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marine life
Trump’s Embrace of Plastic Straws Won’t Make America Healthy Again
The harmful effects of plastics on human health should be a primary concern for any administration that claims to value human life.
Feb 12, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, which reverses the push for paper straws in favor of plastic ones—based on the claim that paper straws don’t work (which, by the way, isn’t true)—is about way more than just straws. It is designed to undercut the Biden administration’s 2022 initiative to phase out single-use plastics, including straws, containers, and bottles, from federal buildings by 2032.
While the administration’s EO focus might seem to be shining a light on a seemingly trivial issue, it is a symptom of a much larger, and much more alarming problem: plastic pollution and its impact on all of us. Plastic is a human health crisis in the making and this decision is more than absurd—it’s actually dangerous.
Firstly, while banning plastic straws specifically is not all about saving turtles and trashing the ocean—we are in fact by using them helping to trash the oceans.
This decision to roll back a policy aimed at reducing plastic waste isn’t just a misguided nod to convenience—it’s a big win for Big Oil.
Plastics have become a pervasive pollutant with 8 million tonnes of plastic dumped in our oceans every single year, killing marine life, including whales and seabirds at an alarming rate. One million sea turtles alone die every year from ingesting plastic trash. That represents 10% of the entire global population.
Researchers estimate there are around 199 million tonnes of plastic contaminating our marine environment already, and every year we do not take action and instead back plastic, that number rises.
Much of this largely single-use plastic, like straws, eventually breaks down into microplastics, smaller than a grain of rice. So, when we eat fish, we are consuming all the plastic junk and chemicals they have been ingesting too.
Which might help to explain why scientists have found plastic particles in human brains, lungs, hearts, and even placentas. We are poisoning our own babies with plastics, even before they are born.
These microplastics are harmful in their own right but, they also leach out toxic plastic chemicals, like Bisphenol A and phthalates, both known endocrine disruptors. Exposure to these chemicals in early development can have lifelong effects on a child's health, from developmental delays to ADHD, autism, and increased risks of certain cancers. These chemicals are even linked to miscarriages and infertility.
We already know that babies and infants appear to be ingesting high levels of microplastics because a study by scientists from Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland discovered they had over 10 times higher rates of microplastics in their feces samples than adults.
From the moment we wake up to the time we go to sleep, we are being exposed to microplastics—whether through the food we eat, the water we drink, or the air we breathe.
The harmful effects of plastics on human health should be a primary concern for any administration that claims to value human life. So, the president’s focus on supporting plastic straws is worryingly indicative of a disregard for the growing scientific consensus on the dangers of microplastics and the chemicals used to make plastics in general.
This decision to roll back a policy aimed at reducing plastic waste isn’t just a misguided nod to convenience—it’s a big win for Big Oil. Why? Because plastics are made from petrochemicals, this order therefore supports the fossil fuel industry. An industry already wreaking havoc on our planet by fueling climate change.
If we are serious about safeguarding human health, we must shift away from our throwaway plastic culture that has dominated our society for decades. The impacts of plastic pollution on our health, and our babies’ too, are far-reaching and catastrophic. It's time for our leaders to prioritize the health of people, not the interests of the plastic industry.
As the debate over plastic straws continues, which it will, we need to refocus the conversation on the real, life-threatening dangers posed by plastic pollution. It is time to recognize that this is not a fight over a straw—it is a fight for children’s health.
Which is why EARTHDAY.ORG is running an End Plastic Initiatives—so we can continue to drive public support around making a stand against plastic pollution and in the process protect our planet—and more importantly our health—for generations to come. The fight continues. Plastic is Toxic. DON’T GO BACK TO PLASTICS!
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Biden Tried to Protect the Vulnerable Bering Sea; Will It Work?
The climate emergency has led to dramatic changes for Alaska fish and wildlife and for the subsistence-based communities of the Arctic who depend on these creatures for their survival.
Jan 22, 2025
In early January, as one of his last acts in office, former U.S. President Joe Biden banned future offshore oil and gas drilling on more than 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters including the entire East Coast, West Coast, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico as well as the northern Bering Sea.
