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Dam it all: More than half of the world’s long rivers are blocked by infrastucture

by TristaChampion Posted on May 9, 2019

It hasn’t even been a week since the U.N. released a depressing report on biodiversity, and now, a new study in Nature shows that 63 percent of the world’s longest (at least 620 miles) rivers are impeded by human-built infrastructures such as dams and reservoirs. Dam(n).

Rivers are a key source of food and water for agriculture, energy, and humanity. They’re critical to many cultures and communities and home to a plethora of species like salmon and trout. They also bolster ecosystems by restoring groundwater and serve as a buffer against drought.

But with the increasing demand for more water, energy generation, and flood management, the construction of dams, levees, reservoirs, and other river-obstructive infrastructures is becoming ubiquitous.

“Free-flowing rivers are important for humans and the environment alike, yet economic development around the world is making them increasingly rare,” lead author Günther Grill of McGill University said in a statement. Here are a few gloomy statistics from the study.

  1. There are 60,000 large dams and more than 3,7000 hydropower dams currently planned or are under construction worldwide.
  2. The longest uninterrupted rivers are restricted to remote regions in the Arctic, the Amazon and Congo basins.
  3. The last two uninterrupted long rivers in Southeast Asia are critical sources of food for fisheries that provide over 1.2 million tonnes of catch each year.
  4. While Asia is flowing with dam installations, the Amazon, Balkans, China, and the Himalayas are facing a huge increase in hydropower construction. Other countries such as India, Brazil and China are also planning and building infrastructure that will harm rivers through dredging and building dams.

Rivers are vital to our ecosystems. But hydropower is a difficult balancing act in a planet where there’s a desperate need for more clean energy.

There’s one bit of good news. Carmel River in California is seeing a big recovery of fish populations after a centuries-old dam was removed. The demolition is considered the largest dam removal in California history. And four years later the dam went down, species such as trout and lampreys are rebounding and other tributaries are reviving.

“We don’t want to do the touchdown dance yet, but so far things are looking good,” Tommy Williams, a biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the Mercury News. “It’s just amazing how fast these systems come back. Everything is playing out like we thought.”

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Dam it all: More than half of the world’s long rivers are blocked by infrastucture

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

by TiffinyDarley Posted on April 25, 2019

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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Trump’s Immigration Order May Have A Very Different Effect Than He Intended

by ElissaZIXe Posted on January 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here’s a chunk of President Trump’s executive order banning refugees:

The Secretary of State shall suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days….Upon the resumption of USRAP admissions, the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality. Where necessary and appropriate, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security shall recommend legislation to the President that would assist with such prioritization.

In practice, the temporary suspension of the refugee program chiefly affects majority Muslim countries, which means that it’s designed to stop the flow of Muslim refugees into the US.

Or is it? I suspect that was indeed the intent, since the plight of Christian refugees has been a hobbyhorse on the right for years—something that Mike Pence is keenly aware of. But the actual data begs to differ. Here are the top ten countries that the United States accepted refugees from in 2016:

Syria gets all the attention, but the top refugee contributor was the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is 80 percent Christian. Among the top ten countries, we accepted about 44,000 refugees from majority Muslim countries and 43,000 from other countries.

Likewise, once the 120-day suspension is over the “minority religion” provision will affect both Christians and Muslims relatively equally. Favoring Christian refugees may well have been the intent of this provision, but in practice it doesn’t actually seem to favor any particular religion. This was not what I expected when I decided to take a look at the data. But that’s what it shows.

POSTSCRIPT: Just in case it’s not obvious, I’m talking here only about refugee prioritization after Trump’s 120-day ban is up. Trump has also barred the entry of anyone from seven Muslim-majority countries for the next 90 days, and barred Syrian refugees indefinitely. Those are different provisions of his order, and they pretty obviously target Muslims.

Also, we’ll have to wait and see what orders the State Department issues at the end of the 120-day suspension. Right now we don’t know what they’ll do.

UPDATE: I got the refugee numbers wrong in the original version of this post. Both the chart and the text have been corrected.

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Trump’s Immigration Order May Have A Very Different Effect Than He Intended

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For environmental activists, 2015 was the deadliest year yet

by BobbieWhinham Posted on June 20, 2016

Four protesters were killed last year in protests over the huge Las Bambas mine in Apurimac, Peru. Photo courtesy of Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros en el Perú.

For environmental activists, 2015 was the deadliest year yet

By on Jun 20, 2016 9:41 amShare

As we continue to mine the Earth for its resources, global corporate interests are fighting to get to the dwindling supply. And as the stakes rise, so has the death toll of our planet’s defenders.

Last year was the most dangerous year yet for environmental activists, the watchdog group Global Witness reported on Monday. An average of three environmentalists per week were murdered for resisting resource extraction and pollution by major agribusiness, mining, and logging interests — with 185 activists total murdered around the globe. (The murder rate was 59 percent lower in 2014.)

