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Remember that $20 million ocean cleanup project? It isn’t working.

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The $20 million effort to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has hit a bit of a snafu.

Organizers for The Ocean Cleanup, which launched the project in September, already had their work cut out for them — the floating garbage patch is made up of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, which has coalesced into a field of debris twice the size of Texas, weighing in at 88,000 tons (that’s the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets, yikes).

In order to clean up the massive garbage island, engineers at the non-government organization built a U-shaped barrier, which they hoped would act like a coastline, trapping the plastic floating in large swathes of the patch. The system can communicate its whereabouts at all times, allowing a support vessel to come by periodically to pick up all the junk in the device’s trunk, so to speak, for recycling.

The highly anticipated endeavor deployed out of San Francisco in September, when the floating device — known as System 001 or Wilson — was towed out to the island of rubbish located between California and Hawaii. The goal of The Ocean Cleanup is to remove up to 50 percent of plastics in the area within five years.

But so far, the giant garbage catcher is having issues holding on to plastic waste.

George Leonard, chief scientist of the Ocean Conservancy, a non-profit environmental advocacy says the organization’s goal is admirable, but can’t be the only solution to ocean plastics pollution. He said a solution must include a multi-pronged approach, including stopping plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place. Humans dump more than 8 million tons of trash into the ocean each year — the equivalent of one dump truck full of plastic every minute.

“The clock is ticking; we must confront this challenge before plastics overwhelm the ocean,” Leonard said.

The Ocean Cleanup Fonder Boyan Slat said the slow speed of the solar-powered 600-meter long barrier isn’t allowing it to scoop up plastic from the swirling trash island. Over the next few weeks, a crew of engineers will make tweaks to the system. Slat says it’s all part of the process when you take on a project this ambitious (Forbes called it “the world’s largest ocean cleanup”).

In a statement released on December 20, Slat said that he always expected it was going to be a bit of an ongoing experiment. “What we’re trying to do has never been done before,” he said. “For the beta phase of [the] technology, this is already a success.”

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Remember that $20 million ocean cleanup project? It isn’t working.

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What’s a smokestorm? A meteorologist explains.

As wildfire smoke descended on Seattle this week, the sun turned an apocalyptic shade of red and the city breathed in some of the unhealthiest air in the world. A new word to describe this phenomenon graced the headlines: “smokestorm.”

The person who coined the term is Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington and revered Seattle meteorologist. “A Smokestorm is Imminent,” read the title of his blog post last Saturday, in which he projected the dangerously smoky days ahead for northwest Washington state.

“You have heard of rainstorms, snowstorms, and windstorms,” Mass wrote. “It is time to create another one: the smokestorm.”

I called up Mass on Wednesday — the day before a drizzle came in and the smoke began to dissipate — to hear the story behind the term and what he thinks we can do to prevent future smokestorms.

He came up the word to help prepare people for the hazardous air conditions. “I just wanted to give people a heads up, and something dramatic probably was more effective than ‘air quality alert,’” Mass tells me.

Mass defines a “smokestorm” as “a sudden onset of high concentrations of smoke that are large enough to affect daily life.”

Like other types of storms, a smokestorm disrupts normal operations. In Seattle this week, flights were delayed. The tourism industry took a hit. State health officials even started warning people not to vacuum.

“This was the worst [smoke] event we had in 20 years,” Mass tells me. “But one thing you can keep in mind is that people are not old enough to remember what it was like in the early 20th century and before.”

Mass says that Seattle was historically a “very smoky place.” He points to an example: In 1895, when Mark Twain visited Olympia, the capital of Washington, the city’s reception committee apologized to him for the dense smoke from wildfires that clouded picturesque views of the Olympic Mountains.

Wildfires and smoke were part of life, but they weren’t like the giant blazes or smokestorms we see today. In additional to naturally occuring blazes, indigenous groups in the area would start low-intensity burns for hunting and clearing the land to gather food — a practice that stands in stark contrast with the aggressive fire suppression practiced during the last hundred-plus years.

The forests are now overgrown and “completely unlike what they were like 150 years ago,” Mass says, “and they tend to burn these large fires which sometimes we just can’t stop.”

