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For Once, Something Genuinely Good for the Earth Is Happening on Earth Day

by WilliamsLockyer Posted on April 22, 2016

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World leaders are in New York City to sign the first global agreement on climate change. This image from the 1968 Apollo 8 mission helped inspire the first Earth Day. NASA A lot of champagne was popped on the night of Saturday, December 12, when diplomats from almost every country on Earth finalized the text of the historic global agreement to combat climate change. In the Paris Agreement, countries committed to hold global temperature increases to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, an ambitious target considering that the world is already more than halfway to that limit. The deal also laid out a system for wealthier nations to help poorer ones pay for adapting to unavoidable climate impacts. But finalizing the agreement was only one step on the long road to actually achieving its aims. The next step is happening today, on Earth Day, as heads of state and other top officials from more than 150 countries will gather at the United Nations headquarters in New York City to put their signatures on the deal. Secretary of State John Kerry, who was a driving force in Paris, will sign the document on behalf of the United States. Signing the document is mostly a symbolic step, indicating a country’s intent to formally “join” the agreement at some later stage. In order to “join” the agreement, national governments have to show the UN the piece of domestic paperwork—a law, executive order, or some other legal document—in which the government consents to be bound by the terms of the agreement. Some small countries, including some island states that are among the most vulnerable to climate impacts, are expected to offer up those documents at the same time they sign. Other countries will take longer. The agreement doesn’t take legal effect until it is formally joined by both 55 individual countries and by enough countries to cover 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (a threshold that essentially mandates the participation of the US and China). The World Resources Institute made a pretty cool widget for experimenting with various ways to reach those thresholds. You can play around with different options to see what it would take. Once countries start signing the agreement, the widget will automatically update accordingly: President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping have promised to join the agreement this year. Obama is expected to join using an executive agreement, which will allow him to avoid sending the deal to Congress. (Executive agreements account for the vast majority of US foreign commitments.) He’s able to do this because the US says it can fulfill its Paris promises without any changes to domestic laws; instead, the Obama administration is holding up its end of the bargain by imposing new EPA regulations on emissions from power plants. Unlike a treaty, an executive agreement does not require ratification by the Senate. It’s not bulletproof; a future president could unilaterally abandon from the deal. But for Obama, there’s a clear incentive for pushing to reach those 55 countries/55 percent thresholds as quickly as possible: Once the agreement goes into force, it requires a four-year waiting period before a country can withdraw. In other words, in the event that either Ted Cruz or Donald Trump—both vociferous climate change deniers—succeeds Obama in the White House, they wouldn’t be able to back out of the agreement until their (*shudder*) second term. The odds are against the agreement taking force before Obama leaves office, because adoption by the European Union—which in the Paris Agreement acts as a singular unit—requires domestic actions by all of its 28 member states, which could take some extra time. Still, if the next president bails, he or she will have to pay a heavy diplomatic price for it, cautioned Elliot Diringer, executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “Walking away from the agreement would instantly turn the US from a leader to a defector,” he said, “and would almost certainly trigger a diplomatic backlash that would hamper our other priorities.” The upshot is that the US will likely join soon after today’s signing ceremony. A slew of other nations will follow, and the Paris Agreement will become binding international law sometime before 2018, when it calls for a global check-in on emission reductions. Of course, none of this puts the world any closer to averting devastating climate change than we were back in December. As they stand today, the country-level plans (nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, in UN jargon) enshrined in the agreement fall woefully short of the “well below” 2 degrees C target. The chart below, from a recent analysis by MIT and Climate Interactive, shows a variety of possible future scenarios. The blue line is what would happen without the Paris Agreement—a world where the impacts of climate change would be truly horrific and many major cities would become uninhabitable. The red line shows what will happen if countries stick to their current commitments. The green line is what a successful outcome of the Paris Agreement would look like (and, to be clear, even that level of warming will come with severe consequences): Climate Interactive/MIT Sloan As you can see, by 2025 or so countries need to be doing far more than they have committed to thus far. The Paris Agreement states that in 2020, at the next major international climate conference, countries must roll out new plans that go well beyond their current ones. So we’re very much not out of the woods yet. But we’re moving in the right direction, at least. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, the holiday has generally declined into little more than a “news” hook for corporate communications people to harass reporters about eco-friendly guns and cheeseburgers and other dumb stuff. So it’s kind of nice to see the day being used for something of actual historical significance.

