Environment
Environment
Nuclear Energy Cannot Meaningfully Contribute to a Climate-Neutral Energy System
Scientists for the Future: the experience with commercial nuclear energy generation acquired over the past seven decades points to the significant technical, economic, and social risks involved. .. Nuclear energy is too dangerous, too expensive, and too sluggishly deployable to play a significant role in mitigating the climate crisis. ... In addition, nuclear energy is an obstacle to achieving the social-ecological transformation, without which ambitious climate goals are elusive...
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Dec 16, 2021, 3:24pm
Environment
A Way of Life in Danger
Marc Eisen: Organic farmers face unprecedented challenges. ... Passion comes quick when organic farmers talk soil. Their commitment to land stewardship—nurturing and improving the soil’s life-giving qualities—is a point of immense pride. ... A perfect storm of problems is challenging organic’s primacy in producing healthy food. And organic food, once a culty and idealistic passion for both farmers and consumers, is increasingly just another cog in the agribusiness behemoth. ... farmers are often captive to a small number of giant processors and purveyors that control particular branches of the industry: beef slaughtering, chicken packaging, corn and soy processing, agrochemical sales, and seed selling...
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Dec 13, 2021, 4:39pm
Environment
How Big Oil Rigs the System to Keep Winning
Naomi Oreskes and Jeff Nesbit: The oil and gas industry has refined its techniques to stay a step ahead over decades. And it has no plans to stop anytime soon. ... Big Oil also saw climate change coming. ... oil and gas companies didn’t just lie about their own research. They also mounted a stealth campaign to monitor and influence what the rest of the scientific community learned and said about climate change. ... to influence the direction of the scientific community as a whole ... The industry promotes methane gas (AKA natural gas) as a “clean” fuel ... It’s about 80 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide is. ... it’s time to recognize that they simply can’t be trusted as partners...
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Dec 10, 2021, 2:41pm
Environment
The US Biofuels Mandate Helps Farmers, But Does Little for Energy Security and Harms the Environment
John DeCicco: If you’ve pumped gas at a U.S. service station over the past decade, you’ve put biofuel in your tank. Thanks to the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, almost all gasoline sold nationwide is required to contain 10% ethanol – a fuel made from plant sources, mainly corn. ... Rather than biofuels, a much better way to address transportation-related CO2 emissions is through improving efficiency, particularly raising gasoline vehicle fuel economy while electric cars continue to advance. ... What can we conclude from 16 years of the RFS? .. Its energy security rationale is largely moot, and its climate rationale has proved false...
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Dec 8, 2021, 12:46pm
Environment
Japan’s Upcoming Nuclear Waste Dump
Robert Hunziker: Nuclear fuel remains dangerously radioactive for thousands of years after it is no longer useful in a commercial reactor. ... In April 2021, the Japanese government announced its decision to discharge nuclear waste from Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean via a sub-seabed pipeline. At least 1.2 million tons of tritium-laced toxic water will be discharged. ... local authorities in Japan have measured elevated levels of radionuclides in shellfish and seaweed near the nuclear plants ... the pollutants will reach as far as the coast of North America to the east and as far as Australia to the south...
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Dec 7, 2021, 1:49pm
Environment
Burned-out Forests Are Not Re-Growing
Robert Hunziker: Trees are not re-growing in burned-out forests. This strange occurrence is becoming more frequent as global warming turns verdant flora into flammable tinder, causing more and bigger wild forests fires. ... this puts one more distorted face on the consequential impact of the multi-billion dollar business called “woody biomass,” which burns trees in place of coal to meet carbon neutral protocols. ... one has to wonder about nature’s “carbon sink” capacity ... "Forests are our last, best natural defense against global warming. Without the world’s trees at peak physical condition, the rest of us don’t stand a chance."...
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Dec 6, 2021, 11:49am
Environment
Why Do Walmart, Amazon, Target and IKEA Have Such High Shipping Emissions?
Olive Rosane: As a congestion crisis continues to stall polluting container ships in ports around the world, there is a growing awareness of the role that international shipping plays in both the climate crisis and the public-health impacts of air pollution. ... Walmart is the company whose U.S. imports generate the most pollution ... tends to ship its goods from Asia all the way to the East Coast of the U.S., preferring ports in Houston, Savannah and Norfolk, Virginia ... It’s preferred carrier is also the greatest polluter among all the carriers studied ... and accounted for 68 percent of Walmart’s shipping emissions and 33 percent of all four retailers’ emissions...
