Browsed by
Category: Environment

Energy: A silver lining in the pandemic

Energy: A silver lining in the pandemic

Michael T. Klare writes: Energy analysts have long assumed that, given time, growing international concern over climate change would result in a vast restructuring of the global energy enterprise. The result: a greener, less climate-degrading system. In this future, fossil fuels would be overtaken by renewables, while oil, gas, and coal would be relegated to an increasingly marginal role in the global energy equation. In its World Energy Outlook 2019, for example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted that, by…

Read More Read More

Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists

Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists

The Guardian reports: The coronavirus pandemic is likely to be followed by even more deadly and destructive disease outbreaks unless their root cause – the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly halted, the world’s leading biodiversity experts have warned. “There is a single species responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic – us,” they said. “Recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost. We…

Read More Read More

When confronting a pandemic, we must save nature to save ourselves

When confronting a pandemic, we must save nature to save ourselves

Sahir Doshi and Nicole Gentile write: The COVID-19 pandemic has brutally and tragically exposed the extent to which the health and well-being of every family in America depends on the health and well-being of nature—both here at home and around the world. Nature is connected to human health, from the inherent mechanisms through which ecosystems regulate the emergence of new pathogens to the health benefits of spending time outdoors. But in our destruction of earth’s natural resources, we are losing…

Read More Read More

An Earth Day reminder on how the Republicans have abandoned the environment

An Earth Day reminder on how the Republicans have abandoned the environment

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: The idea for Earth Day came to Gaylord Nelson all of a sudden one day in the middle of 1969. That summer, “teach-ins” about the Vietnam War were all the rage. It occurred to Nelson, then the junior U.S. senator from Wisconsin: How about a “teach-in” about the environment? To attract the widest possible audience, Nelson, a Democrat, invited Representative Pete McCloskey, a Republican from California, to co-chair the event. The response was way more enthusiastic than…

Read More Read More

Bill McKibben on Earth Day at 50

Bill McKibben on Earth Day at 50

  Bill McKibben writes: On the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, let’s think for a moment about the Earth—backdrop for our busy and dramatic life, but also a planet. One can observe it dispassionately, through scientific instruments, as if it were any other planet. And here’s how it looks, these past five decades: The white ice at the northern pole, one of the most obvious features on the planet, has shrunk dramatically: at least half the summer sea…

Read More Read More

Air pollution may be ‘key contributor’ to Covid-19 deaths, study finds

Air pollution may be ‘key contributor’ to Covid-19 deaths, study finds

The Guardian reports: High levels of air pollution may be “one of the most important contributors” to deaths from Covid-19, according to research. The analysis shows that of the coronavirus deaths across 66 administrative regions in Italy, Spain, France and Germany, 78% of them occurred in just five regions, and these were the most polluted. The research examined levels of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant produced mostly by diesel vehicles, and weather conditions that can prevent dirty air from dispersing away…

Read More Read More

‘They’re killing us,’ Texas residents say of Trump rollbacks of public health and environmental protections

‘They’re killing us,’ Texas residents say of Trump rollbacks of public health and environmental protections

The Associated Press reports: Danielle Nelson’s best monitor for the emissions billowing out of the oil refineries and chemical plants surrounding her home: The heaving chest of her 9-year-old asthmatic son. On some nights, the boy’s chest shudders as he fights for breath in his sleep. Nelson suspects the towering plants and refineries are to blame, rising like a lit-up city at night around her squat brick apartment building in the rugged Texas Gulf Coast city of Port Arthur. Ask…

Read More Read More

EPA regulation changes will weaken controls on mercury and other toxic pollutants

EPA regulation changes will weaken controls on mercury and other toxic pollutants

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Thursday weakened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, another step toward rolling back health protections in the middle of a pandemic. The new Environmental Protection Agency rule does not eliminate restrictions on the release of mercury, a heavy metal linked to brain damage. Instead, it creates a new method of calculating the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution that environmental…

Read More Read More

As coronavirus pandemic rages, Trump disregards advice to tighten clean air rules

As coronavirus pandemic rages, Trump disregards advice to tighten clean air rules

The New York Times reports: Disregarding an emerging scientific link between dirty air and Covid-19 death rates, the Trump administration declined on Tuesday to tighten a regulation on industrial soot emissions that came up for review ahead of the coronavirus pandemic. Andrew R. Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said his agency will not impose stricter controls on the tiny, lung-damaging industrial particles, known as PM 2.5, a regulatory action that has been in the works for months….

