Tag Archives: Ona

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species – Daniel Duzdevich

by Myrna Posted on December 14, 2018

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Darwin’s On the Origin of Species

A Modern Rendition

Daniel Duzdevich

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: February 24, 2014

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


An essential new edition of the 19th-century scientific masterpiece that translates Darwin’s Victorian prose into modern English: “Most useful” (Walter Brock, Columbia University).   Charles Darwin’s most famous book On the Origin of Species is without question one of the most important books ever written. Yet many students have great difficulty understanding it. While even the grandest works of Victorian English can be a challeng for modern readers, Darwin’s dense scientific prose is especially difficult to navigate.   For an era in which Darwin is more talked about than read, doctoral student Daniel Duzdevich offers a clear, modern English rendering of Darwin’s first edition. Neither an abridgement nor a summary, this version might best be described as a translation for contemporary English readers. A monument to reasoned insight, the Origin illustrates the value of extensive reflection, carefully gathered evidence, and sound scientific reasoning. By removing the linguistic barriers to understanding and appreciating the Origin , this edition brings 21st-century readers into closer contact with Darwin’s revolutionary ideas.

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Darwin’s On the Origin of Species – Daniel Duzdevich

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40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up.

by petrafitzgerald Posted on December 13, 2018

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Prompted by years of drought and mismanagement, a series of urgent multi-state meetings are currently underway in Las Vegas to renegotiate the use of the Colorado River. Seven states and the federal government are close to a deal, with a powerful group of farmers in Arizona being the lone holdouts.

The stakes are almost impossibly high: The Colorado River provides water to 1-in-8 Americans, and irrigates 15 percent of the country’s agricultural products. The nearly 40 million people who depend on it live in cities from Los Angeles to Denver. The river supports native nations and industry across the vast desert Southwest — including 90 percent of U.S.-grown winter vegetables. Simply put: The region could not exist in its current form without it.

Decades of warming temperatures have finally forced a confrontation with an inescapable truth: There’s no longer enough water to go around. This past winter was a preview of what the future will look like: A very low amount of snow fell across the mountains that feed the river, so water levels have plummeted to near-record low levels in vast Lake Mead and Lake Powell — the two mega-reservoirs that are used to regulate water resources during hard times.

Since then, the news has only gotten worse.

Water managers project that Lake Powell, which straddles the Arizona-Utah border, is on pace to lose 15 percent of its volume within the next 12 months. Lake Mead, which feeds hydroelectricity turbines at the Hoover Dam and is the region’s most important reservoir, will fare even worse — falling 22 percent in the next two years, below a critical cutoff point to trigger mandatory water rationing.

“Within Arizona, we must agree to share the pain,” Governor Doug Ducey said at a meeting of state water managers in Phoenix this week. For many reasons, Arizona is going to suffer first. The state relies on the river for 40 percent of its water — and some cities, like Tucson, are entirely dependent on it. The prospect of near-term shortfalls, according to Ducey, means there’s “no time to spare.”

In a dystopian twist, Las Vegas has already been planning for the worst-case scenario: Three years ago, the city completed a three-mile long tunnel to suck water from directly below Lake Mead. The tunnel will provide last-resort access to every drop of water — long after the reservoir falls an additional 125 feet, below the point that renders the Hoover Dam obsolete. At the current pace, that could happen within years.

Losing the river’s carbon-free hydropower will create electricity shortages. Unpredictable legal challenges, and perhaps interstate fighting, would escalate to the Supreme Court. Since agriculture currently consumes about 80 percent of the river’s water, it’s the obvious first place that urban areas are going to look to shore up their own supplies.

In the plans currently being discussed, within months, Southwestern farmers will have to abandon some of their irrigated cropland. That will kick off an inevitable decline of the region’s economy that could eventually reshape the entire country’s food distribution system.

Under the current rules, federal water managers project a 52 percent chance that an official water shortage will be declared in fall of 2019, with mandatory cutbacks beginning in 2020. A shortage is more than 99 percent certain the following year. The problem is, due to systematic over-use, even those cutbacks won’t be enough to prevent the river from falling still lower, so the multi-month series of meetings this year have centered around agreeing on deep cuts starting right away.

To be clear: There is no remaining scenario that does not include mandatory cutbacks in water usage along the Colorado River within the next few years. The long-awaited judgement day for the Southwest is finally here.

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40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up.