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For Once, Something Genuinely Good for the Earth Is Happening on Earth Day

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For Once, Something Genuinely Good for the Earth Is Happening on Earth Day

Posted in Citadel, Cyber, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Monterey, ONA, organic, organic gardening, OXO, Ringer, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on For Once, Something Genuinely Good for the Earth Is Happening on Earth Day

Senate Republicans Want To Cut Funding For UN Climate Change Agency, Because Palestine

by briangowlland4 Posted on April 21, 2016

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Two birds, one stone.<!–more–> Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., talks with reporters. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call More than two dozen Republican senators this week asked Secretary of State John Kerry not to provide any funding for the United States’ involvement in the United Nations effort to address climate change, saying they object to the U.N. treating Palestine as a state. The Palestinians joined the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that governs action on climate change, in March. On Monday, the group of 28 senators, led by Wyoming Republican John Barrasso, argued in a letter to Kerry that — because of a 1994 law barring federal funds from being distributed to any U.N. program that grants membership to a state or organization that lacks “internationally recognized attributes of statehood” — the UNFCCC should not receive U.S. funding. It may not be entirely a coincidence that this letter comes from a group of senators who, by and large, don’t really believe climate change is an issue the U.S. should be addressing at all. Among the letter’s signatories: Sens. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Dan Coats (R-Ind.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), John Thune (R-S.D.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), David Vitter (R-La.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). They’re not all climate change deniers, per se. But Barrasso has said that the climate “is constantly changing” and that “the role human activity plays is not known.” Inhofe, who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment And Public Works, wrote a whole book about how climate change is “the greatest hoax.” Rubio has spouted every type of climate denial possible. Cornyn has said he believes humans can influence the environment, but he doesn’t want the feds “in charge of trying to micromanage” the issue. “The U.S. government does not recognize the ‘State of Palestine,’ which is not a sovereign state and does not possess the ‘internationally recognized attributes of statehood,’” the letter reads. “Therefore, the UNFCCC, as an affiliated organization of the UN, granted full membership to the Palestinians, an organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood. As a result, current law prohibits distribution of U.S. taxpayer funds to the UNFCCC and its related entities.” The lawmakers have some precedent for this argument. In 2011, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization lost U.S. funding — which made up about 22 percent of its budget — after allowing the Palestinians full membership. The U.S. later lost its voting rights to the UNESCO general assembly as a result. Kerry said last year that he planned to work with Congress to restore U.S. funding to the organization. State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday that he was aware of the lawmakers’ letter but declined to comment further. The Palestinians have endeavored to gradually join U.N. organizations and treaties as a way of gaining international recognition after several rounds of failed bilateral negotiations with the Israelis. The Palestinians gained non-member observer status at the U.N. in 2012, and the Palestinian flag was flown at the U.N. headquarters in New York for the first time last year during the annual general assembly, but they still lack full member status. The Obama administration opposes Palestinian efforts to gain statehood through U.N. recognition, but the senators’ letter criticizes the administration for failing to block the Palestinians from gaining recognition within the UNFCCC. “We urge the administration to clarify, both publicly and privately, that the United States does not consider the ‘State of Palestine’ to be a sovereign state, and to work diligently to prevent the Palestinians from being recognized as a sovereign state for purposes of joining UN affiliated organizations, treaties, conventions, and agreements,” the lawmakers wrote. The United States has pledged to give $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which was created through the UNFCCC negotiations so that industrialized countries could help developing nations address climate change. It’s seen as a pivotal part of the deal reached at the U.N. summit last December, which nations will begin officially signing this week. The UNFCCC was created in 1992 to provide a mechanism for international coordination on addressing climate change. The United States provides funding to support the UNFCCC secretariat and other activities, as do the 196 other parties to the convention. CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misidentified the state that Sen. Dan Sullivan represents. It is Alaska, not Arkansas.

