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Hawaii’s Hurricane Lane is already a flooding catastrophe

by TyrellMilburn Posted on August 24, 2018

A rare hurricane is dousing Hawaii, producing flooding, power outages, and washing away roads — damage the National Weather Service is calling “catastrophic.” It’s increasingly clear that the Aloha state is already feeling the effects of a changing climate.

As of Friday morning, Hurricane Lane is at Category 2 strength and continues to move towards Oahu, home to Honolulu and Hawaii’s most densely populated island. Though the latest projections showed Lane’s center remaining offshore, the most powerful side of the storm will still wash over nearly all of Hawaii’s main islands, bringing torrential rainfall for more than 24 hours to a million people.

As Lane approached Thursday evening, civil defense sirens pierced the cloudy Honolulu skies and federal officials pre-staged plane-loads of supplies in the country’s most isolated state, hoping to prevent a repeat of the government’s bungled response to Hurricane Maria’s in Puerto Rico. The Big Island has been hardest hit so far with rainfall exceeding 30 inches, transforming normally tranquil waterfalls into violent torrents.

As a result of Lane’s slow motion, the National Weather Service in Honolulu has boosted its maximum rainfall prediction to 40 inches in some parts of the islands — months worth of rain, even for Hawaii’s lushest locations. In an update late Thursday Hawaii time, the NWS said Lane is “expected to lead to major, life-threatening flash flooding and landslides over all Hawaiian Islands.”

There has never been a hurricane landfall in Maui or Oahu in recorded history. Even if Lane doesn’t achieve that feat, it’s already the closest a storm has ever approached central Hawaii. Water temperatures near Hawaii are as much as 4.5 degrees F warmer than normal this week, supporting Lane’s high winds and heavy rains.

As the waters of the Pacific warm, heavy rainfall has become an increasingly dangerous problem for Hawaii. Lane is Hawaii’s second major flooding disaster this year, after torrential rainfall on Kauai in April produced nearly 50 inches in 24 hours, a new U.S. record. Our warmer atmosphere can now hold more water vapor, resulting in heavier rainfall during both regular thunderstorms and hurricanes. Since the 1950s, the amount of rain falling in the worst storms in Hawaii has increased by about 12 percent, according to a University of Hawaii study.

As the the country’s only ocean state, Hawaii is on the front lines of climate change. Hurricane Lane is the latest example that Hawaii’s warmer, wetter reality is already here.

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Hawaii’s Hurricane Lane is already a flooding catastrophe

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Bigger, stronger, rainier: Is Hawaii’s Hurricane Lane a sign of what’s to come?

by Severynjg5 Posted on August 22, 2018

Hurricane Lane, one of the strongest hurricanes ever measured in the Central Pacific Ocean, is on a crash course with paradise.

At the peak of its intensity late Tuesday and early Wednesday, Lane had sustained winds of 160 mph and gusts up to nearly 200 mph — making it the most powerful hurricane to threaten Hawaii on record. The storm, now downgraded from Category 5 to 4, poses a colossal threat to the islands: The National Weather Service says that “life-threatening impacts are likely.”

On Lane’s current track, Hawaii could see torrential downpours, mudslides, and 20-foot waves. The desert-like parts of the tropical islands could witness a year’s worth of rain, up to 2 feet, in mere hours. Lane should weaken as it approaches, but it could still bring tropical-storm-force winds to almost every part of every island — winds strong enough to tear roofs off homes and cause widespread power outages that could last weeks or months.

Hawaii’s governor, David Ige, declared a state of emergency in advance of the hurricane, which is expected to arrive as soon as late Wednesday night. On Twitter, President Donald Trump urged those in its path to prepare. Hawaiians have taken those words to heart, clearing out grocery store shelves and filling up their gas tanks.

The vast majority of people in the state have never seen a storm like this. Since 1950, just two hurricanes have made official landfall in Hawaii, both hitting the island of Kauai. As of Wednesday afternoon, the most heavily populated islands were either under a hurricane watch or warning.