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CNN gave a platform to climate deniers, then debunked their lies

by CandraVillalobos Posted on December 11, 2018

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CNN put out a video this week titled, “Don’t believe these climate change lies.” It’s a change of pace for a mainstream media outlet long accustomed to presenting climate change as if it’s an issue that’s still debated by the scientific community.

CNN’s two-and-a-half-minute video features the network’s team of meteorologists debunking a bunch of talking points frequently spouted by deniers. Yes, the climate has always been changing. But never at this rate, the video says. “Only man-made influences, including the burning of fossil fuels, could have created this crisis.”

Watch the video:

As welcome as this is, there’s still a glaring problem: Two of the network’s four examples of how climate deniers operate are clips from CNN itself. One of those deniers, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, was hired by CNN as a senior political commentator last January. Right after the Trump administration released the 4th National Climate Assessment in November, Santorum was on air, arguing that “the reality is that a lot of these scientists are driven by the money that they receive.”

The next day, CNN invited Tom DeLay, the former Republican House majority leader, to discuss the assessment. He promptly unloaded a heap of nearly identical denier BS on viewers: “The report is nothing more than a rehash of age-old, 10 to 20 year assumptions made by scientists getting paid to further the politics of global warming.”

In other words, CNN is telling us not to believe these myths about climate change while giving a platform to people who … tell us these myths about climate change. Oy gevalt.

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CNN gave a platform to climate deniers, then debunked their lies

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Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps

by WillardFuerst Posted on December 11, 2018

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Our current rate of warming will quickly lead us back to a climate that predates the evolution of modern humans, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That kind of rapid change has no direct comparison in all of Earth’s multi-billion year history.

“The only thing that comes to mind is a meteorite impact,” says co-author Jack Williams, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The researchers analyzed the current, near-past, and near-future climates for every part of the planet, and then compared them to what likely existed during similar warming periods of the distant past. The results were shocking, even to Williams.

“We are creating a geological-scale climate event,” Williams says. “These things don’t happen that often, and we don’t know how humans will do through it.”

Without rapidly reducing emissions, we’ll quickly go back to a climate similar to somewhere between the Pliocene and Eocene — geological epochs that occurred about 3 million, and about 56 million years ago, respectively. Both would have hellish consequences and likely reshape human civilization permanently.

During the Pliocene period, global temperatures were about 2-4 degrees Celsius warmer than today and sea levels eventually stabilized about 60 feet higher than current levels. It was a world largely inconsistent with natural ice formation.

By 2030, under a business-as-usual scenario, Pliocene-like conditions become the closest match for most land areas, according to the study. Under a moderate climate action scenario, like the lax pledges of the Paris Agreement, that could be extended out to 2040. Only a drastic, economy-wide makeover within the next decade, consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C, would avoid the transition.

“This is coming up pretty fast,” Williams says.

An even more worrying period in Earth history was the Eocene, about 56 million years ago. The warmest part of this period — the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum — lasted around 200,000 years and was one of the warmest times in Earth history. The 8 degrees C-warmed world triggered a deep-sea mass extinction event and rainstorms so intense they scoured away the land surface at a continent scale. Humans are currently releasing carbon into the atmosphere at approximately 50 times the rate of the volcanic eruptions that led to the Eocene warm period.

According to Williams and his team, the Earth could tip toward Eocene-like conditions in just 120 years, based on current emissions trajectories. Millennials’ grandchildren would likely still be alive. Over the long haul, such conditions would be consistent with Greenland transforming from a mile-thick ice sheet to a marshy swamp, similar to Louisiana or Florida.

In 250 years from now on our current path, about 9 percent of the Earth’s land surface — mostly in East and Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and the coasts of the Americas — would transform into climates beyond the Eocene with no known precedent in all of Earth history, at least since life first formed.

But with rapid, near-term emissions reductions, those kinds of unprecedented and unknown climates can be almost entirely avoided, Williams says. Understanding the urgency and the scale of the choices currently facing humanity requires “balancing hope and despair,” he says.

“We’ve been talking about these challenges for years and there’s not been much measurable progress in stabilizing our greenhouse emissions,” Williams says. “We’ve built our cities and our societies for the current climate.” As a scientist and a concerned citizen, he said that observing the nations of the world not taking urgent action is like watching “a slow-motion train wreck.”

The challenge, according to Williams, is that “our options narrow as time goes forward.” The longer we wait to institute radical changes in society, the more likely the climate will become radically and irreversibly different, during the lifetimes of people alive today.

Talking about the choice we currently face as a civilization is perhaps the most important thing that any of us can do. The choice between a liveable world and a world completely unknown in all of Earth history, as Williams and his colleagues uncovered, is one of the starkest talking points yet.