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Senate Republicans Want To Cut Funding For UN Climate Change Agency, Because Palestine

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Senate Republicans Want To Cut Funding For UN Climate Change Agency, Because Palestine

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Everything You Need to Know About Pot’s Environmental Impact

by Myrna Posted on April 19, 2016

Lots of energy. Lots of water. Amelia Bates/Grist Americans smoke a lot of weed. It’s a little tricky to get a handle on the actual numbers — there’s that whole “illegal” thing in a lot of places — but we can say there are at least 20 million users in the country. Colorado alone had nearly $1 billion in recreational and medicinal marijuana sales in 2015, enough to rake in more than $130 million in taxes and fees. Weed’s becoming a hefty industry, and like any other, it’s going to have a hefty environmental footprint. So as decriminalization makes its THC-laden way across the United States, Grist is here to show you just how big that footprint is. Read the rest at Grist. Original source:   Everything You Need to Know About Pot’s Environmental Impact ; ; ;

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Everything You Need to Know About Pot’s Environmental Impact

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Can Bernie Sanders Ride Fracking to Victory in New York?

by Myrna Posted on April 18, 2016

The Democratic presidential candidates have divergent views on the controversial natural gas drilling technique. New Yorkers protest against fracking in 2014 a katz/shutterstock In this week’s tight New York Democratic primary, the fight over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is one issue of contention between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And it could be a deciding factor for some voters. Sanders says he would ban all fracking everywhere. Clinton says the practice should be regulated and restricted, but natural gas is helping the U.S. move away from coal-fired power. Sanders’ campaign has capitalized on that difference, noting in an ad released on Monday that he “is the only candidate for president who opposes fracking everywhere.” Fracking uses a high-pressure stream of water, sand and chemicals to tap into shale formations to release natural gas. The practice has been highly contentious in New York, which contains a lot of natural gas in the Marcellus formation. A number of communities in upstate New York banned the practice, worried about potential impacts on groundwater, along with other health and safety concerns. In December 2014, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would ban the practice entirely. (Sanders’ home state of Vermont banned fracking in 2012.) Read the rest at The Huffington Post. Link:   Can Bernie Sanders Ride Fracking to Victory in New York? ; ; ;

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Can Bernie Sanders Ride Fracking to Victory in New York?

Posted in alo, cannabis, Cyber, eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, growing marijuana, Hagen, horticulture, LAI, LG, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can Bernie Sanders Ride Fracking to Victory in New York?

Study: Miami Can Expect 380 Instances of Flooding a Year by 2045

by Myrna Posted on April 18, 2016

Thanks to climate change. Flooding in South Beach after Hurricane Sandy meunierd/Shutterstock A new study says much of Miami-Dade County will see the number of projected floods rise from 45 a year to 80 with a 10-inch rise in sea levels by 2030, and then accelerate to 380 instances of flooding a year by 2045. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) came up with the projections using new data compiled by the Army Corps of Engineers. “In 2045, given normal variations in the tides, while some days would be flood-free, many days would see one or even two flood events—one with each high tide,” UCS said in its report. The findings jibe with another recent report from the University of Miami that since 2006, flooding in Miami Beach has soared 400 percent from high tides and 33 percent from rain. Read the rest at Fusion. View original post here: Study: Miami Can Expect 380 Instances of Flooding a Year by 2045 ; ; ;

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Study: Miami Can Expect 380 Instances of Flooding a Year by 2045

Posted in cannabis, Cyber, eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, growing marijuana, horticulture, LAI, LG, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Study: Miami Can Expect 380 Instances of Flooding a Year by 2045

Trump manages to surprise us with strange “climate” obsession

by MayDeeter575 Posted on March 28, 2016

Trump manages to surprise us with strange “climate” obsession

By on 28 Mar 2016commentsShare

Leave it to Donald Trump to stumble onto a talking point that can still surprise us. Trump has told two newspapers in the last week that nuclear weapons are the only type of climate change that concerns him.

