Author Archives: LarhondCraft

Major TV networks spent just 50 minutes on climate change — combined — last year.

by LarhondCraft Posted on March 23, 2017

Nanette Barragán is used to facing off against polluters. Elected in 2013 to the city council of Hermosa Beach, California, she took on E&B Natural Resources, an oil and gas company looking to drill wells on the beach. Barragán, an attorney before going into politics, learned of the potential project and began campaigning for residents to vote against it. The project was eventually squashed. In November, she won a congressional seat in California’s 44th district.

To Barragán, making sure President Trump’s environmental rollbacks don’t affect communities is a matter of life or death. The district she represents, the same in which she grew up, encompasses heavily polluted parts of Los Angeles County — areas crisscrossed with freeways and dotted with oil and gas wells. Barragan says she grew up close to a major highway and suffered from allergies. “I now go back and wonder if it was related to living that close,” she says.

Exide Technologies, a battery manufacturer that has polluted parts of southeast Los Angeles County with arsenic, lead, and other chemicals for years, sits just outside her district’s borders. Barragán’s district is also 69 percent Latino and 15 percent black. She has become acutely aware of the environmental injustices of the pollution plaguing the region. “People who are suffering are in communities of color,” she says.

Now in the nation’s capital, Barragán is chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s newly formed environmental task force and a member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, which considers legislation on topics like energy and public lands and is chaired by climate denier Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican. She knows the next four years will be tough but says she’s up for the challenge. “I think it’s going to be, I hate to say it, a lot of defense.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Major TV networks spent just 50 minutes on climate change — combined — last year.

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Can toilets revive New York City’s oyster population?

by LarhondCraft Posted on September 7, 2016

Australian architect James Gardiner wants to use 3D-printing technology to build structures for coral to grow on in places where reefs are decimated by disease, pollution, dredging, and other maladies (looking at you, crown o’ thorns).

Right now, artificial reefs are built out of uniform, blocky assemblages of concrete or steel. Those are cheap and easy to make, but don’t look or work like the real thing — for starters, because “the marine life that colonizes these reef surfaces can sometimes fall off,” one biologist told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Gardiner worked with David Lennon of Reef Design Lab to design new shapes with textured surfaces and built-in tunnels and shelters. The computer models are turned into wax molds with the world’s largest 3D printer, and then cast with, essentially, sand. It’s a cheap and low-carbon way to manufacture custom, modular pieces of reef.

Reef Design Lab installed the first 3D-printed reef in Bahrain in 2012 — and, eight months later, it was covered with algae, sponges, and fish.

Mandatory disclaimer: Rebuilding all of the world’s coral reefs by hand is impossible, and climate change is still the biggest threat facing coral reefs, so let’s not forget to save the ones we’ve got.

Link – 

Can toilets revive New York City’s oyster population?

Posted in alo, Anchor, Crown, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can toilets revive New York City’s oyster population?

Faculty joins students in the call for divestment. We’re going streaking!

by LarhondCraft Posted on September 12, 2014

stripping down

Faculty joins students in the call for divestment. We’re going streaking!

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12 Sep 2014 3:21 PM

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You may have already heard: Students concerned about climate change are demanding that university endowments divest from fossil fuel companies. A handful of institutions have already committed to divestment, and many others have at least offered compromises.

Now, professors are joining the on-campus divestmentfest. On Sunday, the UC Berkeley Faculty Association urged the committee responsible for managing the University of California’s 10-campus, $91 billion-with-a-B endowment to purge fossil fuels from its portfolio. Also this week Boston University’s faculty circulated a document calling for divestment from oil, coal, and gas corporations; 245 faculty members had put their John Hancock on the petition as of Wednesday, Sept. 10. Academics at Harvard, the University of Washington, and other schools are signing on to the movement as well.

The good news for divestment fans is that these scholars come armed with petitions and academic authority, giving divestment even more cred. It’s also heartening that The Wall Street Journal is taking notice, covering the intensification [paywall] of what it calls the “showdown between activists and schools” centered in California. Still, on-campus divestment haters are gonna hate:

Divestment is “really tricky” for university officers who are under pressure to deliver returns, said Charles Skorina, a San Francisco recruiter for university endowments who is the managing partner of Charles A. Skorina & Co. “Are you going to save the world or screw students that depend on endowment earnings to fund scholarships?”

Look, we’re not saying that stripping students of scholarships is good, either. However, Skorina oversimplifies university divestment as an either-or proposition. Plus, in a world where money rules — for worse or for worse — divestment is an important strategy among many in the struggle for a stable climate. And now that the scholarly community is catching on, the divestment crusade might just score an A.

Source:
UC Berkeley Faculty Association urges divestment from fossil fuel companies

, The Daily Californian.

BU Faculty Petition Urges Divestment from Fossil Fuel Companies

, BU Today.

Fossil Fuels Stir Debate at Endowments [paywall]

, The Wall Street Journal.

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Faculty joins students in the call for divestment. We’re going streaking!

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Faculty joins students in the call for divestment. We’re going streaking!