Pittsburgh is one of 10 cities chosen to join the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Food Matters Regional Initiative, an effort designed to prevent food waste, rescue food surplus and recycle food scraps.
The initiative will help Pittsburgh increase food waste awareness by producing educational materials, conducting a “food audit” and encouraging composting, according to the city’s urban agriculture and food policy planner Shelly Danko+Day.
The NRDC “Food Matters” team selected nine other cities alongside Pittsburgh — Baltimore; Jersey City, New Jersey; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Nashville, Tennessee; Asheville, North Carolina; Atlanta; Memphis, Tennessee; and Orlando, Florida — to advance regional food waste prevention.
Pittsburgh had a 21% food insecurity rate before the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), Danko+Day said. Now, she said the city estimates the rate has probably increased to about 35%.
NRDC will team up with each city to develop a baseline understanding of the amount of food waste generated, NRDC city lead Madeline Keating said in an email. The group will also provide technical help to build strategies that improve larger food systems and support climate goals, according to an NRDC blog post.
One of the initiatives that Pittsburgh will focus on through the partnership will be a food audit, inspired by similar audits completed by NRDC in Baltimore and Denver. Such an audit will involve sorting through the trash of a local community center within a given week, dividing it into categories and then measuring what they find, Danko+Day said. Based on what is gathered, the city can gain insights about how to prevent or maximize the waste found.
“That’s another data point that (shows) we’re not out of the woods yet,” Gov. Phil Murphy said while announcing the latest numbers during an unrelated event in Iselin.
At the same time, the state’s rate of transmission ticked up for the sixth straight day, with the latest mark sitting at 0.99 — just below the critical benchmark of 1, which determines whether the outbreak is expanding or shrinking.
Murphy did not detail when the newly reported deaths occurred.
The new figures come a day before the six-month mark since the Garden State announced its first COVID-19 case.
In that time, the state has reported just under 193,000 positive tests out of more than 2.9 million administered tests. That’s the eighth-most cases in the U.S.
Out of those, New Jersey has reported 15,971 deaths related to the virus — 14,188 lab-confirmed and 1,783 considered probable. That’s the second-most coronavirus deaths in the country.
More than 33,900 residents have recovered, according to Johns Hopkins University, though that number is likely much higher.
New Jersey’s latest transmission rate is up from 0.96 announced Tuesday. The number has increased incrementally in recent days after declining for more than a week.
Any number above 1 means each newly infected person, on average, is spreading the virus to at least one other person. Any number below 1 means the virus is decreasing.
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The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which hold enough frozen water to lift oceans 65 metres, are tracking the UN’s worst-case scenarios for sea level rise, researchers said Monday, highlighting flaws in current climate change
Mass loss from 2007 to 2017 due to melt-water and crumbling ice aligned almost perfectly with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme forecasts, which see the two ice sheets adding up to 40 centimetres (nearly 16 inches) to global oceans by 2100, they reported in Nature Climate Change.
Such an increase would have a devastating impact worldwide, increasing the destructive power of storm surges and exposing coastal regions home to hundreds of millions of people to repeated and severe flooding.
That is nearly three times more than mid-range projections from the IPCC’s last major Assessment Report in 2014, which predicts a 70-centimetre rise in sea level from all sources, including mountain glaciers and the expansion of ocean water as it warms.
Despite this clear mismatch between the observed reality of accelerating ice sheet disintegration and the models tracking those trends, a special IPCC report last year on the planet’s frozen regions maintained the same end-of-century projections for Greenland, and allowed for only a small increase from Antarctica under the highest greenhouse gas emissions scenario.
“We need to come up with a new worst-case scenario for the ice sheets because they are already melting at a rate in line with our current one,” lead author Thomas Slater, a researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds, told AFP.
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Water utility Suez North America said Sept. 2 it plans to spend more than $600 million over four years on new mains, treatment plant improvements and other projects across northern New Jersey.
The total includes $135 million in spending slated for 2020 on 170 projects in 68 municipalities.
Twelve new environmental enforcement actions have been filed targeting polluters across New Jersey whose actions threaten the health and safety of residents in minority and lower-income communities in Newark, Orange, South Orange, Paterson, Jersey City, Elizabeth, Hillside, Fairton and Upper Deerfield Township, according to Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal.
These lawsuits are a part an agenda to address harms disproportionately affecting the public and environmental health of New Jersey’s low-income, non-English speaking and minority residents. They come as New Jersey residents confront the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented public health crisis that has unduly burdened these communities.
