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Category: Environment

Tree-ring records suggest that drought played a role in Roman Britain’s decline

Tree-ring records suggest that drought played a role in Roman Britain’s decline

Molly Glick writes: Roman Britain collapsed into chaos in the spring of 367 A.D.—the rival Picts attacked by land and sea, while the Scotti barged in from the west and Saxons from the south. Anarchy ensued in an event that’s now known as the Barbarian Conspiracy: The invaders captured and murdered senior commanders, and some Roman soldiers may have even joined in. It’s considered a pivotal event in the abandonment of Roman Britain. Historians have surmised some of the potential…

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Greenpeace must pay at least $660m over Dakota pipeline protests, says jury

Greenpeace must pay at least $660m over Dakota pipeline protests, says jury

The Guardian reports: A jury in North Dakota has decided that the environmental group Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the pipeline company Energy Transfer and is liable for defamation and other claims over protests in the state nearly a decade ago. Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based oil and gas company worth almost $70bn, had sued Greenpeace, alleging defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017, claiming the organization…

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Trump orders swathes of national forests to be cut down for timber

Trump orders swathes of national forests to be cut down for timber

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump has ordered that swathes of America’s forests be felled for timber, evading rules to protect endangered species while doing so and raising the prospect of chainsaws razing some of the most ecologically important trees in the US. The president, in an executive order, has demanded an expansion in tree cutting across 280m acres (113m hectares) of national forests and other public lands, claiming that “heavy-handed federal policies” have made America reliant on foreign imports of…

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Trump is reversing all U.S. efforts to tackle climate change

Trump is reversing all U.S. efforts to tackle climate change

The New York Times reports: In a few short weeks, President Trump has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet. With a flurry of actions that have stretched the limits of presidential power, Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry. He is abandoning efforts…

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How Trump’s bid to control lithium mining in Ukraine would benefit Elon Musk

How Trump’s bid to control lithium mining in Ukraine would benefit Elon Musk

The Daily Beast reports: Elon Musk‘s future prosperity is inextricably linked to lithium, the vital mineral required for many of his businesses, from Tesla to X to SpaceX. Tech may be marching into the future. But it is still battery-powered. Dubbed ‘white gold’, lithium is notoriously difficult to mine in the United States. A $1 billion lithium refinery that Musk is building in Corpus Christi, Texas could use as many as eight million gallons of water a day in a…

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How Trump’s federal funding and hiring freezes increase risk of catastrophic wildfires

How Trump’s federal funding and hiring freezes increase risk of catastrophic wildfires

By Mark Olalde This story was originally published by ProPublica President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal government, launched as the deadly Palisades and Eaton fires burned across Los Angeles, have left the country’s wildland firefighting force unprepared for the rapidly approaching wildfire season. The administration has frozen funds, including money appropriated by Congress, and issued a deluge of orders eliminating federal employees, which has thrown agencies tasked with battling blazes into disarray as individual offices…

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Songbirds being killed by topical pesticides used for pet fleas and ticks

Songbirds being killed by topical pesticides used for pet fleas and ticks

The Guardian reports: Songbird chicks are being killed by high levels of pesticides in the pet fur used by their parents to line their nests, a study has found. Researchers surveying nests for the harmful chemical found in pet flea treatments found that it was present in every single nest. The scientists from the University of Sussex are now calling for the government to urgently reassess the environmental risk of pesticides used in flea and tick treatments and consider restricting…

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Trump eliminates help for Black and Latino communities hit harder by pollution

Trump eliminates help for Black and Latino communities hit harder by pollution

The Associated Press reports: For four years, the Environmental Protection Agency made environmental justice one of its biggest priorities, working to improve health conditions in heavily-polluted communities often made up largely of Black, Latino and low-income Americans. Now that short-lived era is over. President Donald Trump in his first week eliminated a team of White House advisors whose job it was to ensure the entire federal government helped communities located near heavy industry, ports and roadways. Trump eliminated the “Justice40”…

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Catastrophic tipping point in Greenland: crystal blue lakes turn brown, belch out carbon dioxide