As the waters of the Central Pacific warm, hurricanes like Lane are expected to become more common — and indeed, the Pacific has seen a flurry of hurricanes near Hawaii in recent years. While the hurricane threat to Hawaii tends to peak during El Niño years, recent research shows that long-term ocean warming, not El Niño, is likely the dominant cause of Hawaii’s growing hurricane threat. And Hawaiian scientists have found these new hurricanes tend to be larger, stronger, and rainier.

A disaster response effort in Hawaii could be hindered by the Jones Act, as Puerto Rico experienced during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The act restricts foreign ships from delivering supplies from the mainland to the islands — meaning that Hawaiians pay inflated prices for basic supplies, which could make restocking shelves and rebuilding homes especially difficult.

In addition to sea-level rise and coral bleaching, hurricanes are increasingly part of Hawaii’s reality. For his part, the governor is putting Hawaii on a path to reduce its contribution to climate change. In 2015, Ige signed legislation making the state the first in the nation to mandate 100 percent renewable energy — a goal it plans to reach by 2045.

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Bigger, stronger, rainier: Is Hawaii’s Hurricane Lane a sign of what’s to come?

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The Department of Defense wants to protect itself from climate change threats it’s helping to spur

by MaxineBorowski Posted on August 15, 2018

The Department of Defense may be one of the only parts of the Trump administration that openly admits that climate change is a threat. On Monday, President Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes $717 billion in spending and advises the military to prep for climate-related flooding and sea-level rise. The nearly trillion-dollar package will be spent on “the finest planes, and ships, and tanks, and missiles anywhere on Earth,” Trump said from Fort Drum in upstate New York.

Problem is: This same federal agency, which is actively planning for global warming, is getting new toys that are capable of emitting tons of carbon.

CNBC outlined some of the big-ticket items in the DoD’s goodie bag. They include: $7.6 billion for 77 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, $85 million for 72 Black Hawk utility helicopters, and $1.56 billion for three coastal combat ships (the Navy had only requested one).

A single F-35 fighter has an internal fuel capacity of nearly 18,498 pounds. If each of the 77 fighter jets uses up just one tank, that would amount to more than 1.4 million pounds of fuel. A Black Hawk helicopter has a 360-gallon fuel tank, and the combat ships each can lug nearly 150,000 gallons.

Although it’s been difficult to get hard numbers on the DoD’s total carbon footprint, it’s largely accepted that the U.S. military is likely the single biggest energy consumer in the world. The department said that it sent out more than 70 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2014 — roughly the amount of C02 the entire country of Romania produced that year — but that number excludes hundreds of overseas bases, vehicles, and anything classified as a national security interest.

Basav Sen, climate justice project director at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies, pointed to another climate threat: The White House, even before President Trump, has made securing access to oil and gas a national security imperative. And indeed, the U.S.’s latest security strategy outlines “energy dominance” as a key priority — which includes protecting global energy infrastructure from “cyber and physical threats.” He points to the Iraq War as a recent example of the U.S. intervening in an oil-producing region with the intent of securing the crude supply.

“When you’re pumping money into the military, you’re not just pumping money into an institution that burns a lot of fossil fuels and emits a lot of greenhouse gases,” Sen says, adding that funds also go to providing armed protection to the fossil fuel industry under the guise of national security. “That is really, really disturbing.”

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Bribery trial reveals Jeff Sessions’ role in blocking EPA action targeting major donor

by Jamie01L805961 Posted on August 3, 2018

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

When a coal executive and two lawyers stood trial in Alabama last month for bribery and related crimes, it was clear from the start that things might get uncomfortable for Jeff Sessions. The attorney general’s name, after all, appeared on a list of possible witnesses.