He did this using presidential powers granted under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, which in 2019 a federal judge in Alaska ruled cannot be rescinded by a future president. This means, despite his day one executive order reversing Biden’s order, President Donald Trump will likely have to get Congress to pass legislation negating this drilling ban. Three Republican congressmen from Louisiana and Texas have already introduced legislation to do that, but may have a hard time getting fellow Republicans from states like South Carolina and Florida—where anti-drilling sentiment is strong—to go along.
It’s pretty clear why Biden did what he did, first to thwart Trump’s “Drill Baby Drill” energy plan and to burnish his own environmental legacy. What is less clear to most people is why he included 44 million acres of the Northern Bering Sea off of Alaska in the drilling ban.
“Everything’s declining, even our (summer) moss berries, cloud berries, everything.”
As a Biden White House fact-sheet explained it: “The Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area was established in 2016 and includes one of the largest marine mammal migrations in the world—beluga and bowhead whales, walruses, and seals… the health of these waters is critically important to food security and to the culture of more than 70 coastal Tribes, including the Yup’ik, Cup’ik, and Inupiaq people who have relied on these resources for millennia.”
So, what’s the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area? Established by President Barack Obama in December of 2016, it was an attempt to meet the concerns of both Alaska Natives and environmental scientists studying the rapidly changing conditions they were witnessing. Alaska and its waters are today warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world due to a climate phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification,” linked to vanishing sea ice. As the Arctic Ocean ice cover that reflects solar radiation back into space has retreated, the dark ocean waters exposed absorb ever greater amounts of heat leading to 2024 being listed as the hottest year on record going back to 1850. 2023 was the previous hottest year. The 10 warmest years have all occurred in the last decade.
This has led to dramatic changes for the fish and wildlife and for the subsistence-based communities of the Arctic who depend on these creatures for their survival. For example, a study published last month found that 4 million common murres, a seabird that frequents the area, recently died as the result of a marine heatwave. This was about half the state of Alaska’s population, and may be the largest documented die-off of a single species of wild bird.
The Bering Sea’s Alaska Native communities—some 70 federally recognized tribes—first requested action under Obama and got both a ban on destructive bottom trawl fishing in the 113,000-square-mile resilience area and a ban on oil drilling in about half the area (rescinded by Trump during his first term and now fully protected by Biden under the Lands Act), also a commitment for the Coast Guard to restrict shipping channels in areas where native communities are involved in fishing, hunting, and whaling (still not finalized by the Coast Guard) and a pledge to consult with these same communities moving forward. Three leading Alaska Native organizations—Kawerak, Inc., the Association of Village Council Presidents, and the Bering Sea Elders Group—released a joint statement on the day Biden acted expressing their “deepest appreciation and gratitude” to him for protecting waters that President Trump hopes to reopen to oil drilling.
I recently interviewed two women from St. Paul Island in the Pribilof Islands, about 300 miles off the Alaskan mainland in the Bering Sea. Destiny Bristol Kushin is a 20-year-old college student working toward an associate degree in environmental sciences, and her grandmother Zinaida Melovidov is an elder who has lived on the island, with a population of just under 400 people, most of her life. They both talked about the decline of the murres that were hunted for meat and whose eggs were collected on a nearby island where they’ve all but disappeared since the die-off.
“Everything’s declining, even our (summer) moss berries, cloud berries, everything,” Melovidov worries.
“Even in the last 20 years since I was born, you can see the differences in the environment, especially with the seasons. Our summers will be later and foggy where they used to be sunny,” Kushin notes. “Our winters aren’t as snowy. It’s mostly wet now, like rain and snow all during the winter time.”
I’ve heard similar concerns about climate impacts on lives and livelihoods from Alaska Natives in the Aleutians and Southwest Alaska whose villages are also at risk from erosion, flooding, and thawing permafrost.
Even if Biden’s drilling ban in the Bering Sea stands the test of Trump, other threats will remain including oil spills from Russian tankers passing through the 55-mile-wide Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia delivering oil to China via Russia’s Northern Sea Route of retreating Arctic ice. Russia’s oil trade with China has increased since Western sanctions were imposed following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Reflecting these tensions around oil, in 2023 the Russians refused to participate with the U.S. Coast Guard in a joint oil spill response exercise.
