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Category: Environment

EPA set to revoke restrictions on toxic metals poisoning drinking water

EPA set to revoke restrictions on toxic metals poisoning drinking water

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is expected to roll back an Obama-era regulation to limit dangerous heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury from coal-fired power plants, according to two people familiar with the plans. With a series of new rules expected in November, the Environmental Protection Agency will move to weaken the 2015 regulation by relaxing some of the requirements on power generators and also exempting a significant number of power plants from even those requirements….

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The devastating environmental impact of technological progress

The devastating environmental impact of technological progress

Wired reports: For decades, David Maisel has been photographing places where humans are changing the environment so dramatically that the impact can be seen from the sky. For his latest project, Desolation Desert, the San Francisco-based visual artist spent two weeks in and around South America’s Atacama desert, where humankind’s insatiable demand for copper, lithium and rare-earth metals to fuel the consumer electronics and electric vehicle industries is reshaping the landscape of a fragile ecosystem. The Atacama, in northern Chile,…

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Ocean acidification can cause mass extinctions, fossils reveal

Ocean acidification can cause mass extinctions, fossils reveal

The Guardian reports: Ocean acidification can cause the mass extinction of marine life, fossil evidence from 66m years ago has revealed. A key impact of today’s climate crisis is that seas are again getting more acidic, as they absorb carbon emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas. Scientists said the latest research is a warning that humanity is risking potential “ecological collapse” in the oceans, which produce half the oxygen we breathe. The researchers analysed small seashells in…

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How ballooning carbon emissions will impact trees

How ballooning carbon emissions will impact trees

Daniel Grossman writes: Apart from the experts, few people realize that climate change could be worse. Every year, trees, shrubs, and every other kind of plant absorb 9 billion tons of CO2—one quarter of what we let loose from our tailpipes and smokestacks—and help slow the gas’s accumulation in the atmosphere. If not for the world’s photosynthesizers, the concentration of CO2 in the air, along with Earth’s temperature, would be rising much faster than it already is. Our terrestrial plants…

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Trump wants to erase protections in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, a storehouse of carbon

Trump wants to erase protections in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, a storehouse of carbon

Inside Climate News reports: The Trump Administration wants to allow logging in previously off-limit areas of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service announced Tuesday, a move that could turn one of the nation’s largest carbon sinks into a source of new climate-changing emissions. The old-growth temperate rainforest contains trees that are centuries old and play a crucial role in storing carbon. In a state that is synonymous with oil production, the Tongass National Forest represents the potential for…

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Global warming threatens two-thirds of North American bird species

Global warming threatens two-thirds of North American bird species

National Geographic reports: As they soar through the sky, birds seem blissfully impervious to the stresses of Earth. Indeed, their ability to migrate makes them more resilient to habitat disruption than less dynamic creatures. That makes the most recent annual report produced by the National Audubon Society, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting birds and their habitat, particularly startling. Released this week, the report predicts that if Earth continues to warm according to current trends—rising 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit)…

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What the Bureau of Land Management shake-up could mean for public lands and their climate impact

What the Bureau of Land Management shake-up could mean for public lands and their climate impact

InsideClimate News reports: The changes underway at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management might not seem like much: A few hundred employees are being relocated from offices near the White House and dispersed throughout the West, while agency leaders move in next door to energy companies in newly leased headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado. But along with the appointment of a self-described Sagebrush Rebel as acting director, the shuffling of staff could help position conservatives to accomplish substantial political goals:…

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‘If you pour poison unremittingly onto the land for 70 years — which is what we’ve done — you’re going to kill everything’

‘If you pour poison unremittingly onto the land for 70 years — which is what we’ve done — you’re going to kill everything’

  One in seven British species is threatened with extinction, according to a new report by the country’s main wildlife and conservation charities. The study shows there have been strong or moderate declines in 41% of all species since 1970.