Though he was never called to the stand, detailed references to Sessions and key members of his staff thread their way through the record of the four-week trial, which concluded on July 20 when David Roberson, vice president of Drummond Coal, and Joel Gilbert, a partner in the Birmingham-based law firm Balch & Bingham, were found guilty of paying off an Alabama lawmaker to oppose a federal environmental cleanup effort that could have cost Drummond millions. (The judge dismissed the charges against a second Balch lawyer, Steve McKinney.)

Sessions has long had close ties to Balch and Drummond — the companies respectively ranked as his second- and third-biggest contributors during his Senate career, collectively donating nearly a quarter of a million dollars to his campaigns. And as Mother Jones and the Project on Government Oversight have previously reported, then-Senator Sessions directly intervened with the Environmental Protection Agency to block the cleanup at the center of the federal bribery case.

Upon becoming attorney general, Sessions had a glaring conflict of interest in a criminal prosecution that he was technically overseeing as the nation’s top law enforcement official. Yet despite questions from Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont,  and others, he repeatedly refused to say whether he had recused himself from the matter. His silence seems even more questionable given evidence introduced as part of the case.

Billing statements, meeting minutes, and other records briefly made public during the trial — and quickly placed under seal by the judge presiding over the case, but not before Alabama columnist Kyle Whitmire saved copies — reveal that Sessions and his Senate staff coordinated more closely with the defendants than previously known. The documents indicate extensive contact on the EPA action between Sessions’ office and Roberson, Gilbert, and McKinney, including at least 13 phone calls and two in-person meetings in Washington, D.C. And they show that Drummond’s attorneys at Balch & Bingham coached Sessions’ staff on how to attack the EPA’s position and that Sessions’ staff reported back to the lawyers about their interactions with the agency.

The backdrop for the bribery case is North Birmingham’s 35th Avenue neighborhood — an impoverished, largely black enclave sandwiched between the city’s airport and various industrial sites, including a Drummond plant. For years, residents have reported unusually high levels of cancer and respiratory illness, and they have complained about the dark soot that coats their homes. In 2013, the EPA found such high levels of toxins in the area that it designated a 400-acre section of the neighborhood a Superfund site; federal health authorities warned parents not to allow their children to play outside in their own yards. The EPA determined that Drummond was one of the companies potentially responsible for the pollution, and thus possibly on the hook for some of the cleanup costs.

When, in 2014, EPA officials tried to elevate the neighborhood to the National Priorities List — a select group of highly polluted sites picked for accelerated and more extensive cleanups — they hit a brick wall of resistance from Alabama’s mostly Republican political establishment. But to the surprise of EPA officials, a local Democratic state lawmaker, Oliver Robinson, also joined the opposition, sending a February 2015 letter to Alabama environmental authorities decrying the EPA effort.

It would later turn out that this letter was ghostwritten by Balch & Bingham’s Joel Gilbert, who, on behalf of Drummond, was funneling money to Robinson’s personal foundation in order to secure the lawmaker’s cooperation in blocking the EPA cleanup. Last summer, Robinson pleaded guilty to accepting $360,000 in bribes. He then began cooperating with prosecutors as they built their case against the Drummond and Balch officials he said were at the heart of it: Roberson, Gilbert, and McKinney (lawyers for all three men declined to comment for this article.)

Like Robinson, Sessions also sent a letter ghostwritten by Balch lawyers, this one to the EPA. Records released during the trial shed light on how this letter, sent a year after Robinson’s, came to be, as well as the extensive actions Sessions took on behalf of his top political donors to thwart EPA action in North Birmingham. Sessions’ office did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

On Feb. 4, 2015, Balch lawyers convened to discuss their plan to derail the 35th Avenue site’s inclusion on the National Priorities List. According to notes of that meeting released at trial, Balch had prepared a draft “letter but no signatures” for Alabama’s congressional delegation that disputed the methods the EPA had used to determine responsibility for the pollution (and thus potential liability for the cleanup). The Balch meeting notes list a Sessions staffer named Brandon Middleton as the only lobbying contact for Alabama’s congressional delegation on the matter. The day after the meeting, internal Balch records show that Gilbert reached out to Sessions’ office. And they note that on Feb. 18, McKinney spoke with Middleton “regarding North Birmingham.”

