thursday, after a draft agreement was released.

Read more: We’re Gonna Need a Greener Boat

Still, the result could have been worse. Much of the IMO negotiations in recent weeks were carried out in small group sessions, which made it difficult for some national delegations to get their perspective heard. The body very nearly agreed to a weaker compromise, before a last day push by delegations from small island states like Vanuatu and the Marshall Islands, with support from developed nations like the U.K., succeeded in winning concessions from developing countries. Rising sea levels caused by climate change are threatening those small island nations’ existence, while developing countries like India and Brazil have historically been opposed to stronger shipping emissions requirements, out of fear that the limits could hurt their export-dependent economies.

One of the crucial points of contention in the negotiations were whether the new IMO greenhouse gas strategy would include interim 2030 and 2040 emissions targets in advance of a final 2050 goal. Climate advocates say that those near-term targets are essential to making sure the longer-term goals are actually achieved. They would also provide a clear market signal for international shipping companies to put more investment into green technologies, and production and distribution infrastructure for zero emission fuels.

The IMO agreement does include new shorter-term targets that would cut emissions by 20-30% by 2030 and 70-80% by 2040. But instead of actually being referred to as firm targets, the final agreement ambiguously refers to them as “indicative checkpoints.” They’re also lower than what the Pacific Island countries and their bloc of supporters were pushing for: 37% emissions reductions in the sector by 2030 and a 96% reduction by 2040. That level of ambition would have kept the sector on track to do its part in keeping global temperature rise at around 1.5°C. The upper bound of the targets the IMO did adopt, a 30% emission cut by 2030 and an 80% cut by 2040, were only put in place thanks to the last minute push by small island nations on July 6.

Some observers cited the change as a win. Others were less positive about the result. “In typical IMO fashion there was delay tactics in working groups while the real inaction happened behind closed doors where many [national delegations] were excluded until the final hour and in front of a near ultimatum,” said Lucy Gilliam, senior shipping policy officer at European environmental NGO Seas at Risk. “The Pacific [states] brought it back from the brink. But let’s be clear that this was not transparent, just, or equitable and it is reflected in the result reached.”

Read more: The Cruise Industry Is On a Course For Climate Disaster

The current agreement will cause shipping to overshoot its carbon budget to keep global temperatures under 1.5°C by 2032, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation. If the sector hits the 2030 and 2040 targets set in the agreement, and actually fully decarbonizes by 2050, it can still stay on track to keep global temperature rise below 2°C.

Much depends on what actual enforcement measures the IMO agrees to, and how strongly they are enforced. Some options include mandates to use lower emission fuels, emissions cap and trade systems, or direct taxes on carbon emissions. The details are set to be hammered out over the course of the next year, with implementation happening around 2026 or 2027. Climate advocates say the last minute IMO push by small island nations helped give them a leg up in those negotiations, since the stronger high-end targets could keep more stringent emission reduction policies on the table. “They were heroes this week,” says Delaine McCullough, shipping emissions campaign manager at Ocean Conservancy. “There’s no other way to describe them.”

Still, the ambiguous language around the targets has left plenty of room for negotiators to sidestep strong emission policies. Individual nations could take matters into their own hands, implementing stricter emissions rules for shipping companies trying to use their ports. The E.U. for instance, adopted a policy last year that would force shippers to pay for emissions. Some environmentalists, however, say that it would be better if the IMO were implementing such financial schemes, as the international body would be able to direct funds generated by carbon levies toward poorer nations that need the most help in adapting to climate change.

“There’ll be a big debate over where those revenues are distributed, and that’s where the question of an equitable and just transition will play out,” says McCullough. “It seems like [this week’s agreement] is the end, but it actually isn’t. It’s the starting gun.”

source https://time.com/6292927/imo-global-shipping-emissions-climate-deal/

Why You Really Need to Change Your Air Conditioners Filter

Given that the average person in the U.S. spends 90% of their time inside, indoor air quality can have a significant impact on overall health and well-being. But many people overlook one common contributor to indoor air quality: air conditioning, which the vast majority of U.S. homes use in some form.

