The spotlight is a weekly categorized compilation of links and excerpts from Daily Kos environmentally related posts. Any posts that are included in the collection do not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of them. Because of the interconnectedness of the subject matter, some of these posts could be placed in more than one category.
CRITTERS & THE GREAT OUTDOORS
Midwest Beaver Summit Gets Some Media Attention by sushideluxe. My first story! And it’s about #beavers! Hi! I’m a long-time lurker! In April 2021, I was minding my own business, watching TV with my husband, when I scrolled through Facebook and discovered that there was a family of beavers in my Chicagoland suburb that was about to be trapped and killed by an HOA because they were damaging trees. Humans confuse me. They plant amazing natural settings and then get mad when nature moves in. Anyway, a group of us sprang into action. We created a Facebook group, wrote a press release, talked to the media, held a rally, and got the HOA to agree not to trap and kill the beavers. But then I started thinking. “My” beavers were going to have babies (kits) who eventually were going to disperse, and then those juvenile beavers would be at risk of being trapped and killed. I read Ben Goldfarb’s book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, and I knew what I needed to do. Obviously, I needed to form a nonprofit, the Illinois Beaver Alliance, and I needed to go to graduate school and get a certificate in Environmental Law & Policy so I would have some qualifications to become a beaver advocate. So I did!
Note: Founded by Mark Sumner, the Daily Bucket is described by its participants as a nature refuge where animals, weather, soil, plants, water, climate, and life’s patterns are discussed amicably.
Daily Bucket - Friday Sequence, feeding habits (a controlled situation) by CaptBLI. I have been scattering sunflower seeds in my driveway for several years. I have two reasons for doing that. #1 offering a meal to all my feathered visitors and #2 to study their behavior. I’ll expand on my observations after the page break and mission statement. The Nuthatch (title photo) is holding a seed as big as his beak. These tiny birds will dive rapidly out of the trees and snatch a seed; then flit back into the trees to eat. Other species that repeat this technique are Tufted Titmouse, Carolina Chickadee, White-breasted Nuthatch, Red-headed and Red-bellied Woodpeckers. Wary of predators, it is a good habit but uses a lot of energy. Sunflower seeds offer great nutrition as a counter balance.
Daily Bucket - Morning at Noxubee Wildlife Refuge by CaptBLI. I had Wednesday, September 13th all to myself. I drove two hours South to Noxubee Wildlife Refuge to explore new things hidden there. A talk with a park ranger verified that Whistling ducks have been regular migrants to the refuge for years. I was surprised because of the ranges shown on Audubon and Cornell sites. She was helpful in giving times and dates for future sightings (if I considered seeing other species). I appreciated the information. I didn’t tell her I wasn’t a “twitcher”, but got the impression that most birders she encountered were.
The Daily Bucket -- Open Thread: Fall Migration at Lake Erie Marshes by Clickadee. Last Saturday a birding pal and I went to Magee Marsh Wildlife Area and Howard Marsh Metropark along the southwest coast of Lake Erie. Magee is famous for spring Warbler migration, but I’ve learned it’s also a hotspot in the fall. I didn’t see the variety that I usually do in spring, but I’m thrilled to see any Warbler that stays put long enough for a good look, and hopefully a photo. There was little to see on the entrance causeway. So we headed for the boardwalk. Birding got off to a good start with an immature Bald Eagle perched next to the parking lot.
Daily Bucket: Who dat bird? by cal birdbrain. Hi all — I started birding about 3 years ago with the advent of the pandemic. I got my field guides and joined e-bird but I am still learning so much every day. But some birds are so similar that it’s a real challenge to figure out just who you took a picture of.I get lots of birds I know, the Starling, Turkey Vulture, Red-Wing Blackbird and the Great Blue Heron along with some other cool photos. But the bird in the title photo stumped me. He was quite a distance away and I only got one shot before he took off. He has the beak of a woodpecker type bird and the wings striping typical of flickers. My initial guess was Northern Flicker but the head color is wrong or maybe he is a juvenile. I can’t find this bird in the field guides. Next a raptor flies over. I have just seconds to snap a shot. It’s a shot straight up in the air. Silhouetted against the sky he comes out a little dark but I lighten the photo enough to see the color pattern under the wings.
Dawn Chorus: Offline, On Tomales Bay by lineatus. It’s ever harder to disconnect these days, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. It doesn’t take a trip of hours (or days) to remote wilderness to do so. Weak cell service is enough to do the trick. Three decades married to my favorite engineer was celebrated by a midweek trip to Marshall, a (very) small town on Tomales Bay, about an hour north of San Francisco. It was an excellent opportunity to unplug, not only because of weak cell service but also the fact that Nicks Cove (where we stayed) does not offer Wi-Fi. It was bliss Three days without seeing TFG; I have pretty much stopped reading about him but it’s hard to avoid a photo or headline on the front page here or anywhere. What a waste of bandwidth. No connection = no problem! It was great to be oblivious to the outrage du jour. No MTG or Gym Jordan, no photos of creepy Gaetz, and perfect timing to miss the beginning of the hysteria over Boebert. No chest-thumping Angry Children’s Caucus (thank you Charlie Pierce for the perfect name) nor kangaroo court hearings.