The next month, Drummond and Balch’s political action committees contributed a combined $10,000 to a political action committee controlled by Sessions — and run in part by a former Sessions staffer named Ed Haden,who is now a senior partner at Balch.

During the rest of 2015 and into early 2016, Sessions staffers communicated extensively with representatives of Balch and Drummond over the letter, sending drafts back and forth. On September 15, 2015, Drummond’s Roberson and Balch’s Gilbert flew from Birmingham to Washington, D.C., for meetings with staffers for Sessions, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), and Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Alabama). In an “Environmental Update” subsequently posted on Balch & Bingham’s website (and since removed), the firm said its attorneys “met with Senator Jeff Sessions” and predicted that a letter issued “shortly” from “key members of the Alabama congressional delegation” would make the case for opposing the effort to make Drummond and other companies pay for cleaning up the polluted site in Birmingham. Two months later, on Feb. 26, 2016, Middleton delivered a letter signed by Sessions, Shelby, and Palmer to the EPA. The letter also summoned top EPA officials to a meeting “to discuss the concerns.”

“Any information given to Senator Shelby’s office would have been one of many tools used to help inform the senator,” said a spokesperson. Palmer’s office did not respond to questions.

After the letter was delivered, Sessions’ office continued to work in close coordination with the Balch attorneys at the center of the bribery case to aggressively undermine the possibility of a cleanup. In March 2016, the EPA responded to Sessions’ letter, expressing disagreement but offering to meet. According to an email obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Middleton told an EPA official that he was “waiting to hear back from our folks and boss on how they’d like to approach meeting.” But Sessions’ staffers weren’t just looking for feedback from Sessions. Balch records show that over the course of several months, Balch attorneys and Middleton exchanged emails and spoke over the phone about how to deal with the EPA’s response and prepare for the meeting with EPA officials.

Meanwhile, Balch’s political action committee continued contributing to Sessions’ campaign coffers. On June 30, 2016, Balch donated $1,000 to Sessions’ political action committee. That day, according to another email obtained under FOIA, Middleton sent the EPA a message setting the agenda for a July 7 sit-down in Sessions’ office to discuss why the proposed Birmingham cleanup should not go forward.

The day before the meeting, McKinney met Sessions staffers to prep them, according to the firm’s billing records.

On July 7, two high-level EPA officials met with members of Sessions’ staff, who grilled them on the Birmingham cleanup and attacked the methods the agency had used to measure toxins in the neighborhood. Sessions himself was scheduled to attend, but at the last minute he backed out to spend the day with then-candidate Donald Trump, who had decided to make a round of visits to Republican senators on Capitol Hill.

One of the EPA officials who attended the meeting told Mother Jones that he was surprised by the stridency with which Sessions staffers opposed the EPA’s actions in North Birmingham, especially considering the situation on the ground. “For residents, there was an immediate threat,”said Mathy Stanislaus, who was then an assistant EPA administrator, but “the public health risk didn’t seem to be a prominent concern from those who opposed it.”

During his confirmation process to become attorney general, Sessions was asked how he would handle an investigation involving campaign donors. Sessions said he would consult with Justice Department ethics officials on any investigation where a possible conflict might exist, but his office has repeatedly refused to discuss whether he insulated himself from the Drummond bribery case.

And he isn’t the only Justice Department official linked to matters involving the 35th Avenue Superfund site. When Sessions became attorney general, he installed in key positions at least two people involved in the conversations his office had on the subject. Among them was Brandon Middleton, who served as the liaison between Sessions’ office and the Balch lawyers working to undermine the 35th Avenue cleanup. Sessions appointed Middleton as a top deputy in the Justice Department’s environmental and natural resources division — the office responsible for bringing cases against corporate polluters, such as Drummond, to force them to fund environmental remediation. (Middleton has since moved on to a position at the Interior Department.) And Sessions named Jeff Wood, a Balch & Bingham partner who was part of the firm’s 35th Avenue lobbying effort, to the top job in that division. (Wood recused himself from the matter.) Middleton and a spokesman for Wood did not respond to questions.

