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Republican lawmakers’ familiar blame game hangs COVID’s spread on young people

by TNYSidney742 Posted on July 2, 2020

Taking no responsibility for coronavirus infections raging to new records amid the rash reopenings of businesses, beaches and bars, the White House and governors are now playing the role of Aristotle: They blame the young for bringing us down.

Leading this ancient lament on excessive juvenile gratification is Vice President Mike Pence. Over the last week, as infections rose in 38 states and Puerto Rico, according to tracking by the New York Times, Pence admonished Americans under 35, saying they bear “particular responsibility” to not infect their elders. He urged them to wear masks to blunt the spread of the virus. On CBS’s Face the Nation, he wagged his finger at partying younger adults, saying they may “have disregarded the guidance that we gave.”

It is impossible to regard Pence as the nation’s nanny when he and President Trump have actually offered little guidance during the worst pandemic in modern medical history. Despite 126,000 Americans being dead, Trump rarely wears a mask. Rather, he has speculated on efficacy of ingesting disinfectant, promoted off-label use of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine — which the National Institutes of Health says confers no benefit — and went the last half of May without speaking with his infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci. The president’s March prediction of 50,000 deaths will likely be tripled in a month and may soar beyond 175,000 fatalities by October.

Both Pence and Trump are back at rallies and appearances where supporters and choirs shout and sing unencumbered by masks. There was no scolding by the administration of 20-somethings at Trump’s recent young conservative voter rally in Phoenix where masks were roughly as evident as Black Lives Matter t-shirts.

Following suit in viral hypocrisy are Trump-supporting governors who have overseen some of the nation’s most disastrous reopenings. Take Florida, which according to public health experts, has had a more than 200 percent spike in cases in its rolling 14-day average. The state saw 9,585 new coronavirus cases on June 27, seven-and-a-half times more than the previous high during April and May. Governor Ron DeSantis blamed younger adults for creating cramped conditions in bars – that, mind you, he reopened — where “caution was thrown to the wind.”

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott blames 20-somethings for that state’s nearly 140 percent rise in its rolling 14-day average of cases. That includes a new record of high of 6,584 infections on June 24, more than triple the single-day record during April and May. Abbott complained that young adults are “not wearing face masks, they’re not sanitizing their hands, they’re not maintaining the safe distancing practices.” (This is quite the umbrage from a governor who banned municipalities from issuing mandatory mask orders with penalties, and only just now is looking the other way as localities are implementing them anyway in a desperate bid to fight the virus.)

To be clear, the frolicking of the young is being noticed in Democratic strongholds where the virus is ablaze, but they are not being assigned complete blame. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom is also blaming playdates, birthday parties, and adult family gatherings. Such events invariably are organized by parents and older adults.

As for the White House, DeSantis, and Abbott, even Aristotle might shake his head over a septuagenarian president who is burying science wherever he can, a sexagenarian vice president who was slow to address HIV/AIDS as governor of Indiana, and a host of lapdog governors past the age of 40 telling us to behave as they reopened unsafely, without a sustained decline in cases and without robust testing and contact tracing in place. National Public Radio and Harvard’s Global Health Institute reported Tuesday that only four states are doing enough testing to suppress the virus. DeSantis, Abbott, and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp are among the COVID hotspot governors who have been accused of cherry-picking, manipulating, or ignoring data to justify reopening.

Their own poor behavior on COVID-19 is a logical outcome of their general disregard for science, public health, and the environment. DeSantis this winter received a D from the Florida chapter of the Sierra Club for his performance on environmental protection. Abbott runs a state where environmental spending was cut 35 percent between 2008 and 2018. The governor’s blaming of the young is the latest volley in a generational battle, where baby boomers and older Gen Xers create a hot mess and then place an undue burden on younger people to save humanity.

That is literal with climate change and the planet frying up. Witness the sharp rise in youth climate activism over the past several years, where 20-somethings and teens — like Greta Thunberg and the members of the Sunrise Movement — have pointed their fingers at the older generation for dragging its feet on climate change. Instead of being moved by the pleas of the young, Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have belittled them, specifically Thunberg. Our supposed leaders, instead of mandating or modeling the behaviors needed to stem a crisis, are passing the buck to younger people even as their cowardice robs our youth of weddings, proms, and graduations.

Worse, it appears that game of relying on the young has infected more than the older fogies who told us to get back to work, get back in the barber’s chair, roll one down the bowling alley, and eat, drink and be merry. Administration officials who still have some credibility at coronavirus task force briefings or congressional hearings are joining the chorus.