CLIMATE CRISIS
Watch Pete Buttigieg expose utter idiocy of Republican climate change denier by Walter Einenkel. On Wednesday, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg weathered the slings and arrows of outrageous Republicans at a committee hearing. At one point, while discussing why his department needed more support in combating the issues presented by climate change, Buttigieg was forced to face off against Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a longtime climate change denier and the guy who supports a push for parts of Northern California to secede from California. As the extent of LaMalfa’s understanding of the climate begins and ends with looking out of his window every morning, his intellectually undercooked climate denialism is very easily dismissed. But Buttigieg used LaMalfa’s ignorance against him in a subtle yet very effective way. During a tense exchange where LaMalfa obfuscated the task at hand by blathering about percentages of carbon in the atmosphere, Buttigieg bottom-lined him by saying, “What I can tell you is that climate change is real, and we gotta do something about it,” to which LaMalfa attempted to retort, “Yeah, this one’s called autumn, sir.”
Overnight News Digest: “Humanity has opened the gates of hell” by Magnifico. From The Washington Post—This summer, all across the torrid globe, air conditioning was a necessity for billions of people, though less than a third of households have it. In the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, it offered defense against not just the heat but also the eerie orange smoke from Canadian wildfires exacerbated by climate change. In Phoenix, where the temperature rose above 110 degrees for weeks on end, temporary cooling centers were a lifesaver for homeless people, though hundreds of heat-related deaths were confirmed or suspected throughout the metropolitan area. In Europe, where air conditioning is evolving from an eccentric, American-style indulgence to a standard amenity, AC offered a critical defense against a heat wave so powerful and persistent that the Europeans gave the high-pressure system causing it a name, “Cerberus,” after the mythological three-headed hellhound who guards the gates of Hades. As temperature records were broken across the planet this summer, you could sense something shift in our relationship to air conditioning. Billions of people in the Global South and other hot zones still live without household air conditioning. And the cost of remedying that is staggering. But it isn’t just the financial challenge of manufacturing and distributing more cooling systems. The environmental costs are terrifying, too.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is close to a melting point of no return, warns the AGU by Pakalolo. Interesting photos and quotes from Elizaveta Vereykina of the Barents Observer on an ongoing study to determine how much methane from vegetation is under the Greenland Ice Sheet. The study area is a small outlet glacier, Isunguata Sermia, that shows evidence of methane from below the ice margin. The Greenland ice sheet is the biggest contributor to global sea level rise at the moment. And it’s set to accelerate. So we need to understand how fast that is happening. It already looks like it will be a problem for low-lying coastal regions around the planet in the next 80 years”, Alun Hubbard - Professor of Glaciology at UiT, told the Barents Observer. When glaciers advanced in the past, they buried vegetation and soil, trapping organic carbon beneath the ice. Over time, microbes may have transformed this carbon into greenhouse gases”, expedition member Petra Klimova, microbiologist from Charles University in Prague, told The Barents Observer. The preliminary seismic data we collected seems to confirm our suspicions that layers of sediment are lying under the ice here - more than 150 metres thick in fact - and importantly the potential envrionment for methane production that we have been on the hunt for”, explained Henry Patton.
Climate Crisis Killing Children: The Diarrhea Edition by SninkyPoo. Children are already so vulnerable, so underserved, so on the fraying, ragged edges of viability in so many places on this planet, that anything that seems new in the litany of challenges they face in poorer/usually browner places clutches at the heart.From Grist.com: Diarrhea, both common and preventable, is among the most dangerous threats to young children in the Global South, where clean water and medical care are often scarce. Diarrheal diseases, and the intense dehydration that accompanies them, kill more children under 5 years old than almost anything else — more than half a million children every year — primarily in middle- and low-income countries. Many parts of the globe have made progress against the viruses, bacteria, and parasites that cause diarrhea in recent decades — but climate change is threatening to slow those advancements. In low-income countries, many people lack access to clean municipal water and toilets. Open defecation pits are still the norm in parts of the world that lack the resources to build out sanitation systems. And people get their drinking and washing water from open rivers, streams, and ponds. During extreme flooding events, bacteria from excrement can leach into water sources and infect people. More flooding events and longer wet seasons mean more people are potentially exposed to dangerous pathogens that lead to diarrhea.
