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Category: Environment

Global financial giants stop funding production from destructive oil sands

Global financial giants stop funding production from destructive oil sands

The New York Times reports: Some of the world’s largest financial institutions have stopped putting their money behind oil production in the Canadian province of Alberta, home to one of the world’s most extensive, and also dirtiest, oil reserves. In December, the insurance giant The Hartford said it would stop insuring or investing in oil production in the province, just weeks after Sweden’s central bank said it would stop holding Alberta’s bonds. And on Wednesday BlackRock, the worlds largest asset…

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Iceberg twice the size of Washington cleaves off Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, in a sign of rapid warming

Iceberg twice the size of Washington cleaves off Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, in a sign of rapid warming

The Washington Post reports: An iceberg about twice the size of the District of Columbia broke off Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica sometime between Saturday and Sunday, satellite data shows, confirming yet another in a series of increasingly frequent calving events in this rapidly warming region. The Pine Island Glacier is one of the fastest-retreating glaciers in Antarctica, and along with the Thwaites Glacier nearby, it’s a subject of close scientific monitoring to determine whether these glaciers are in…

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Rapid permafrost collapse is underway, disintegrating landscapes and our predictions

Rapid permafrost collapse is underway, disintegrating landscapes and our predictions

AFP reports: Permafrost in Canada, Alaska and Siberia is abruptly crumbling in ways that could release large stores of greenhouse gases more quickly than anticipated, researchers have warned. Scientists have long fretted that climate change – which has heated Arctic and subarctic regions at double the global rate – will release planet-warming CO2 and methane that has remained safely locked inside Earth’s frozen landscapes for millennia. It was assumed this process would be gradual, leaving humanity time to draw down…

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Bumblebees’ decline points to mass extinction, scientists say

Bumblebees’ decline points to mass extinction, scientists say

PA Media reports: Bumblebees are in drastic decline across Europe and North America owing to hotter and more frequent extremes in temperatures, scientists say. A study suggests the likelihood of a bumblebee population surviving in any given place has declined by 30% in the course of a single human generation. The researchers say the rates of decline appear to be “consistent with a mass extinction”. Peter Soroye, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa and the study’s lead author,…

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The internet is invading the night sky

The internet is invading the night sky

Marina Koren writes: Last year, Krzysztof Stanek got a letter from one of his neighbors. The neighbor wanted to build a shed two feet taller than local regulations allowed, and the city required him to notify nearby residents. Neighbors, the notice said, could object to the construction. No one did, and the shed went up. Stanek, an astronomer at Ohio State University, told me this story not because he thinks other people will care about the specific construction codes of…

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Trump withholding $823 million for clean energy, Democrats say

Trump withholding $823 million for clean energy, Democrats say

Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration is withholding nearly a billion dollars for a clean energy program it has unsuccessfully tried to cut, congressional Democrats said Wednesday, raising the specter of political interference. The unspent funds now amount to $823 million in the Energy Department’s office that provides grants and other financial assistance for alternative energy, electric vehicles and energy efficiency, according to Democrats on the House Science Committee, which is holding a joint subcommittee hearing on the topic. The Office…

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Once again, why fossil fuels are on the wrong side of history

Once again, why fossil fuels are on the wrong side of history

Jim Cramer writes: Tesla plus 80, Exxon Mobil minus a dollar and a half. On a huge up day, doesn’t that say it all? I’ve gotten a lot of blowback about my stand on fossil fuels. It’s been roundly criticized by many even as so many others are grateful for my new stand. The funny thing is that the stance itself is often poorly described by others so let’s unpack my comments. First, I have spent a great deal of…

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Unprecedented data confirms that Antarctica’s most dangerous glacier is melting from below

Unprecedented data confirms that Antarctica’s most dangerous glacier is melting from below

The Washington Post reports: Warm ocean water has been discovered underneath a massive glacier in West Antarctica, a troubling finding that could speed its melt in a region with the potential to eventually unleash more than 10 feet of sea-level rise. The unprecedented research, part of a multimillion-dollar British and U.S. initiative to study the remote Thwaites Glacier, involved drilling through nearly 2,000 feet of ice to measure water temperatures in a narrow cavity where the glacier first connects with…

