High energy prices in the UK have meant that many farmers have made limited use of greenhouses to plant winter crops. According to a BBC report, this is leading to the first supermarkets to ration various types of vegetables. Field crops such as tomatoes, peppers, lamb’s lettuce, cauliflower or cucumbers are sometimes only sold in limited quantities.

Meanwhile, wholesalers are looking for new suppliers from other countries – but this means that the harvests have to travel much longer distances to Europe, which is not in the interest of the environment.

So far, farmers are not among those who benefit particularly from public support. This is now beginning to have an impact on consumers. Inexpensive food that is available all year round will soon be a thing of the past in Europe.

Rabat markets ‘well supplied with basic products’

British consumers are told that the impact that high electricity prices are having on produce grown in greenhouses in the UK, is due to “climate change”. The UK government has therefore blamed “bad weather” in Morocco.

The situation is quite different however: From the beginning of 2023 to February 22, 64,034 places of production, storage and wholesale and retail sales were inspected, said Moroccan government spokesman, Mustapha Baitas.

During these interventions, 3,325 offences were recorded in terms of pricing and quality, Baitas said in a press briefing after the meeting of the Government Council, in response to a question on the results of control operations and the situation of seized products.

The joint commissions seized and destroyed 400 tons of products “not conforming to the standards in force”, while all usable products were sold at public auction, he added.

The minister had stressed earlier that the markets “are well supplied with basic products”.

UK to introduce GM foods

In the UK, the Lea Valley Growers Association (LVGA) produces around 75 percent of the country’s crops. They now say that half of the greenhouses are empty and production is expected to go down by up to 60 percent.

The Bank of England director, Andrew Bailey, apologized in June last year for sounding “apocalyptic” about rising food prices.

Such dire warnings have led to support for the introduction of a Bill that paves the way for genetically modified (GM) crops, with new food laws expected to pass through the UK’s Parliament.

Not a UK problem only

“Many greenhouse producers are abandoning their businesses due to the inability to cover their current heating and labor costs. So far, the state has taken absolutely no measures to support the greenhouse production sector. As we all know, it is one of the most expensive industries in the agricultural sector and is directly related to gas and electricity prices,” according to the Bulgarian Association of Greenhouse Farmers.

The profitability of Dutch companies have also been impacted, because energy represents 20 to 30 percent of their costs, Reuters reported.

A study conducted by ABN Amro predicted that rising energy prices would cost Dutch companies around 22 billion euros this year as gas and electricity prices jumped almost 5 times their 2019 levels.

Among the most impacted sectors: greenhouse production whose annual turnover reaches around 8 billion euros but where energy represents 20 to 30 percent of the costs. Already 40 percent of the members of the Glastuinbouw Nederland group are operating at a loss, due to excessive energy costs.

[…]

Via https://freewestmedia.com/2023/02/28/uk-greenhouses-shut-down-due-to-high-energy-costs/

By  Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

A Wall Street Journal editorial board member Sunday called out the press and public health officials — who are now affirming “natural immunity” protects against COVID-19 — for spending three years disparaging natural immunity despite overwhelming evidence supporting it.

In her WSJ opinion piece — “Three Years Late, the Lancet Recognizes Natural Immunity?” — Allysia Finley wrote:

“The Lancet study’s vindication of natural immunity fits a pandemic pattern: The public-health clerisy rejects an argument that ostensibly threatens its authority; eventually it’s forced to soften its position in the face of incontrovertible evidence; and yet not once does it acknowledge its opponents were right.”

Finley began her op-ed with a quote from a Feb. 16 NBC article describing the Lancet findings:

“Immunity acquired from a Covid infection is as protective as vaccination against severe illness and death, study finds.”

The study found that prior infection offered 78.6% protection against reinfection from the original Wuhan, Alpha or Delta variants at 40 weeks, and 36.1% against Omicron. Protection against severe illness remained around 90% across all variants after 40 weeks. Those results mean that natural immunity provides protection equal to or better than two or three doses of the mRNA vaccines, as The Defender reported.

The Lancet is finally acknowledging what doctors and scientists have been gaslit for saying for years — that natural immunity provides superior protection to experimental vaccines. Only the tsunami of propaganda and censorship from the pharma/government https://t.co/RKKlDN1gQY… https://t.co/AvQ1O0srrx

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) February 17, 2023

The idea that prior COVID-19 infection would protect against future illness was “deeply rooted in immunology before studies bore it out,” Finley explained. Repeat exposure to respiratory viruses trains our immune systems to live with and fight off viruses as they become endemic.

“The concept of natural immunity isn’t scientifically controversial, yet it was disparaged by public-health officials who associated it with opposition to lockdowns and the Great Barrington Declaration in autumn 2020,” she wrote.