Things Fall Apart by SninkyPoo. Well, it seems as if we are finally starting that “national conversation” about global warming that so many thought would never start. As we near the end of this gobsmacking year of punishing heat domes, catastrophic fires, golf ball sized hail, super-charged hurricanes, Biblical floods, and the mind bending horrors of Derna and Lahaina, an actual frank discussion seems to be tentatively bubbling up in the MSM, in which these disasters are sometimes even correctly attributed to the climate crisis. Online, the internet is lit up with traffic focusing on methane clathrates and the Thwaites glacier and mass die-offs of penguin chicks, and a new word has jumped from Twitter and the other socials to the mainstream: doomer. “By 2100,” we read in serious MSM reporting, sea levels will have risen “by 0.2 meters to 2.0 meters (0.66 to 6.6 feet).” “Miami,” we are told, “a city of 430,000 people, could disappear within the century if the worst climate-change predictions come true.”
By Request: That Look You Get When Wildfire Apocalypse Entered Your Texas Subdivision by Rule of Claw. The world [the woman in the video] now is processing is a very different place. It is a place where a gust of wind mixed with searing heat and drought could turn your home into ash. It is not the carefree suburb where you can walk your dog, it is now a place where she has to be constantly vigilant to not be torched to death, like dozens of people in Lahaina, by the ravages of climate change. The human brain when faced with certain realities sometimes fails to process the information. Her struggle is real. At times, the truth does not so much dawn on someone as lands on them. She now has no choice other than to explore the reality of how this happened. In this sense, we have an opportunity. The shock and torment of this experience will burn the layers of mind fat, mixed with lies and misinformation, down to its original state. Perhaps it leaves victims able to finally, after the truth, in fire form, literally chases them down and they have to run for their lives, open to facts of the matter.
By Request of the Climate: Humans Suck. We Suck So Much, We Affected the Tilt of the Earth's Axis by Rule of Claw. Boy howdy, can we humans use us up some water. Scientists recently discovered something that previously, they believed impossible.
Between 1993 and 2010, the tilt of the Earth shifted by 31.5 inches, corresponding with people’s worldwide withdrawals of underground water. Researchers published the findings in June in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Based on prior research, people pumped an estimated 2,150 gigatons of water from the natural ground reservoirs called aquifers during the study’s time frame. That’s enough to fill 860 million Olympic pools, The Washington Post noted.
It has also likely caused the world to wobble more. The journal Science’s news section likens the motion to a spinning top or basketball on a finger having weight redistributed. This metaphorical basketball also has water-balloon-like properties of “sloshing” slightly.
Climate change documentary EXTRAPOLATIONS free on Apple TV this weekend by maydon. Start watching now as there are EIGHT episodes to binge before Monday September 25 at 10 am EST. The filmmaker Scott Z. Burns is the writer and director of what Michael Moore has dubbed “the brilliant and powerful streaming series” EXTRAPOLATIONS, and described as telling “8 separate stories of what life will be like over the next few decades on our planet as the climate catastrophe gets worse. Starring Meryl Streep, Diane Lane, Edward Norton, Forest Whitaker, and many others.” No subscription to Apple TV is necessary for this weekend until Monday (which is Yom Kippur by the way, a day to fast and pray—no driving or leather shoes allowed). It is time to repent and vow to change our plastic-using dirty-commuting ways. Tshuvah, tefilla, tzedekah can avert the evil decrees. Repentance/return, prayer and charity/justice, in translation.
Naming Climate Villains by Alan Singer. The world’s poorest countries and poorest people are the most vulnerable to climate change, even though they have the lowest carbon footprint. They want the worst polluters today and historically to pay the cost of adapting to climate change and repairing climate devastation. Under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, wealthy greenhouse gas emitters like the United States and Europe committed to paying a $100 billion per year to address the impact of climate change on poorer countries but they have not lived up to their promise. Only a small fraction of the aid they do provide has helped build sea walls to protect against rising sea levels or farmers cope with drought. Unlike U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, I have no problem naming climate villains. China is the highest fossil fuel polluter today producing 10 million tons of CO2 or about 30% of the total emissions. The United States is second producing 5.4 million tons of CO2 or about 14% of the total. However, the United States by far has the highest per capita emissions at 17.6 tons of CO2 per person. In second place is South Korea at 12.6 tons per person. Historically, between 1750 and 2021, the United States produced 421.9 billion tons of CO2 emissions, about 35% of the world’s total.
US & China Not Invited to Major UN Climate Ambition Summit by boatsie. The United States and China were not in attendance at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, which convened today during Climate Week in Manhattan and followed huge climate demonstrations around the world. Convened by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, the summit spotlighted the efforts of global leaders accelerating the battle against global warming. Also excluded from the list of 34 speakers was the UAE, which will host the U.N. COP28 later this year. California Governor Gavin Newsom was one of the 34 speakers on the schedule and received huge applause from the audience when he addressed the role of the fossil fuel industry in the climate crisis. “This climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis. It’s not complicated,” he said. “It’s the burning of oil, the burning of gas, the burning of coal. We need to call that out. For decades, the oil industry has been playing each and everyone in this room for fools. Their deceit and denial going back decades has created the conditions that persist here today.”
