BBC discusses how planting new forests ‘can do more harm than good’.
Rather than benefiting the environment, large-scale tree planting may do the opposite, two new studies have found.
One paper says that financial incentives to plant trees can backfire and reduce biodiversity with little impact on carbon emissions.
A separate project found that the amount of carbon that new forests can absorb may be overestimated.
Both papers have been published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
BBC discusses Arctic Circle sees ‘highest-ever’ recorded temperatures. Temperatures in the Arctic Circle are likely to have hit an all-time record on Saturday, reaching a scorching 38C (100F) in Verkhoyansk, a Siberian town. The record still needs to be verified, but it appears to have been 18C higher than the average maximum daily temperature in June.
Axios discusses Siberian town records Arctic’s hottest temperature ever. Temperatures in the small Siberian town of Verkhoyansk — normally one of the coldest places on the planet — reached 100.4°F on Saturday, likely the hottest temperature ever recorded in Siberia and north of the Arctic Circle, CBS News reports.
Virginia Mercury discusses why this is no time for Virginia to keep outdated building efficiency standards.
You remember the story of the Three Little Pigs. First the little pigs built themselves a house out of straw, but the big, bad wolf huffed and puffed and blew it down. Barely escaping with their lives, the little pigs built a new house out of sticks, but again the big, bad wolf blew it down. Wiser at last, the little pigs built their third house out of brick, and they lived happily ever after because the wolf could not blow it down.
When you were a child, you probably did not realize what must be obvious to you now: the story is really about the importance of building codes. Shoddy construction brings nothing but grief, as the little pigs learned, and in the end it costs you more than if you had used high-quality materials right from the start.
The story is silent on whether our young porcine heroes also concerned themselves with the energy performance of their house, but it stands to reason they would have taken an interest in the U factors of windows and the R values of wall and ceiling insulation. Their experience with tropical storm-force wolf breath would have given them an appreciation for the snuggest possible construction. Possibly they even went on to put solar panels on their roof and an electric vehicle in the garage, but on this we can only speculate.
PV-magazine-usa discusses how Bill Gates leads $10M investment in Quidnet’s long-duration geomechanical pumped storage. The year of living durationally — the holy grail of energy storage has always been low-cost and long-duration. Venture investors have started putting their money into novel, extended-duration storage technologies.
Quidnet Energy, a startup developing a long-duration energy storage technology, just closed on a $10 million series B financing round. Additionally, the firm announced a contract with the New York State Energy Development Authority (NYSERDA) for a 2 MW/20 MWh demonstration project of its geomechanical pumped storage (GPS) technology.
That’s ten hours of storage versus the four hours typical of the predominant lithium ion battery technology.
Existing investors Breakthrough Energy Ventures (founded by Bill Gates in 2015) and Evok Innovations participated in the round, along with new investors Trafigura and The Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust.
The Conversation discusses how Covid 19 is hurting recycling programs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the U.S. recycling industry. Waste sources, quantities and destinations are all in flux, and shutdowns have devastated an industry that was already struggling.
Many items designated as reusable, communal or secondhand have been temporarily barred to minimize person-to-person exposure. This is producing higher volumes of waste.
Grocers, whether by state decree or on their own, have brought back single-use plastic bags. Even IKEA has suspended use of its signature yellow reusable in-store bags. Plastic industry lobbyists have also pushed to eliminate plastic bag bans altogether, claiming that reusable bags pose a public health risk.
CBC discusses how U.S. toilet paper production is wiping out Canada’s boreal forest, report claims. An environmental group says toilet paper companies are fuelling deforestation. The forest industry disagrees.
The toilet paper crisis of 2020 will probably be remembered as a strange and humorous aside to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But a new report from the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council says there’s a different but more worrisome toilet paper crisis now looming in Canada, and it’s driving global climate change.
The Issue with Tissue 2.0: How the tree-to-toilet pipeline fuels our climate crisis, claims a significant portion of virgin wood fibre from the one million acres of Canadian boreal forest clear-cut every year goes to large American toilet paper producers.
The Guardian discusses how the US has moved to exempt companies from reporting harmful chemical releases. The exemption allows companies to bypass an EPA law meant to address widespread contamination from perflourinated chemicals.
Federal regulators are crafting an exemption for polluters releasing harmful perfluorinated chemicals (PFAS) into the environment in a way that environmental advocates say circumvents a new law meant to address widespread contamination.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a rule Monday adding 172 PFAS chemicals to a list of those that are required to report when they release them into the air or water, or on land.
Dubbed ‘forever chemicals,’ PFAS have been found in drinking water around the country. They are used in weatherproof fabrics, nonstick cookware and firefighting foam, and they are linked with cancer, low infant birth weights, immune issues and thyroid disruptions.
Independent discusses how researchers have found that mercury pollution has reached ocean’s deepest valley. ‘This work shows that human-released mercury has reached and entered foodwebs in even the most remote marine ecosystems on earth,’ researcher says. [No Sstudy link provided.]
Man-made mercury pollution has reached the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, scientists have discovered.
Two groups of scientists from China and the US found toxic mercury in fish and crustaceans living more than 11,000 metres below the surface of the ocean in the Mariana Trench.
“This is a surprise” said Dr Ruoyu Sun, who led a group of researchers from Tianjin University in China. “Previous research had concluded that methlymercury was mostly produced in the top few hundred meters of the ocean.
Mother Jones discusses How a Decade of Neglect and Politics Undermined the CDC’s Fight Against Climate Change. It started with Obama and then just got worse.
Scientists link the warming planet to a rise in dangerous heat in the US, as well as the spread of infectious diseases and other health conditions. Federal research predicts heatstroke and similar illnesses will claim tens of thousands of American lives each year by the end of the century. Already, higher temperatures pose lethal risks: the five warmest years nationwide have all occurred since 2006. In the last six decades, the number of annual heatwaves in 50 US cities has, on average, tripled. In contrast to a viral pandemic, this is a quiet, insidious threat with no end point.
But the program has been hampered by a decade of underfunding, limited expertise and political resistance, Columbia Journalism Investigations and the Center for Public Integrity found.
Bloomberg discusses Mapping America’s Underwater Real Estate. What happens to home prices if flood maps start measuring climate change? Millions of Americans are about to find out.
Millions of Americans just woke up in a flood zone that had never before been listed on U.S. government maps.
The first-ever public evaluation of flood risk for every property in the 48 contiguous states has found that federal maps underestimate the number of homes and businesses in significant danger by 67%. The new flood-risk data, released Monday by the research and technology nonprofit First Street Foundation, is a virtually unprecedented disclosure of how much damage climate change can be expected to inflict at the level of individual homes.