“I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons,” he told The Washington Post Editorial Board when asked about his concern for human-made warming. Trump then told The New York Times in an interview about his foreign policy, completely unprompted, “When people talk global warming, I say the global warming that we have to be careful of is the nuclear global warming.”

Trump’s nuclear-as-climate-change concern hasn’t yet reached the same level of infamy of lines like, “I’m not a scientist,” but he’s been tweeting on it since at least 2014:

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Apparently, it’s a reference to the Cold War-era debate over the threat of a nuclear winter if the United States and Soviet Union were to go to war, but now he means it in the context of North Korea and Iran. Conservatives might not normally compare nuclear weapons directly to climate change, though they do like to complain that President Obama overstates the risks of climate change compared to terrorism and foreign threats (see Mike Huckabee’s favorite quip, “I assure you that a beheading is much worse than a sunburn”).

In the same Post interview, Trump insisted he isn’t a “big believer in man-made climate change.” But he hasn’t mentioned his other two favorite theories in a while about how climate change is a hoax: Cold weather in New York debunks global warming, and the whole thing is a con “created by and for the Chinese.”

Trump could be following national Republican trends where politicians change the subject instead of jumping into science denial. Maybe that counts as something like progress? Or Trump is just giving us another flavor of climate denial.

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In the future, you may never have to do laundry again

by PaulineLoughman Posted on March 24, 2016

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In the future, you may never have to do laundry again

By on 24 Mar 2016commentsShare

Get a load of this: Coming soon to a closet near you, clothes that clean themselves.

That reality is inching closer with new research from Australia’s RMIT University, where scientists have been testing nanotechnology that eats away at grime on fabric.

The secret behind this technology: silver and copper-based nanostructures. When these itty-bitty structures are exposed to light, they create “hot electrons” — a tiny burst of energy that can break down organic matter. The researchers found they could durably attach these nanostructures to material by immersing the fabric in certain solutions. Later, when this nano-enhanced, crud-covered textile is exposed to light from the sun or a lightbulb, poof! Within six to 10 minutes, the fabric starts to clean itself.

This is all exciting because way we wash our clothes now isn’t perfect. Washing machines use up precious H2O, dryers are huge energy wasters, and detergents can leach a troubling concoction of chemicals into the water supply. If nanostructures can be cheaply produced, using less energy and water than all those endless spin cycles, they might spare us a whole load of dirty fossil fuel emissions.

But don’t toss out your vintage washtub and antique clothespin collection — I mean, “washer and dryer” — just yet. While these results could be the first inklings of the self-cleaning textile revolution, the technology isn’t ready to roll out on an industrial scale.

Meanwhile, the Australian team is looking into other super-fabrics. Next up, according to ABC: Seeing if similar nanotechnology could be used to create antibacterial materials (or should we say, “anti-bactematerials”? No? OK, we won’t) to fight superbugs.