End Fossil Fuel March: Estimates 75K in NYC by boatsie. Some 75,000 protestors took to the streets of New York City today demanding an end to the era of fossil fuels ahead of the UN Climate Ambition Summit Wednesday. The event was just part of worldwide demonstrations this week where millions are expected to rally in response to their governments' failure to aggressively address global warming. Over 700 organizations, led by march organizers at the Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Popular Democracy, Climate Organizing Hub, Food & Water Watch, Fridays For Future USA & NYC, Earthworks, Greenfaith, Indigenous Environmental Network, New York Communities for Change, Oil Change International and Oil & Gas Action Network, supported today’s mass action. In addition, over 100 federal elected leaders, actors, and renowned climate activists lent their support to the march. Additionally, 400 scientists and nearly 100 local elected officials in New York, Hawaii, and across the country sent letters to President Biden asking him to end fossil fuel expansion and declare a climate emergency.
75,000??? What say we stop inflating protest counts...by lao hong han. I count marches. I’ve been doing it for some decades. There are others here in NYC who do it as well, and we collaborate to sharpen our methodology and compare our results. At Saturday’s Climate Crisis march in Manhattan, I set myself up on an elevation at around the halfway point on the route, and a full block ahead of the front contingent. After the end trickled past me one hour and 42 minutes later, I had counted 16,000 marchers. Another counter contacted me later and said they had it at 14,500. Neither of us could count how many people left the march before the line went past us, nor how many had gone straight to the rally point near the UN so that could conceivably bump the number as high as 20,000. BUT… A currently recommended diary here stated that 75,000 people took part, using the word Estimates in the headline. To which I can only reply, “Sez who?” I saw that number elsewhere, citing unnamed “march organizers.”
Help Kos have his "Come to Mother Earth" moment regarding the Climate Crisis by Peter Olandt. Daily Kos has been a moderate platform for Climate Crisis news and opinion. It has attempted to have climate focused writers in the past. It provides some climate news from the paid staff such as some articles by Mark Sumner. It provides a platform for community writers such as Pakalolo (amongst others) to publish climate news and opinion. But even as the climate crisis deepens, it has removed paid support for reporting on it and has no special sections for it on the front page. The Climate Crisis is not just any issue. It is a problem which threatens global society as we know it. Even in the best case scenarios before us, there are a multitude of significant problems headed our way in terms of sea level rise, famine, forced migration, political instability, heat waves, and so much more. And should we do nothing, the worst case scenarios do threaten humanity itself. In the past, Kos has stated that running stories on Climate Change has not been popular enough with readers to justify continued paid staff focusing on it. He has essentially said that we as a readership will need to force him to cover it.
My personal Climate Change writing roadmap (work in progress) by Peter Olandt. All week in our collective talking about the state of climate coverage so many ideas have come up. My own thoughts have been shifting quite rapidly. We need to challenge readership, we need to challenge ourselves to write more, we need to change our style. We certainly need to do something. And instead of telling you all what you should be doing, I’m just going to speak for myself. My first need is a road map. A plan. Some more concrete direction to gauge whether I am lost or on the right track. Sometimes you are lost and don’t know it, and sometimes you think you are lost but are on the right track. But without landmarks, a plan, or direction, I can’t even be lost, I’m just wandering aimlessly. In all my desires for what I want to see in other people’s coverage, what I most want to see is the sign of a plan.
Kos told me DK ‘cares’ about the environment. That care is proving to be worthless by mikeymikey. All issues are interconnected and the War in Ukraine is not taking place in a petri dish. Deciding that when the environment is correctly identified as the penultimate of issues, that it threatens the attention other issues deserve, is a defensive maneuver to excuse the neglect climate has been suffering — not just on this site, but globally. And the answer is indeed to ‘walk and chew’. Not covering the environmental rallies speaks to deeper issues of denial and cognitive dissonance on the part of DK and it shares kinship with the FF Industry which can’t change course even though their agenda is insuring their own destruction. DK’s own existence is of course threatened by environmental collapse, but, ironically the bigger threat here is that made to DK’s ‘business as usual’ comfort zone. At this point DK suffers from a form of split personality, every bit as dangerous as the profound bipolar condition of the American political system. The bottom line is that the climate rallies should have been extensively covered by DK as part of the leading political issue of our times. By not doing so, DK crosses the line and enables the agenda of the FF industries, wealth interests, corporations and corruption. It is time for everyone on this site to do some deep soul searching.”