The “Great Barrington Declaration” proposed to protect vulnerable people while allowing those at low risk from COVID-19 to “live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection,” with the goal of minimizing deaths and social harms until herd immunity was reached.

She added that although herd immunity became elusive because the virus mutated, the central premise of the declaration was correct, “As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all — including the vulnerable — falls.”

The “public-health clerisy” feared that if people understood natural immunity, it would encourage them to get infected intentionally or discourage them from getting vaccinated, she wrote. But, there was no evidence for the first assertion, and the second one was “no reason to deny scientific reality.”

So instead of acknowledging reality, this “clerisy” mandated vaccines even for people who had been previously infected and tech companies censored discussion of natural immunity online, which fueled suspicion by vaccine skeptics.

Now could be the time to make it right. Finley concluded:

“The Lancet study could serve a useful political purpose by giving public-health officials cover to relax vaccine mandates, which in turn could reduce resistance to vaccines. But this would require the clerisy to concede its opponents were right.”

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/wsj-covid-natural-immunity/

By Christopher O’Donnell and Max Chesnes

More than a decade after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster — the largest marine oil spill in history — cleanup workers are still reporting cases of respiratory illnesses, skin disorders, dizziness and other medical issues they say were caused by the spill.

A special agent for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, he was assigned to patrol 14 miles of Panhandle beaches on an all-terrain vehicle, alerting cleanup crews to new slicks from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.

His 16-hour shifts started at dawn. The air felt greasy; the ATV splashed up oil, he said, soaking his clothes, gun belt, hat and boots.

“The smells were horrendous,” he recalled. “Like the ocean mixed with chemicals.”

About 4 million barrels of crude oil seeped into the Gulf of Mexico and 11 people died in the April 2010 disaster, the largest marine oil spill in history.

Tens of thousands of workers were hired to clean sludge on beaches, mangroves and dunes across Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and the Florida Panhandle.

Boblitt said he wasn’t the same when he returned to his regular job after three months in the Panhandle. He struggled to concentrate. Knowledge gleaned from years of service eluded him. Physically demanding work caused him to shake.

Within two years, he said, he’d deteriorated so much he no longer trusted himself to handle airboats, personal watercraft and his firearm safely.

He took early retirement. He was 43.

More than a decade after the disaster, cleanup workers are still reporting cases of respiratory illnesses, skin disorders, dizziness and other medical issues they say were caused by the spill.

Their health struggles are documented in more than 5,000 lawsuits filed against BP in federal courts in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, with some workers reporting illnesses diagnosed as recently as 2020.

BP has so far set aside nearly $70 billion for the ecological disaster, including $11.6 billion to businesses affected by the spill, according to its website.

Payouts for cleanup workers’ medical claims make up a tiny portion of that restitution. According to a 2019 report from the court-appointed claims administrator, BP paid roughly $67 million to 22,833 workers to settle a class-action lawsuit, an average of about $3,000 each.

The petroleum giant also agreed in the 2012 settlement that cleanup workers could seek compensation for exposure symptoms that emerged later.

But BP attorneys are aggressively contesting the new lawsuits — despite government-funded studies showing that these workers have higher-than-normal incidences of skin conditions, respiratory issues and heart ailments.

BP officials declined to comment on the health claims filed against them. In multiple ongoing lawsuits, including the ongoing case filed by Boblitt against the oil giant, they maintain there’s no evidence that workers’ health problems were caused by the spill.

That burden of proof has become a very high bar for potential victims seeking compensation, according to plaintiffs’ attorneys. It has led some to stop accepting new cases.

And on Jan. 24, a federal court effectively ended four cases filed by cleanup workers when it ruled that an expert hired by their attorneys had failed to prove their conjunctivitis and sinus problems were a direct result of the spill.

Allen Lindsay Jr., an attorney from the city of Milton in the Panhandle, has represented around 150 cleanup workers. He’s lost a third of those cases and is pessimistic about the remaining ones.

[…]

The legal battle has gotten so heated that attorneys at a Miami law firm have amassed a war chest of evidence — 130,000 samples of contaminated water, sand, sediment, wildlife and tar balls — they believe will give them an edge in the courtroom.

‘Real illnesses’

The cleanup was dirty. Some workers dragged oil booms to contain slicks in the Gulf. Others shoveled oil-soaked sand into trash bags and scrubbed oil from shoreline plants and jetties.

Workers who cleaned up the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska faced similar conditions and have said they were still suffering health issues long after the 1989 disaster. But the medical impacts were never studied, according to a 2010 McClatchy report.

That won’t happen with the BP spill. A year after the disaster, researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences began the Gulf Study, surveying 33,000 cleanup workers.

The largest-ever analysis of the health impacts from an oil spill included home visits to about 11,000 participants, including 3,000 in Florida, to draw blood samples and test lung function and blood pressure.