Fauci and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield recently singled out people under 40 as having a societal responsibility not to spread the virus. After saying last week that the coronavirus has “brought this nation to its knees,” Redfield on Tuesday told a Senate hearing: “It is critical that we all take the personal responsibility to slow the transmission of Covid-19 and embrace the universal use of face coverings. Specifically, I’m addressing the younger members of our society, the Millennials and the Generation Zs — I ask those that are listening to spread the word.”

As necessary as it is for all of us to take personal responsibility on COVID-19, it is scary to see Fauci and Redfield creep down the same road as Pence and the red-state governors. Surely they know in their hearts who told America that the water was fine and firewater could flow again. If health officials are going to tell us that the young are silent time bombs for the virus, they also have to tell us who lit the fuse. It was not the 20-somethings.

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Republican lawmakers’ familiar blame game hangs COVID’s spread on young people

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The Mountains of Saint Francis: Discovering the Geologic Events That Shaped Our Earth – Walter Alvarez

by Myrna Posted on June 12, 2020

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The Mountains of Saint Francis: Discovering the Geologic Events That Shaped Our Earth

Walter Alvarez

Genre: Geology

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: December 17, 2008

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


One of the world's leading geologists takes readers into Italy's Apennine Mountain Range—the Mountains of Saint Francis—on a journey to discover the fascinating secrets of the Earth's deep history. Modern geologists, Walter Alvarez among them, showed in the last decades of the twentieth century that the history of our planet has witnessed events profoundly more dramatic than even the most spectacular chapters in human history. More violent than wars, more life altering than revolutions—understanding the geologic events that have shaped the Earth's surface is the quest and the passion of geologists. In the knowledgeable and graceful prose of Alvarez, general readers are led to explore the many mysteries that our planet guards. The author has chosen Italy as a microcosm in which to explore this amazing past for several reasons. First, it is the land where the earliest geologists learned how to read the history of the Earth, written in nature’s rock archives. Second, it is where Alvarez and his Italian geological friends have continued to decipher the rock record, uncovering more historical episodes from the Earth’s past. And third, the lovely land of Italy is unusually rich in geological treasures and offers examples of the key processes that have created the landscapes of the entire world. The Mountains of Saint Francis begins in Rome. We discover that the landscape of Rome was built by violent volcanic eruptions in the very recent past, almost certainly witnessed by our human ancestors. Next we travel to Siena and come face to face with a fundamental discovery of the geologists—that much of the dry land that we currently inhabit was once underwater, beneath ancient seas or oceans. Then we stop in the small medieval city of Gubbio and contemplate the amazing secret that the limestone rocks kept hidden for 65 million years—that a huge asteroid smashed into the Earth, disrupting the environment so severely that the dinosaurs, and perhaps half of the other forms of life inhabiting the Earth at the time, disappeared forever, opening the way for the rise of the mammals and eventually of humans. The impact theory that came from those Italian limestones at Gubbio was one of the great geological discoveries of the twentieth century. Just as important to the field of geology was the theory of plate tectonics—the understanding that the outer layer of the Earth is divided into crustal plates that move around, sometimes carrying continents into collisions with one another, like the great collision between Italy and Europe that built the Alps. And yet, to explain the Mountains of Saint Francis requires something more than a collision between continents. These are mountains that are still jealously guarding the secret of their past, and in this book we go along with the geological detectives as they try to uncover that secret. It is a journey that has seen the land of Italy lifted out of the sea, squashed and folded, torn apart, left high and dry when the Mediterranean Sea evaporated away, and then flooded when the Atlantic waters poured back in. The story of the Earth's history is fascinating in its own right, but with Alvarez as the tour guide, the journey takes on a human dimension, full of stories about the landscape and history of Italy and about the great geologists who uncovered the deep past of this land. It is a journey recounted in warm tones and subtle colors, reflecting the transcendent beauty of Italy itself.

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The Mountains of Saint Francis: Discovering the Geologic Events That Shaped Our Earth – Walter Alvarez

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Why climate skeptics are less likely to wear coronavirus masks

by DakotaMacDonnel Posted on April 30, 2020

There are many ways in which the coronavirus pandemic intersects with climate change — so many that Grist launched a whole newsletter about them. This week, the pollsters at Morning Consult unveiled another link between the two issues: Concern about climate change correlates with the way people are responding to the virus.

The poll, conducted online between April 14 and 16 on a national sample of 2,200 adults, found that people who said that they are not concerned about rising temperatures are less likely than the general public to take steps to prevent the spread of COVID-19. (The poll was weighted for age, educational attainment, gender, race, and region and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.)

Forty-four percent of all the adults surveyed said they “always” wear a mask to grocery stores, public parks, and other public places. Fifty-four percent of folks who said they’re concerned about climate change said they always wear masks, but just 30 percent of people who are unconcerned about climate change said they always wear masks in public places. That’s a 24-point difference.

