Natural Resources Defense Council Staff Blog: “As the government shutdown enters its second week with no end in sight, the stalemate continues to erode our health, safety, the environment and our economy.  Just as the effects of a slow-acting toxin are not apparent at first, the shutdown’s impacts may not yet be fully evident, but the longer it goes on, the more damage will be caused and the more expensive it will be to restart programs. The world’s largest repository of climate data, in North Carolina, is now dark and its daily information processing halted.  Researchers probing the on-going crisis of large numbers of dolphins now dying along the East coast may lose data, and some labs analyzing the tissue samples are closed. The near-total shutdown of the Environmental Protection Agency—94 percent of the workforce furloughed—may expose more people to health risks because of the delay to important new standards to cut down on tailpipe pollution that has been linked to lung disease.”