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Category: Environment

Severe drought stunts Great Plains wheat crops

Severe drought stunts Great Plains wheat crops

The Wall Street Journal reports: Were this a normal mid-June morning, farmer Gary Millershaski would be looking out at waist-high fields of golden wheat almost ready to be harvested. Instead, he’s standing on a patch of mud, plucking at thin stalks of wheat that poke less than a foot out of the ground. It is the result of a multiyear drought that has left farmers in the country’s breadbasket with likely their worst wheat crop in more than 60 years….

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Fresh air matters

Fresh air matters

Emily Anthes writes: In January 1912, in the depths of a New York City winter, an unusual new apartment complex opened on the Upper East Side. The East River Homes were designed to help poor families fend off tuberculosis, a fearsome, airborne disease, by turning dark, airless tenements inside out. Passageways led from the street to capacious internal courtyards, where outdoor staircases wound their way up to each apartment. Floor-to-ceiling windows opened onto balconies where ailing residents could sleep. The…

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‘The fires here are unstoppable’

‘The fires here are unstoppable’

The New York Times reports: An out-of-control fire was advancing rapidly toward a logging road on Tuesday afternoon, tearing through Canada’s immense — and highly flammable — boreal forest with a force and intensity bewildering to a team of French firefighters. Surrounded by thick smoke, a handful of them headed into the forest to search for water. A veteran knelt down and used his right finger to sketch a plan on the gravel road, pressing to attack the fire head-on….

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A once-shuttered California mine is trying to transform the rare-earth industry

A once-shuttered California mine is trying to transform the rare-earth industry

Maddie Stone reports: In arid southeastern California, just across the border from Nevada, sits the only large-scale rare-earth element mine in the Western Hemisphere. Here at Mountain Pass, rocks are dug out of a 600-foot pit in the ground, crushed, and liquified into a concentrated soup of metals that are essential for the magnets inside consumer electronics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, or EVs.* Today, that metallic soup is shipped to China, where individual rare earths are separated before being…

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A shocking number of birds are in trouble

A shocking number of birds are in trouble

Emily Sohn writes: The North American Breeding Bird Survey, organized by the US Geological Survey and Environment Canada, has enlisted thousands of participants to observe birds along roadsides each June since 1966. Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count, which began in 1900, encourages people to join a one-day bird tally scheduled in a three-week window during the holiday season. There are shorebird censuses and waterfowl surveys, all powered by citizen scientists. This wealth of longitudinal recordings started to turn up signs of distress as…

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This alien ocean is the first known to have all elements crucial for life

This alien ocean is the first known to have all elements crucial for life

The Washington Post reports: Saturn’s moon Enceladus has enticed scientists for years with its plumes fizzing their way up from an ocean beneath a thick crust of ice. Now there’s a new element to the story, literally: That cold, dark ocean appears to contain a form of phosphorus, an essential ingredient for life as we know it. That means Enceladus has the only ocean beyond Earth known to contain all six elements needed for life. The claimed discovery of dissolved…

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Whisper it, but the boom in plastic production could be about to come to a juddering halt

Whisper it, but the boom in plastic production could be about to come to a juddering halt

Geoffrey Lean writes: Plastic production has soared some 30-fold since it came into widespread use in the 1960s. We now churn out about 430m tonnes a year, easily outweighing the combined mass of all 8 billion people alive. Left unabated, it continues to accelerate: plastic consumption is due to nearly double by 2050. Now there is a chance that this huge growth will stop, even go into reverse. This month in Paris, the world’s governments agreed to draft a new treaty to control plastics….

