Browsed by
Category: Environment

Plastic waste pact approved with U.S. among few holdouts

Plastic waste pact approved with U.S. among few holdouts

Comments 0 Comment

The Associated Press reports: Almost every country in the world has agreed on a legally binding framework for reducing polluting plastic waste, with the United States a notable exception, United Nations environmental officials said Friday. An agreement on tracking thousands of types of plastic waste emerged at the end of a two-week meeting of U.N.-backed conventions on plastic waste and toxic, hazardous chemicals. Discarded plastic clutters pristine land, floats in huge masses in oceans and entangles wildlife, sometimes with deadly…

Read More Read More

U.S. fossil fuel subsidies exceed Pentagon spending, says IMF

U.S. fossil fuel subsidies exceed Pentagon spending, says IMF

Comments 0 Comment

Rolling Stone reports: The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion. The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices…

Read More Read More

Humans are wiping out life on Earth

Humans are wiping out life on Earth

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded. The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in…

Read More Read More

Loss of biodiversity is just as catastrophic as climate change

Loss of biodiversity is just as catastrophic as climate change

Comments 0 Comment

Robert Watson writes: A colleague recently described how fish would swim into her clothing when she was a child bathing in the ocean off the coast of Vietnam, but today the fish are gone and her children find the story far-fetched. Another recalled his experiences just last year in Cape Town – one of the world’s most attractive tourism and leisure destinations – when more than 2 million people faced the nightmare prospect of all taps, in every home and…

Read More Read More

Biodiversity crisis is about to put humanity at risk, UN scientists to warn

Biodiversity crisis is about to put humanity at risk, UN scientists to warn

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: The world’s leading scientists will warn the planet’s life-support systems are approaching a danger zone for humanity when they release the results of the most comprehensive study of life on Earth ever undertaken. Up to 1m species are at risk of annihilation, many within decades, according to a leaked draft of the global assessment report, which has been compiled over three years by the UN’s leading research body on nature. The 1,800-page study will show people living…

Read More Read More

Indigenous Waorani win landmark legal case against Ecuador government

Indigenous Waorani win landmark legal case against Ecuador government

Comments 0 Comment

Al Jazeera reports: The indigenous Waorani community in Ecuador won a landmark lawsuit on Friday against three government bodies for conducting a faulty consultation process with the community before putting their territory up for sale in an international oil auction. The ruling immediately suspends any possibility of selling the community’s land for oil exploration. It also sets an important precedent for other communities in Ecuador’s southern Amazon rainforest, trying to keep oil extraction out of their territories. “Today, the courts…

Read More Read More

When did Donald Trump become an environmentalist?

When did Donald Trump become an environmentalist?

Comments 0 Comment

Well before he became a presidential candidate, Donald Trump professed a deep concern about the welfare of birds endangered by wind turbines: “[Wind power] kills all the birds,” Trump told 2012 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain on the latter’s radio show Tuesday. “Thousands of birds are lying on the ground. And the eagle. You know, certain parts of California — they’ve killed so many eagles. You know, they put you in jail if you kill an eagle. And yet these windmills [kill]…

Read More Read More

Coral reproduction on the Great Barrier Reef falls 89% after repeated bleaching

Coral reproduction on the Great Barrier Reef falls 89% after repeated bleaching

Comments 0 Comment

By Morgan Pratchett, James Cook University The severe and repeated bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef has not only damaged corals, it has reduced the reef’s ability to recover. Our research, published today in Nature, found far fewer baby corals are being produced than are needed to replace the large number of adult corals that have died. The rate at which baby corals are settling on the Great Barrier Reef has fallen by nearly 90% since 2016. While coral does…

Read More Read More

The natural world can help save us from climate catastrophe

The natural world can help save us from climate catastrophe

Comments 0 Comment

George Monbiot writes: I don’t expect much joy in writing about climate breakdown. On one side, there is grief and fear; on the other side, machines. I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering. Technological change is essential, but to a natural historian it often feels cold and distancing. Today, however, I can write about something that thrills me: the most exciting field…

Read More Read More

Insects have ‘no place to hide’ from climate change, study warns

Insects have ‘no place to hide’ from climate change, study warns

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: Insects have “no place to hide” from climate change, scientists have warned, following an analysis of 50 years of UK data. The study showed that woodlands, whose shade was expected to protect species from warming temperatures, are being just as affected by climate change as open grasslands. The research examined the first springtime flights of butterflies, moths and aphids and the first eggs of birds between 1965 and 2012. As average temperatures have risen, aphids are now…

Read More Read More

Across the Middle East and North Africa, environmentalists are coming under attack like never before

Across the Middle East and North Africa, environmentalists are coming under attack like never before

Comments 0 Comment

Peter Schwartzstein writes: Conservation NGOs have been closed or so suffocated that they’re as good as dissolved. Activists and experts have been threatened into silence—or worse. A community that had until recently mostly escaped the fate of much of the region’s civil society has suddenly fallen afoul of the authorities. Its plight mirrors the difficulties faced by environmentalists worldwide. Globally, 197 environmental defenders were killed in 2017, according to the UN Environment Programme, a fivefold increase from a decade ago….

Read More Read More

Trump’s order to open Arctic waters to oil drilling was unlawful, federal judge finds

Trump’s order to open Arctic waters to oil drilling was unlawful, federal judge finds

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: In a major legal blow to President Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by Mr. Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and parts of the North Atlantic coast was unlawful. The decision, by Judge Sharon L. Gleason of the United States District Court for the District of Alaska, concluded late Friday that President Barack Obama’s…

Read More Read More

The plague killing frogs everywhere is far worse than scientists thought

The plague killing frogs everywhere is far worse than scientists thought

Comments 0 Comment

Carl Zimmer reports: On Thursday, 41 scientists published the first worldwide analysis of a fungal outbreak that’s been wiping out frogs for decades. The devastation turns out to be far worse than anyone had previously realized. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers conclude that populations of more than 500 species of amphibians have declined significantly because of the outbreak — including at least 90 species presumed to have gone extinct. The figure is more than twice as large as…

Read More Read More

Interior nominee intervened to block report on endangered species

Interior nominee intervened to block report on endangered species

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: After years of effort, scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service had a moment of celebration as they wrapped up a comprehensive analysis of the threat that three widely used pesticides present to hundreds of endangered species, like the kit fox and the seaside sparrow. “Woohoo!” Patrice Ashfield, then a branch chief at Fish and Wildlife Service headquarters, wrote to her colleagues in August 2017. Their analysis found that two of the pesticides, malathion and…

Read More Read More

Protecting indigenous lands protects the environment. Trump and Bolsonaro threaten both

Protecting indigenous lands protects the environment. Trump and Bolsonaro threaten both

Comments 0 Comment

Deb Haaland and Joênia Wapichana write: On Tuesday, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro will meet with President Trump at the White House. Both administrations are pushing a host of policies that are detrimental to the rights of indigenous people. As two of the first female indigenous members of Congress in the United States and Brazil, respectively, we are concerned about these policies and the mounting threats facing our communities. We must stand up against toxic rhetoric and brutal attacks on the…

Read More Read More

As costs skyrocket, more U.S. cities stop recycling

As costs skyrocket, more U.S. cities stop recycling

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country. Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month,…

Read More Read More