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Category: Environment

How Trump’s federal funding and hiring freezes increase risk of catastrophic wildfires

How Trump’s federal funding and hiring freezes increase risk of catastrophic wildfires

By Mark Olalde This story was originally published by ProPublica President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal government, launched as the deadly Palisades and Eaton fires burned across Los Angeles, have left the country’s wildland firefighting force unprepared for the rapidly approaching wildfire season. The administration has frozen funds, including money appropriated by Congress, and issued a deluge of orders eliminating federal employees, which has thrown agencies tasked with battling blazes into disarray as individual offices…

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Songbirds being killed by topical pesticides used for pet fleas and ticks

Songbirds being killed by topical pesticides used for pet fleas and ticks

The Guardian reports: Songbird chicks are being killed by high levels of pesticides in the pet fur used by their parents to line their nests, a study has found. Researchers surveying nests for the harmful chemical found in pet flea treatments found that it was present in every single nest. The scientists from the University of Sussex are now calling for the government to urgently reassess the environmental risk of pesticides used in flea and tick treatments and consider restricting…

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Trump eliminates help for Black and Latino communities hit harder by pollution

Trump eliminates help for Black and Latino communities hit harder by pollution

The Associated Press reports: For four years, the Environmental Protection Agency made environmental justice one of its biggest priorities, working to improve health conditions in heavily-polluted communities often made up largely of Black, Latino and low-income Americans. Now that short-lived era is over. President Donald Trump in his first week eliminated a team of White House advisors whose job it was to ensure the entire federal government helped communities located near heavy industry, ports and roadways. Trump eliminated the “Justice40”…

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Catastrophic tipping point in Greenland: crystal blue lakes turn brown, belch out carbon dioxide

Catastrophic tipping point in Greenland: crystal blue lakes turn brown, belch out carbon dioxide

Live Science reports: Thousands of Greenland’s crystal-clear blue lakes have turned a murky brown thanks to global warming — and the worst part is that they’ve started emitting carbon dioxide. Record heat and rain in 2022 pushed the lakes of West Greenland past a tipping point, so rather than absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂), they began to emit it into the atmosphere, according to a new study. The changes began in fall, which is normally a snowy time for Greenland. However,…

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Biden administration reaches deal limiting controversial protections for multinational corporations

Biden administration reaches deal limiting controversial protections for multinational corporations

Inside Climate News reports: The Biden administration announced a last-minute deal on trade this week, reaching an agreement with Colombia to limit protections for investors between the two countries. The move represents a small step toward reforming a system that has awarded multinational corporations more than $100 billion in taxpayer funds from countries around the globe. Investor state dispute settlement, or ISDS, allows foreign companies to bypass national courts and sue governments before panels of arbitrators if they believe their…

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John Vaillant: ‘Virtually any city on Earth can burn now’

John Vaillant: ‘Virtually any city on Earth can burn now’

Kiley Bense writes: The journalist John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather” begins in the spring of 2016 in the boreal forests surrounding the remote Canadian city of Fort McMurray, where a fire is growing. Although wildfire is a regular part of life in northern Alberta, this fire was destined to be different. “A new kind of fire introduced itself to the world,” Vaillant writes. Ushered in by soaring temperatures, drought and high winds, this wildfire obliterated thousands of buildings, forced 88,000…

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We can still get out of the climate Hellocene and into the clear

We can still get out of the climate Hellocene and into the clear

Rob Jackson writes: The NASA scientist James Hansen gave landmark testimony to a US Senate committee in 1988 that brimmed with evidence of climate change. More than 35 years ago, he concluded: ‘The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.’ Viewing the climate carnage of 2023 and the lack of action since 1988, Hansen was even stronger: ‘We are damned fools.’ But who is the ‘we’? The top 1 per cent of the world’s population…

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California wildfire season should be over. So why is Los Angeles burning?

California wildfire season should be over. So why is Los Angeles burning?