The survey defined climate-concerned adults as people who said they’re worried about climate change and agree that it’s driven by human activity. Climate-unconcerned respondents were those who said they were “not too concerned” or “not concerned at all” about climate change. (Must be nice!)

The disparity between climate hawks and climate skeptics was also evident in responses to other survey questions about disinfecting and social distancing, albeit on a smaller scale. The researchers said that the relatively small gap between climate concerned and unconcerned adults on the question of social distancing — a modest 8 percent — could be due to the fact that local, state, and federal officials started getting out the message about distancing earlier and were clearer about it than they were about disinfecting surfaces and wearing masks. (The CDC only advised Americans to start wearing masks in public in early April.)

Morning Consult cites experts who say there could be two reasons why people who aren’t concerned about climate are less likely to take steps to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic. A general skepticism of science and scientists is one of them. Previous polling has shown a partisan disparity in the way people regard scientists, primarily environmental scientists. In a 2019 poll, 43 percent of Democrats had “a great deal” of confidence in scientists, compared to 27 percent of Republicans. Much of conservatives’ mistrust of science is the result of a long, deliberate disinformation campaign from fossil fuel companies. Now, many of the same conservative pundits and leaders (including the president) who have sown doubt about climate change are also spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.

Concerns about personal autonomy can also help explain the divide in the poll, Emma Frances Bloomfield, an assistant professor in communication studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told Morning Consult. “Everything that science asks us to do is really sacrificing personal convenience for community convenience and well-being,” Bloomfield said. “And for a lot of people, the coronavirus is invisible, just like climate change is invisible.”

The pandemic has asked a lot of Americans. The climate crisis will surely ask more of us. The question, as we get deeper into the pandemic and more Americans are affected or know someone who has been touched by COVID-19, is whether authority-averse and science-skeptical adults will start drawing connections between their personal choices and scientist’s warnings, or if the pandemic will force everyone deeper into their ideological foxholes.

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Why climate skeptics are less likely to wear coronavirus masks

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What does Joe Biden have to do to win over the climate movement?

by JuanaBostic Posted on April 21, 2020

This story has been updated.

If Joe Biden had released his $1.7 trillion climate plan in a vacuum last year, the proposal would have been hailed as the most ambitious climate platform introduced by a presidential candidate in United States history. The 22-page plan aims to zero out emissions by 2050, protect disadvantaged communities from pollution, and create 10 million new jobs to boot.

Unfortunately for the former vice president, his proposal paled in comparison to plans from a number of his primary challengers that were three, five, and even 10 times as expensive. Bernie Sanders, for example, put out a $16 trillion climate plan called the Green New Deal that had the elderly pied piper of the progressive left collecting endorsements from climate groups like a Vermonter picking blueberries in July.

Whether progressives like it or not, Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. And on Monday, he snagged his first environmental endorsement from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), a powerful environmental group that helps elect climate hawks to office and scores members of the House and Senate based on how they vote on environment and climate bills.

“We are confident that as president, Biden will immediately put our country on track for a 100 percent clean energy economy with policies centered in justice and equity that restore America’s global climate leadership,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs for LCV Action Fund, the political arm of the group, said in a statement.

Given that the choice in the general election comes down to Donald Trump, who has left no stone unturned in his effort to roll back environmental protections, and Biden, who has an 83 percent lifetime score for his environmental voting record from LCV, it’s not surprising that the group decided to endorse the former senator from Delaware.

What is surprising, and what might be welcome news to voters for whom climate change is a top priority, is that Biden plans to expand his climate platform. In his own statement in response to the LCV’s announcement, the former vice president said he was “honored” to receive the endorsement and indicated that there’s more to come. “In the months ahead, expanding this plan will be one of my key objectives,” he said, adding that he knows the issue “resonates” with young voters.

Biden’s statement said he aims to “campaign on climate change and win on climate change,” which isn’t a bad plan if he’s looking to convince a wider swath of Democratic voters — and maybe even pick up a Republican or two. In poll after poll after poll, climate change and health care are the top two issues for Democrats this election cycle. And the issue is no longer relegated to one side of the political aisle. Polls also show that young Republicans may care as much about the warming planet as their blue counterparts.

By his own admission, Biden has a lot of work to do to earn the progressive movement’s vote. Many local chapters of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate group that backed Bernie Sanders in the primary and has emerged as a powerful force in the activist landscape, have said they aren’t endorsing Biden. But that could change if the candidate steps up his climate game.