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Poisoning America: Trump removes pollution controls on streams and wetlands

Poisoning America: Trump removes pollution controls on streams and wetlands

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Thursday will finalize a rule to strip away environmental protections for streams, wetlands and other water bodies, handing a victory to farmers, fossil fuel producers and real estate developers who said Obama-era rules had shackled them with onerous and unnecessary burdens. From Day 1 of his administration, President Trump vowed to repeal President Barack Obama’s “Waters of the United States” regulation, which had frustrated rural landowners. His new rule, which will…

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Native people did not use fire to shape New England’s landscape

Native people did not use fire to shape New England’s landscape

Old-growth forests prevailed in New England for thousands of years. David Foster, CC BY-ND By Wyatt Oswald, Emerson College; David R. Foster, Harvard University, and Elizabeth Chilton, Binghamton University, State University of New York An interpretive sign stands at the edge of the Montague Plains Wildlife Management Area, a 1,500-acre state conservation property in central Massachusetts. It explains the site’s open land vegetation has been shaped by “millennia of fire” – and that the recent exclusion of fire has led…

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U.S. drinking water contamination with ‘forever chemicals’ far worse than scientists thought

U.S. drinking water contamination with ‘forever chemicals’ far worse than scientists thought

Reuters reports: The contamination of US drinking water with manmade “forever chemicals” is far worse than previously estimated with some of the highest levels found in Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans, said a report on Wednesday by an environmental watchdog group. The chemicals, resistant to breaking down in the environment, are known as perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Some have been linked to cancers, liver damage, low birth weight and other health problems. The findings here by the Environmental Working Group…

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Fighting the fossil fuel economy in Appalachia

Fighting the fossil fuel economy in Appalachia

Michael Sainato writes: About 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh, along the Ohio River, lies one of the largest active construction projects in the United States. Dozens of cranes dominate the more-than-300-acre site, where hundreds of construction workers assemble a massive petrochemical facility set to convert natural gas into plastic pellets used to develop a range of products from plastic bottles to car parts. The ethane cracker plant being developed in Monaca, Pennsylvania, by Royal Dutch Shell is one of at…

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The playbook for poisoning our planet

The playbook for poisoning our planet

The Intercept reports: In September 2009, over 3,000 bee enthusiasts from around the world descended on the city of Montpellier in southern France for Apimondia — a festive beekeeper conference filled with scientific lectures, hobbyist demonstrations, and commercial beekeepers hawking honey. But that year, a cloud loomed over the event: bee colonies across the globe were collapsing, and billions of bees were dying. Bee declines have been observed throughout recorded history, but the sudden, persistent and abnormally high annual hive…

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BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: Climate crisis will reshape finance

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: Climate crisis will reshape finance

The New York Times reports: Laurence D. Fink, the founder and chief executive of BlackRock, announced Tuesday that his firm would make investment decisions with environmental sustainability as a core goal. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with nearly $7 trillion in investments, and this move will fundamentally shift its investing policy — and could reshape how corporate America does business and put pressure on other large money managers to follow suit. Mr. Fink’s annual letter to the chief…

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The bleak future of Australian wildlife

The bleak future of Australian wildlife

Ed Yong writes: As temperatures rise, Australia becomes more monochrome. In the ocean, the reefs have been whitening. On land, the forests have been blackening. Successive heat waves have forced corals to expel their colorful, nutrient-providing algae; half of the Great Barrier Reef has died. A near-unprecedented drought and exceptional temperatures—December saw Australia’s two hottest days on record—triggered the unusually intense bushfires that have incinerated almost 18 million acres of land. These disasters are vivid testaments to the consequences of…

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How viruses secretly control the planet

How viruses secretly control the planet

Nala Rogers writes: 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 shape the composition and behavior of Earth’s oceans, soil…

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