As Amazon fires burn, Pope convenes meeting on the rainforests and moral obligation to protect them

As Amazon fires burn, Pope convenes meeting on the rainforests and moral obligation to protect them

Georgina Gustin reports: Pope Francis convened nearly 200 bishops, climate experts and indigenous people from the Amazon on Sunday for an unprecedented meeting in Rome to discuss the fate of the Amazonian rainforests and the world’s moral obligation to protect them. The meeting, or Synod, is the first of its kind to address an ecosystem, rather than a particular region or theme. It comes as fires continue to consume the Amazon rainforest, destroying a critical tool for stabilizing the climate,…

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For Rachel Carson, wonder was a radical state of mind

For Rachel Carson, wonder was a radical state of mind

By Jennifer Stitt In 1957, the world watched in wonder as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into outer space. Despite Cold War anxieties, The New York Times admitted that space exploration ‘represented a step toward escape from man’s imprisonment to Earth and its thin envelope of atmosphere’. Technology, it seemed, possessed the astonishing potential to liberate humanity from terrestrial life. But not all assessments of Sputnik were so celebratory. In The Human Condition (1958), the…

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Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions of Russians living on unstable ground

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions of Russians living on unstable ground

From Zyryanka River in Russia’s Siberia, the Washington Post reports: Andrey Danilov eased his motorboat onto the gravel riverbank, where the bones of a woolly mammoth lay scattered on the beach. A putrid odor filled the air — the stench of ancient plants and animals decomposing after millennia entombed in a frozen purgatory. “It smells like dead bodies,” Danilov said. The skeletal remains were left behind by mammoth hunters hoping to strike it rich by pulling prehistoric ivory tusks from…

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South America’s second-largest forest is also burning – and ‘environmentally friendly’ charcoal is subsidizing its destruction

South America’s second-largest forest is also burning – and ‘environmentally friendly’ charcoal is subsidizing its destruction

The Paraguayan Chaco, South America’s second largest forest, is rapidly disappearing as agriculture extends deeper into what was once forest. Here, isolated stands of trees remain amid the farms. Joel E. Correia, CC BY-NC-ND By Joel E. Correia, University of Florida The fires raging across the Brazilian Amazon have captured the world’s attention. Meanwhile, South America’s second-largest forest, the Gran Chaco, is disappearing in plain sight. The Gran Chaco, which spans from Bolivia and Brazil to Paraguay and Argentina, is…

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The world’s oceans are in danger, major climate change report warns

The world’s oceans are in danger, major climate change report warns

The New York Times reports: Earth’s oceans are under severe strain from climate change, a major new United Nations report warns, which threatens everything from the ability to harvest seafood to the well-being of hundreds of millions of people living along the coasts. Rising temperatures are contributing to a drop in fish populations in many regions, and oxygen levels in the ocean are declining while acidity levels are on the rise, posing risks to important marine ecosystems, according to the…

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Studying the hidden effects of artificial light

Studying the hidden effects of artificial light

Rebecca Boyle writes: Light is the basis for all life, but it is more than just a source of energy. It is also a source of information, telling organisms when to sleep, hunt, hide, migrate, metabolize, and reproduce. Since the advent of incandescent light bulbs, humans have been interfering with those messages. And the interference is worsening with the spread of LEDs, which consume less electricity and so are often brighter and stay on longer and later than their predecessors….

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This isn’t extinction, it’s extermination of nature

This isn’t extinction, it’s extermination of nature

Jeff Sparrow writes: We know that, as far back as the late 50s, researchers for the oil industry understood the effects of carbon on the atmosphere but did nothing about it. In 1988 George HW Bush promised on the campaign trail to fight climate change. “I am an environmentalist,” he declared. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect.” There was, of course, no White House effect. In…

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Brazil’s army wants to ‘occupy’ the Amazon

Brazil’s army wants to ‘occupy’ the Amazon

The Intercept reports: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is planning to push industrialization and development in the interior of the country’s Amazon basin. It is far from a new project. For more than a century, a series of Brazilian governments have sought to move into the country’s interior, developing — or, to be more precise, colonizing — the Amazon. From the populist president-turned-dictator who made one of the early industrial pushes into the forest in the 1930s to the military dictatorship…

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