There’s considerable agreement among scientists that climate change is making drought and heat — and consequently, wildfires — worse. But it’s not the only factor at play here. Mass calls the climate change explanation for wildfires a “simplistic narrative,” though he acknowledges the danger it poses. (Recently, some in the climate community have criticized Mass’ approach to climate.*) “Climate change is going to get more and more serious as time goes on, so you gotta worry about that,” he told me.

In addition to overgrown forests, Mass places some responsibility on the spread of invasive grasses — which he referred to as “grassoline” — that burn more readily than Washington’s native grasses.

So how do we put a stop to gigantic fires, and thus smokestorms, in the West? Mass says the key is proper forest management: Clearing out excess fuel and doing low-level prescribed burns.

“It would cost billions of dollars to do,” Mass says, “but we’re gonna pay for it anyway. You might as well do it smart and take care of it.”

*This piece has been updated. 

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What’s a smokestorm? A meteorologist explains.

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Fire scientists know one thing for sure: This will get worse

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Subtract out the conspiracists and the willfully ignorant and the argument marshaled by skeptics against global warming, roughly restated, assumes that scientists vastly overstate the consequences of pumping greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere. Uncertainties in their calculations, the skeptics say, make it impossible to determine with confidence how bad the future was going to be. The sour irony of that muttonheaded resistance to data is that, after four decades of being wrong, those people are almost right.

As of July 31, more than 25,000 firefighters are committed to 140 wildfires across the United States — over a million acres aflame. Eight people are dead in California, tens of thousands evacuated, smoke and pyroclastic clouds are visible from space. And all any fire scientist knows for sure is, it only gets worse from here. How much worse? Where? For whom? Experience can’t tell them. The scientists actually are uncertain.

Scientists who help policymakers plan for the future used to make an assumption. They called it stationarity, and the idea was that the extremes of environmental systems — rainfall, river levels, hurricane strength, wildfire damage — obeyed prior constraints. The past was prologue. Climate change has turned that assumption to ash. The fires burning across the western United States (and in Europe) prove that “stationarity is dead,” as a team of researchers (controversially) wrote in the journal Science a decade ago. They were talking about water; now it’s true for fire.

“We can no longer use the observed past as a guide. There’s no stable system that generates a measurable probability of events to use the past record to plan for the future,” says LeRoy Westerling, a management professor who studies wildfires at UC Merced. “Now we have to use physics and complex interactions to project how things could change.”

Wildfires were always part of a complex system. Climate change — carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases raising the overall temperature of the planet — added to the complexity. The implications of that will play out for millennia. “On top of that is interaction between the climate system, the ecosystem, and how we manage our land use,” Westerling says. “That intersection is very complex, and even more difficult to predict. When I say there’s no new normal, I mean it. The climate will be changing with probably an accelerating pace for the rest of the lives of everyone who is alive today.”

That’s not to say there’s nothing more to learn or do. To the contrary, more data on fire behavior will help researchers build models of what might happen. They’ll look at how best to handle “fuel management,” or the removal of flammable plant matter desiccated by climate change-powered heat waves and drought. More research will help with how to build less flammable buildings, and to identify places where buildings maybe shouldn’t be in the first place. Of course, that all presumes policymakers will listen and act. They haven’t yet. “People talk about ‘resilience,’ they talk about ‘hardening,’” Westerling says. “But we’ve been talking about climate change and risks like wildfire for decades now and haven’t made a whole lot of headway outside of the scientific and management communities.”

It’s true. At least two decades ago — perhaps as long as a century — fire researchers were warning that increasing atmospheric CO2 would mean bigger wildfires. History confirmed at least the latter hypothesis; using data like fire scars and tree ring sizes, researchers have shown that before Europeans came to North America, fires were relatively frequent but relatively small, and indigenous people like the Pueblo used lots of wood for fuel and small-diameter trees for construction. When the Spaniards arrived, spreading disease and forcing people out of their villages, the population crashed by perhaps as much as 90 percent and the forests went back to their natural fire pattern — less frequent, low intensity, and widespread. By the late 19th century, the land changed to livestock grazing and its users had no tolerance for fire at all.

“So in the late 20th and early 21st century, with these hot droughts, fires are ripping now with a severity and ferocity that’s unprecedented,” says Tom Swetnam, a dendrochronologist who did a lot of that tree-ring work. A fire in the Jemez Mountains Swetnam studies burned 40,000 acres in 12 hours, a “horizontal roll vortex fire” that had two wind-driven counter-rotating vortices of flame. “That thing left a canopy hole with no trees over 30,000 acres. A giant hole with no trees,” he says. “There’s no archaeological evidence of that happening in at least 500 years.”

