Articles include: A trillion-dollar bet on clean energy; The Senate leader stalls an insurance overhaul; After a season of fire, floods ravage Australia; Fish farming is getting better; The seas are still vulnerable.
Month: March 2021
What’s Good for the Ocean May Also Be Good for Business
New York Times: What’s Good for the Ocean May Also Be Good for Business. Companies are trying to prove that conservation, sustainable fishing and carbon sequestration are profitable.
This article is part of our new series, Currents, which examines how rapid advances in technology are transforming our lives.
Marty Odlin, who grew up and lives on the Maine coast, remembers what the ocean used to be like. But now, he said, “It’s like a desert and just within my lifetime.” In the last few years, he said, he has seen lots of sea grass and many other species virtually disappear from the shoreline.
Mr. Odlin, 39, comes from a fishing family and has a passion for the history of the ocean and the coast, both of which have informed his sense of the ocean’s decline, a small part of the catastrophic deletion of marine life over the last several hundred years.
Yale Climate Connections, March 26, 2021
Articles include: The choice is clear: Fair climate policy or no climate policy; Zero emissions drive would grow U.S. economy; Cartoonists – left, right, and center – have their say on Texas freeze and power outage; The making of a one-of-a-kind climate change PR professional; Why some Christians are participating in a ‘carbon fast’ for Lent; Artist and scientist install fake bakery storefront in Chicago to draw attention to climate change; Scientists work to make solar panels more efficient; Food rescue group in Hawaii reduces food waste, feeds community; NASCAR drivers try out racing version of Ford’s all-electric Mustang Mach-E.
DeSmogBlog, March 27, 2021
Articles include: Appalachian Fracking Faces Financial Risks, Report Warns. Hopes for Petrochemical Plastics Boom ‘Unlikely.’ (Report is here.) Why Companies’ ‘Net-Zero’ Emissions Pledges Should Trigger a Healthy Dose of Skepticism. Experts Urge World Leaders to ‘Put Marine Ecosystems at the Heart of Climate Policy’. Climate Disinformation Database: Charlie Kirk.
Study: Evidence of Fracking Chemicals Found in Bodies of Pennsylvania Children
Truthout: Evidence of Fracking Chemicals Found in Bodies of Pennsylvania Children.
State lawmakers in Pennsylvania are demanding an investigation into the public health impacts of fracking after a new study found evidence of harmful chemicals accumulating in the bodies of children and their families living near fracking wells in communities inundated by fossil fuel development.
Environmental Health News, a nonprofit news organization, released a series of in-depth reports last week based on a two-year study of fracking pollution in Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland County and Washington County, two heavily fracked counties in a state that has been at the epicenter of the shale gas boom for over a decade. Backed by an independent review board of scientists, watchdog journalists found toxic chemicals associated with fracking in air and water samples at levels that exceeded safety thresholds.
The study also found evidence that people living near gas wells and other fracking infrastructure bear a “body burden” from fracking in the form of industrial pollutants such as benzene, ethylbenzene, styrene and toluene that were detected in their bodies at elevated levels. Families living closer to fracking wells also had higher levels of chemicals, such as 1,2,3-trimethylbenzene, 2-heptanone and naphthalene, than families living further away. These compounds are linked to irritation of the skin, eyes and digestive track, along with a host of health problems associated with exposure to fracking chemicals and emissions.
Ancient Rocks Reveal When Earth’s Plate Tectonics Began
Wired: Ancient Rocks Reveal When Earth’s Plate Tectonics Began. New data indicating that the planet’s surface broke up about 3.2 billion years ago helps clarify how shifting plates drove the evolution of complex life.
IN 2016, THE geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany.
Five years of sawing, crushing, dissolving, and analyzing later, they have coaxed from those rocks a secret hidden for eons: the era when plate tectonics began.
Now, a study of the rocks from the Australian Outback by Tusch, Münker and their co-authors, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has captured “a snapshot” of the advent of plate tectonics, said Alan Collins, a geologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. The team’s analysis of tungsten isotopes in the rocks reveals Earth in the act of transitioning to plate tectonics around 3.2 billion years ago.
Study: Opinion: Climate change is threatening our circulation. We must act now.
Washington Post: Opinion: Climate change is threatening our circulation. We must act now.
THE WORLD’S climate depends on a global aquatic “conveyor belt” system that snakes around the oceans, taking heat from some places and redistributing it elsewhere. It is this system that keeps Europe relatively warm despite its northern latitudes, underpins major fisheries and drives key weather patterns across continents.
Global warming may be endangering this crucial circulation. Scientists are accumulating evidence that climate change is disrupting a major section of the conveyor belt, running from the tropics up to the North Atlantic and back south, slowing this piece of the system to its weakest pace in more than 1,000 years, according to a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience. By changing the atmosphere’s chemistry at a breakneck pace, humanity is conducting a massive, unprecedented experiment on finely tuned planetary systems, with consequences that range from predictable to speculative, and what experts know about
A group of scientists from Britain, Germany and Ireland studying the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — that is, the circulation pattern that warms the North Atlantic — have sought to compare how it is behaving now with its recent past. Experts only began directly measuring the pattern in 2004, so they looked for clues in seafloor sediments and ocean temperature patterns, which suggested how the currents behaved before. The clues present a consistent picture: The circulation has weakened in a way that is unprecedented in the past 1,000 years, said Niamh Cahill, a statistician from Ireland’s Maynooth University.
Lawmakers must protect Virginians from the harms of gold mining
Virginia Mercury: Lawmakers must protect Virginians from the harms of gold mining.
In 1990, heavy rainfall overpowered a holding dam at the Brewer Gold Mine in Jefferson, South Carolina, where gold had been pulled from the earth going back to 1828. The spill sent 10 million gallons of the cyanide solution used to process gold into a nearby tributary to the Lynches River, killing aquatic life as far as 50 miles downstream.
In 2015, while attempting to address and remediate polluted wastewater at the abandoned Gold King Mine in Silverton, Colorado, personnel with the Environmental Protection Agency and contractors accidentally released an estimated 3 million gallons of gold mine tailings laced with toxins like lead, mercury and arsenic into a tributary of the Animas River, damaging watersheds in three states and the Navajo Nation. The Animas River ran an eerie shade of orange after the spill and, today, six years later, large stretches of the river are devoid of life because of the toxic pollution.
Report: Wind and solar power aren’t displacing coal nearly fast enough
Axios: Wind and solar power aren’t displacing coal nearly fast enough.
New analysis shows how wind and solar growth are helping to displace coal-fired generation, but not nearly enough to slash overall emissions from electricity at a time of generally rising global demand.
Driving the news: Last year, a 15% rise in wind and solar generation combined with the pandemic briefly halting power demand growth led to a record drop in coal-fired output, the environmental think tank Ember said.
The big picture: Those renewables combined supplied nearly a 10th of total global electricity last year, around twice the share just five years earlier.
DeSmogBlog, March 20, 2021
Articles include: Argentina’s Illegal Oil and Gas Waste Dumps; Whistleblower Claims Dangerous Defects in Pipeline for Shell’s Pennsylvania Plastics Plant; Nudging Social Media Users to Think Critically Helps Slow the Spread of Fake News, Study Finds; Green Groups File ‘First-of-Its-Kind’ FTC Complaint Against Chevron for Climate Lies; Climate Disinformation Database: Principia Scientific International.