Read More Read More

The largest Arctic ozone hole ever measured is hovering over the North Pole

The largest Arctic ozone hole ever measured is hovering over the North Pole

Science News reports: A curious confluence of atmospheric events has produced the largest ozone hole ever measured over the Arctic. A powerful polar vortex has trapped especially frigid air in the atmosphere above the North Pole, allowing high-altitude clouds to form in the stratosphere, where the ozone layer also sits. Within those clouds, chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons already high in the atmosphere — gases used as refrigerants — react with ultraviolet rays from the sun to release chlorine and bromine atoms,…

Read More Read More

How viruses are a hidden driving force controlling the planet

How viruses are a hidden driving force controlling the planet

A re-post of an article that appeared in January at Inside Science: Viruses control their hosts like puppets — and in the process, they may play important roles in Earth’s climate. The hosts in this case aren’t people or animals: They are bacteria. A growing body of research is revealing how viruses manipulate what bacteria eat and how they guide the chemical reactions that sustain life. When those changes happen to a lot of bacteria, the cumulative effects could potentially…

Read More Read More

Coronavirus pandemic leading to huge drop in air pollution

Coronavirus pandemic leading to huge drop in air pollution

The Guardian reports: The coronavirus pandemic is shutting down industrial activity and temporarily slashing air pollution levels around the world, satellite imagery from the European Space Agency shows. One expert said the sudden shift represented the “largest scale experiment ever” in terms of the reduction of industrial emissions. Readings from ESA’s Sentinel-5P satellite show that over the past six weeks, levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) over cities and industrial clusters in Asia and Europe were markedly lower than in the…

Read More Read More

As Americans face virus threat to respiratory health, EPA eases restrictions on air pollution

As Americans face virus threat to respiratory health, EPA eases restrictions on air pollution

The Guardian reports: The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has suspended its enforcement of environmental laws during the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, signaling to companies they will not face any sanction for polluting the air or water of Americans. In an extraordinary move that has stunned former EPA officials, the Trump administration said it will not expect compliance with the routine monitoring and reporting of pollution and won’t pursue penalties for breaking these rules. Polluters will be able to ignore environmental…

Read More Read More

Giraffes are in far greater danger than people might think

Giraffes are in far greater danger than people might think

Ed Yong writes: Until recently, giraffes have suffered from surprising scientific neglect. Few researchers have studied them in the wild, so even basic aspects of their lives remain mysterious. Perhaps that’s because giraffes live in what researchers suspect are protean societies lacking the cohesiveness of elephant herds or lion prides. Whatever the reason, one of the world’s most conspicuous creatures has somehow been overlooked. The same goes for its impending extinction. And without fanfare, many other major animal groups—insects, birds,…

Read More Read More

Deforestation plays a key role in triggering epidemics

Deforestation plays a key role in triggering epidemics

On Feb. 18, 2020, in Seoul, South Korea, people wearing face masks pass an electric screen warning about COVID-19. AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon By Suresh V Kuchipudi, Pennsylvania State University The coronavirus disease, known as COVID-19, is a frightening reminder of the imminent global threat posed by emerging infectious diseases. Although epidemics have arisen during all of human history, they now seem to be on the rise. In just the past 20 years, coronaviruses alone have caused three major outbreaks worldwide….

Read More Read More

Ecosystems the size of Amazon ‘can collapse within decades’

Ecosystems the size of Amazon ‘can collapse within decades’

The Guardian reports: Even large ecosystems the size of the Amazon rainforest can collapse in a few decades, according to a study that shows bigger biomes break up relatively faster than small ones. The research reveals that once a tipping point has been passed, breakdowns do not occur gradually like an unravelling thread, but rapidly like a stack of Jenga bricks after a keystone piece has been dislodged. The authors of the study, published on Tuesday in the Nature Communications…

Read More Read More