By that time, oil products such as the carcinogen benzene were no longer present in blood samples, according to Dale Sandler, lead investigator and chief of the institute’s epidemiology branch. That made determining exposure levels a challenge.

The studies have documented several elevated health risks among cleanup workers.

Those with the highest levels of exposure suffered a higher-than-normal incidence of itchy eyes, burning throats, coughing, wheezing and skin irritation, one of its studies found.

In the first three years after the disaster, the researchers found that the workers were 60% more likely than the general population to be diagnosed with asthma or experience respiratory symptoms.

They also faced a higher risk of hypertension. Some reported dizziness, nausea and stumbling.

Workers exposed to smoke and fumes when BP briefly tried burning oil slicks in the Gulf have experienced increased rates of heart disease and reduced lung capacity, the researchers found.

More than a decade after the disaster, researchers have yet to determine longer-term issues, said Sandler. And it’s too soon to say whether exposure will result in higher rates of cancer and lower life expectancy. Cancers can take up to 15 years to develop, she said.

[…]

On the beach

[…]

After clearing tar for hours, Culliver would ball up his stained jeans and T-shirt and leave them in his garage to be washed. A father of five, he didn’t want his soiled clothes indoors.

[…]

For about four months in 2010, Culliver worked in Pensacola, according to his pending lawsuit filed about a year and a half ago against BP.In 2019, a year after marrying, Culliver was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

His lawsuit alleges the BP oil spill “was a substantial contributing cause” of his illness.

[…]

“When you litigate against a corporate giant like this, the common narrative that you’re going to see is a war of attrition. And that’s exactly what BP has defaulted to in this litigation,” said Dylan Boigris, a partner at Downs Law Group in Miami, which represents 50 Florida cleanup workers.

In determining exposure, courts have been relying on water sample data BP collected during the spill. A key argument made by Boigris and his firm is that BP skewed the results to make it seem as if the oil on beaches wasn’t toxic.

“What they try to argue is that what arrived on the beach was “weathered” oil and that it was effectively dead oil — that there’s nothing harmful and that it’s no different than a rock,” Boigris said.

And BP attorneys have convinced courts that those seeking damages must determine what level of exposure to crude oil is harmful, court records show.

That would be like trying to prove exactly how many cigarettes caused somebody’s cancer, Boigris said.

His firm has gone to considerable expense to counter that.

In 2019, BP prepared to dispose of samples from the spill. Boigris and his team drove to Colorado with six refrigerated trucks to retrieve them.

Since then, the firm says, it has paid as much as $150,000 per year to store the samples in a South Florida warehouse. The law firm’s enlisted experts are studying the samples and “unraveling the perception that there was no harmful exposure,” Boigris said.

[…]

The firm plans to have some samples analyzed by independent toxicologists and hopes to use the data as evidence.

It’s why Boigris views his firm as “the last hope” for any workers seeking justice.

“BP went out and hired the indigent and the underrepresented, and they took advantage of those local populations,” he said. “They sent them out there to clean up their oil, and they’ve discarded them.”

Finding an answer

In the years after his stint in the Panhandle, Boblitt, the retired environmental special agent, says he burned through sick leave.

He was diagnosed with chronic rhinosinusitis and other sinus conditions that doctors told him were caused by breathing in fumes, according to his lawsuit. Court records show he was paid $1,300 in compensation in the 2012 settlement.

Figuring out what was wrong with his memory and concentration proved more difficult. Tests for Lyme disease and other neurological conditions came back negative, he said.

[…]

A neurology specialist diagnosed Boblitt with toxic encephalopathy, a brain dysfunction caused by exposure to toxic substances. Now 54, he said he also suffers from depression, sleep apnea and post-traumatic stress disorder, and he pays for life insurance that covers cancer.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/bp-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-cleanup-workers-medical-issues/

By  Carey Gillam

An analysis of data collected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and nonprofit groups that track chemical accidents in the U.S. shows accidental releases — through train derailments, truck crashes, pipeline ruptures or industrial plant leaks and spills — occur as frequently as every two days.

Amid fears about the toxic chemicals released in the East Palestine train derailment, public officials have clamored to reassure community members that the resulting contaminated air, water and soil is being cleaned up, and their tiny Ohio town made safe.

In a recent press conference, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine lamented the toll taken on the residents there, saying “no other community should have to go through this.”

But an analysis of a combination of data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and by nonprofit groups that track chemical accidents in the U.S. shows that accidental releases — be they through train derailments, truck crashes, pipeline ruptures or industrial plant leaks and spills — are happening regularly across the country.

One data set shows incidents occurring, on average, every two days.