Of the 185 dead, many were assassinated; others were tortured, or publicly executed.

A number of Latin American countries were the most deadly for environmental defenders.

Global Witness uncovered that governments have increasingly criminalized activists for organizing or protesting, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Madagascar. “Across the world, collusion between state and corporate interests shield many of those responsible for the killings,” Global Witness reports.

The winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize is among the countless indigenous activists recently murdered. After having led her community to resist hydroelectric dams in Honduras, Berta Cáceres was assassinated in her home in March of this year. Her success made her a target: Once she forced the largest dam company in the world to abandon a major project on the Gualcarque River.

The report is all the more sobering given that the vast majority of incidents go unreported.

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For environmental activists, 2015 was the deadliest year yet

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"No Flag to March Behind": The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team

by RemonaAllen924 Posted on May 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Six nights a week, Popole Misenga travels by bus from a favela in the northern reaches of Rio de Janeiro to a private college on the city’s west side. The trip takes roughly two hours, and once he arrives—often beat from a day’s work loading trucks—he makes his way past the classrooms to the school’s small outdoor gym, where he slips on a heavy white judo robe, steps barefoot onto blue vinyl mats, and grapples with his workout partners until exhaustion sets in.

These days, Misenga is an Olympic-caliber athlete without a country. But before he was that, he was a member of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s national team, which came to Brazil back in August 2013 to compete in the judo world championships. Misenga had survived the DRC’s devastating civil war only to suffer under its abusive coaches, who he says would punish him and his teammates for losing practice matches by denying them food for days and even locking them in a closet. (The secretary-general of the DRC’s judo federation claims this never happened.)

When the team arrived in Rio that year, things took on a new level of crazy. The head coach promptly disappeared, Misenga says, taking with him the athletes’ passports, food vouchers, and uniforms. Misenga had to borrow a competitor’s robe for his first match, which he lost in three minutes. When the coach finally returned after a three-day bender, Misenga decided he was done with his country: He would stay in Brazil as a refugee. Wandering around Rio, he began stopping every dark-skinned passerby to ask, in French, “Do you know where the Africans live?”

Misenga’s decision kicked off a chain of events that would lead the 24-year-old judoka to the cusp of competing in this summer’s Olympics as part of an inaugural all-refugee team consisting of athletes from around the world. Last October, with the Syrian migrant crisis sweeping Europe, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach announced that, for the first time, refugee athletes “having no flag to march behind, having no national anthem to be played,” could compete in Rio 2016. The Olympic flag would be their banner.

Video by Fabio Erdos

All told, there are 43 athletes out of an estimated 20 million refugees worldwide who have been selected as potential members of Team Refugee Olympic Athletes. The IOC will announce the full team this week at its executive-board meeting; besides Misenga, the committee has publicly identified just two other contenders: taekwondo master Raheleh Asemani, an Iranian living in Belgium, and Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini, who lives in Germany and whose backstory is the stuff of one of those Bob Costas-narrated profiles. Last August, Mardini and her sister left Turkey on a packed boat with 18 other Syrian refugees. After the engine failed, the sisters jumped into the water and helped kick the craft three-plus hours to the Greek island of Lesbos. (Yolande Mabika, another Congolese judoka who stayed in Brazil, also hopes to make the refugee team.)

Misenga grew up during a particularly bloody time in the eastern DRC, the site of a conflict that’s been described as Africa’s world war. A rebel attack forced him to flee his home on foot as a young child, leaving his family behind. (He hasn’t seen them since.) He ended up in the capital, Kinshasa, sleeping on the street with other children before finding an orphanage. It was there, at age nine, that he was introduced to judo. The sport instantly drew him in. “People who like judo are calm,” he told me, “with respect for other people.”

We chatted in the university’s courtyard, steps away from where he trains under the guidance of 73-year-old Geraldo Bernardes, who’s been to four Olympics as coach of Brazil’s national team. The day I visited, Misenga was late to practice, and his worried coach made some calls to make sure he showed up. By the time Misenga arrived, at dusk, the training session was all but over. Bernardes lectured Misenga about not wasting his opportunity before quickly switching gears to discuss his Olympic weight class. (They decided on 198 pounds; Misenga’s stocky frame was most of the way there.)

Bernardes met Misenga through a nonprofit he’d started with Olympic medalist Flávio Canto to provide an outlet for inner-city kids. He’d seen the young judoka through a difficult transition: Early on, Misenga fought like his life depended on it, sometimes yanking his partners onto the concrete slab surrounding the mat. No wonder, Bernardes added, given the “subhuman” conditions Misenga faced back home.