With the convictions of Gilbert and Roberson, the lead prosecutor in the case claimed victory for the people of North Birmingham. “We’re happy for the citizens of Birmingham that someone is finally speaking on their behalf,” prosecutor George Martin told reporters after the trial ended. “This is a righteous verdict.”

Balch’s managing partner Stan Blanton said in statement, “Although our firm was not a party to the case, I and the rest of our partners, associates and staff are deeply disappointed in any conduct that does not adhere to our commitment to the rule of law and to the communities in which we are fortunate to live and work.” Yet Drummond blamed Balch for Roberson’s legal troubles. “We consider David to be a man of integrity who would not knowingly engage in wrongdoing,” according to a company statement, “When an environmentalist group raised allegations regarding our operations in the Birmingham area, Drummond responded by hiring one of Alabama’s most well-respected environmental law firms … We were assured the firm’s community outreach efforts on our behalf were legal and proper.”

If anything, what the trial exposed was just how intricate the ties were between powerful corporate interests such as Drummond and Balch and members of the Alabama political establishment, notably Sessions.

If justice was delivered for North Birmingham, it still may not feel that way to the people who continue to live there. Roberson and Gilbert may have been convicted on bribery charges, but the plan they carried out has worked so far. With the help of Sessions and other Alabama lawmakers, they blocked the EPA from mounting a large-scale cleanup — and Drummond has yet to pay a dime for any role it might have played in turning an impoverished neighborhood into a Superfund site.

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Trump’s coal bailout would mean more pollution — and more deaths

by TemekaWinter Posted on July 6, 2018

Coal is struggling in the U.S. — we’re using less of it, and plants are shutting down. But President Trump is following through on his campaign promise to bring back coal. Last month, he called for a bailout for the nation’s floundering coal-fired and nuclear power plants.

Keeping these coal plants afloat would have deadly consequences. The sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions could lead to the deaths of more than 800 Americans, according to a paper out Thursday from independent nonprofit research group Resources for the Future. The researchers analyzed what Trump’s bailout policy could mean for emissions, public health, and jobs, given that struggling plants stay open for two more years, as reports have suggested the plan would do.

The plants would churn out some serious emissions in that scenario — over two years, we’d see an additional 22 million tons of CO2. That’s roughly equal to the amount emitted by 4.3 million cars in a year.

The report found that the bailout would “support” an estimated 790 jobs. But for every two to 4.5 coal mining jobs that Trump’s plan sustained, one American would die from air pollution. That’s not exactly an impressive ratio.

We’ve known for a while that coal is bad for our health. And Trump sure doesn’t seem to be helping with that, especially not for miners. Though the coal industry employed more people during Trump’s first year in office, he didn’t make their jobs any safer: Coal miner deaths nearly doubled over that same period.

The administration has also taken steps to hide coal mining’s impact on people’s health. In August, the Trump administration stopped a National Academy of Sciences study about the risks of living near mountaintop removal coal mining sites in Central Appalachia. Previous research had suggested that the practice was linked to lung cancer. The administration said the study was paused as part of a financial review.

While you’d think protecting people’s health would be a priority, the Trump administration isn’t like any other administration — and it seems like they have other things top of mind.

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Trump’s coal bailout would mean more pollution — and more deaths

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Meet Hurricane Beryl, now aimed at the Caribbean

by christoperschone Posted on July 6, 2018

The first hurricane of the 2018 season has formed in the Atlantic Ocean, and it’s headed toward the Caribbean. Those aren’t welcome words, especially considering the region’s fragile recovery after last year’s record-breaking storms.