Even with drilling protections for coastal America, the U.S. will remain the world’s leading oil and gas producer, including the 14% of national production that comes from the western Gulf of Mexico where the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster took place.
And, with President Trump’s commitment to produce ever more fossil fuels that drive climate disruption and contribute to extreme weather events from heatwaves in the Arctic to the Los Angeles’ firestorms, our problems with oil and gas remain far from over.
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Ocean Heat, Sea Surface Temperatures Shattered Records in 2023
"The ocean is the key to telling us what's happening to the world, and the data is painting a compelling picture of warming year after year after year," one study author said.
Jan 11, 2024
2023, the hottest year on record overall, was also the hottest year on record for the world's oceans.
A study published Thursday in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences found that the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean warmed by 15 zettajoules in 2023 compared to 2022, according to one dataset. To put that in perspective, the world's economy only requires half a zettajoule to run every year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences explained in a statement. Fifteen zettajoules would be enough to boil 2.3 billion Olympic-sized swimming pools or roast 260 trillion turkeys.
"The ocean is the key to telling us what's happening to the world, and the data is painting a compelling picture of warming year after year after year," study co-author John Abraham, a professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, toldThe Guardian.
Ocean heat content has been on the rise since the late 1950s, and, for the past decade, each year has been the warmest on record, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The ocean is an important indicator of human-caused climate change because around 90% of the excess heat produced by the burning of fossil fuels is absorbed by its top 2,000 meters, according to United Press International.
"As long as the level of greenhouse gases remains relatively high in the atmosphere, the oceans will keep absorbing energy, leading to the increase of the heat in the oceans," study lead author Cheng Lijing, an oceanographer at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, toldNature.
"We're already facing the consequences and they will get far worse if we don't take action."
The study was the latest in a yearly effort led by the IAP; this year's installment had contributions from 34 scientists in 19 research bodies in China, France, Italy, New Zealand, and the U.S., according to Nature and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The researchers looked at two datasets for ocean heat content: the IAP's dataset and one compiled by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The 15 zettajoules figure came from the IAP dataset, while the NOAA dataset gave a lower increase of nine zettajoules. Lijing explained on social media that both organizations used the same raw data, but had different methods of quality control and spatial interpolation. Sometimes, accurate high temperature measurements can be mistakenly discarded as inaccurate, the Chinese Academy of Sciences pointed out.
"This means that the warming might be greater than the numbers reported here," Lijing said in a statement.
NCEI oceanographer and study co-author Tim Boyer told Nature that "the important point in the paper and for scientific understanding is that the ocean is warming consistently, year over year to new record levels of ocean heat content."
In addition, the paper documented a record rise in sea surface temperature. It was higher than 2022's by 0.23°C for the entire year and by what the authors called an "astounding" 0.3°C for the second half of the year.
Another measurement that reached record levels in 2023 was ocean stratification, which occurs when the warmer water floats near the surface and does not mix as much with the cooler water below, The Guardian explained. This can harm ocean life by reducing the amount of oxygen available to it. It also decreases the ocean's ability to absorb both heat and carbon dioxide.
Another point raised by the study authors is that what happens to and in the ocean does not stay in the ocean.
"Ocean warming has far-reaching consequences on physical, human, and biological systems in the Earth system, which is expected to be much more severe in the future because of the irreversibility of ocean warming in the following centuries," Lijing wrote on social media.
Warmer oceans increase sea-level rise, fuel extreme weather events such as storms or droughts, and impact marine life by forcing some animals to move in search of cooler waters or changing the time when migrations or reproduction occur, Nature explained.
"We're already facing the consequences and they will get far worse if we don't take action," Abraham told The Guardian. "But we can solve this problem today with wind, solar, hydro, and energy conservation."
"Once people realize that, it's very empowering," Abraham continued. "We can usher in the new energy economy of the future, saving money and the environment at the same time."
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