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The Overview Effect

Grist

Nothing could have prepared the man who played Star Trek ’s Captain Kirk for the profound shock of seeing his home planet from 65 miles above. Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available,” Fred Hoyle, an English astronomer, wrote in 1948, “a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”

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Part 2: The Dirty Dozen Documents of Big Oil’s Secret Climate Knowledge

DeSmogBlog

In the minds of the fossil fuel executives, this point must have been hammered home when federal scientists published a report on carbon dioxide and climate change in 1979. Exxon completes an “Atmospheric CO2 Scoping Study,” which concludes that reducing fossil fuel use through efficiency and renewable energy is the only foreseeable option.

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A Texas Community Is Being Bombarded by Cancer-Causing Benzene. State Officials Have Known for Nearly Two Decades

DeSmogBlog

“The EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment tool is based on weaker monitoring data from a few years back. Children return home from school in Channelview, Texas. Tim Doty is the scientist who led the TCEQ mobile monitoring team that recorded Channelview’s high benzene levels back in 2005 and 2006.

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New data show Houston-area communities are being flooded with chemicals

Grist

In June, Public Health Watch, the Investigative Reporting Workshop and Grist published a year-long investigation about pollution, power, and politics in the Texas petrochemical industry. And those in power, especially at the state level, need to know.”. But the data from the monitors confirmed her worst fears.

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In Texas, a battle is brewing over a Trump EPA official’s confidential emails

Grist

“Very many of us were alarmed and held expectations about his tenure lower than the Mariana Trench,” recalled John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s clean air, climate, and clean energy program. In one interview, he went so far as to suggest that reducing ozone levels might result in worse public health outcomes. “I

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