On Friday, the National Hurricane Center upgraded a tropical storm in the central Atlantic to Hurricane Beryl, with top wind speeds of 80 mph. The storm’s hurricane-force winds are only 20 miles wide, relatively small for a hurricane, so Beryl’s behavior is especially unpredictable.

In advance of the storm, Puerto Rico’s government has opened more than 400 shelters and started distributing satellite radios to mayors. Even more worrisome: Beryl’s path takes it dangerously close to tiny Dominica, an island-nation of 75,000 people still struggling to recover after taking a direct hit from Hurricane Maria last year. Dominica’s government has already circulated a list of 120 shelters.

Beryl could strengthen to a Category 2 hurricane this weekend with winds of up to 100 mph before entering the eastern Caribbean on Sunday afternoon, according to the National Hurricane Center. Thereafter, it’s forecasted to steadily weaken as it passes by Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Islands along Beryl’s path could face torrential rains of 4 to 8 inches — enough to cause flash flooding, worrying enough in normal circumstances.

In a press briefing on Thursday, Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, said that, despite the storm’s expected weakening, Beryl remains “a danger due to the vulnerable condition of Puerto Rico.”

Puerto Rico, which just finished restoring power to all of its municipalities on July 1 — 284 days after Maria made landfall — is simply not ready for another storm. Tens of thousands of people are living in homes without permanent roofs, and the power grid routinely fails during passing showers. A recent independent estimate conducted by Harvard University showed that more than 4,000 people likely died in the storm and its aftermath, making it the deadliest natural disaster in modern American history. The island’s recovery was plagued by delays and indifference by the federal government — meaning that many of those deaths were likely preventable.

Beryl could also pose significant setback for Dominica’s recovery efforts. The country lost half of its buildings from Maria’s 160 mph winds, and is in the middle of a transformational change to prepare for the future storms of a warmer world.

The National Hurricane Center plans updated forecasts every six hours until Beryl dissipates, likely on Tuesday.

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Meet Hurricane Beryl, now aimed at the Caribbean

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A fiery Fourth of July threatens Southwest economies

by AngelinDoolette Posted on July 4, 2018

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

Around the country, Americans are cooking up hamburgers and bratwursts on their barbecues, embarking on backcountry camping trips, and preparing fireworks displays to celebrate the Fourth of July.

In the Southwest, those celebrations will be markedly different. Fire restrictions — and in some cases closures — are in place for many national forests in the four corners region of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. Officials hope to avoid adding to the wildfires already burning there and across the West, including in Alaska, Northern California, and Oregon. Over a dozen fireworks celebrations have been canceled in Colorado mountain towns, which often depend on the holiday to bring in tourism revenue.

The cancellations aren’t new, but they are more prevalent this year as the Southwest grapples with a severe drought. While precipitation levels vary from year to year, all signs point to further aridification in the region over the long term. This year may illustrate the likely changes to come as communities across the West are forced to confront challenges to their economies — and their quality of life.

Take the town of Silverton, Colorado, for example. This year’s weather hit the town of 630 people doubly hard. First, a bad snow season delayed the town’s ski resort opening date until mid-January; then drought brought forest closures and fast-moving wildfire, including the 416 Fire, which closed off one of the main gateways to town. The blaze also halted service of the narrow gauge train, a major tourist attraction, between Silverton and Durango. Those factors, and the ensuing media coverage, led to a “tsunami of lodging cancellations for all the summer season,” said DeAnne Gallegos, executive director of the Silverton Area Chamber of Commerce. The town usually makes most of its money during the summer months. This year, however, Gallegos estimates the summer economy is down by 60 to 80 percent, with businesses along the train route faring even worse. Fourth of July is typically the area’s biggest summer draw, but this year the town had to cancel its fireworks.