While he has adapted to his training in Brazil, Misenga still struggles away from the mats—especially when it comes to money. Instituto Reação, Bernardes’ nonprofit, helps Misenga with some basics. He’s occasionally found work loading boxes onto trucks for about $11 a day, but Misenga and his Brazilian wife have four mouths to feed—a one-year-old son, plus her three kids from a previous relationship. It embarrasses him that she’s the breadwinner: “A big guy like me should be able to pay for the house.”

It doesn’t help that his friends in Brás de Pina—a favela home to Angolans, Moroccans, and some Congolese—say things like, “Do you really think they’ll let you compete? Give up this dream and get a real job.” But Misenga is holding out hope. Maybe the games will lead to a sponsorship, or at least income steady enough to pay for some new sneakers—he’s been running in a pair scavenged from the trash.

After an hour of talking, it was getting late, and Misenga’s broad shoulders were starting to slump. We walked out through the university’s gate and said our goodbyes at a nearby intersection. Misenga crossed the street and headed up a hill, off to find the first of his two buses home. He still had a long way to go.

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"No Flag to March Behind": The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team

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Here’s How Donald Trump Treats the Little People

by RamiroRestrepo9 Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s pretty common knowledge that Donald Trump lies routinely about his wealth and his businesses. He can get away with this because he runs a private company and isn’t required to open his books to the public.

But there was one period in his life when he ran a public company. Here’s the backstory: During the ’80s, Trump invested heavily in Atlantic City casinos. He ended up owning three of them, culminating in the Trump Taj Mahal, a billion-dollar monstrosity that was ill conceived and poorly run, hemorrhaging money from the day it opened. Trump had borrowed heavily during this period, guaranteeing many of the loans personally, and this was the last straw. His company was bankrupt.

He would have been personally bankrupt, too, but his creditors decided to put him on a leash and let him try to work his way out. He made steady progress, but the casinos continued to be a millstone around his neck. By the mid-’90s, however, the stock market was getting hot and lots of small investors, then as now, were mesmerized by the Trump name. So Trump decided that as long as there were lots of rubes who still thought he was a great businessman, he might as well take advantage of them. Timothy O’Brien tells the story in TrumpNation:

In a masterstroke of financial maneuvering, and in a tribute to the sucker-born-every-minute theorem, Trump managed to take two of the Trump casinos—the Plaza and the Taj Mahal—public in 1995 and 1996, at a time when Donald was unable to make his bank payments and was heading toward personal bankruptcy. The stock sales allowed Donald to buy the casinos back from the banks and unload huge amounts of debt. The offering yanked Donald out of the financial graveyard and left him with a 25 percent stake in a company he once owned entirely.

…In one fell swoop someone else became responsible for the debts that almost sank Donald…Exactly what investors thought they might get for their Trump Hotels investment wasn’t entirely clear. Donald had already demonstrated that casinos weren’t his forte, and investors were buying stock in a company that was immediately larded with debts that made it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade the operations.

…Allan Sloan, the financial writer who had opined with great accuracy on many things Trump, offered a fair warning to Trump Hotels’ investors: “Shareholders and bondholders have to be total fools ever to think that Donald Trump will put their interests ahead of his own.”…Donald spent several years proving Sloan correct.

…Just a few months after Trump Hotels absorbed the Taj, Donald sold his last Atlantic City casino, the Castle, to the public company. That is, Donald sold his own casino, with all of its heavy debts, to a public company he controlled. The $490 million price tag for the Castle was about $100 million more than analysts thought it was worth…sending the company’s stock into a nosedive from which it never recovered.

…Although Trump Hotels’ shares were sinking and there were no earnings to be seen, Donald paid himself $7 million for his handiwork at the company in 1996…Jerry Useem at Fortune took note in 2000 of Donald’s “disquieting” tendency to “use the casino company as his own personal piggy bank.” In addition to the multimillion-dollar bonuses Donald was lifting out of Trump Hotels, Useem pointed out that “the pilots of his personal 727 are on the casino company’s payroll” and that in 1998 Donald “had the already cash-strapped company lend him $26 million to pay off a personal loan.”

Trump’s fans were conned into buying up his debt-laden properties and turning them into a public company. Trump, who plainly had no interest in running a casino and had demonstrated no corporate management skills during the prior decade, paid himself millions of dollars from the company’s coffers for doing essentially nothing. He then unloaded his third casino onto the public company at an inflated price.

The public company didn’t show a profit during a single year of its existence. In 2004 the stock was delisted and the company forced into Chapter 11 reorganization. It was renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts, but with Trump still at the helm it continued to pile up losses and amassed debts of nearly $2 billion. In 2008, after missing a $53 million bond payment, it declared bankruptcy yet again and Trump resigned as the company’s chairman. Its investors lost all their money.

In case you’re curious, this is how Trump treats the little people. Some of the investors in his casinos were big guns who should have known better. But plenty of them were moms and pops who believed Trump when he insisted he was the greatest businessman the world had ever known. Trump didn’t care: He figured he could fleece them, and he did. That’s what happens to people who trust Donald Trump.