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As Africa loses forest, its small farmers are bringing back trees

As Africa loses forest, its small farmers are bringing back trees

Fred Pearce writes: For decades, there have been reports of the deforestation of Africa. And they are true — the continent’s forests are disappearing, lost mainly to expanding agriculture, logging, and charcoal-making. But the trees? Maybe not, according to new satellite data analyzed by artificial intelligence and a growing body of on-the-ground studies. This new research is finding ever more trees outside forests, many of them nurtured by farmers and sprouting on their previously treeless fields. Across the continent —…

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Humanity has entered a fire age

Humanity has entered a fire age

The Washington Post reports: When the sky over New York City turned a thick, silty orange on Wednesday, 8 million residents woke up in a new era. Until this week, the East Coast had remained cocooned, thousands of miles away from the walls of choking smoke that have become commonplace in Washington state, California, Oregon and British Columbia. Not anymore. The East Coast, along with the rest of the planet, has entered a new fire era, or — as Stephen…

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Oil lobby pushed pollution loophole for wildfire smoke

Oil lobby pushed pollution loophole for wildfire smoke

The Lever reports: Seventy-five million people nationwide have been under air quality alerts, as days of smoke-filled skies sent soot levels soaring more than 10 times beyond what federal regulators consider safe for breathing. But in federal air quality data, it will be as if those days never happened. That’s because a Big Oil-backed exemption in federal environmental law allows states to discount pollution from “exceptional events” beyond their control, including wildfires. And while environmental regulators are considering cracking down…

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The Kakhovka Dam collapse is an ecological disaster

The Kakhovka Dam collapse is an ecological disaster

Chris Baraniuk writes: A push notification news alert on his phone, then images of the deluge—that’s how Heorhiy Veremiychyk learned of the disaster. With water pouring through the stricken Kakhovka Dam in the Kherson region of Ukraine, he immediately understood the enormity of what had happened. “The water raised very sharply,” he says, referring to the terrible effects on wildlife downstream. “There was no possibility to escape.” Veremiychyk, of the National Ecological Center of Ukraine (NECU), says the impact of…

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There’s a deeper problem hiding beneath global warming

There’s a deeper problem hiding beneath global warming

Mark Buchanan writes: During the past two centuries at least (and likely for much longer), our yearly energy use has doubled roughly every 30 to 50 years. Our energy use seems to be growing exponentially, a trend that shows every sign of continuing. We keep finding new things to do and almost everything we invent requires more and more energy: consider the enormous energy demands of cryptocurrency mining or the accelerating energy requirements of AI. If this historical trend continues, scientists estimate waste heat will pose…

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Brazilian Amazon at risk of being taken over by mafia, ex-police chief warns

Brazilian Amazon at risk of being taken over by mafia, ex-police chief warns

The Guardian reports: The rapid advance of organised crime groups in the Brazilian Amazon risks turning the region into a vast, conflict-stricken hinterland plagued by heavily armed “criminal insurgents”, a former senior federal police chief has warned. Alexandre Saraiva, who worked in the Amazon from 2011 to 2021, said he feared the growing footprint of drug-trafficking mafias in the region could spawn a situation similar to the decades-long drug conflict in Rio de Janeiro, where the police’s battle with drug…

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Tackling plastic pollution: ‘We can’t recycle our way out of this’

Tackling plastic pollution: ‘We can’t recycle our way out of this’

France 24 reports: The scale of plastic pollution is growing, relentlessly. The world is producing twice as much plastic waste as two decades ago, reaching 353 million tonnes in 2019, according to OECD figures. The vast majority goes into landfills, gets incinerated or is “mismanaged”, meaning left as litter or not correctly disposed of. Just 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled. Ramping up plastic recycling might seem like a logical way to transform waste into a resource. But recent…

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Stars could be invisible within 20 years as light pollution brightens night skies

Stars could be invisible within 20 years as light pollution brightens night skies

Robin McKie writes: The Herefordshire hills basked in brilliant sunshine last weekend. Summer had arrived and the skies were cloudless, conditions that would once have heralded succeeding nights of coal-dark heavens sprinkled with brilliant stars, meteorites and planets. It was not to be. The night sky was not so much black as dark grey with only a handful of stars glimmering against this backdrop. The Milky Way – which would once have glittered across the heavens – was absent. Summer’s…

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Supreme Court has appointed itself as ‘national decision maker on environmental policy,’ writes Justice Kagan

Supreme Court has appointed itself as ‘national decision maker on environmental policy,’ writes Justice Kagan

The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court on Thursday curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to police millions of acres of wetlands, delivering another setback to the agency’s ability to combat pollution. Writing for five justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the Clean Water Act does not allow the agency to regulate discharges into wetlands near bodies of water unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters. The decision was a second major blow to…

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