Swetnam actually lives in a fire-prone landscape in New Mexico — right in the proverbial wildland-urban interface, as he says. He knows it’s more dangerous than ever. “It’s sad. It’s worrying. Many of us have been predicting that we were going to see these kinds of events if the temperature continued to rise,” Swetnam says. “We’re seeing our scariest predictions coming true.”

Fire researchers have been hollering about the potential consequences for fires of climate change combined with land use for at least as long as hurricane and flood researchers have been doing the same. It hasn’t kept people from building houses on the Houston floodplain and constructing poorly-planned levees along the Mississippi, and it hasn’t kept people from building houses up next to forests and letting undergrowth and small trees clump together — all while temperatures rise.

“Some of the fires are unusual, but the reason it seems more unusual is that there are people around to see it — fire whorls, large vortices, there are plenty of examples of those,” says Mark Finney, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service. “But some things are changing.” Drought and temperature are worse. Sprawl is worse. “The worst fires haven’t happened yet,” Finney says. “The Sierra Nevada is primed for this kind of thing, and those kinds of fires would be truly unprecedented for those kinds of ecosystems in the past thousands of years.”

So what happens next? The Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine forests of the west burn, and then don’t come back? They convert to grassland? That hasn’t happened in thousands of years where the Giant Sequoia grow. So … install sprinklers in Sequoia National Forest? “I’m only the latest generation to be frustrated,” Finney says. “At least two, maybe three generations before me experienced exactly the same frustration.” Nobody listened to them, either. And now the latest generation isn’t really sure what’s going to happen next.

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Fire scientists know one thing for sure: This will get worse

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Are giant suction cups the key to cheap wind power?

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Are giant suction cups the key to cheap wind power?

By on Jul 26, 2016Share

The coolest new innovation in offshore wind energy right now is, essentially, a giant toilet plunger. Put enough of these plungers together and they could help power Detroit, Chicago, and the other metropolises of the Midwest.

Lake Erie Energy Development and Fred Olsen Renewables, a European energy company, plan on building a wind installation with the help of these toilet plungers, aiming for six 50-foot high turbines in Lake Erie, seven miles off the coast of Cleveland.

Putting wind turbines in the Great Lakes instead of on Midwestern farmland makes plenty of sense. Compared to farmland, underwater land is cheap. There’s also more wind on the water, because there are no inconvenient trees or buildings in the way. The Great Lakes are freshwater, so mechanical parts won’t wear down as fast as they would in the ocean’s saltwater. And big cities surround the Great Lakes, which makes it easy to connect a new installation to a pre-existing power plant.

The toilet plunger method (more formally known as the “Mono Bucket”) is an example of how a technological game-changer can often be incredibly low tech. Imagine a bunch of giant plungers in a lake. When the plungers descend, the water trapped in the bottom is pushed out, creating a vacuum. The vacuum pulls the plunger down to the lake bed and anchors it. This provides a solid base for a wind turbine and takes much less time than the standard method of using pile drivers to push concrete-filled steel pipes into the ground. It’s also less environmentally destructive.

This “Icebreaker” project  — a nod to the ice floes that dot Lake Erie in the winter — is expected to generate 20 megawatts by the fall of 2018. But the potential for expanding this project is enormous. The Great Lakes have one-fifth of the country’s impressive but unused offshore wind energy, a mind-boggling 700 gigawatts, enough to power as many as 525 million households, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s nearly four times as much energy as U.S. households currently use.

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Are giant suction cups the key to cheap wind power?

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Forget recycling. Let’s turn old plastic into fuel.

fanplastic

Forget recycling. Let’s turn old plastic into fuel.

By on Jul 8, 2016 6:07 amShare

Plastic is a big problem, like, bigger-than-Texas big. Giant islands of plastic trash — one in the North Pacific Ocean is estimated by some to cover an area twice the size of the Lone Star State — are accumulating at sea, with some 9 million metric tons added to the oceans in 2015 alone. That’s a lot of sippy cups.