Nearby towns, including Durango, Ouray, and Pagosa Springs, also decided to skip the pyrotechnics this year. Where officials have the financial resources, however, they are embracing new forms of celebration. Glenwood Springs and Steamboat Springs have scheduled laser shows, and Aspen is advertising a patriotic drone light display in lieu of explosives. Closer to the Front Range, Breckenridge town council members acknowledged that doing away with fireworks might be a permanent reality. “If we see our summers continuing to get hotter and drier that’s definitely going to be probably more of the future,” Breckenridge spokeswoman Haley Littleton said at a city council meeting last week.

In addition to fireworks cancellations, most of the national forests in the region are under at least Stage 2 fire restrictions. That means anything that can produce a spark is forbidden, including campfires, barbecues, smoking in open areas, target shooting on public land, and using tools like chainsaws without a device to stop sparks. The situation is dire enough to close many national forests in the Southwest. In New Mexico, for example, the 1.5 million-acre Carson National Forest shut down last week — a month after the Santa Fe National Forest closed. The Cibola National Forest has also been closed since mid-June. In Arizona, where several wildfires have cropped up, popular areas in the Prescott National Forest, the Tonto National Forest, and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests have also been shuttered until conditions improve.

As the climate changes, these types of forest closures and fire restrictions will continue to strain town coffers around the West. That means places like Silverton will be tasked with examining their identities as weather-dependent tourism economies. For Gallegos, that realization is hitting home now as the residents of her community take financial hits in order to keep their businesses open and their neighbors employed. “When you live in a high alpine town that is completely connected to Mother Nature and the weather and tourism … it impacts you that much more dramatically and exponentially,” she said.

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Atomic Accidents – James Mahaffey

by Myrna Posted on June 8, 2018

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Atomic Accidents

A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

James Mahaffey

Genre: History

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: February 4, 2014

Publisher: Pegasus Books

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


A “delightfully astute” and “entertaining” history of the mishaps and meltdowns that have marked the path of scientific progress ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review). ​ Radiation: What could go wrong? In short, plenty. From Marie Curie carrying around a vial of radium salt because she liked the pretty blue glow to the large-scale disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, dating back to the late nineteenth century, nuclear science has had a rich history of innovative exploration and discovery, coupled with mistakes, accidents, and downright disasters. In this lively book, long-time advocate of continued nuclear research and nuclear energy James Mahaffey looks at each incident in turn and analyzes what happened and why, often discovering where scientists went wrong when analyzing past meltdowns. Every incident, while taking its toll, has led to new understanding of the mighty atom—and the fascinating frontier of science that still holds both incredible risk and great promise. Praise for Atomic Awakening “Mahaffey writes with delightfully witty prose. A surprisingly entertaining history of nuclear power.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “ Atomic Awakening provides the most complete history of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy development I have ever read in a single book.” — Nuclear Street “The book aids in the understanding of how atomic science is far from the spawn of a wicked weapons program and how nuclear power will shape the twenty-first century.” — Nuclear News James Mahaffey was senior research scientist at Georgia Tech Institute and has worked at the Defense Nuclear Agency, the National Ground Intelligence Center, and the Air Force Air Logistics Center, focusing on nuclear power, nanotechnology, and cold fusion. He is the author of Atomic Awakening and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Atomic Accidents – James Mahaffey

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Officials tried to censor a report on national parks. Here’s what was in it.

by RedaParks71345 Posted on May 21, 2018

Roughly 25 percent of U.S. national parks are vulnerable to rising sea levels because they’re situated in coastal areas. For years, the National Parks Service has had a report in the works to quantify how higher ocean tides and storm surges could impact its sites. But in April, Reveal found that in drafts of the publication, park officials had censored all mentions of human-caused climate change as an explanation for the encroaching waters.

The story prompted Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources to write a letter to the Department of the Interior requesting an investigation into the scientific integrity of the Parks Service. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has said that he never changes reports before they go out.

