Author Archives: TiffinyDarley

Remember the rainforests? We still haven’t saved them.

Every half hour, the world lost a football-field chunk of tropical forest in 2018.

Over the course of the year, that added up to a total forest loss of nearly 30 million acres, an area the size of Pennsylvania, according to the World Resources Institute’s annual report, out Thursday. As bad as that sounds, many more acres were lost in each of the two previous years, when huge fires wiped out millions of trees. The report is hardly cause for celebration, said Frances Seymour, senior fellow at WRI.

“The world’s forests are in the emergency room, said Seymour. “Even though they are recovering from extensive burns suffered in recent fires, the patient is also bleeding profusely from fresh wounds.”

Global Forest Watch

Deforestation is responsible for about 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. If deforestation were a country, it would be the third largest source of carbon pollution, after the United States and China.

“Tropical forest loss pulls the rug out from under efforts to stabilize the global climate,” Seymour said.

Every year, WRI’s Global Forest Watch pores over satellite images of the world’s woodlands and reams of data to monitor where trees are falling. Here are a few bullet points from the report:

Old growth deforestation continues: Primary or old-growth rainforest stores a lot of carbon in big trees and a lot of biodiversity — the frogs, bromeliads, lichens, leafcutter ants, and lemurs that live in those big trees. Since 2000, we’ve been losing about the same amount of primary rainforest every year: A Belgium-sized 9 million acres.

And it’s spreading: Efforts in Indonesia and Brazil to stem the loss of old-growth forests have started to work. By enforcing a moratorium on clearing primary forest, Indonesia has managed to bring deforestation down to the lowest level since 2003, said Belinda Margono from Indonesia’s Department of Environment and Forestry. But forests are falling at a quicker pace in West Africa, Colombia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Big trouble in Madagascar: The East Africane East African island island country lost a full 2 percent of its primary forest, more than any other country.

Peace brings cattle to Colombia: A truce between the government and between the government and rebels made it safe for farmers to enter previously perilous forests. Now they’re cutting down trees to create pastures for cattle.

Small farmers, big problems: Small-scale farmers (often growing cocoa for chocolate) were responsible for most of the forest loss in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Peru. By contrast, large farms — like those growing soy for China — were the main culprit in Bolivia.

From the distance, these data points might seem abstract, but the numbers represent “heartbreaking losses in real places,” Seymour said. “For every area of forest loss there’s likely a species one inch closer to extinction. And for every area of forest loss there’s likely a family that has lost access to an important part of their daily income from hunting, gathering, and fishing. Such loses pose an existential threat to the cultures of indigenous peoples. And for every area of forest loss there’s likely a community downstream that has less access to clean water and is more exposed to floods and landslides.”

Still, she said she’s optimistic that the world can stop leveling forests. Some countries have radically slowed tree loss by passing and enforcing laws. And the United Nations program that pays developing countries to stop deforestation has worked in the few places where it has been funded, she said.

“We know what to do, we just need to do it,” Seymour said.

Originally posted here – 

Remember the rainforests? We still haven’t saved them.

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Uber Needs to Start Acting Like a Grownup

Mother Jones

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Adam Ozimek is dismayed by progressive excitement over the regulation of Uber in the city of Austin:

There’s a lot of celebrating in some corners about Austin’s recent passage of a law mandating that ridesharing companies like Uber fingerprint their drivers….Amazingly, many aren’t trying very hard to hide the fact that they aren’t mostly concerned about whether this policy is a good idea!…I find this celebration a little puzzling given that we are just now beginning to exit the era where local taxi regulations were almost everywhere an embarrassing milieu of cronyism designed to protect politically powerful incumbents who offered shoddy service. The history of local taxi regulation should be an embarrassment, not a model we celebrate our inability to escape from.

….It’s very interesting how many erstwhile progressives have shown little concern for the rights of those who have been accused of a crime, and the disproportionate impact of a policy on minorities, in just this circumstance. Too excited by the prospect of local government regulating a rich tech company, there has been little time to consider these traditional progressive worries.

This might be true. And I certainly can’t speak for all progressives. But I’d offer a couple of counterpoints:

Municipal regulation of the taxi industry has indeed been an embarrassment, and to the extent that Uber fights it, they’re doing God’s work. At the same time, Uber has been almost thuggishly aggressive about defending its apparent belief that they should be immune from any regulation whatsoever. To hear them talk, they’re really nothing more than a database that provides a lookup service for car owners. What happens after that has nothing to do with them.

As a progressive, this attitude does bother me. Uber is a company that basically employs hundreds of thousands of drivers. The public has a right to expect them to act like the multi-billion company they are, and to treat both their employees and their customers within the confines of expected corporate norms. The Austin case may or may not be misguided, but as a fight to show Uber that they aren’t above the law, I can understand the enthusiasm.

In any case, I’m not sure the Austin case is misguided. The taxi regulations that Uber is justified in fighting are the ones that have turned the whole industry into little fiefdoms of cozy little cartels. However, the regulations demanding that taxis be safe and drivers be reliable are pretty good ones. Requiring Uber to keep ex-felons out of taxis may have some downsides, but it’s also got plenty of upsides. It’s certainly not a slam dunk that this is a bad idea.

Overall, I’m a fan of Uber. They provide a great service, and breaking up the taxi cartels is almost certainly a boon to Americans everywhere. At the same time, they’re not a startup anymore. They’re a multinational, multi-billion dollar corporation that needs to accept public oversight in the areas of employment law, safety regulation, and reasonable licensing. They don’t seem very willing to do this, and sometimes the public needs to fight back and win.

Continued here: 

Uber Needs to Start Acting Like a Grownup

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