One possible way to mitigate the mind-boggling volume of waste: Make it valuable. Scientists envision a future where, instead of dumping more plastic trash into the sea, we convert it all into fuel. Chemists at UC Irvine recently devised a new method to break down polyethylene — the most common form of plastic — into its constituent elements, including diesel.

Existing methods of breaking down the material involve heating it to 700 degrees F, or using corrosive chemicals to do the job. The new process uses certain hydrocarbons and a metal catalyst to scramble plastic molecules into useful fuel compounds. Their process, report the scientists, is both less toxic and twice as energy efficient as alternatives.

Before you ask: No, the technology is not yet ready to go commercial. “The catalyst has to be 10,000 or even one million times more efficient than it is now, before it’s practical enough for real-world application,” says Zheng Huang, one of the study’s authors. His team is now working on improving these — honestly, not terrific — odds.

Moreover, the mission to hoover up all the plastic already in our oceans is quixotic, at best. And almost certainly not carbon neutral, with all the boats, nets, money, and manpower involved. The best thing to do, obvs, is to not use more plastic. Just stop.

In the meantime, however, people are thinking seriously about managing what is likely to be an ongoing deluge of plastic. New companies such as Agilyx and Vadxx are gearing up to use existing plastic-to-fuel technology to take on trash at a large scale. According to the Vadxx website, each facility will be able to transform 40 million pounds of plastic into 4 million gallons of fuel each year, with no hazardous byproducts and minimal emissions. That’s enough to fuel about 60,000 cars for an entire year.

Or — stretch goal — we could build a society with walkable cities and zero-waste economies. None of this would be a problem in the first place, and there’d be no need for trail-blazing plastic-to-fuel startups. Sorry, Vadxx.

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Forget recycling. Let’s turn old plastic into fuel.

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Should You Buy Free-Range, Organic or Humane Eggs?

What eggs are the best when it comes to how the chickens they come from are raised and the kind of impact those chickens have on the planet?

Many eggs come from chickens raised in industrial cages that leave no room for the animals to move around in, let alone walk or peck at the ground. They’re basically kept in a state of non-stop egg laying until they can’t lay any more. It’s a cruel and inhumane way to treat any animals, so labels that verify that the chickens aretreated humanely are particularly important. This Care2 post on ethical egg production explains the issue in more detail.

Here are the labels to look for when you go shopping.

Skip These Cartons

The following words and phrases are essentially meaningless when it comes to indicating how chickens were raised on the land, what they were fed and how the eggs themselves were produced.

Natural or FarmFresh – There are no federal definitions or industry standard for these terms. If an egg’s only claim to fame is that it’s natural or farm fresh, leave it on the shelf.

Vegetarian Fed – Again, this designation doesn’t indicate how a chicken was treated or what the nature of the feed was. Chickens are actually meat eaters (they like worms and grubs), so it’s not necessarily a benefit that they’re fed vegetarian food, even if it’s organic.

Omega-3 Enriched – This designation has nothing to do with how the animals were raised or what they ate.

Cage-Free, Free-Range, Pasture-Raised, Natural, Humanely-Raised – Unfortunately, none of these words actually mean much unless they’re accompanied by a third-party certification that verifies them. This verifies not just that the animals weren’t in cages, but that they were allowed room to roam and forage. “Cage-free” or “free-range” can still describe crowded, filthy living conditions for chickens, potentially in barns with tens of thousands of other birds. If you’re buying eggs at a farmer’s market, the farmer may have photographs of what his chicken operation looks like. In the grocery store, you’re at the mercy of a meaningless label.

No Added Hormones – Federal regulations have never allowed the use of hormones or steroids in poultry, so this is a meaningless claim.

Consider These Cartons

The following words and phrases are better indicators of how eggs were produced.

Organic – As defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture standards, organic means that hens’ feed is organic, not tainted with GMOs and free of additives and animal byproducts. Hens are also to nest in boxes rather than cages and given access to the outdoors, weather-permitting. Farmers cannot administer antibiotics except during an infectious outbreak.

No Antibiotics – This is good information to have, given how over-treated conventional meat and poultry production can be.

Certified Humane – While “humane” itself is not defined by the USDA, the “certified humane” label indicates farmers who have met the standards set by the non-profit group Humane Farm Animal Care. The are also Animal Welfare approved.