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Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps

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Climate change is a human rights issue

by payoneerdeutsch Posted on December 10, 2018

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Seventy years ago today, nearly every nation in the world approved a list of fundamental rights entitled to every human being on the planet. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a milestone document signed in the wake of World War II. Now, a new humanitarian crisis is afoot: climate change.

So many of our human rights, such as the right to life, food, health, and an adequate standard of living are adversely affected by climate change. From devastating hurricanes to killer wildfires, climate change exacerbates socioeconomic disparity, gender inequality and other forms of discrimination.

And yet, even among our so-called climate leaders, the link between justice and the environment goes unnamed. As the United Nations climate summit in Katowice (dubbed COP24) enters its second week, some advocates are concerned that the conversation has not been focused enough on human rights. When the Paris Agreement was signed three years ago, parties outlined a vision that recognized nations must respect and protect human rights. This year, the talks are being sponsored by coal companies, and the latest draft of the Paris rulebook (which outlines what countries need to do to put the accord into action) omits a human rights reference.

Sébastien Duyck, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law released a statement in response to the silence around human rights at COP24, saying, “Immediate action is necessary to avoid the suffering of millions of people and the collapse of ecosystems, and to be truly effective that action must be rights-based and people-centered. At a time when every human right is threatened by the accelerating climate crisis, it is unacceptable for negotiators to be backsliding on the promises of the Paris Agreement.”

Here at Grist, we agree that covering the environment involves covering human rights as well. Here are some of our top justice stories of 2018:

Heat Check

Grist / Justine Calma

Extreme heat kills more than a hundred New Yorkers yearly. Here’s how the city’s tackling the problem in a warming world.

4 Indigenous leaders on what Bolsonaro means for Brazil

Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro wants to open the Amazon rainforest up to new development.  But it’s not just one of the world’s largest carbon sinks that’s threatened — the lives of many of Brazil’s indigenous peoples are under siege as well.

Between Trump and a devastated place

This year, undocumented immigrants reeled from hurricanes, fires, and the Trump administration.

When criminal justice and environmental justice collide

Shadia Fayne Wood of Survival Media

Black communities in the United States face a host of structural challenges that impact day-to-day life — from environmental injustice to heightened policing and racial profiling.

California’s most vulnerable were already breathing bad air. Heat and wildfires are making things worse.

MARK RALSTON / AFP / Getty Images

It was a punishing summer in California. But it’s worse for those who live in the most polluted areas

On Thin Ice

Grist / Michael DeFreitas / robertharding / Allan White / Winnie Au / Getty Images

Climate change circles are not immune to #MeToo. Homeward Bound was supposed to foster science’s next generation of female leaders. But it finds itself navigating treacherous waters.

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Climate change is a human rights issue

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China is both the best and worst hope for clean energy

by leoratulk31488 Posted on December 8, 2018

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

In Katowice, Poland, delegates from around the world have gathered to discuss how to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. The intent is to meet the goals that emerged from the 2015 Paris United Nations Climate Summit. But this year there’s a new top dog at the table.

The United States, led by a president who doesn’t believe in climate change or the scientists who study it, will take a back seat at this month’s climate summit, known as COP24. Meanwhile China, with its massive economy and growing green energy sector, has become the world’s climate leader.

That might seem like a good thing if it weren’t for a couple of problems. China is the world’s biggest carbon polluter, and its emissions won’t start easing for many years. Chinese leaders are also exporting dirty energy around the world through their “belt and road” development program, which is spurring economic growth throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. A construction boom in coal-fired power plants has accompanied that growth in places like Vietnam, Pakistan, and Kenya, for example.

So having China as the big power at a climate summit doesn’t bode well for any new get-tough-on-carbon deals between now and the end of the meeting on December 14, experts say. “The negotiations abhor a vacuum,” says Andrew Light, senior fellow at the World Resources Institute and a former climate negotiator in the Obama administration. “The U.S. is not showing leadership, so China steps in.”

The latest round of climate negotiations (held in the capital of Poland’s coal-producing region of Silesia) are focused on the technical issues of how best to measure and verify each country’s stated emissions reductions. Even though the negotiations are held under the flag of the United Nations, there’s no real carbon police out there. So it’s up to each country to self-report their carbon dioxide emissions from factories, automobile tailpipe emissions, and other sources that end up forming a warming blanket in the Earth’s atmosphere. Those numbers are then fact-checked by other nations and NGOs.