At Climate Ambition Summit, U.N. Secretary-General Guterres warns we're at the 'gates of hell' by Meteor Blades. The Climate Ambition Summit began today in New York City with a speech by Secretary-General António Guterres. Not in the audience were U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and President Joe Biden. Back in 2015, practically every nation on the face of the planet agreed—in a non-binding way—to try to keep the rise of global average temperature before 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit, with an aspirational goal of 1.5°C (2.7°F). But numerous studies have found that since the agreement was signed in Paris, those goals have remained far out of reach. Here’s one such study. Current projections are alarming, "but the future is not fixed," Guterres said, "We can still build a world of clear air, green jobs, and affordable, clean power for all." But it will take a far more aggressive effort. Here’s the text of Guterres’s speech, courtesy of the U.N. press office. (If you prefer to limit your clicks, the entire speech appears in the diary.)
Report: Nearly 40 million U.S. properties are overvalued because of climate-related risks by Meteor Blades. A new report from the First Street Foundation released Wednesday has found that 39 million U.S. properties are overvalued because damage risks from climate change as a result of flooding, hurricanes, and wildfires ““have yet to be reflected in the insurance premiums.” The largest percentage of those properties—60%—are coastal properties at risk from hurricanes, 30% are vulnerable to flooding, and 10% are in wildfire zones. At ClimateWire,Thomas Frank writes (paywall): The foundation’s latest report, “The Climate Insurance Bubble,” says the properties are “likely overvalued due to the underpricing or subsidization of climate risk in their insurance.” “It has the potential to impact property values in a way that’s similar to what we saw in the last recession in 2008,” First Street CEO Matthew Eby said in an interview.
Fifty-one members of Congress want Biden to issue new executive order for a Civilian Climate Corps by Meteor Blades. For more than two years, activists and a cohort of progressive members of Congress have called on President Joe Biden to declare a “climate emergency.” He reportedly seriously considered this in the summer of 2022 but decided against it. Critics have said the government’s emergency powers aren’t designed to deal with long-term crises like climate change. Advocates haven’t given up trying to prove that wrong..But they also are pressing the president to take other executive action, including a broad use of the Defense Production Act, to speed the acceleration of the clean energy transformation. On Monday, 51 Democratic members of Congress, spearheaded by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, sent a four-page letter to Biden urging him to issue an executive order “establishing a Civilian Climate Corps initiative to work on key conservation and climate priorities.” Included in the signatories are 10 senators, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Kristin Gillibrand, and Robert Casey Jr. Additionally, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey reintroduced their "Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice Act." First put forth in 2021, the act would provide participants a living wage and authorize $132.5 billion over five years for the CCC.
FOOD, AGRICULTURE & GARDENING
Climate Resilience: Greywater management by Gardening Toad. Because we’re in an historic drought here in Central Texas I’m taking action to manage our greywater resources better. My new project is to install greywater pipes and a growing basin for use of our kitchen sink water. This will take a few days, as I have to dig out heavy clay, roots, and rocks to install the pipe and form the basin. I’ll be planting vines to grow up the nearby rainwater tank, possibly including a grape vine or two. Information resources: • water management videos • greywater information.
Saturday Morning Garden Blog Vol. 19.38 - Autumn Equinox by Merry Light. Fall starts today and it is obvious. The colors are showing at all elevations, even though it's a little delayed this year. I anticipate a colorful season. I do love fall because it's so photogenic. It's usually perfect weather. Monday I might wander up to our local ski area with my Canon; my neighbor told me it's looking very fall-like. I also have a birthday in the fall. It is definitely a season of change for me. Weather people are predicting a nice autumn and lots of moisture coming our way this winter, hopefully. So far cool nights and midday 80's are temps everyone loves, even the flowers.
The Future of Food by
IDrew. It is hard not to panic or despair when seeing videos from Libya and other parts of the world suffering the extremes of climate change—thanks to all who report on these since our main stream media seems unconcerned.
I believe learning to eat less meat is a step in the right direction, even if one cannot totally stop eating the animal proteins. So I’ve been braving it and want to report on some experience. I brought a crock full of Beyond Meat meatballs to a student picnic a week ago. The meatballs were the Italian variety, and so they were slow cooked in a thick marinara sauce along with peppers and onions. I brought sandwich rolls and smoked provolone along to make meatball sandwiches; much of it was devoured with nary a word about the meatballs seeming “funny” or not like regular, well, “meat”balls. Leftovers were brought home and we ate them with pasta. Seriously, you could not tell these were plant based!
POLLUTION
Fighting Killer Dust by Tom Conway. Silica dust at the Genesis Alkali mine in Green River, Wyo., is so thick some days that Marshal Cummings can barely see a foot in front of him. It blankets his clothes, clogs his respirator, coats his hair, blackens his mucus and lodges deep inside him like a ticking bomb. Exposure to silica can lead to silicosis, a scarring and stiffening of the lungs that leaves miners gasping for air, and it’s also a cause of lung cancer, kidney disease and other major ailments. Silica robs thousands of their health every year. But now, after years of fighting, Cummings and tens of thousands of surface and underground miners across the country are on the brink of achieving true protections and holding all mining employers accountable for the first time. President Joe Biden’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) recently proposed a rule that would force employers to significantly reduce miners’ exposure to silica dust. It would also mandate air monitoring to ensure compliance with the new standard and require corrective actions when silica levels exceed the rule.
Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Sky Grief by boatsie. Humanity is slowly losing access to the night sky, and astronomers have invented a new term to describe the pain associated with this loss: "noctalgia," meaning "sky grief." Along with our propensity for polluting air and water and the massive amounts of carbon we're dumping into the atmosphere to trigger climate change, we have created another kind of pollution: light pollution. The loss of the night sky has several tangible and cultural impacts. We are losing a rich tradition of human cultural knowledge; cultures around the world and throughout history have used the sky as a springboard for the imagination, painting heroes, monsters and myths in the constellations. Nowadays, city dwellers are lucky to see even the brightest stars in the sky, let alone the faintest sketch of a familiar constellation.
Wildfire smoke is as bad as it feels—and getting worse by Laura Clawson. One thing you might not expect is that hospital emergency department visits go down on days with a lot of smoke, according to a new paper from Stanford University’s Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab. But that’s not good news, the lab’s Marshall Burke tweeted. Emergency visits for respiratory problems go up on smoky days. The decrease comes from fewer people having accidents that send them to the hospital—and the reason there are fewer accidents is that people are staying inside to avoid the smoke. While people staying inside to avoid smoke may be less likely to break their legs, it’s not an overall quality-of-life improvement. People have good reason to stay inside, though. Another paper from the ECHO Lab finds that, thanks to the Clean Air Act, PM2.5 levels—which measure fine particulate matter that poses a particularly significant health risk—had dropped by 40% between 2000-2015. Since 2015, wildfire smoke has wiped out 25% of that gain, with 75% of states affected. In some Western states, the amount of the improvement eliminated by wildfires is over 50%. Notably, some of the few states that were not affected by wildfire smoke in the paper’s data, which went through 2022, suffered from Canadian wildfire smoke this summer.
ACTION
55 groups urge Gov. Newsom to veto Big Oil-backed bill weakening refinery price gouging legislation by Dan Bacher. The struggle between Big Oil, represented by the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), and climate justice, environmental and public interest groups, amped up in California this week. Fifty-five organizations sent a letter to Governor Newsom urging him to veto SB 842 (Bradford), the Western States Petroleum Association-backed legislation that they say “would make it more cumbersome to assess and control price spikes consumers face at the pump during oil refinery maintenance periods.” SB 842, initially a homelessness initiative, was gutted and amended at the last minute. As a result, it was able to slip by under that radar with only the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) listed in support, according to the letter. In case you didn’t know, WSPA is the largest and most powerful corporate lobbying group in California.
[Note: The climate strike action began at San Francisco City Hall in 2019. The following entries are excerpts from “letters” that were issued each week of the action. Although the strike was focused on San Francisco, many of the same issues affect countless U.S. cities.]
A Summary for Winter -- Strike for the Planet week 87 by birches. You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event, in your town or your city! So, what has been accomplished in the last 87 weeks?
- We finally got you to pass a partial ban on methane infrastructure, though only in new or substantially remodeled city buildings.
- You instituted Slow Streets, and some of the long-planned street calming and traffic safety measures are finally being built.
- There is some dense housing/no car planning happening in some neighborhoods for low and moderate income families.
- There are more EV charging stations (531 currently).
- And you published some reports, plans, and assessments.
And that’s it. Pretty underwhelming. Heavy on words, light on actions. It’s not a lot.
Science Is Conservative, and That's Important -- Strike for the Planet week 86 by birches. This week’s topic: Science Is Conservative, and That’s Important. Climate change and extinction are here.
- The extinction rate is at least 1000 times faster now — because of us
- There’s been an increase in extreme weather events
- We’re in the first years of a megadrought
- The ocean is rapidly acidifying
- The permafrost is rapidly melting
- The cryosphere is rapidly vanishing in the Arctic, Himalayas, Antarctic, and Greenland
- There’ve been massive increases in plastic and toxic chemicals in the environment
- There’s been an increase in the number of people in desperate circumstances
- And the 1st pandemic of the Holocene extinction is already underway, with more to follow
We're All On A Ghost Ship -- Strike for the Planet week 85 by birches. Do you remember the Ghost Ship fire? That fire happened because an old warehouse was being used in dangerous ways, filled with all kinds of inappropriate materials, and stuffed with too many people. The location’s misuse was fueled by greed and grandiosity, and the authorities entrusted with protecting the health and safety of all involved were negligent and underfunded. What does the Ghost Ship have to do with climate change? The earth is being exploited in dangerous ways, filled with all kinds of inappropriate materials3, and stuffed with too many people. The misuse of the Earth is fueled by greed and grandiosity, and the authorities entrusted with protecting the health and safety of all involved are negligent and underfunded. So how do we avoid dying on a burning Earth?