“We’ve tried to be super clear about the way that we need them to improve on not only their climate policy but their immigration, criminal justice, and financial regulation policies,” Varshini Prakash, Sunrise co-founder and executive director, told Vice News, referring to the Biden campaign. “We’ll see if that conversation translates into policy changes.” In an interview on the New York Times’ The Daily podcast, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat from New York who is one of the architects of the Green New Deal, expressed a similar sentiment and said she was waiting to fully endorse him.

Will Biden be able to win over diehard Sanders supporters? Probably not. Biden’s campaign is premised on returning to a time of relative normalcy, not turning the economic system on its head. But if he does scale up his climate plan, he might be able to rack up a few more endorsements from environmental heavyweights.

Update: On Tuesday, a group of more than 50 scientists and climate experts wrote an open letter endorsing Biden for president. “We are confident that, unlike President Trump, Joe Biden will respect, collaborate with, and listen to leaders in the scientific community and public health experts to confront the existential climate crisis and other environmental threats,” the letter said. Prominent climate scientists Michael Mann and Jane Lubchenco (formerly head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under President Obama) are among the letter’s signatories.

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What does Joe Biden have to do to win over the climate movement?

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Here are the top ways the world could take on climate change in 2020

by BernieSeidel Posted on March 19, 2020

The climate think tank Project Drawdown first took on the question “what’s really the best way to stop climate change” in 2017 — and came up with a hundred answers, from cutting food waste to implementing alternative refrigerants. Now, Project Drawdown has updated its original list to incorporate the latest findings.

The name references the day when humanity switches from emitting carbon dioxide to storing it and begins drawing down the carbon we’ve dumped into the atmosphere. The team compiled its recommendations, which were first published as a bestselling coffee table book, based on rigorous scientific analysis of the costs and carbon savings of every solution available at scale today.

Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist and the executive director of Project Drawdown, chatted with us about the changes — and explained why we don’t need technological breakthroughs or political miracles to bring the world to net-zero carbon emissions. Our interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. To start off, can you tell me a little bit about what stayed the same? 

A. The top-line message remains the same essentially, which is that with solutions that exist now — not ones that are in the lab, not ones that are just science fiction or wishful thinking — but with solutions that actually exist today, we can stabilize our climate at 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees C. It wouldn’t be easy. It requires a lot of political will, a lot of leadership, and a lot of mobilization. But it’s all stuff that exists right now. That’s pretty amazing.

The other thing that stayed the same was the message that we have to do a lot of different things to get there. There are no silver bullets when it comes to climate change. We may have silver buckshot, but that’s about it.

Q. And what have been the most substantial changes to the recommendations from the original Project Drawdown?

A. The numbers are actually pretty different, especially on the cost. Things got cheaper and with better returns on investments compared to the original analysis. And a lot of that is because things have gotten cheaper in renewables in the last few years. So I think we’re seeing a stronger economic case for climate solutions every year.

A lot of people remember the rankings of solutions from the first book, and we did provide new rankings in this one. We presented two sets of rankings — one for a scenario that gets us 2 degrees C and one for a scenario that could get us to 1.5 degrees C.

I think the message is that we still have to do all of these solutions. It doesn’t matter to me much that a solution was ranked No. 3 and that it’s now No. 6. The same kinds of things still appear near the top: The food system, like food waste and diets, is up there are pretty high, and things like refrigerants, which people kind of forget about — these potent greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons. And of course, sprinkled throughout all the rankings are items that address the fossil fuel problem from many different angles. Whether it’s energy efficiency or renewable electricity or different ways of transportation, fossil fuels are found everywhere on that list from top to bottom.

Q. Even though the Project Drawdown guide is backed by a lot of rigorous science, it isn’t meant for scientists or policymakers — it’s for regular people. How do you accurately and succinctly explain issues that often have a lot of complex science behind them to the general public?

A. Usually when somebody does a study, the first thing they do is write it up for a scientific journal or a white paper, where it’s written basically in almost incomprehensible language, for maybe a hundred people in the world who could read it. Then later they’ll say, “OK, now we’re going to make the more public version of this.”

We’re flipping the model. People find it inspiring that there are solutions to climate change, and that when you do the math, they seem to work. So we systematically go through all the different solutions, and use the same technique to look at them — we’re comparing an apple to an apple to an apple when we compare our forestry solutions to a nuclear energy solution to a different type of car, and that’s what had never been done before. I think universities are very good at what they do, and we need the real in-depth experts on every single one of those solutions. But we’re not a university. None of us are working on getting tenure.

Q. It seems extremely likely that in November, we’re either going to have either a President Trump, a President Biden, or a President Sanders for the next four years. Which of the Drawdown solutions are you the most hopeful about regardless of the election outcome, and which ones do you think require more political willpower to make happen?