Catastrophic tipping point in Greenland: crystal blue lakes turn brown, belch out carbon dioxide

Live Science reports: Thousands of Greenland’s crystal-clear blue lakes have turned a murky brown thanks to global warming — and the worst part is that they’ve started emitting carbon dioxide. Record heat and rain in 2022 pushed the lakes of West Greenland past a tipping point, so rather than absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂), they began to emit it into the atmosphere, according to a new study. The changes began in fall, which is normally a snowy time for Greenland. However,…

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Biden administration reaches deal limiting controversial protections for multinational corporations

Biden administration reaches deal limiting controversial protections for multinational corporations

Inside Climate News reports: The Biden administration announced a last-minute deal on trade this week, reaching an agreement with Colombia to limit protections for investors between the two countries. The move represents a small step toward reforming a system that has awarded multinational corporations more than $100 billion in taxpayer funds from countries around the globe. Investor state dispute settlement, or ISDS, allows foreign companies to bypass national courts and sue governments before panels of arbitrators if they believe their…

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John Vaillant: ‘Virtually any city on Earth can burn now’

John Vaillant: ‘Virtually any city on Earth can burn now’

Kiley Bense writes: The journalist John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather” begins in the spring of 2016 in the boreal forests surrounding the remote Canadian city of Fort McMurray, where a fire is growing. Although wildfire is a regular part of life in northern Alberta, this fire was destined to be different. “A new kind of fire introduced itself to the world,” Vaillant writes. Ushered in by soaring temperatures, drought and high winds, this wildfire obliterated thousands of buildings, forced 88,000…

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We can still get out of the climate Hellocene and into the clear

We can still get out of the climate Hellocene and into the clear

Rob Jackson writes: The NASA scientist James Hansen gave landmark testimony to a US Senate committee in 1988 that brimmed with evidence of climate change. More than 35 years ago, he concluded: ‘The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.’ Viewing the climate carnage of 2023 and the lack of action since 1988, Hansen was even stronger: ‘We are damned fools.’ But who is the ‘we’? The top 1 per cent of the world’s population…

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California wildfire season should be over. So why is Los Angeles burning?

California wildfire season should be over. So why is Los Angeles burning?

Science News reports: Unusually dry conditions and hurricane-force seasonal winds are fueling multiple fast-moving and destructive wildfires in Los Angeles County. Gusts that reached over 145 kilometers per hour (90 miles per hour) quickly drove the blazes into urban areas, forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate from their homes and killing at least two people as of January 8. The largest of the blazes, known as the Palisades fire, erupted the morning of January 7 on the west side…

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The ocean is teeming with networks of interconnected bacteria

The ocean is teeming with networks of interconnected bacteria

Veronique Greenwood writes: Prochlorococcus bacteria are so small that you’d have to line up around a thousand of them to match the thickness of a human thumbnail. The ocean seethes with them: The microbes are likely the most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet, and they create a significant portion — 10% to 20% — of the atmosphere’s oxygen. That means that life on Earth depends on the roughly 3 octillion (or 3 × 1027) tiny individual cells toiling away….

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Biden to block new offshore drilling along most of the U.S. coastline

Biden to block new offshore drilling along most of the U.S. coastline

Politico reports: President Joe Biden is planning to prohibit future offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the nation’s coastline, setting up a potential roadblock for Republicans’ plans to expand production in federal waters. Biden is set to announce on Monday that he will withdraw 625 million acres of coastline from future oil and gas drilling. That would encompass all of the Atlantic Coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coast from Washington to California and parts of…

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How regenerative agriculture can foster peacebuilding in conflict areas

How regenerative agriculture can foster peacebuilding in conflict areas

Drew Marcantonio writes: In the dry valley between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía del Perijá mountain ranges, in northern Colombia, former combatants in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerilla group, or FARC, are leading a surprising new revolution: regenerative agriculture. The region was once plagued by violence between antagonistic groups, including FARC, and is currently under pressure from both climate crisis and deforestation. But through an agricultural cooperative called COOMPAZCOL, former FARC members are forming…

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