Air conditioners can enhance air quality by regulating temperature, reducing humidity levels, and improving filtration. On the flip side, a dirty system can degrade air quality.

Studies have shown that bacteria and other pathogens can accumulate in air conditioning units, potentially sickening people exposed to them. Legionnaires’ disease, a form of pneumonia, can be spread by air-cooling systems contaminated by bacteria, and dirty AC can also lead to hypersensitivity pneumonitis, an allergic reaction to irritants like bacteria and fungi that leads to lung inflammation. A 2023 study compared healthy adults in India who spent at least six hours per day in air conditioning with those who spent equivalent time in naturally ventilated buildings and found that those in air-conditioned environments had more health issues, including respiratory symptoms, headaches, and lethargy—possibly because of contaminants accumulating in these buildings, among other factors.
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Here’s how to avoid AC-related health risks and improve the quality of the air you breathe.

Upgrade your filter

An air-conditioning filter should be labeled with a minimum efficiency reporting value (MERV), which rates its ability to trap particles in the air, ranging from dust and pet dander to smog and mold. The higher the MERV value, the more the filter catches. If they’re compatible with your air-conditioning system, look for a filter labeled MERV 11 or MERV 13, suggests William Bahnfleth, a professor of architectural engineering at the Pennsylvania State University and a member of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

If your system doesn’t work with these filters—window units, in particular, tend to have lower-quality filters—you may want to purchase a separate HEPA filter to help improve your air quality, says Jeffrey Siegel, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto who researches ventilation and indoor air quality.

And use it well

More important than which filter you buy is how you use it, Siegel says. Priority number one: replacing or cleaning it regularly. If you put it off for too long, mold and other contaminants can accumulate in your AC system and circulate throughout your home, potentially triggering allergies and other respiratory issues, says Dr. Anthony Gerber, a pulmonologist at National Jewish Health in Colorado.

Exactly how often you need to swap your filter varies depending on the manufacturer’s instructions, how often you use your AC, and the quality of your home’s air. But, as a rule of thumb, you should clean or replace your filter every month or two during seasons of peak use, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. This not only prevents contamination but also helps the system run better. If you have a reusable filter, manufacturers typically recommend vacuuming it, washing it with water and a gentle detergent, and letting it dry fully before reinserting it.

Regardless of which filter you buy, make sure it fits well, Siegel says. “Air will take the easiest path,” he says, so if there are gaps around your filter, air will simply bypass it. If you have central air conditioning, you can likely have an upgraded filter slot installed relatively inexpensively to improve the fit, Siegel says.

Run your fan more

With central air conditioning, the fan comes on when the system is actively working to lower the interior temperature by circulating cool air. That’s about 20% of the time for most residential systems, Siegel’s research has shown. Air only goes through the filter when the fan is on—so if your system allows, Siegel suggests setting the fan to run for around 20 minutes every hour (about 33% of the time) to improve filtration, especially during seasons when there’s lots of pollen or other irritants in the air.

Many window units also have fan settings, but Siegel says extra run time won’t bring meaningful health benefits, since the filters used in window AC systems typically don’t remove most particles from indoor air.

Bring outdoor air in

Most industrial HVAC systems periodically bring in outdoor air to improve ventilation. That’s important, as inadequate ventilation is thought to contribute to “sick building syndrome,” a phenomenon whereby people feel unwell—experiencing symptoms like headaches, coughing, fatigue, and nausea—while inside, even if there’s no obvious cause for those symptoms.

By contrast, most residential air-conditioning units don’t mechanically bring in fresh outdoor air, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, though some models have a vent that can be left open for fresh-air intake. If yours doesn’t, you can simply turn off your system for a few hours a day and open the windows to get air flowing, Bahnfleth says. (That’s assuming the outdoor air quality is good; if not, you’re better off keeping your windows closed.)

Maintain your system regularly

“It’s the most boring thing in the world, but air-conditioner maintenance is really important,” Siegel says. HVAC technicians can make sure your system is working properly and that hard-to-reach parts are clean and free of potentially harmful build-up.

source https://time.com/6292834/air-conditioner-filter-health-tips/