A. We have to remember that this is a 30-year effort we’re talking about. One four-year term can make a big difference, but it’s not game over, regardless of who wins in November. The world will not be fried if Trump gets reelected. It just won’t help much. And the world will not be saved if Bernie wins with the Green New Deal. So I don’t really think it’s wise to clip all our hopes on one election outcome — or all our fears.

There are so many levers of power to pull: at the local level, states, banks, Wall Street, businesses, our own behavior and communities. This is an international problem, from our neighborhoods to the international markets.

What we need now is time. Saying, “That’s who’s going to save us: the U.S. House of Representatives, or the U.S. federal government, or the United Nations,” is how we managed to waste the last three decades. I think we need to start leading elsewhere and hope that Washington and the U.N. will follow.

Q. Coronavirus is something that’s changing a lot of personal behaviors right now. Do you think there’s a potential for a ripple effect after the pandemic crisis is resolved that might shift around things on the list for dealing with the climate crisis?

A. Recessions suck for everybody. No one in the environmental community should be celebrating this virus — this is a tragedy and there’s no other way to say it. But it does, at least in the short run, mean a drop in emissions. And hopefully, there’ll be some lasting lessons from this. Hey, there are other ways to do things besides flying all the time and driving all the time. Working from home and telecommuting might be really viable options now, so let’s learn how to do those really well. That might help reduce some of the emissions long term after this crisis if people stick to those habits a bit more.

People also learn how to be more resilient as a society to these kinds of shocks. Whether it’s a virus next time, or a big storm, or a hurricane, or fires, people are going to be a little bit better on the resiliency side of the equation. If there is any silver lining about this incredibly dark cloud, that might be it.

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Here are the top ways the world could take on climate change in 2020

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The plan to protect the Chesapeake is failing, and it’s Pennsylvania’s fault

by DongTrouette Posted on January 21, 2020

In early January, members of the Chesapeake Bay Commission sat in a gray conference room in Annapolis, Maryland, for a routine meeting. The 21-member legislative body, with representatives from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, convenes regularly to coordinate interstate efforts to restore and protect the Chesapeake Bay. But as the meeting drew to a close, EPA Chesapeake Bay Program director Dana Aunkst got up and delivered a demoralizing message to the group.

“The TMDL itself is not enforceable,” he said. He was referring to the Total Maximum Daily Load, a set of science-based limits for three pollutants — nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment — flowing into the bay. The states in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed have agreed to achieve the TMDL by 2025, and the EPA committed to enforcing it under the terms of a 2010 settlement. But Aunkst went on to describe the TMDL as merely “an informational document” that was “aspirational.”

Aunkst’s comments were jarring to some in the room, but they weren’t entirely out of left field. Pennsylvania, by far the largest source of pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, has failed to meet its pollution reduction benchmarks for years, with little response from the EPA. This single state’s negligence threatens the success of the entire regional program.

The Chesapeake is the largest estuary in the United States, a nationally significant economic resource, and a crucial habitat for thousands of species. But the influx of pollution from upstream sources has led to fishery declines, recurring “dead zones” where pollutants starve aquatic animals of oxygen, and regular algae blooms that suffocate underwater plant life. Even after nearly 10 years of strategic planning and implementation of these pollution reduction plans by neighboring states, its overall health is still poor.

And Pennsylvania seems increasingly to blame. In August of last year, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection released its third and final Watershed Implementation Plan, or WIP. The plan admitted that PA was only about 30 percent closer to achieving its target for nitrogen pollution than it had been in the 1980s. Not only was the Keystone State entering the final phase of the cleanup far behind where it should have been, but the state’s plan for phase three still had it falling 25 percent short of the 2025 target. That underwhelming plan also had a funding deficit of about $324 million per year. In December, the EPA signed off on the plan with no indication of imposing consequences.

According to Harry Campbell, the Pennsylvania executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit that works closely with watershed states on the cleanup effort, there are a few reasons the state is having such a hard time making progress.

Of all the sources of pollution going into the watershed, Pennsylvania has already tackled the lowest-hanging fruit — wastewater treatment plants. In fact, the state met its 2017 pollution reduction goals for wastewater treatment plants three years early. But the vast majority of PA’s contribution doesn’t come from these easy “point source” targets, it comes from “non-point sources,” like stormwater from the thousands of municipalities in the watershed, and runoff from 33,000 small farms.

About 80 percent of the nitrogen Pennsylvania needs to tackle comes from those farms. And convincing 33,000 farmers — who are already operating on razor-thin profit margins because of trade wars and a poor farm economy — to shoulder new conservation practices is a time- and labor-intensive process. “You have to work with individual farmers, meet them at their table, oftentimes provide the technical and financial assistance necessary to actually design and implement those practices,” said Campbell.