Science News reports: Unusually dry conditions and hurricane-force seasonal winds are fueling multiple fast-moving and destructive wildfires in Los Angeles County. Gusts that reached over 145 kilometers per hour (90 miles per hour) quickly drove the blazes into urban areas, forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate from their homes and killing at least two people as of January 8. The largest of the blazes, known as the Palisades fire, erupted the morning of January 7 on the west side…

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The ocean is teeming with networks of interconnected bacteria

The ocean is teeming with networks of interconnected bacteria

Veronique Greenwood writes: Prochlorococcus bacteria are so small that you’d have to line up around a thousand of them to match the thickness of a human thumbnail. The ocean seethes with them: The microbes are likely the most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet, and they create a significant portion — 10% to 20% — of the atmosphere’s oxygen. That means that life on Earth depends on the roughly 3 octillion (or 3 × 1027) tiny individual cells toiling away….

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Biden to block new offshore drilling along most of the U.S. coastline

Biden to block new offshore drilling along most of the U.S. coastline

Politico reports: President Joe Biden is planning to prohibit future offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the nation’s coastline, setting up a potential roadblock for Republicans’ plans to expand production in federal waters. Biden is set to announce on Monday that he will withdraw 625 million acres of coastline from future oil and gas drilling. That would encompass all of the Atlantic Coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coast from Washington to California and parts of…

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How regenerative agriculture can foster peacebuilding in conflict areas

How regenerative agriculture can foster peacebuilding in conflict areas

Drew Marcantonio writes: In the dry valley between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía del Perijá mountain ranges, in northern Colombia, former combatants in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerilla group, or FARC, are leading a surprising new revolution: regenerative agriculture. The region was once plagued by violence between antagonistic groups, including FARC, and is currently under pressure from both climate crisis and deforestation. But through an agricultural cooperative called COOMPAZCOL, former FARC members are forming…

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Unheralded environmentalist: Jimmy Carter’s green legacy

Unheralded environmentalist: Jimmy Carter’s green legacy

Kai Bird writes: The angry Alaskans gathered in Fairbanks to burn the president’s effigy. It was early December 1978 and President Jimmy Carter was that unpopular in Alaska. A few days earlier Carter had issued an unusual executive order, designating 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness as a national monument. He did so unilaterally, using a little known 1906 Antiquities Act that ostensibly gave the president the executive power to designate buildings or small plots of historical sites on federal…

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How to buy a piece of a lawsuit and impoverish a country

How to buy a piece of a lawsuit and impoverish a country

Inside Climate News reports: When a foreign mining company sued Greenland in 2022, the government’s lead lawyer thought he was prepared. Paw Fruerlund had handled similar cases before, and he believed the law and facts were on his side. When he arrived at one of the first hearings, however, Fruerlund stared across the table at 12 corporate lawyers from two firms representing his opponent, an Australian company called Greenland Minerals. There were so many, they spilled across two rows of…

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Our morals change with the seasons

Our morals change with the seasons

Alice Sun writes: The seasons have been shown to influence many elements of our psyches and behavior: mood, color preferences, how charitable we are, even cognitive performance. But recently, researchers found they may also affect what we tend to consider among our most profoundly held convictions: how we decide what is right and wrong. A team of researchers looked at a decade’s worth of responses to an online survey about morals and analyzed how these responses changed from one season…

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To escape extreme heat, farmers and fisherfolk worldwide are adopting overnight hours

To escape extreme heat, farmers and fisherfolk worldwide are adopting overnight hours

Modern Farmer reports: Every morning, for years, Josana Pinto da Costa would venture out onto the waterways lining Óbidos, Brazil, in a small fishing boat. She would glide over the murky, churning currents of the Amazon River Basin, her flat nets bringing in writhing hauls as the sun ascended into the cerulean skies above. Scorching temperatures in the Brazilian state of Pará have now made that routine unsafe. The heat has “been really intense” this year, said Pinto da Costa…

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The alchemy that powers the modern world

The alchemy that powers the modern world

December 13, 2024 by Sarah Scoles The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” That universe must then invent the first atoms, which will make up the first stars, which will fuse those initial elements into larger ones. Stars will explode and die and crash into each other, those cataclysms building heavier elements. Eventually, billions of years later, the universe will produce an Earth whose insides…

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