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Nanotechnology self-cleaning clothes are on the way, RMIT University researchers say

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Wanna See What Happens When You Rely on the Fossil Fuel Sector and Slash Taxes?

by Myrna Posted on March 9, 2016

Check out Louisiana. Andrew Cline/Shutterstock The state of Louisiana has fallen on hard times, and its situation offers some hard lessons. First, don’t let a right-wing ideologue cut your budget to the bone. Second, don’t hang your whole economy on fossil fuel extraction. The Washington Post reports on the state’s budget crisis: Already, the state of Louisiana had gutted university spending and depleted its rainy-day funds. It had cut 30,000 employees and furloughed others. It had slashed the number of child services staffers … And then, the state’s new governor, John Bel Edwards (D), came on TV and said the worst was yet to come. … Despite all the cuts of the previous years, the nation’s second-poorest state still needed nearly $3 billion — almost $650 per person — just to maintain its regular services over the next 16 months. … A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships. Select hospitals will close. Patients will lose funding for treatment of disabilities. Some reports of child abuse will go uninvestigated. For eight years, under former Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), Louisiana slashed taxes and played tricks to fill budget holes. Jindal claimed that the tax cuts he pushed through would promote miraculous economic growth and make up for the lost revenue. That didn’t work, of course, just as it didn’t work on a national level under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Read the rest at Grist. See more here –  Wanna See What Happens When You Rely on the Fossil Fuel Sector and Slash Taxes? ; ; ;

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Wanna See What Happens When You Rely on the Fossil Fuel Sector and Slash Taxes?

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Science Has Found a Brilliant New Use for Your Kitchen Scraps

by Myrna Posted on March 9, 2016

Turns out, dumping compost on grasslands can do a surprising amount for the planet. Steve Russell/The Toronto Star/ZUMA When John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathmann, bought their 540-acre ranch in 1998, it was in bad shape. Located in California’s Marin County, a windswept region northwest of San Francisco Bay, the land had been worn down by overgrazing; the grass was gone and the soil was degraded. Neither Wick nor Rathmann knew how to fix it because the couple didn’t have any ranching experience—Wick worked in construction management, and Rathmann wrote children’s classics like 10 Minutes till Bedtime and Good Night, Gorilla. So Wick consulted his friend Jeffrey Creque, a rangeland ecology expert. Creque helped Wick repair the soil by bringing back some grass—which gave the two an idea: They knew that in addition to enriching the soil, healthy grass, through photosynthesis, could remove carbon from the atmosphere. So was there a way, they wondered, to grow more grass on Wick’s land and slow global warming at the same time? The theory made sense: Carbon that is absorbed by grass can be stored for hundreds of years in the grass’ roots and surrounding soil—a much better spot for it than in the air, where it warms the planet in the form of carbon dioxide. Carbon-enriched soil, in turn, feeds grass so it can grow taller and suck down even more carbon. In rangelands, this cycle takes place on a massive scale: Between the grass and the soil, a third of the world’s carbon is stored in these expanses. But tilling and overgrazing unleash that carbon. These practices also cause topsoil erosion, which compounds the problem by making it hard for grass to grow. To make matters worse, rangelands are often home to cows, and manure releases methane and nitrous oxide gases into the atmosphere. In fact, livestock are responsible for nearly one-fifth of the globe’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. Read the rest at Mother Jones. Originally posted here –  Science Has Found a Brilliant New Use for Your Kitchen Scraps ; ; ;

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Middle East Summers Could Become Unlivable By End Of Century

by Myrna Posted on March 9, 2016

The “father of global warming” has a dire warning for people living in hot, tropical locales. Meryll/Shutterstock James Hansen has a dire warning for the Middle East and tropical areas: Summer is coming. By the end of the century, the so-called “father of global warming“ predicts that rising temperatures caused by human-induced climate change will render the countries that already experience hot summers unlivable during those months. “The tropics and the Middle East in summer are in danger of becoming practically uninhabitable by the end of the century if business-as-usual fossil fuel emissions continue, because wet bulb temperature could approach the level at which the human body is unable to cool itself even under well-ventilated outdoor conditions,” Hansen, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, wrote in anew paper published Wednesday and co-authored with his colleague Makiko Sato. Read the rest at The Huffington Post. From:  Middle East Summers Could Become Unlivable By End Of Century ; ; ;

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Middle East Summers Could Become Unlivable By End Of Century

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