In a follow-up, Reveal reported that when Maria Caffrey, a University of Colorado research assistant and the study’s lead author, fought the changes, officials said they could take her name off the paper or potentially not release it at all. “The fight probably destroyed my career with the (National Park Service) but it will be worth it if we can uphold the truth and ensure that scientific integrity of other scientists won’t be challenged so easily in the future,” she said.

Finally released Friday, the analysis illustrates how different levels of emissions would increase sea levels and storm surges near 118 national parks over roughly the next century. In the end, science prevailed: The report identifies human-caused climate change as the main culprit behind the rising sea levels that endanger the sites.

Here’s what the collaboration between the National Parks Service and the University of Colorado found:

Rising seas will flood parks. By the end of the century, some sites in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, for example, could experience an ocean rise of nearly two-and-a-half feet. The researchers caution that this would submerge large parts of those parks.
Wright Brothers National Memorial is predicted to face the largest sea-level rise. By 2100, the shoreline near the park is predicted to see up to a 2.7 foot increase under the most severe global warming situation they studied.
Unsurprisingly, islands are at an increased risk. The authors note that for more remote national parks, like those in the Caribbean or the National Park of American Samoa, a storm surge could be particularly ruinous, as it’s difficult to deliver aid to those sites quickly.
Overall, parks in the U.S. southeast are at highest risk for storm surges. For example, a category two hurricane would inundate Everglades National Park.

Now is the time to plan. The authors say that their findings can help inform parks as they adapt to a warming world that endangers their infrastructure and historical structures.

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Officials tried to censor a report on national parks. Here’s what was in it.

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Bitcoin’s energy use got studied, and you libertarian nerds look even worse than usual

by FreddyTyio Posted on May 17, 2018

Bitcoin’s energy footprint has more than doubled since Grist first wrote about it six months ago.

It’s expected to double again by the end of the year, according to a new peer-reviewed study out Wednesday. And if that happens, bitcoin would be gobbling up 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, about as much as the Netherlands.

That’s a troubling trajectory, especially for a world that should be working overtime to root out energy waste and fight climate change. By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.

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Although the author of the study, Alex de Vries, an economist and data consultant based in the Netherlands, has shared these calculations publicly before, this is the first time that an analysis of bitcoin’s energy appetite has appeared in a peer-reviewed journal.

Bitcoin continues to soar in popularity — mostly as a speculative investment. And like any supercharged speculative investment, it swings wildly. Within the past 18 months, the price of bitcoin has soared ten-fold, crashed by 75 percent, only to double again, all while hedge funds and wealthy libertarians debate the future of the virtual currency.

Beyond its tentative success as a get-rich-quick scheme, bitcoin has an increasingly real-world cost. The process of “mining” for coins requires a globally distributed computer network racing to solve math problems — and also helps keep any individual transaction confidential and tamper-proof. That, in turn, requires an ever-escalating arms race of computing power — and electricity use — which, at the moment, has no end in sight. A single bitcoin transaction is so energy intensive that it could power the average U.S. household for a month.

A fluctuating bitcoin price, along with increases in computer efficiency, has slowed the cryptocurrency’s energy footprint growth rate to “just” 20 percent per month so far in this year. If that keeps up, bitcoin would consume all the world’s electricity by January 2021.

That simply won’t happen — government regulators would surely come to their senses by then — but it is a sign of bitcoin’s disastrous growth rate. In recent months, bitcoin supporters have criticized de Vries for being too pessimistic about its energy usage. But, as de Vries writes in the study, his estimates could also be missing out on secretive or illegal participation in the network, meaning there’s maybe even more happening than meets the eye. In at least one instance that de Vries found, a researcher was caught diverting a National Science Foundation supercomputer to mining bitcoin.

It’s a telling social phenomenon of late capitalism that we are willing to construct elaborate computer networks to conduct secure transactions with each other — and in the process torpedoing our hopes at a clean energy future.

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Bitcoin’s energy use got studied, and you libertarian nerds look even worse than usual

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