Environment
Environment
Inside a Timber Sale Scam
George Wuerthner: Amazingly the Forest Service claims that if they don’t log the forest (killing the trees with chain saws), the trees will die from root rot, beetles, and other “calamities” In other words, death by chainsaws is acceptable, but mortality by natural agents is not. ... the real purpose of the “forest health” project is about ...improving the “health” of the timber industry, not the forest. ... After a major fire, there are more fish in streams. More bees. More birds. More fungi. More flowers. More small rodents. More food for elk to grizzlies. ... Climate warming is driving large blazes, not fuels...
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Sep 14, 2021, 3:06pm
Environment
Climate activists are being killed for trying to save our planet. There is a way to help
Bill McKibben: Last year, there were a record 227 killings globally. It is our duty to keep resisting the insatiable forces that led to their deaths ... The demand for the highest possible profit, the quickest possible timeline, the cheapest possible operation, seems to translate eventually into the understanding, somewhere, that the troublemaker must go. ... When people stand up to block a pipeline, or an illegal mine, or a new plantation slated for an old forest, they are also standing in the way of the activities that threaten us all. ... They make life harder for the oil companies and the timber barons, and in so doing strive to safeguard all of us from incessant temperature increases...
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Sep 13, 2021, 11:03am
Environment
Vast majority of fossil fuels ‘must stay in ground’ to stem climate crisis
Damian Carrington: Analysis shows future is bleak for fossil fuel industry with trillions of dollars of assets at stake ... The research found 90% of coal and 60% of oil and gas reserves could not be extracted if there was to be even a 50% chance of keeping global heating below 1.5C, the temperature beyond which the worst climate impacts hit. ... “The [analysis] implies that many operational and planned fossil fuel projects [are] unviable” ... action to cut production could include ending subsidies, taxes and even bans on new exploration...
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Sep 8, 2021, 10:51am
Environment
Complacency Rules: Consumerism and the Environment
Graham Peebles: Complacency and the refusal to change individual behavior and collective ways of living are stoking the underlying cause of the crisis – Consumerism ... - the bedrock of the prevailing socio-economic system and materialistic way of life. ... Governments and businesses are completely invested in maintaining high levels of consumption; their profitability and continued existence depend on it. ... It is this poisonous Ideology of Profit, which, in direct contrast to the needs of the environment for simplicity of living, collectivity and sharing, perpetuates, not just rampant consumerism, but widespread apathy and inaction...
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Sep 6, 2021, 12:08pm
Environment
Hurricane Ida Makes a Mockery of Big Oil’s Philanthropy
Sharon Lerner: During Hurricane Ida, energy companies briefly paused efforts to claim credit for combating the problems they’ve caused. ... While Big Oil continues to make — and publicize — their philanthropic contributions, they are fighting legal efforts to collect on the true costs of the climate crisis. ... More than 20 cities, states, and localities, including Baltimore, have recently sued fossil fuel companies seeking compensation for the financial burdens now being shouldered by the public. ... “I want them to acknowledge that climate change is a real problem and that they’re fueling it — and stop pursuing fossil fuels" ... “Every storm and every wildfire is a message that we need to take that action.”...
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Sep 2, 2021, 3:16pm
Environment
The Battle to Protect State-Owned Lands
George Wuerthner: Though most conservation groups focus on federal lands, a neglected area of concern are state properties. Throughout the West, most of these lands are either leased for timber cutting or livestock grazing. ... One of the problems with all state lands is that the ecological costs of resource extraction are never considered in the calculations. .... No resource extraction, even logging valuable old-growth timber, would be profitable if all costs were internalized. ... There is no way to graze livestock in the arid West without substantial ecological costs. ... the irrigation for livestock forage production also dewaters the West’s river ... If one looked at just the ecological damage from livestock use of these lands, it would make no sense to lease them at all...
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Aug 31, 2021, 2:02pm
Environment
Drought Clobbers the World
Robert Hunziker: According to SPEI Global Drought Monitor, no continent is spared the ravages of severe drought, except for Antarctica. ... The world is coming apart at the seams as a result of greenhouse gas emissions ... A Middle East water crisis is threatening millions of people to the precipice of famine. ... Droughts take no prisoners, as the entire Mediterranean region has been hit hard. ... The natural water cycle is already interrupted by climate change,” but Dr. İlhan suggests it’s also affected by urban surfaces that are sealed with asphalt and concrete (the human footprint) “leaving very little green spaces where water can meet soil and fill groundwater resources.”...
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Aug 28, 2021, 11:55am
Environment
Trump’s Favorite Pesticide Banned!
Robert Hunziker: The Biden EPA has put a stop to use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos on food crops ... EPA - “There are no safe uses for the pesticide.” ... Earthjustice: “Chlorpyrifos is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of exposures to organophosphate pesticides, which all act in the same way and cause the same type of harm.” ... While we can’t reduce all environmental and health problems to one insidious thing, I believe there is a common denominator. The common denominator is glyphosate. ... it destroys ecosystems and alters human DNA and likely spikes chronic diseases...
