Climate Point: Warmer weather fuels dangerous tick explosion. And Keystone is kaput.

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. From Palm Springs, California, I'm Janet Wilson. 

By the 1950s, American cars were bigger, faster and more powerful, in part because lead was added to gasoline to rev up engine performance. By the 1970s, unleaded gas was already taking its place, after evidence of neurological damage to children's growing brains became too stark to ignore. Leaded gas was taken off the market and banned completely as of 1996.

Imagine if we'd recognized the clear threats of pumping carbon dioxide out of tailpipes and smokestacks back then and banned and replaced products that emitted it. Instead, despite pandemic slowdowns, we've now reached the highest levels of carbon dioxide not just in 50 years but in four million years, as Doyle Rice reports for USA Today. 

Our overheated atmosphere is causing problems globally, including in forests and grasslands across the U.S. that are seeing far higher numbers of disease-carrying black-legged tick nymphs, American dog ticks and other crawling, biting species. 

There are varied reasons for this year’s tick boom, writes Zoya Teirstein with Grist. Climate change is making the “shoulder seasons,” spring and fall, warmer, which means longer feeding seasons for ticks. And rising temperatures are making it possible for ticks to shift their ranges all over the U.S. 

Nymphs typically emerge from hibernation in May, reach their peak around Memorial Day weekend, and stay highly active until July, right when Americans are heading out for some outdoor fun. So check your dog and yourself carefully after you head outdoors.

Here are some other stories that might be of interest:

MUST-READ STORIES

Canceled. TC Energy pulled the plug on the contentious Keystone XL crude oil pipeline on Wednesday, after Canadian officials failed to persuade President Joe Biden to reverse the cancellation of its permit the day he took office. Construction on the 1,200-mile pipeline began in earnest last year when President Donald Trump revived the long-delayed project.

Native Americans and environmentalists who fought it as a poster child of damaging fossil fuels and habitat destruction were overjoyed by Wednesday's news.  "It’s official. We took on a multi-billion dollar corporation and we won!!" tweeted Dallas Goldtooth with the Indigenous Environmental Network. 

But Republicans from Western states said it was a disastrous decision. “President Biden killed the Keystone XL Pipeline and with it, thousands of good-paying American jobs,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Matthew Brown with Associated Press reports.

Next.Thousands of protesters — many of them later arrested — converged in Minnesota's boreal forests this week to fight another proposed oil pipeline.

Box of rain. With California experiencing both prolonged dry spells and fiercer rainstorms as climate change sets in, scientists say capturing floods to combat droughts could help reduce flood risk while boosting dwindling groundwater supplies. As Liza Gross with Inside Climate News explains, hydrologist Xiaogang He and colleagues found a possible increase in floodwater to replenish dwindling aquifers big enough to fill 192,000 Olympic swimming pools each year in the Golden State under an intermediate-emissions scenario, and even more with higher emissions.

ALL ABOUT TOXICS

Don't get burned. Americans are eager to lather up with sunscreen and head to their nearest beaches now that vaccines have stifled coronavirus. But a report found dozens of popular sunscreen products have been contaminated with benzene, a known carcinogen. 

Valisure, which did the analysis, is calling on the Food and Drug Administration to recall 40 sunscreen and after-sun products found to contain higher levels of benzene, including some by brands like Neutrogena, Sun Bum, CVS Health and Fruit of the Earth. The benzene is not an ingredient in the products, but they may have been contaminated during manufacturing, Adrianna Rodrigues with USA Today reports.

Stinky. Be careful what you put on your garden fruits and flowers this growing season too. Some common fertilizers sold by major retailers like Lowe's and Home Depot have concerning levels of PFAS compounds, so-called "forever chemicals" that last in the environment for decades and potentially harm health, a new study found. The fertilizers contain biosolids — sewage sludge sold by wastewater treatment plants after it has been dried and treated.

But as Keith Matheny with The Detroit Free Press finds, it's often not treated for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — PFAS — compounds used in a host of commercial products for waterproofing and grease resistance, as well as in many industrial applications. The PFAS compounds have been tied to cancer and other health problems.

Wasting away. California's largest oil wastewater pit will finally be shuttered and cleaned up, under a settlement agreement announced Wednesday among watchdog groups, oil company Sentinel Peak Resources (SPR) and the oil and gas wastewater disposal company Valley Water Management  “This settlement will prevent future contamination of groundwater used by farmers and forces the oil industry to pay the full cost,” said Tom Frantz, a Kern County almond farmer and head of Association of Irritated Residents. 

“It’s a good day for California water,"  said Andrew Grinberg of Clean Water Fund.

POLITICAL CLIMATE

Banking on it. In the USA, financing clean energy projects is often contingent on partisan dealmaking in Congress. But Elsa Nilsen with Vox writes that a green bank model has been used in several other countries. The United Kingdom's green bank funded much of its offshore wind boom. And via its green bank, the largest in the world, Australia has invested in wind, solar, and hydrogen and financed energy-efficient homes.

The banks typically are government-owned or quasi-public and take a set amount of government money to launch, then leverage private money. Like private banks, green banks expect to be paid back. In the U.S., a few states and cities — including Connecticut, New York, and Washington, D.C. — have been running them for years.

In 2020, nearly $2 billion of green bank funds generated $7 billion of investment in projects around the country, without federal investment. But that could soon change. President Joe Biden included $27 billion for a “Clean Energy & Sustainability Accelerator” (a longer name for a green bank) in his infrastructure plan.

Or not. Biden's national climate advisor Gina McCarthy on Tuesday told Zack Coleman with Politico that some ambitious proposals to fight climate change could be dropped from the infrastructure plan, but the administration would not give up yet. Her comments came as the president broke off negotiations with Senate Republicans who are pushing a smaller bill with no climate incentives, even those backed by major utilities.

Help. Small, cash-strapped countries hit hardest by climate change's impacts so far won't be at the Group of Seven summit next week in England, but as Brady Dennis with the Washington Post reports, pressure is mounting on deep-pocketed countries that have spewed far more emissions to help those bearing the brunt. “This is a matter of urgency and trust,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said, calling the G-7 a “pivotal moment” in which rich countries must help fund climate adaptation in struggling nations. 

AND ANOTHER THING

Artistic license. Climate news typically gets buried by the latest on Harry and Meghan (congrats on that bouncing baby girl!) or any celebrity on the planet, but a pair of artists are aiming to alter the algorithms that decide which stories show up in news feeds.  Synthetic Messenger, created by artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, has 100 bots hunt climate stories daily, then click on them and every ad in them. They've "read" 1.7 million stories and opened more than 4 million ads so far. Vice Motherboard's Gita Jackson fills us in.

That's it for now. To skip the bots and get human-curated climate, energy and environment news, follow me on Twitter @janetwilson66. Or sign up to get Climate Point in your inbox for free here.