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Category: Environment

Air pollution will lead to mass migration, say experts after landmark ruling

Air pollution will lead to mass migration, say experts after landmark ruling

The Guardian reports: Air pollution does not respect national boundaries and environmental degradation will lead to mass migration in the future, said a leading barrister in the wake of a landmark migration ruling, as experts warned that government action must be taken as a matter of urgency. Sailesh Mehta, a barrister specialising in environmental cases, said: “The link between migration and environmental degradation is clear. As global warming makes parts of our planet uninhabitable, mass migration will become the norm….

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Insect populations suffering death by 1,000 cuts, say scientists

Insect populations suffering death by 1,000 cuts, say scientists

The Guardian reports: Insect populations are suffering “death by a thousand cuts”, with many falling at “frightening” rates that are “tearing apart the tapestry of life”, according to scientists behind a new volume of studies. The insects face multiple, overlapping threats including the destruction of wild habitats for farming, urbanisation, pesticides and light pollution. Population collapses have been recorded in places where human activities dominate, such as in Germany, but there is little data from outside Europe and North America…

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Revolutionary archaeology reveals the deepest possible Anthropocene

Revolutionary archaeology reveals the deepest possible Anthropocene

Lucas Stephens, Erle Ellis, and Dorian Fuller write: Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere, even the Earth’s surface – all were irreversibly transformed. When asked about this transition, some people might be able to name the Neolithic Revolution or point to the Fertile Crescent on a map. This widespread understanding is the product of years…

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In last rush, Trump grants mining and energy firms access to public lands

In last rush, Trump grants mining and energy firms access to public lands

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is rushing to approve a final wave of large-scale mining and energy projects on federal lands, encouraged by investors who want to try to ensure the projects move ahead even after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office. In Arizona, the Forest Service is preparing to sign off on the transfer of federal forest land — considered sacred by a neighboring Native American tribe — to allow construction of one of the…

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EPA’s final deregulatory rush runs into open staff resistance

EPA’s final deregulatory rush runs into open staff resistance

The New York Times reports: President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency was rushing to complete one of its last regulatory priorities, aiming to obstruct the creation of air- and water-pollution controls far into the future, when a senior career scientist moved to hobble it. Thomas Sinks directed the E.P.A.’s science advisory office and later managed the agency’s rules and data around research that involved people. Before his retirement in September, he decided to issue a blistering official opinion that the pending…

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Trump officials rush to auction off rights to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before Biden can block it

Trump officials rush to auction off rights to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before Biden can block it

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration is asking oil and gas firms to pick spots where they want to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as it races to open the pristine wilderness to development and lock in drilling rights before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. The “call for nominations” to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register allows companies to identify tracts on which to bid during an upcoming lease sale on the refuge’s nearly 1.6 million…

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Trump to strip protections from Tongass National Forest, one of the biggest intact temperate rainforests

Trump to strip protections from Tongass National Forest, one of the biggest intact temperate rainforests

The Washington Post reports: President Trump will open up more than half of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development, according to a notice posted Wednesday, stripping protections that had safeguarded one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests for nearly two decades. As of Thursday, it will be legal for logging companies to build roads and cut and remove timber throughout more than 9.3 million acres of forest — featuring old-growth stands of red and…

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‘Sleeping giant’ Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find

‘Sleeping giant’ Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find

The Guardian reports: Scientists have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean – known as the “sleeping giants of the carbon cycle” – have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal. High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected down to a depth of 350 metres in the Laptev Sea near Russia, prompting concern among researchers that a new climate feedback…

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How a more conservative Supreme Court could impact environmental laws

How a more conservative Supreme Court could impact environmental laws

E&E News reports: Barrett, who currently serves on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has a relatively slim record on climate and environmental matters. But if she is confirmed to the high court, Barrett, 48, likely would lock up a conservative coalition there, legal experts said. That bloc could smooth the path for future environmental rollbacks or make it more difficult to expand emissions regulations through a broad reading of statutory authority. “I view Barrett being added to the…

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Groups pressure Biden to exclude fossil fuel execs from team

Groups pressure Biden to exclude fossil fuel execs from team

The Hill reports: More than 100 climate and advocacy groups are asking Joe Biden’s presidential campaign to commit to blocking fossil fuel representatives from its transition team or administration should the former vice president win the election. “We urge you to ban all fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives from any advisory or official position on your campaign, transition team, cabinet, and administration,” the groups wrote in a letter to the campaign, which was signed by a mix of 145…

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Big Oil is in trouble. Its plan: Flood Africa with plastic

Big Oil is in trouble. Its plan: Flood Africa with plastic

The New York Times reports: Confronting a climate crisis that threatens the fossil fuel industry, oil companies are racing to make more plastic. But they face two problems: Many markets are already awash with plastic, and few countries are willing to be dumping grounds for the world’s plastic waste. The industry thinks it has found a solution to both problems in Africa. According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, an industry group representing the world’s largest chemical makers…

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Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fueling

Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fueling

George Monbiot writes: When a major study was published last month, showing that the global population is likely to peak then crash much sooner than most scientists had assumed, I naively imagined that people in rich nations would at last stop blaming all the world’s environmental problems on population growth. I was wrong. If anything, it appears to have got worse. Next week the BirthStrike movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have children, seek…

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Seeing human society as a complex system opens a better future for us all

Seeing human society as a complex system opens a better future for us all

Jessica Flack and Melanie Mitchell write: We’re at a unique moment in the 200,000 years or so that Homo sapiens have walked the Earth. For the first time in that long history, humans are capable of coordinating on a global scale, using fine-grained data on individual behaviour, to design robust and adaptable social systems. The pandemic of 2019-20 has brought home this potential. Never before has there been a collective, empirically informed response of the magnitude that COVID-19 has demanded….

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Earth has lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice in less than 30 years

Earth has lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice in less than 30 years

The Observer reports: A total of 28 trillion tonnes of ice have disappeared from the surface of the Earth since 1994. That is stunning conclusion of UK scientists who have analysed satellite surveys of the planet’s poles, mountains and glaciers to measure how much ice coverage lost because of global heating triggered by rising greenhouse gas emissions. The scientists – based at Leeds and Edinburgh universities and University College London – describe the level of ice loss as “staggering” and…

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In Alaska, Trump doubles down on environmental vandalism

In Alaska, Trump doubles down on environmental vandalism

Bill McKibben writes: Of all the jobs I’ve ever watched humans do, few have seemed more appealing to me than counting salmon at the head of the Ugashik River, in Alaska. Every hour, the man charged with this duty would rouse himself from his cabin in that vast and sweeping wilderness, climb a ladder into what looked like a lifeguard’s chair, and then stare down at the stream—with a clicker in his hand, like an usher at a movie theatre….

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Air pollution is much worse than we thought

Air pollution is much worse than we thought

Vox reports: In the late 1960s, the US saw regular, choking smog descend over New York City and Los Angeles, 100,000 barrels of oil spilled off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and, perhaps most famously, fires burning on the surface of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. These grim images sparked the modern environmental movement, the first Earth Day, and a decade of extraordinary environmental lawmaking and rulemaking (much of it under a Republican president, Richard Nixon). From the ’70s…

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