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Here’s How Donald Trump Treats the Little People

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Weekly Flint Water Report: March 4-11

by EdnaTomlinson Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week I posted a chart showing the average lead levels in Flint’s water since the beginning of the year. This is an easy chart to update, so I figure I’ll make it a weekly feature on Monday morning for a while. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. The average for the past week was 8.08. The average since mid-January is 10.07.

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Weekly Flint Water Report: March 4-11

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Republican Tax Plans Will Be Great for the Ri—zzzzz

by KirkWainwright Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Our good friends at the Tax Policy Center have now analyzed—if that’s the right word—the tax plans of Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio. You can get all the details at their site, but if you just want the bottom line, you’ve come to the right place.

The chart on the left shows who benefits the most from each tax plan. Unsurprisingly, they’re all about the same: middle income taxpayers would see their take-home pay go up 3 or 4 percent, while the rich would see it go up a whopping 10-17 percent. On the deficit side of things, everyone’s a budget buster. Rubio and Bush would pile up the red ink by $7 trillion or so (over ten years) while Trump would clock in at about $9 trillion. That compares to a current national debt of $14 trillion.

No one will care, of course, and no one will even bother questioning any of them about this. After all, we already know they’ll just declare that their tax cuts will supercharge the economy and pay for themselves. They can say it in their sleep. Then Trump will say something stupid, or Rubio will break his tooth on a Twix bar, and we’ll move on.

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Republican Tax Plans Will Be Great for the Ri—zzzzz

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The Russians Are Doing Surprisingly Well in Syria

by CarlotaShirk Posted on February 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the interest of keeping myself honest, I should acknowledge that—so far, at least—the Russian incursion in Syria has apparently gone a lot better than I expected:

Under the banner of fighting international terrorism, President Vladimir Putin has reversed the fortunes of forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad….Government forces are now on the offensive, and last week they scored their most significant victory yet….“The operation is considered here to be quite successful,” said Evgeny Buzhinsky, a retired lieutenant general and senior vice president of the Russian Center for Policy Studies in Moscow. It could probably continue for one year or longer, he said, “but it will depend on the success on the ground.”

….“Putin can afford to play geo­political chess in the Middle East because it does not cost much,” said Konstantin von Eggert, an independent political analyst based in Moscow. Entering the conflict in Syria has allowed Putin to combat what he sees as a U.S. policy of regime change, show off his military muscle and reassure allies in the region that Moscow is a loyal partner, von Eggert said.

In the past couple of days, thanks to Russian help, Assad has come ever closer to taking control of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city:

Gains by Assad and his allies in the past month have squeezed overland supply lines to Turkey that may represent the last bulwark against defeat for the rebels in northern Syria.

Assad, who was on the verge of defeat in mid-2015 before Russian President Vladimir Putin stepped in with military support, has wrested back the initiative. His army last week broke a three-year siege of two villages north of Aleppo. The city is almost encircled, apart from a narrow stretch of contested territory.

The Russian air force has acquitted itself better than I expected, and Assad’s forces have taken advantage of Russian air support better than I expected. It’s still early days, of course, and there’s a lot more to Syria than Aleppo. Russia could still find itself drawn into a long, pointless quagmire down the road. But it hasn’t yet.

Over the past decade, Putin has taken on several small-scale military incursions: in Georgia in 2008; in Crimea in 2014; and now in Syria. But small though they may be, they’ve been executed competently and they’ve provided the Russian army with invaluable real-world experience. Apparently that’s paid off.

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The Russians Are Doing Surprisingly Well in Syria

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Arabic Social Media Goes Gaga Over Sisi’s Red Carpet

by Beau47Tgqggfj Posted on February 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Nothing says “I care about poor people” like driving to a new housing project on a red carpet 2.5 miles long. Amirite? But this has a secret subtext: When Egyptian president Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi motored his way to a grand opening ceremony Saturday on a carpet this size, it was apparently a sign that the military is pleased with him. I guess the more they like you, the longer the carpet:

Brig Gen Ehab el-Ahwagy explained on several talk shows on Sunday night that the carpet was not purchased by Sisi’s administration and the same one had been used for more than three years for similar occasions.

“It gives a kind of joy and assurance to the Egyptian citizen that our people and our land and our armed forces are always capable of organising anything in a proper manner,” Ahwagy told the TV talk show host Amr Adeeb. “It is laid out in a way to beautify the general area, so it gives a good impression of the celebration that is being broadcast to the whole world.”

See? No big deal. And certainly no reason to postpone a speech warning that Egypt is in dire financial trouble and will soon have to stop subsidizing water and electricity bills for low-income families.

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Arabic Social Media Goes Gaga Over Sisi’s Red Carpet

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