A major report released in October by a panel of the world’s leading scientists says that the planet will experience severe environmental damage — wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and floods — that could top $54 trillion by 2040 unless there’s a big downward shift in carbon dioxide emissions. That’s going to require every nation to make changes, as well as individual cities, states, and businesses.

“It will require things that are more aggressive, like shutting down existing power plants, and by 2030, we probably need to reduce global coal power production by 70 or 80 percent,” says Nathan Hultman, director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland.

Hultman, who worked on climate issues in the Obama White House, says the solutions may be politically impossible for now. “Are we doing enough quickly enough?” he said. “The answer is probably no. At the same time, we have to ask, how do we ramp up contributions toward limiting emissions.”

Still, Hultman and others see progress, and they see China as both a cause of the problem and a potential solution. China burns half the world’s coal and has added 40 percent of the world’s coal capacity since 2002. More than 4.3 million Chinese people work in coal mines, compared to 76,000 in the U.S. (that’s fewer employees than work at Arby’s or in radio).

While China is gaga for coal, it also is more green than anyone else. China owns half the world’s electric vehicles and 99 percent of the world’s electric buses. One quarter of its electricity comes from renewable power like solar or wind. Its cheap silicon panels have driven down the price of solar energy worldwide, and Chinese manufacturers are now starting to export EV batteries to automakers in Europe, Asia, and the U.S.

For Chinese leaders, boosting global green energy isn’t a moral issue, it’s an economic one, according to Jonas Nahm, assistant professor of energy, resources, and environment at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “It doesn’t come from an altruistic place,” Nahm said. “They are doing this as an economic development strategy.”

Nahm has been studying the disconnect between green energy targets announced by party leaders in Beijing, and the actions of local leaders in China’s far-flung provinces. He found that up to 40 percent of renewable energy is wasted because there’s no national power market in China. That means that wind and solar power generated in one province can’t be sent to an adjacent province, so more coal plants are fired up even if there’s cheaper green energy next door.

But China’s reliance on dirty coal has come back to haunt its own citizens, according to Nahm. “The air pollution crisis is a reason to get away from coal,” he said. “That’s the first environmental crisis that’s pushed the government to act, and then the impact of climate change. There’s desertification, water shortages, giant dust storms, and some of these problems are getting more severe.”

Nahm and the other experts believe that China is headed in the right direction on climate change, but its economy is so big and so dependent on coal that it takes a while to get there. As for the climate summit in Poland, it’s possible that China might try to wiggle out of meeting even tougher new climate commitments, even as it becomes the biggest nation supporting the U.N. Paris agreement goals. President Trump said he plans to walk away from the Paris agreement; the earliest he can do that is in 2020.

There’s also the issue of checking up on each country’s measurements. Before the Paris agreement, China was considered a “developing” nation subject to less stringent reporting requirements. That changed after 2015. But without a strong U.S. influence to check it today, China might try to loosen the bookkeeping, says Samantha Gross, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“What will the reporting requirements be and how will they be verified,” said Gross. “That’s what the negotiators will be duking out in Poland. I’m curious to see how far they get.”

As for China, Gross says they hold the cards for the world’s climate future. “We’re all gonna fry if they don’t do something.”

Continued:

China is both the best and worst hope for clean energy

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First Solar-Powered Car To Be Introduced in Late 2019

by WillisSteffan6 Posted on December 7, 2018

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First Solar-Powered Car To Be Introduced in Late 2019

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Climate change caused the “Great Dying,” aka the planet’s worst extinction

by IndianaBrewster Posted on December 6, 2018

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The “Great Dying” was just as bad as it sounds. In the planet’s worst mass extinction 252 million years ago, up to 80 percent of all species died out, including up to 96 percent of ocean species. Trilobites, sea scorpions, and spiny sharks disappeared forever. The rapid reorganization of life on Earth spawned all kinds of unimaginably nasty things, like a giant burp of toxic hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere released from decaying marine animals.

For the first time, a new study in Science draws parallels between the cause of this horrific, planet-changing event and the global warming we’re experiencing today. “It is beyond deniable that climate change is linked to extinction,” lead author Justin Penn said in an interview with Grist.

In the Great Dying, global temperatures rose by more than 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees F) over the span of a few thousand years — a blink of an eye in geologic terms. Human activity has “only” warmed the planet about 1 degree Celsius over the past 150 years, and we’re on course for about 3 degrees (5.4 F) of total warming by 2100.

Penn and his University of Washington colleagues found that, should we continue unabated fossil fuel use, we could unavoidably kick off another crisis like the Great Dying by about 2300. Fast forward another thousand years, and we could be looking at all of the extinction, just much, much faster.