Part of the problem was also the planning process the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection employed for its earlier WIPs, which was not very inclusive of the various communities and entities whose buy-in was necessary for success. But according to Campbell, a lack of funding and leadership from the legislature have also plagued the state’s performance. “If the legislature and the administration invested in implementation of those plans, we’d be in a far better place than we are right now,” Campbell said.

When it came time to draw up the WIP for phase three of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup, the state finally made an effort to start from a more grassroots level. It created workgroups for each sector that included farmers and county commissioners. But Campbell, who was on the Local Area Goals Workgroup, said that even though the process was improved, the funding gap hung over the proceedings. “We just see it every day — whether it be the local county conservation districts or the partners on the ground, like watershed groups and land trusts — this persistent and consistent scarcity-like mentality, that we just don’t have enough to get the job done,” he said. “And so everyone was able to sense it, feel it, or otherwise acknowledge it.”

The governor of Pennsylvania, Democrat Tom Wolf, has proposed a tax on natural gas extraction in the state to raise money for infrastructure projects for five years straight. His latest proposal, the Restore Pennsylvania Plan, would raise $4.5 billion and fund many of the water pollution reduction strategies written into the WIP. But the tax is unlikely to make it through the Republican-controlled legislature.

Over the years, the EPA has penalized Pennsylvania for its lack of progress in small ways. It has objected to permits for wastewater treatment plant expansions, temporarily withheld funding, and most recently, redirected funding in order for it be used more efficiently. But those consequences have not been enough to get the attention of elected officials who continue to devalue the program, putting the entire cleanup effort at risk, said Campbell.

One of Pennsylvania’s neighbors has had enough. Following Aunkst’s comments at the meeting, the Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, who’s administration has spent a record $5 billion on Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts, directed his attorney general to sue both Pennsylvania and the EPA. But it’s unclear whether EPA can be held liable for not enforcing the TMDL in Pennsylvania.

In response to the lawsuit, Governor Wolf’s office suggested that Hogan’s time would be better spent using his sway as a Republican to help Wolf secure more funding for the program. “Instead of protracted litigation that will take resources away from our efforts to improve water quality in the watershed and undermine the partnership that has helped make progress, Governor Hogan and the foundation’s time would be better spent convincing Republicans that control the legislature in Pennsylvania to support Governor Wolf’s plan,” said J.J. Abbott, a spokesperson for Wolf.

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The plan to protect the Chesapeake is failing, and it’s Pennsylvania’s fault

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It’s not just Australia — Indonesia is facing its own climate disaster

by sandrathomason5 Posted on January 8, 2020

It’s not just Australia that’s having a rough start to the new year. Indonesia’s sinking capital of Jakarta and the surrounding areas have been inundated with rain, triggering landslides and floods that have killed dozens of people.

As of Tuesday, the torrential downpours have left at least 67 people dead as rising waters deluged more than 180 neighborhoods and landslides buried at least a dozen Indonesians. Search missions for survivors are still ongoing, and officials say the death toll is expected to rise as more bodies are found.

Indonesia’s national meteorological agency said the rainfall on New Year’s Day was the heaviest downpour in a 24-hour period since Dutch colonists began record-keeping in the 1860s. Although floodwaters are starting to subside, the Indonesian Red Cross Society warned people to expect more severe rainfall in the coming days.

Dasril Roszandi / NurPhoto via Getty Images

The communities most vulnerable to flooding are those in poor neighborhoods — especially slums located near wastewater, which can spread pathogens when combined with flooding. More than 1,000 soldiers and health workers were dispatched to use disinfectant sprays in these areas on Sunday to prevent the spread of disease.

Jakarta, which is home to about 10 million people, is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels and extreme weather. It also has dangerous levels of air pollution and the largest uncovered landfill in Southeast Asia. On top of that, the city’s rapidly growing population has faced major water shortages in recent years due to a dearth of groundwater. Meanwhile, rivers are polluted with garbage, and researchers say that at least 20 tons of trash are dumped in the Jakarta Bay each day.

Donal Husni / NurPhoto via Getty Images

The city is sinking as quickly as 9 inches a year in some neighborhoods, and about half of it is already below sea level. The country is also the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, mostly due to the country’s deforestation habit. And if Indonesia and the rest of the world don’t take measures to slash emissions drastically, researchers say that 95 percent of northern Jakarta will be submerged by 2050.

The country has pledged to cut its carbon emissions by 29 percent by 2030 as part of the Paris Agreement, but the government is still set to rely on coal to generate electricity for the next decade. And a recent survey from YouGov and the University of Cambridge revealed that a whopping 18 percent of Indonesians believe there’s zero link between human activity and the climate crisis.

