Imagine the dirtiest engine legal in the United States. It’s an engine responsible for an annual 30 million tons of carbon dioxide, 21,000 tons of fine particulates and 68,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, which are harmful to human health and the environment, PennEnvironment reports. A heavy-duty truck or SUV may spring to mind, but this
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The same blue flame that imparts the sense that gas cooking is real cooking also accounts for the health hazards posed by the appliance found in approximately one third of American homes. “When you have a gas stove,” Drexel University environmental epidemiologist Josiah Kephart told NPR in 2021, “combustion is actually occurring right in your
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What makes us healthy or unhealthy? Is it how many steps we take in a day? Whether we eat enough whole grains or leafy vegetables? Exercise and diet are important, certainly, but much is beyond our control. This can be simultaneously comforting and worrisome. We benefit from the public health accomplishments of the past, such
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Walk into Live! Casino in South Philly on a Saturday night, and the smell of cigarettes hits you immediately. The Clean Indoor Air Act prohibiting smoking in Pennsylvania establishments passed in 2008, but casinos remain a notable loophole — one of the last bastions of the old, vice-friendly service industry. They’re open 24 hours, they’re
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On May 8, the City of Philadelphia cleared a homeless encampment that stretched two blocks on Kensington Avenue between East Allegheny Avenue and Orleans Street under the Market-Frankford Line. This clearing marked the first step of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s five-phase plan to dramatically improve Kensington, whose residents contend with extreme poverty, open-air drug markets and
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By Kyle Bagenstose and Adam Litchkofski If you’re reading this story when it’s still hot off the press, odds are you’re probably pretty warm yourself. Another July has arrived in Philadelphia, and they ain’t what they used to be. From 1939 through the end of the 20th century, Philadelphia’s average air temperature in this quintessential
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Last week, I plucked a tick off the neck of a teenager I had guided on a canoe outing. (It came off easily, not having latched on yet.) Presumably the tick had climbed on as the teen had walked through some tall grass after the boats were put away. With single-minded determination, the tick had
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The title of Austin, Texas-based journalist Jeff Goodell’s 2023 book, “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet,” should leave no doubt as to the topic and its urgency. Grid spoke with Goodell at the end of May about the most lethal and least visible natural disaster on the planet.
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South Philadelphia dad and Little League coach Alex Kaslowitz remembers watching the Phillies play at Veterans Stadium, one of the first to install artificial turf in 1970. Since then, as reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer, six former Phillies have died from a rare form of brain cancer linked to the turf they played on. “That
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In April, the Philadelphia Eagles scored a few days of positive publicity when quarterback Jalen Hurts donated $200,000 to install more than 300 air conditioning units in 10 Philly public schools. The problem the donation addressed is real; Philly’s ancient school buildings afflict our students with temperatures too hot to learn safely in our warming
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