Here’s how the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history went down: A series of massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia emitted huge quantities of greenhouse gases, rapidly warming the planet. When water warms, its capacity to retain oxygen is reduced. Think of the air bubbles that form on the bottom of a pot being heated on the stove and then escape. The same thing, hypoxia, happened to the oceans 252 million years ago on a massive scale.

The researchers found that during the Great Dying, the oceans lost about 76 percent of their oxygen. So far, modern oceans have lost only about 2 percent of oxygen, but with continued rapid warming, that is going to quickly worsen, according to Penn’s findings.

Earlier this year, a different study projected how blowing past Paris Agreement goals would change our oceans. The researchers had to extend their modeling effort far beyond 2300 — the furthest out most climate models go — because they found that the impact was still getting worse.

That study found that ocean oxygen will keep declining until about the year 3000, even if fossil fuel emissions cease in the next few decades, because our current rapid phase of warming is causing ocean circulation to slow down. Beyond that, it could take about 6,000 years for ocean oxygen to recover to a new equilibrium state. Going that long without oxygen “would mean quite dramatic things for marine life,” says Gianna Battaglia, a climate scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and the lead author of the paper earlier this year.

For Penn, who hasn’t yet finished his PhD, his work on this latest study has renewed his desire to publicly communicate the dire urgency of climate change. “I’m pretty optimistic in my view of life in general,” he says. “Even though we’ve shown the direct connection between warming and mass extinction, we’ve also identified the solution to that problem. There is a way out.”

According to his coauthor and PhD advisor, Curtis Deutsch, that way out looks like a massive mobilization on the biggest problems facing the ocean and humanity.

“To portray this slow-motion ecological collapse as fundamentally a climate problem bothers me,” Deutsch says. “Climate change is not the problem, climate change is a symptom of the problem.” To truly solve the problem of mass extinction would take fixing other problems like overfishing, plastic pollution, and other stressors on the marine environment, Deutsch says.

Studies such as this one are like a time machine, propelling us first backward, to reckon with a reality that has already occurred, and then forward, projecting the known consequences of our current actions.

What happens in the next decade really, really matters. New data on Wednesday showed that, as of 2018, humanity’s carbon emissions are still accelerating upwards — tracking more or less with the worst-case scenario envisioned nearly a decade ago by climate scientists. In addition to jeopardizing human civilization, the results from Penn and his colleagues show we are setting a course of ecosystem annihilation that will play out over thousands and millions of years.

Some people frame climate change as a problem that’s bad for humanity, but ultimately the Earth will pull through. Sarah Myhre, a climate scientist who works in the same University of Washington lab group as the authors, is uncomfortable with that line of thought.

“This is not just about temperature. It’s about changing the biological, chemical, and physical identity of the planet forever,” she says of the study. “It’s about changing the Earth in a way that has no precedent, and it’s permanent.”

It’s entirely within our control to steer the planet on a different path away from the brink. Reading about this may make you may feel powerless, but collectively, our choices are the most powerful geological force in our planet’s history.

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Climate change caused the “Great Dying,” aka the planet’s worst extinction

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What the Los Angeles Auto Show tells us about the future of cars

by maximoqfh2240 Posted on December 6, 2018

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If you ask anyone about the future of the auto industry, it’s all about electrification, ride sharing, and autonomous driving. But in the short-term, at least for automakers, it’s pure anxiety.

Not only did General Motors recently reveal plans to discontinue six of its car models by the end of 2019 (including its only electric offering, the Chevrolet Volt), the Trump administration announced earlier this week that it intends to end automaker subsidies for electric cars after 2022. If pleasing the consumer weren’t enough, now car manufacturers have to worry about a president who clearly doesn’t grasp the complexities of their industry.

Caught between the consumer demands of today and the technology of tomorrow, American auto manufacturers are being pulled in two very disparate directions. Case in point, The Los Angeles Auto Show, which kicked off this weekend to packed crowds, has come to be about two, at times, contradictory concepts: luxury and the environment.

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Finally for those awaiting an electric car that doesn’t look like a science experiment, there’s the Range Rover Plug-in hybrid, Jaguar I-pace (a hybrid SUV), and BMW i8 Roadster and Convertible. Despite the death of the Chevy Volt, nearly every manufacturer is making some sort of entry into electric vehicles, meaning there is more room for fun. EVs aren’t just econo-boxes anymore; the technology is reaching into all aspects of the auto industry, which offers (greener) hope for their future.