Ed Wray / Getty Images

Last summer, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced that the capital city will be relocated to the island of Borneo, hundreds of miles northeast of Jakarta, by 2023. But don’t assume that amounts to an acknowledgement of the climate crisis.

“I don’t think the climate is necessarily the reason for the Indonesian government to move the capital,” Rukka Sombolinggi, an indigenous leader from the Toraja ethnic group, said during a press conference at the United Nations General Assembly last year. “It’s simply because the capital is just so overwhelmed and crowded with people, making the traffic and the quality of air and water terribly alarming.”

The irony is that Indonesia also holds one of the most effective tools to fight against climate change: mangroves. These tall trees growing in coastal waters can remove and store carbon humans have emitted into the atmosphere. But instead of protecting and expanding mangrove ecosystems, the government has continued to allow corporations to slash and burn mangroves for palm oil production, thus producing more carbon emissions.

And even in the wake of devastating floods, the Indonesian government plans to stay the course. Two government ministers told Reuters this week that they have no plans to change their climate policy after the New Year’s flooding. But the head of the country’s meteorological agency minced no words about the impact of climate change on the floods’ severity. “The impact of a 1-degree increase can be severe,” Dwikorita Karnawati told reporters on Friday. “Among that is these floods.”

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It’s not just Australia — Indonesia is facing its own climate disaster

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New study pinpoints the places most at risk on a warming planet

by alenabalderas2 Posted on October 17, 2019

As many as five billion people will face hunger and a lack of clean water by 2050 as the warming climate disrupts pollination, freshwater, and coastal habitats, according to new research published last week in Science. People living in South Asia and Africa will bear the worst of it.

Climate activists have been telling us for a while now that global warming isn’t just about the polar bears, so it’s hardly breaking news that humans are going to suffer because nature is suffering. But what is new about this model is the degree of geographic specificity. It pinpoints the places where projected environmental losses overlap with human populations who depend on those resources and maps them with a nifty interactive viewer.

This model identifies not just the general ways climate change harms the environment and how people will feel those changes, but also where these changes will likely occur, and how significant they’ll be. It’s an unprecedented degree of detail for a global biodiversity model.

Patricia Balvanera, a professor of biodiversity at National University of Mexico who wasn’t involved in the study, said the new model “provides an extremely important tool to inform policy decisions and shape responses.”

The model looks at three specific natural systems that humans benefit from: pollination (which enables crops to grow), freshwater systems (which provide drinking water), and coastal ecosystems (which provide a buffer from storm surges and prevent erosion). Using fine-scale satellite imagery, the team of scientists mapped predicted losses to these natural systems onto human population maps. The resulting map allows you to see how many people could be impacted by environmental changes, and where.

“We were specifically trying to look at how nature is changing in delivering [a] benefit, and then where it overlaps with people’s needs,” said Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, the lead scientist at the Natural Capital Project, a Stanford University-based research group that produced the study.

To understand why the Natural Capital Project’s model is groundbreaking, you need to understand a little bit about past attempts to gauge how the environmental effects of climate change will impact people. It’s a pretty hard thing to do — natural processes are interconnected systems, and many of the ways that humans benefit from these natural processes (what scientists call “ecosystem services” or “nature’s contributions to humanity”) aren’t obvious.

“The real challenge, with nature’s contributions to people, is that it benefits us in so many ways that it’s sort of mind-boggling,” Chaplin-Kramer said. “It’s just so abstract that it tends to be disregarded.”

The Natural Capital Project’s model was initially intended to support the massive U.N. biodiversity report released this spring. That report coalesced 15,000 scientific studies into the most comprehensive survey ever done of how climate change threatens global biodiversity — science-speak for “every living thing.” Even if you didn’t read the whole thing, you probably saw headlines like “One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns.” The IPBES report included a 200-odd page chapter that laid out how all the different things we could see happen to nature will affect people — depending on how humanity reacts in the next few decades to the climate crisis.

But the IPBES report bumped up against one of the biggest challenges when it comes to quantifying nature’s contributions to humankind: Most occur on a local scale. “Spatial context really matters,” said Chaplin-Kramer. “It’s not just the total amount of nature we have, but where we have it, and if it’s in the place where it can deliver the most benefits to people.”

Bee pollinator habitats, for example, only provide benefits to people if they’re within a few miles of the farms that grow our food. Plants that filter nitrogen out of a stream are only “useful” for humans if they’re downstream of the pollution source and upstream of the population. So while the IPBES was able to offer lots of predictions about the aggregate consequences of biodiversity loss — e.g., food supplies will suffer as we lose habitats for bees — they weren’t able to say specifically where they’d occur.