“In New Jersey, we’re committed to our path-breaking approach to environmental enforcement, which ensures that our efforts to clean up our environment will also serve our comprehensive justice agenda for low-income communities and communities of color, said Grewal.
“Today’s twelve lawsuits, filed in cities and towns across our state, are a reflection of that commitment to environmental justice principles. The scourge of COVID-19 has put a harsh spotlight on the way environmental injustices affect our basic health, and we’re going to do the hard work necessary to protect communities from dumping, contamination and other illegal activities.”
“The message to New Jersey residents should be clear: everyone, and I really mean everyone, deserves to breathe clean air and live in a safe environment,” Grewal said.
Many of the properties that are the subject of today’s complaints have pollutants known to contribute to health problems including respiratory tract irritation, chronically reduced lung function, kidney problems, neurological disorders and certain cancers, which may only exacerbate COVID-19 risks.
Since the announcement of the State’s environmental justice initiative in 2018, Grewal and Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner McCabe have filed numerous lawsuits, making New Jersey a national leader in environmental justice enforcement.
“The actions the DEP is taking today exemplify the Murphy Administration’s deep commitment to principles of environmental justice and equity that strengthen all of our communities, especially those most vulnerable to environmental harm, said McCabe.
“Together, we are holding accountable those who, by design or circumstance, disproportionately harm the environment and communities of our low-income and minority neighbors. Today’s lawsuits complement the many ways that we pursue environmental justice, standing with every New Jersey community and for the shared natural resources that unite us.”
The complaints seek to address a host of environmental threats across the state in low-income and minority communities, and are brought under:
New Jersey’s Spill Compensation and Control Act
Water Pollution Control Act
Air Pollution Control Act
Solid Waste Management Act
Industrial Site Recovery Act
Brownfield and Contaminated Site Remediation Act
The 12 cases involve a broad range of harmful contamination including such hazardous substances as arsenic, copper, lead, petroleum hydrocarbons, gasoline, waste motor oil, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), oxides of nitrogen (NOx), volatile organic compounds, including trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), and semi-volatile organic compounds, officials said.
The complaints seek a variety of remedies, including clean-up of contaminated properties and compliance with all outstanding DEP orders, payment of damages and penalties, reimbursement to the State for clean-up costs expended to date and, in certain instances, natural resource damages.
“Pitching is what makes me happy,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1972. “I’ve devoted my life to it. I live my life around the four days between starts. It determines what I eat, when I go to bed, what I do when I’m awake. It determines how I spend my life when I’m not pitching.”
Tom Seaver pitches against the Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series. (AP)
By Matt SchudelWashington Post September 2, 2020 at 8:49 p.m.
Tom Seaver, a Hall of Fame pitcher and the hero of New York’s Miracle Mets, who led his once-hapless team from the National League basement to an improbable World Series championship in 1969, died Aug. 31 at age 75.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame announced his death, noting that the causes were Lewy body dementia and covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The statement did not say where he died. Mr. Seaver and his family announced in 2019 that he was withdrawing from public life because of advancing dementia.
From the time he came to New York in 1967 as a 22-year-old rookie, Mr. Seaver began to transform a team that had been known as an inept group of lovable losers since the franchise began five years earlier.
Enduring another defeat, the team’s first manager, Casey Stengel, memorably quipped, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
New York Mets pitcher Tom Seaver in 1968. (AP)
The clean-cut Mr. Seaver, who had been to college and served in the Marine Corps, brought an orderly sense of purpose to his pitching and to the Mets organization.
In high school, the 5-foot-9, 160-pound Mr. Seaver learned to pitch with finesse, precision and determination. Only later, after he grew four inches and gained 40 pounds, did he have the ability to throw the blazing, pinpoint-accurate fastball that made him one of the most dominant pitchers of his era.
He is generally ranked among the 10 best pitchers in history by baseball historians. “There is a good argument,” noted the sport’s statistical guru Bill James, “that Tom Seaver is the greatest pitcher of all time.”
Tom Seaver, right, waves his cap at the 1999 All-Star Game at Boston’s Fenway Park, alongside Hall of Fame pitchers, from left, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal and Robin Roberts. (Charles Krupa/AP)
Pitchers are among the most single-minded of athletes, and few were as devoted to their craft as Mr. Seaver. He always wore a long-sleeve shirt at the beach to keep his arm from being sunburned. When petting a dog, he used his left hand, not his right, or throwing, hand. He brought an intellectual approach to pitching that often led sportswriters to describe him as an artist on the mound.
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