[…]

In the first seven weeks of 2023 alone, there were more than 30 incidents recorded by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, roughly one every day and a half. Last year, the coalition recorded 188, up from 177 in 2021.

The group has tallied more than 470 incidents since it started counting in April 2020.

The incidents logged by the coalition range widely in severity but each involves the accidental release of chemicals that pose potential threats to human and environmental health.

In September, nine people were hospitalized and 300 evacuated in California after a spill of caustic materials at a recycling facility. In October, officials ordered residents to shelter in place after an explosion and fire at a petrochemical plant in Louisiana.

In November, more than 1,100 gallons of firefighting foam containing toxic chemicals spilled out of a U.S. Navy storage facility in Hawaii where a prior fuel leak had already contaminated drinking water and made some people ill.

Also in November, more than 100 residents of Atchinson, Kansas were treated for respiratory problems and schools were evacuated after an accident at a beverage manufacturing facility created a chemical cloud over the town.

Among multiple incidents in December, an explosion at a biodiesel plant in Iowa injured 10 people and forced the evacuation of many others, and a large pipeline ruptured in rural northern Kansas, smothering the surrounding land and waterways in 588,000 gallons of diluted bitumen crude oil. Hundreds of workers are still trying to clean up the pipeline mess at a cost pegged around $488 million.

[…]

Living in ‘daily fear’

The coalition has counted 10 rail-related chemical events over the last 2-1/2 years, including the derailment in East Palestine, where dozens of cars on a Norfolk Southern train derailed on Feb. 3, contaminating the community of 4,700 people with toxic vinyl chloride.

The vast majority of incidents, however, occur at the thousands of facilities around the country where dangerous chemicals are used and stored.

[…]

In all, roughly 200 million people are at regular risk, with many of them people of color and disadvantaged communities, he said.

There are close to 12,000 facilities across the nation that have on-site “extremely hazardous chemicals in amounts that could harm people, the environment, or property if accidentally released,” according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued last year.

These facilities include petroleum refineries, chemical manufacturers, cold storage facilities, fertilizer plants and water and wastewater treatment plants, among others.

EPA data shows more than 1,650 accidents at these facilities in a 10-year span between 2004 and 2013, roughly 160 per year. More than 775 were reported from 2014 through 2020.

Additionally, looking at incidents between 2016 and 2020, the EPA said it found accident-response evacuations impacted more than 56,000 people and 47,000 people were advised to “shelter-in-place.”

Accident rates are particularly high for petroleum and coal manufacturing and chemical manufacturing facilities, according to the EPA.

Chemical industry advocates maintain that accident incidents at these facilities have declined over time, while watchdog groups say that is not true; they say delays in reporting incidents leads to incomplete data and gives a false sense of improvement.

[…]

The EPA says that by several measurements, accidents are growing worse: evacuations, sheltering, and the average annual rate of people seeking medical treatment stemming from chemical accidents are on the rise, according to the EPA.

[…]

In August, the EPA proposed several changes to the Risk Management Program (RMP) regulations that apply to the sites dealing with hazardous chemicals.

The rule changes reflect the recognition by EPA that many chemical facilities are located in areas that are “susceptible to natural hazards from climate change,” including power outages, flooding, hurricanes and other weather events, the agency said in a letter to the GAO.

The proposed changes include enhanced emergency preparedness, increased public access to information about hazardous chemicals risks communities face and new accident prevention requirements.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has pushed back on stronger regulations, arguing that most facilities operate safely, accidents are declining and that the facilities impacted by any rule changes are supplying “essential products and services that help drive our economy and provide jobs in our communities.”

Opponents to strengthening parts of the RMP include the American Chemistry Council, American Forest & Paper Association, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute

[…]

Many worker and community advocates say the proposed rule changes don’t go far enough, however.

The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace & Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), which represents roughly a million laborers, said in a letter to EPA that accidents are not truly trending lower and the new rules must ensure hazard reduction and give workers more participation in prevention and response efforts.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and U.S. Rep. Nanette Barragan — along with 47 other lawmakers — also have called on the EPA to strengthen regulations to protect communities from hazardous chemical accidents.

[…]

‘We’re going to be ready’

For Eboni Cochran, a mother and volunteer community activist in Louisville, Kentucky, faith in the federal government is hard to come by. Cochran lives with her husband and 16-year-old son near an industrial zone along the Ohio River that locals call “Rubbertown.”

The area is home to a cluster of chemical manufacturing facilities and curious odors and concerns about toxic exposures permeate the neighborhoods near the plants.

Cochran herself has lodged complaints with local officials with her concerns about chemical contaminants in the air. The East Palestine derailment — though roughly 400 miles north of Louisville — sparked fresh fears about what might be wafting in on the air or contaminating the area’s drinking water, she said.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/american-chemical-disaster-risks-ohio-train-derailment-cg/