Eco Minute 13:30

BULLETIN 7 January 1:30 pm

Good afternoon, here is your Eco Minute:

# The City of Cape Town has maintained that its beaches have consistently high water quality. This is despite concerns from the community group, Bays of Sewage, and researchers from Stellenbosch University who reported exceeding safety limits for E. coli and enterococci at some beaches. The metro says that independent lab tests on 297 samples show water quality at beaches is within safe limits. It adds that the enterococci counts are the internationally recognised gold standard indicator for coastal water quality in terms of associated risk to human health.

# US President Joe Biden has banned offshore drilling across an immense area of coastal waters, weeks before Donald Trump takes office pledging to massively increase fossil fuel production. The ban encompasses the entire Atlantic coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Pacific coast off California, Oregon and Washington, and a section of the Bering Sea off Alaska. A White House statement said the declaration protected more than 253 million hectares of waters. Trump says he will undo the ban.

# And finally: At least five people have died in a winter storm that brought heavy snow, ice, strong winds, and freezing temperatures in parts of the US. Seven states, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Arkansas, have declared a state of emergency. The storm has resulted in school closures, power cuts, and more than two-thousand flights cancelled. According to The Guardian, the freezing weather has been attributed to disturbances in the polar vortex, a large, three-dimensional ring of strong winds.

Stay tuned for more news………….