This Week in Pollution: Have you read ‘The Road’? 20-year climate change estimates suggest you should.

“Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made.” — The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Because holidays are supposed to be a joyous time spent with friends and family, I instead read The Road over Christmas in 2006. Between stringing lights and hanging cat stockings, I delved into a future ridden with cannibals and consumption, extinction and the apocalypse.

Not to be a Debbie Downer, but I thought of that book this week when, in addition to Hurricane Michael, its intensity as a near-Category 5  linked to climate change, the international science panel announced that by 2040 parts of the our warming planet (the only one we have, by the way) will likely be uninhabitable.

If fossil fuel emissions continue on their current trajectory, increased wildfires, droughts and floods will cause some species — such as the mass die-offs of coral reefs — to go extinct. Environmental refugees, displacement and poverty from climate change will irreversibly alter where and how we live.

This dystopic scenario, just 22 years away, can be blunted if countries rein in their carbon dioxide and methane emissions. But don’t count on America to be among those trying to preserve a livable future. The Trump administration is relaxing regulations on coal-fired power plants and vehicle emissions, both major sources of carbon dioxide.

Lost among all the hurricane coverage was the troubling development that the US Senate this week confirmed Jeffrey Bossert Clark, an attorney for BP Oil who has disputed the science of climate change, as the nation’s top environmental lawyer, according to Inside Climate News.

It could be worse. Jim Womack could be the nation’s top environmental lawyer. Instead, Womack, the chairman of the state’s Oil and Gas Commission, still wants the nine-member board to take that very, very expensive taxpayer-funded field trip to Pennsylvania to observe fracking operations. Because what could be more rewarding than scoring a front-row seat to climate change: watching fossil fuels be sucked from beneath the earth while leaking methane into the atmosphere? The commission meets Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. — four hours you’ll never get back — in the Ground Floor Hearing Room of the Archdale Building, on the north end of Halifax Mall.

Well, this is just offal: A rendering plant in Bertie County and the Smithfield hog slaughter plant in Bladen County made two national Top 10 list of processors discharging the most nitrogen into nearby waterways. Too much nitrogen in water contributes to algae growth, which can strain water treatment plants, kill fish and in some cases, be toxic.

Valley Proteins “processes” — grinds up, drains and heats — fat, bone and animal hides, which can be used to make bone meal or pet food. But converting the innards and skin releases wastewater containing nitrogen, an average of 1,429 pounds a day, into the Roanoke River.

As for the Smithfield, whose ginormous plant in Tar Heel is the largest such facility in the world, it discharges more than 1,700 pounds per day.

Both facilities have federal and state discharge permits.

Based in Washington, D.C., the Environmental Integrity Project analyzed federal and state data for plants throughout the US to find Clean Water Act violations and other illegal discharges. It is recommending that state and federal governments more closely regulate the slaughterhouse industry, stepping up enforcement, strengthening outdated EPA standards for water pollution, and tightening state pollution control permits to reduce discharges

What sucks more than sucking pests? The pesticides used to kill the sucking pests. Bayer CropScience, headquartered in RTP, wants to spray the pesticide flupyradifurone on North Carolina’s tobacco crop, even though the compound is known to hurt bees and freshwater mussels. The Center for Biological Diversity has asked the EPA to deny the request.

Flupyradifurone is supposed to be an alternative neonicotinoids, which have been linked to bee die-offs. Meanwhile, the aphids and other insects have grown resistant to the pesticide’s effects.

However, flupyradifurone is chemically similar to neonics, and it is acutely toxic to bees that ingest it.

Endangered freshwater mussel species that could be imperiled from the pesticide include the dwarf wedgemussel, which is found in Swift Creek. That mussel and its habitat are already under siege from urban runoff, and they face further jeopardy from the Complete 540 toll road proposed for southern Wake County. Federal wildlife officials have approved an environmental impact statement for the  multi-billion project, even though the mussels could be virtually wiped out in the wild.

“Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?” — The Road