If this is all a bit confusing, refer to this very handy chart created by The Cornucopia Institute. The non-profit research groups rates companies that produce eggs according to how well they meet the organic standards as well as how the animals are treated.

Ratings range from “5 eggs,” which signifies the best sources, to “1 egg,” which is the worst. FYI, Safeway’s O Organic brand, Wegman’s, Kroger’s Simple Truth, Giant’s Nature’s Promise, Meijer’s Organics, Whole Foods’ 350 Organic brand and Trader Joe’s all only rate 1 egg. If you can buy eggs from smaller egg operations and farmers at local markets, chances are you’ll be supporting more humane chicken operations.

Related:
Which are Healthier? Egg whites or whole eggs?
Who Says Eggs Aren’t Healthy or Safe?

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Should You Buy Free-Range, Organic or Humane Eggs?

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This Genius Lawyer Is Our Best Hope Against Deadly Food Poisoning

Mother Jones

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Listeria in frozen foods. E. coli at Chipotle. Salmonella-laced pistachios. Practically every week there’s a new tainted food to avoid—and as a result, foodborne illness sickens 1 in 6 Americans, hospitalizes 128,000, and kills 3,000. The problem of bugs in food has stumped government agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the United States Department of Agriculture.

But there’s one guy who has arguably won more battles against foodborne illness than anyone. This week’s Bite podcast guest is Bill Marler, a Seattle-based attorney who represents victims of food poisoning.

In a landmark 1993 case, Marler sued Jack in the Box over its infamous E. Coli outbreak—and won. Since then, he’s gone up against dozens of food industry giants: McDonald’s, KFC, Cargill, Taco Bell, Odwalla, and most recently, Chipotle, to name but a few. In addition to his work as a lawyer, Marler also fights for our government to tighten the rules that food suppliers have to follow. He runs the website Food Safety News, and he blogs at marlerblog.com.

We talked to Marler about why he insists on washing his own lettuce, how Chipotle became a victim of its own success, and tips on avoiding contaminated chow.

Also in this episode, Tom tells us how the giant poultry company Perdue is leading the way in ditching antibiotics (and what oregano has to do with it). And Maddie solves the mystery of how food behaves at 32,000 feet (and what sichuan peppercorns have to do with it). Have a listen!

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This Genius Lawyer Is Our Best Hope Against Deadly Food Poisoning

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Film Review: “We Are the Giant”

Mother Jones

We Are the Giant

MOTTO PICTURES

Bahraini sisters and activists Maryam and Zainab al-Khawaja are the heart of this devastating look at the lives behind three Arab Spring uprisings. The film’s interviews are interspersed with grainy, often violent footage—one heart-wrenching clip of a little girl singing at a peaceful protest is cut short by a nearby explosion; another expresses the profound remorse of a Syrian protest leader whose peaceful rallies were met by fatal attacks on his people. By the end, some of the film’s main characters are questioning their faith in nonviolent resistance, but their resilience in the face of injustice is this excellent film’s common thread.

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Film Review: “We Are the Giant”

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Inside Yingli, the Giant Chinese Solar Company Sponsoring the World Cup

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You’ve seen their logos on the sidelines, now get a peak inside the company trying to transform the world. It takes about two hours by car from the Chinese capital Beijing to get to the smog-blanketed city of Baoding. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s nothing much to speak of, typical of the Northeast’s expanse of industrial wastelands, threaded together by super-highways. So we were surprised to find that Baoding—where air pollution registers at hazardous levels for more than a quarter of the year—was also home to the sprawling campus of the world’s top solar panel manufacturer, Yingli. We had landed, it seemed, in the very epicenter of China’s clean tech revolution. After weeks of negotiations, my colleague Jaeah Lee and I were finally granted access to film this exclusive footage at Yingli’s headquarters in the fall of 2013. What awaited inside blew our socks off: acres of high-tech solar wizardry attended to by an impressive fleet of skilled workers, and an understandably boastful management. In the video above, we take you behind-the-scenes of Yingli, and put a face to the name you’ve been seeing in the background of World Cup games: In 2010, Yingli became the first renewable energy company, and the first Chinese company, to partner with the tournament.

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Inside Yingli, the Giant Chinese Solar Company Sponsoring the World Cup

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Inside Yingli, the Giant Chinese Solar Company Sponsoring the World Cup

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Giant 50′ Solar Bag

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