This is not a rhetorical question. We have made the planet into a Ghost Ship and the fire has started. If we’re going to have any chance of surviving, we have to act. The part that’s scorching us now is the pandemic. Have you learned the lessons of this pandemic? Are you prepared for the catastrophe that’s coming just behind it?
Sacrifice Zones -- Strike for the Planet week 84 by birches. So this week we’re looking at Sacrifice Zones. A sacrifice zone is an area that has been permanently degraded by environmental damage or economic disinvestment. Sacrifice zones often are in low-income and minority communities because, as Naomi Klein says, “Running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.” Sacrifice zones are also found in areas humans destroy so thoroughly, either by accident or in the process of exploitation, that they become uninhabitable.
Reclaiming Our Space (From Cars) -- Strike for the Planet week 83 by birches. This week’s topic is Reclaiming Our Space (From Cars). Cars? Really? What’s the problem with cars?
Well, let’s quickly consult with some experts. First up, Hanna Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor for urban development: “…in many ways not restricting cars is limiting freedom of other people. Cars make it more difficult for children to play in the street or elderly people to cross the road.” Then there’s JH Crawford, a world expert on car-free cities: “Today’s housing crisis stems from a lack of land. Get rid of cars and the problem is solved immediately.”
Water, Water, Water -- Strike for the Planet week 82 by birches. This week’s topic then is Water, Water, Water. SF needs water in order to survive. Humans cannot live or operate very long without water. In the chaos to come (and don’t fool yourself—climate chaos is coming whatever is not locally produced and controlled won’t be available. We covered this in terms of energy for SF last week. Why talk about water now? California is in the first years of a megadrought. Past megadroughts in the North American west have lasted from multiple decades to over a century. And the current megadrought, the one we’re just entering, is being amplified by climate change. Modern work reexamining the rapid fall of civilizations has shown that climate change is usually the cause 15, and megadroughts are the most common climate condition to destroy civilizations. The implications are obvious: If we don’t take care of our water now, SF will die from a lack of water in the very near future. But we’re fine on water, you say. We’ve got Hetch Hetchy, you say. But do we? Really?
ENERGY, TRANSPORTION & INFRASTRUCTURE
Putin routes thin-hulled oil tankers through the N Sea Route, risking disastrous oil spills by Pakalolo. Stung by Western sanctions that punish Putin for his war crimes against Ukraine, The first time that the Russian government approved using “unreinforced oil tankers” to sail through the country's Northern Sea Route, an extreme and dangerous journey. The use of the vulnerable ships is to find a go around the hard-hit sanctions have had on their oil trade with Asia, according to reporting by the Financial Times. Warnings have been sent to Moscow that they risk a tanker rupture with ships that are not “ice class” vessels along Russia’s 3.500-mile-long northern coast. Ice floes, currents, and winds can surround the vessel and crush it. Increasing Arctic Ocean wave heights pose a danger as well. Two of the vessels sailed to China in early September.
But, its hard… by Btemmink. Most climate activists have taken two separate paths. One, is independent action to lower their personal carbon footprint. Sometimes this is by choosing renewable energy. Other times it is simply taking energy efficiency measures. All of these are good. None of these are enough to address the problem.The other path is to blindly support renewable energy at the cost of any other significant energy strategy. Again, renewable energy is good, but it will not solve the crisis. It will, unfortunately, demand we continue our use of fossil fuel. The largest of the renewable energy solutions is hydro-power. Sources for that are essentially tapped out. Solar and wind are the next largest renewable sources. Both of these have the same limitation. Neither can provide energy continuously. Neither can be adjusted to meet energy demand. Thus, both need a back-up energy source. There are two major options for this back-up energy. One is fossil fuel. The other is nuclear energy.
Renewable Tuesday: Climate March; EV Tipping Points by Mokurai. Germany: All-Electric Car Sales More Than Doubled In August 2023 In August, new passenger car registrations in Germany increased by 37 percent year-over-year to 273,417. During the first eight months of 2023, 1,913,564 new cars were registered (up 16.5 percent year-over-year). Last month was very strong in terms of plug-in electric car sales, which increased to the highest level so far this year. In August, the total new plug-in electric car registrations amounted to 101,201 (up 78 percent year-over-year), which is 37.0 percent of the total volume (compared to 28.5 percent a year ago). This outstanding result is related solely to the surge in battery electric cars (BEV) sales, which increased by almost 171 percent year-over-year to 86,649. That's about 31.7 percent of the total market (compared to 16.1 percent a year ago).