The new model does more than illustrate a problem with great detail — the framework behind it also has the potential to be a powerful tool for avoiding the worst effects of climate change. It could help people prepare for the catastrophes it forecasts.

Unai Pascual, a lead author of the IPBES report and co-author of the Science article, sees this model as taking the IPBES report’s findings a step further, translating a conceptual framework “into something that really can be applied.”

Scientists and non-scientists alike are interested in understanding how to maximize the benefits provided by nature. Just this week a study published in Science Advances found that biologically diverse fields yielded more crops than farms practicing monoculture. Iowan farmers are finding that planting strips of land that mimic native prairies has a range of benefits. In China, a national “Ecological Redline Policy” takes ecosystem services into account in zoning decisions.

These sorts of programs will be more necessary as climate change continues to threaten ecosystems around the world, and policymakers and businesses are increasingly looking to scientists for information about how to protect the natural resources humans need most.

Chaplin-Kramer’s team is working with the World Bank to develop a “Natural Capital” index so that countries can track the condition of their natural resources. They’re also working on an optimization framework to figure out which interventions will have the greatest impact. That will help policymakers use this information to implement conservation policies in the places where, as Chaplin-Kramer put it, “you can get the most bang for your buck.”

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New study pinpoints the places most at risk on a warming planet

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22 states sue the Trump administration over its climate ‘plan’

by LoriMajeski Posted on August 13, 2019

Twenty-two states and seven cities sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over the Environmental Protection Agency’s new plan for power plants. The lawsuit alleges that the so-called Affordable Clean Energy rule would accelerate the impacts of the climate crisis and impose health and safety risks on Americans.

The challenge — led by the states of New York, Massachusetts, California, Rhode Island, Hawaii, and the cities of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia — comes two months after the EPA finalized the plan. The new rule replaced the Obama-era Clean Power Plan that set ambitious goals aimed at weakening carbon emissions coming from power plants. It gives a bit more elbow room to coal-powered stations and allows older ones to stay open longer.

“The science is indisputable; our climate is changing,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a tweet. “Ice caps are melting. Sea levels are rising. Weather is becoming more and more extreme. That’s why we are fighting back.”

A recent Harvard study shows that the EPA’s estimated carbon reductions from power plants under the new rule (which are pretty minor) wouldn’t hold up under changing market conditions. In addition, researchers say that the agency underestimated the health effects the rule would have in some states and overestimated its overall economic benefits.

Not that the EPA’s own projections looked pretty. The administration’s analysis found that the ACE rule, compared to the Clean Power Plan, would lead to 1,400 premature deaths by 2030 and would cost Americans $1.4 billion more per year than it saved.

Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. increased by roughly 3.5 percent last year. The Harvard analysis suggests that Trump’s new rule could drive emissions even higher by failing to nail down target reductions. Meanwhile, it may result in more cases of respiratory illness, heart attacks, asthma, and early death due to exposure to particulate matter and toxic air pollutants.

The new lawsuit parallels the Republican-led effort to stop the Clean Power Plan in 2015, when 24 states led by Oklahoma sued the Obama administration over the rule. The Supreme Court hit pause on the plan a year later. Soon after President Trump took office, the EPA started crafting a Trump-friendly alternative to the plan.

If you compare the states that sued over the Obama-era rule in 2015 and those that are suing the Trump administration now, it’s no surprise that you’ll see a partisan divide. Only Colorado, Michigan, and North Carolina were part of both lawsuits.

An EPA spokesperson told the New York Times, “EPA worked diligently to ensure we produced a solid rule, that we believe will be upheld in the courts, unlike the previous Administration’s Clean Power Plan.” Only time will tell — it’s possible that the challenge could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

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22 states sue the Trump administration over its climate ‘plan’

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Nuclear Physics – W. Heisenberg

by Myrna Posted on June 21, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Nuclear Physics

W. Heisenberg

Genre: Physics

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: May 7, 2019

Publisher: Philosophical Library/Open Road

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


The Nobel Prize–winning physicist offers a fascinating popular introduction to nuclear physics from early atomic theory to its transformative applications. Theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg is famous for developing the uncertainty principle, which bears his name, and for his pioneering work in quantum mechanics. A central figure in the development of the atomic bomb and a close colleague of Albert Einstein, Heisenberg wrote Nuclear Physics “for readers who, while interested in natural sciences, have no previous training in theoretical physics.”   Compiled from a series of his lectures on the subject, Heisenberg begins with a short history of atomic physics before delving into the nature of nuclear forces and reactions, the tools of nuclear physics, and its world-changing technical and practical applications. Nuclear Physics is an ideal book for general readers interested in learning about some of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.  

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Nuclear Physics – W. Heisenberg

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