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Aug 25, 2021, 3:54pm
Environment
This town is the first in America to ban new gas stations – is the tide turning?
Dominic Rushe: A movement in California seeks a moratorium on new pumps – and a transformation of the US transportation system ... In March, Petaluma in Sonoma county became the first city in the US to ban future gas station construction or any new pumps on existing sites. ... Every gallon of gasoline sold adds 9kg (20lb) of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. In 2019 Americans consumed 142bn gallons of gasoline, producing 1.278bn tonnes (1.4bn tons) of CO2. ... A typical gas station can spill up to 100 gallons of gasoline annually, according to Coltura, an environmental activism group, poisoning groundwater and making repurposing the sites expensive and difficult...
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Aug 17, 2021, 12:35pm
Environment
Our Not-So-Slow-Motion Apocalypse
Tom Engelhardt: In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re no longer just reading about the climate crisis; we’re living it in a startling fashion. ... Whether you’ve been sweating and swearing under the latest heat dome; fleeing fires somewhere in the West; broiling in a Siberia that’s releasing startling amounts of heat-producing methane into the atmosphere; being swept away by flood waters in Germany ... all of us — are in a new world and we better damn well get used to it. ... By the way, don’t imagine that it’s just us humans who are suffering. ... one billion! — mussels, barnacles, and other small sea creatures that were estimated to have died off the coast of Vancouver, Canada, during the unprecedented heat wave there earlier in the summer... It’s a world of disaster worth mobilizing over...
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Aug 13, 2021, 4:12pm
Environment
Good Fire / Bad Fire: a False Paradigm
George Wuerthner: There are common factors in all these fires. They are places that have experienced significant “fuel removal” by “active forest management” And they are burning under severe drought, with high temperatures, low humidity, and high winds. This is the recipe for large, unstoppable fires. ... Fuel build-up or limited logging, grazing, or even a lack of Indian burning is not the issue ... The ultimate force driving large wildfires is a warming climate. ... If we don’t deal with climate change, fuel reductions will only exacerbate the situation. Remember another famous quip: Nature bats last...
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Aug 11, 2021, 3:55pm
Environment
To Indigenous People, Line 3 is a Battle Over the Future
Esty Dinur: Opposition is mounting to a project that threatens Native lands, and the planet. ... This is a drought year. Winona LaDuke, the Ojibwe director of Honor the Earth, says it’s the worst drought she has seen in her sixty-two years. Yet Enbridge has requested to use five billion gallons of water, and Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources has approved it. ... At $7.5 billion, the proposed new Line 3 would be the largest project in Enbridge’s history and one of the largest crude oil pipelines in the world. ... The cops, Smith tells me, “are trying social fear and other tactics to wear us down, but they don’t understand that we and our ancestors before us have been through it all our lives and there’s nothing left that they can do...
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Aug 9, 2021, 2:56pm
Environment
The Pentagon Is Killing Us
Marcy Winograd: As the largest institutional consumer of oil and, therefore, the largest single U.S. emitter of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG’s), the Pentagon must reduce its carbon footprint of wars and weapons production as well as its boot print — including tens of thousands of troops deployed worldwide at 800 overseas military bases and one under construction on Okinawa. ... One B-52 Stratofortress, Boeing’s long-range bomber, consumes as much fuel in an hour as the average car driver uses in seven years ... Defenders of record high near trillion-dollar military budgets counter that we must protect ourselves from enemies across the world. ... Ironically, the enemy we know, global warming, poses the most urgent existential threat: the wildfire, the flash flood, the heat wave...
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Aug 6, 2021, 11:45am
Environment
Absolute Zero - Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Report, UK: We have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050: that’s what climate scientists tell us ... Individuals: The big actions are: travel less distance by train or in small (or full) electric cars and stop flying; use the heating less and electrify the boiler when next upgrading; lobby for construction with half the material for twice as long; stop eating beef and lamb. ... In addition to reducing our energy demand, delivering zero emissions with today’s technologies requires the phasing out of flying, shipping, lamb and beef, blast-furnace steel and cement ... No one actor can bring about Absolute Zero. Delivering it is a journey depending on co-operative action by individuals, businesses and governments acting on good information...
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Aug 4, 2021, 2:03pm
Environment
In a Drier Future, What’s the Best Way to Secure Water?
Kate Wheeling: California’s water system, ... is crumbling in the face of climate change. ... But not everyone agrees on the best way to do ... Nowhere is this clearer than in Orange County’s Huntington Beach, the site of a proposed desalination plant. ... environmental justice advocates ... say desalinated water will be more expensive, more energy-intensive, and more harmful to marine ecosystems when compared with other strategies for increasing local water supplies ... “There are so many other inefficiencies in the system that can be fixed to potentially harness more water.” ... capture that excess surface water and turn it into groundwater...
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Aug 2, 2021, 2:15pm
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