If Shutting Down the Government is Wrong, Why is Shutting Down Detroit Right? by Stephen Dreyfus. It appears that the Republican morons in Congress are hell bent on shutting down the government if they don’t get their own way. Marjory Taylor Gang-greene is a major culprit. It would be fun vilifying her, or Gym Jordan, or Kevin McCarthy, or the other absurd clowns in the Republican circus. Their idiocy and blatant hypocrisy provide plenty of fodder for a juicy diary lambasting their misdeeds. Only this time, I believe it is time to reflect about whether the Democrats’ fondness for organized labor, has allowed us to ignore the consequences the UAW strike will have. If you are from Chicago, you root for the Chicago Bears. If you are from Wisconsin, you root for the Green Bay Packers. Likewise, if you are a progressive Democrat, how can you not root for organized labor? I consider myself both a progressive Democrat and was an avid supporter of labor advocate Bernie Sanders. So why am I not gung-ho in favor of the striking auto workers? Because this time I think they are wrong.
MISCELLANY
Caribbean Matters: Six years after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans are still suffering by Denise Oliver-Velez. So here we are again: Another year has passed. In some ways, conditions on the island have worsened since Maria, complicated by and contributed to by Hurricane Fiona last year. One issue of great concern is the island’s piss-poor power situation, with ongoing blackouts and outages which have only increased since the utility was taken over by LUMA Energy, even as consumer costs increase. Alexander C. Kaufman wrote an aptly titled story for HuffPost back in August titled, “Wall Street 'Vultures' Want Puerto Rico To Pay Even More For Electricity That Doesn't Work.” Nearly six years after Hurricane María destroyed Puerto Rico’s electrical grid and triggered the second-longest blackout in world history, Raquel Maria Gonzalez Sparks still loses power weekly, if not daily. The nonstop outages — which many on the island say worsened after a private company took over the public power system in June 2021 — have left Gonzalez’s life in tatters. She can’t complete her work as an independent contractor teaching and translating between English and Spanish when she can’t get online, and her income is already down by 25%.
Overnight Science News: Politically motivated bullies want to 'tear down the fabric of science' by Besame. Scientists are being attacked by more than the common but deadly anti-vax quacks. The Trump Administration ushered in a new level of science denial and dismissal, often abusively so, that undermined science, bullied scientists, with real world repercussions. The Union of Concerned Scientists published Attacks on Science in 2017 (updated 03/23) with examples taken from their study. They just published the full study earlier this year, documenting 206 government attacks on science from January 2017 to November 2022: An equity and environmental justice assessment of anti-science actions during the Trump administration. The study noted that Trump’s attack on the EPA, in particular, “led to a culture of fear and censorship among thousands of EPA scientists.” Of course, the assault isn’t solely from the government. The media trained up howling mobs of ideological anti-science bullies. The covid pandemic was like Miracle-Gro for home-grown anti-science cranks as the roused rabble added covid to their agenda. Now, noted scientist Peter Hotez (dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and chair of Tropical Pediatrics at Texas Children’s Hospital) has written a book about this war of ignorance and the harm to society and scientists in “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.”
DKos Asheville Open Thread: Plastic bags win again by randallt. From Kimberly King at WLOS: Environmental groups suffered a major setback in their fight for bans on plastic bags when lawmakers included in the newly passed state budget wording that prevents cities and counties from prohibiting their use. State leaders have the power to keep local governments from passing such ordinances, and that's what they did with this budget language. Locally, Woodfin and Black Mountain leaders voted to support a ban in Buncombe County, but the state budget now supersedes that. Advocates said they are not giving up. "There have been states that disallowed local governments from pushing bag bans through. And we’ve seen those laws overturned," MountainTrue policy manager Anna Alsobrook said. "And so several of those states have now allowed bag bans to be put into the books. In a time of such drastic climate crisis, we have no time to waste."
Weekly spotlight on DK climate and eco-diaries (9/10-17/23) by Meteor Blades. According to Planet Wreckers, a new report by Oil Change International, just five companies are responsible for 51% of planned oil and gas expansion between now and 2050, what many scientists say is the deadline for zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions to address the climate crisis. The U.S, the report says, is the “Planet Wrecker in Chief,” its plans accounting for a third of the total global emissions associated with new extraction. Canada and Russia are No. 2 & 3. Projects in just 20 nations would produce 90% of emissions from new projects.
Earth Matters: 20 firms plan 90% of new oil & gas projects through 2050; 188,000 EV jobs created by Meteor Blades. According to Planet Wreckers, a new report by Oil Change International, just five companies are responsible for 51% of planned oil and gas expansion between now and 2050, what many scientists say is the deadline for zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions to address the climate crisis. The U.S, the report says, is the “Planet Wrecker in Chief,” its plans accounting for a third of the total global emissions associated with new extraction. Canada and Russia are No. 2 & 3. Projects in just 20 nations would produce 90% of emissions from new projects.
RECENT SPOTLIGHTS