From Climate Nexus, April 5, 2018

Royal Dutch Shell has known about the links between fossil fuel use and climate change for decades, according to newly-released internal company documents.

The documents, unveiled by Dutch newspaper De Correspondent on Thursday, show that the oil giant’s researchers flagged that climate change could have major implications for the fossil fuel industry as far back as the 1980s—and predicted that environmental groups could sue following damages from extreme weather.

“With the very long time scales involved, it would be tempting for society to wait until then before doing anything,” one 1988 report reads. “The potential implications for the world are, however, so large that the policy options need to be considered much earlier. And the energy industry needs to consider how it should play its part.”

On Wednesday, Friends of the Earth announced that it would file a lawsuit against Shell if the company does not bring its investment plan in line with Paris agreement goals within eight weeks.

As reported by Climate Liability News:

One of the documents, written in 1998, models an eerily accurate scenario of violent and damaging storms hitting the East Coast of the U.S. in 2010.

“Following the storms, a coalition of environmental NGOs brings a class-action suit against the U.S. government and fossil-fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years: that something must be done,” the report projects.

Bill McKibben told De Correspondent that the documents show that Shell understood the risks of climate change in the 1980s.

“Had they merely been candid with the world, we could have gotten to work then, and while global warming would not yet be ‘solved,’ we’d be well on the way,” said McKibben.

“Instead they appear to have chosen the path of hedging, minimizing, and diverting—and given the stakes, this was both tragic and immoral. Shell knew. And now we do too.”

https://www.ecowatch.com/shell-climate-change-lawsuits-2556439414.html/

From Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch.com, April 5, 2018

The proliferation of microplastics in the ocean has led to concerns that they might work their way up the food chain to us.

But when researchers at Heriot-Watt University set out to investigate that concern, they found that plastics in our own homes pose a much greater threat to humans.

The results of the study, published March 29 in Environmental Pollution, found that humans likely consume about 114 plastic microfibers each meal simply from household dust that settles on their plates.

Researchers gathered mussels from around the coast of Scotland in order to assess how many microplastics humans might ingest by eating the mussels.

As a control, they also set Petri dishes filled with sticky dust traps next to dinner plates at three separate homes.

Fourteen pieces of plastic settled on the dishes after 20 minutes, about the length of a meal. Given the difference in size, scientists calculated 114 such pieces would settle on a plate during the same time.

That adds up to 13,731 to 68,415 pieces per year.

In comparison, researchers calculated that eating mussels would only lead humans to ingest 100 microplastics yearly. Each mussel they studied contained about two plastic particles.

“These results may be surprising to some people who may expect the plastic fibres in seafood to be higher than those in household dust,” senior study author Dr. Ted Henry said in a Heriot-Watt University press release.

The study’s authors did not think that the plastics came from the home-cooked meals used in the study or the kitchens where they were prepared.

“We do not know where these fibres come from, but it is likely to be inside the home and the wider environment,” Henry said in the release.

Friends of the Earth member Julian Kirby provided the university with insight into how plastic particles end up in dust.

“Plastic microfibers found in the dust in our homes and the air we breathe can come from car tyres, carpets and soft furnishings, as well as clothes such as fleece jackets. These are regularly shedding tiny bits of plastic into the environment as they are worn away,” he said in the Heriot-Watt release.

According to a study published in Lancet Planetary Health in October, 2017, the proliferation of microplastics in the environment is a concern in part because the impact on human health is still not well-known.

However, even if marine microplastics are not the main source for human consumption, they are still a major problem for marine life. The study also marked the first time microplastics were found in the protected mussel species Modiolus modiolus.

Source: https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-consumption-food-dust-2556502607.html/