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Nov 30, 2021, 2:47pm
Environment
EPA: Two Most Widely Used Pesticides Likely Harm Majority of Endangered Species
Center for Biological Diversity: WASHINGTON— The Environmental Protection Agency has determined that the endocrine-disrupting pesticide atrazine and cancer-linked pesticide glyphosate are each likely to harm more than 1,000 of the nation’s most endangered plants and animals. ... The finalized evaluations found that use of the herbicide glyphosate is likely causing harm to 1,676 of the plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. Atrazine is likely harming 1,013 protected species. ... “It’s no surprise that these chemical poisons are causing severe harm to imperiled wildlife since U.S. use exceeds 70 million pounds of atrazine and 300 million pounds of glyphosate every year”...
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Nov 24, 2021, 3:43pm
Environment
An environmental sociologist explains how permaculture offers a path to climate justice
Christina Ergas: Big farming is both a victim of climate change and a contributor. Droughts, floods and soil degradation threaten crop yields. But agriculture produces nearly one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. ... A potential antidote to harmful monocultures is a form of community farming invented back in the 1970s: permaculture. Permaculture is not just about farming; it incorporates economic and social principles. ... Permaculture’s three main tenets – caring for the Earth, caring for the people and sharing the surplus – offer a potential path toward climate justice..
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Nov 20, 2021, 11:42am
Environment
Court convenes historic hearing in Indigenous territory on land consent issue
Kimberley Brown: Ecuador’s Constitutional Court held a hearing in the Indigenous Cofan territory of Sinangoe in the northern Amazon rainforest on Nov. 15, the first time the highest court in the country agreed to travel to Indigenous territory for a court hearing. ... The hearing itself was part of the court’s process to review Ecuador’s free, prior and informed consultation process, or FPIC, using as a basis of analysis Sinangoe’s 2018 lawsuit, when the community sued the government for selling mining concessions on their territory without consulting with the community first, and won...
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Nov 19, 2021, 3:14pm
Environment
Organized crime is a top driver of global deforestation – along with beef, soy, palm oil and wood products
Jennifer Devine: Every year the world loses an estimated 25 million acres (10 million hectares) of forest, an area larger than the state of Indiana. Nearly all of it is in the tropics. ... beef, soy, palm oil, and wood pulp and paper products ... Together these commodities are responsible for the loss of nearly 12 million acres (5 million hectares) annually. There’s also a fifth, less publicized key driver: organized crime, including illegal drug trafficking. ... In South America and Central America, drug trafficking organizations are the vanguard of deforestation. Drug traffickers are illegally logging forests in the Amazon and hiding cocaine in timber shipments to Europe...
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Nov 17, 2021, 12:35pm
Environment
The Woody Biomass Blunder
Robert Hunziker: One of the most controversial fixes for global warming is the use of woody biomass, cutting trees, burning trees to achieve “carbon neutral” status in the worldwide battle to conquer climate change/global warming. ... this could be one of the biggest cons of all time ... “Burning wood puts out more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity produced then coal does.” ... The latest news (Nov. 12) out of COP26 is that the EU is committed to forest biomass burning to achieve “carbon neutral” status. ... It’s only gotten worse ever since they started meeting. Twenty-five years of failure...
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Nov 15, 2021, 3:36pm
Environment
The Buffalo Treaty: We Must Return Buffalo to the American West:
Shelly Fyant, Andy Werk Jr – Lauren Monroe Jr.: Since time immemorial, the Tribes of the Western United States and Canada have had a unique and powerful relationship with buffalo. For generations, buffalo have been our relatives: buffalo are part of us and we are part of buffalo, culturally, materially and spiritually. ... In 2014, our Tribes began joining together under a Buffalo Treaty that calls for restoring buffalo as wildlife that is an important part of ecological systems of the West. ... Let us be clear that while there are millions of acres of public land, we ask for buffalo restoration only on those landscapes where there is a confluence of both Tribal and public interests...
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Nov 14, 2021, 3:50pm
Environment
What If Every American's Home Was a Power Plant?
Thom Hartmann: If we’re committed to reaching zero emissions, we must return to that goal of local self-sufficiency, this time with free power from the sun & wind instead of clear-cutting forests or burning fossils ... And there’s a way to get there, as the technology is already mature and in use in other countries like Germany: we simply shift from a central-power-plant system to a locally-generated-rooftop-system where the utilities, rather than just supplying power, are instead using “smart grids” to keep the entire community up and running even when individual homes have system failures...
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Nov 9, 2021, 2:59pm
Environment
Military pollution is the skeleton in the West’s climate closet
Jonathan Cook: The very nations proclaiming moral leadership in tackling the climate crisis are also the ones doing most to sabotage a meaningful agreement to reduce humanity’s global carbon footprint. ... The US military alone is estimated to have a larger carbon footprint than most countries ... And new technology, rather than turning the military green, is often making things much worse. ... The latest fighter jet developed by the US, the F-35, is reported to burn 5,600 litres of fuel an hour. ... It is precisely this full-spectrum power competition – economic, ideologic and military – that propelled us into the current climate disaster...
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Nov 9, 2021, 2:40pm
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