In the meantime, however, American car companies still rely heavily on sales of pickup trucks and SUVs. In recent years the balance in the car world has shifted from passenger sedans to SUVs and pickup trucks. When General Motors recently announced it was restructuring, laying off nearly 15 percent of its salaried employees and changing its production offerings, it wasn’t so much an industry shake-up as an aftershock. Ford and Chrysler have largely abandoned sedans, GM is the last of the big American carmakers to make the move.

So how can industry aficionados pursue both what we want (SUVs) and (what we need) new electric options, both snazzy and standard?

The L.A. auto show says as much about the city as it does the state of the industry. The City of Angels is one of the biggest and most important car markets in the U.S., and what happens at this auto show has consequences. As someone who’s been covering the industry for nearly a decade, there’s a lot on display beyond the shiny coats of wax and ginormous red bows.

Here’s what the auto show’s offerings say about the future direction of the auto industry:

SUVs are getting greener

In the U.S., more SUVs and pickup trucks are sold than cars. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people want to drive gas-guzzlers. Consumers are flocking to more fuel-efficient crossover SUVs, such as the Honda CRV. Companies such as Volvo are introducing hybrids, and Kia unveiled its Niro EV. SUVs are getting more fuel-efficient, though three-row SUVs are showing no signs of going away — Ford’s Lincoln brand debuted a new Navigator and BMW showed off its xDrive40i model.

Electric vehicles are still the future (globally)

At a time when other automakers are turning out new hybrid models, what are we to make of GM putting the Volt on the chopping block? It’s not the first time the car company has done away with its electric vehicle offerings. (GM killed the EV-1 back in the ‘90s, then introduced the Volt in 2011.)

Environmentalists have long worried carmakers would abandon electric vehicles due to lagging sales (as they have before). And despite all the space on the show floor for electric cars, U.S. consumers have still not embraced them. Without the federal government incentivizing EVs, you’d expect carmakers to be running in the other direction.

But the good news is even if the current administration isn’t interested in the electric vehicles, California, China, and European nations surely are. China has followed the Golden State’s lead in pushing hard for electric vehicles. Air quality in China is an important political issue. On a tour I took of Chinese manufacturers last year, officials admitted that party leaders feel popular opinion about the environment could threaten their hold on power.

Because of the Chinese and European commitments to electric vehicles, the global market for EVs doesn’t appear to be facing extinction. But despite Tesla’s popularity, EV sales are not what they need to be domestically to make them major market winners.

Vehicles are getting more autonomous and more craaaazy

Veteran car journalist Jean Jennings told me, with a bit of regret in her voice, that the future of the industry is “shared rides, electric cars, and autonomous.” In many ways Jennings says the work that it’s going to take for GM to get to a cleaner, safer, profitable future demands rethinking how the cars are made — and that mean no driver instead of no gas.

A person driving a 2003 Honda Civic would barely recognize the driver-assist technology of today like automated braking and adaptive cruise control. Now, the most exciting tech geared toward driver-assist includes I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-magic features that allow a driver to essentially see through the engine block (making parking easier), and map-the-city visualizations that use the pipes and wires under the road to help autonomous vehicles find their way.

Tough air quality standards are likely here to stay

California’s Air Resources Board, soon to be led by California Governor-elect Gavin Newsom, is expected to fight a long battle with federal regulators to preserve the right for the state to set tougher emissions standards than the rest of the country. Trump being in office might seem like an opportune moment for the auto industry’s air quality standards to relax significantly; but China is the market driving these regulations now, and people there really care about air quality.

Politics and the auto industry typically do not mix well

The talk of this auto show was GM, in part because so many GM workers at the show only have months left at their jobs. It was these job cuts, after a bailout from taxpayers, that drew the ire of President “Tariff man” Trump, whose threats to discontinue electric car subsidies have not played well with industry professionals.

President Trump isn’t the first politician to try to use auto executives as a convenient punching bag. CEOs of car manufacturers haven’t done themselves any favors by, say, opposing airbags and fuel economy standards in the past. But this administration’s public feud is causing major road burn in the industry — and not only for GM. If the president intended to punish the Detroit-based company, he failed to grasp an important part of the electric vehicle rules from the Obama era: Because GM got in early on plug-in electric vehicles, it’s already used up most of its federally backed incentives to sell electric cars. (And its credits drying up is what made the Volt expendable.

Buckle up, because auto trends are part of a cycle

If the future of the industry were a race, it’d be the Indianapolis 500: fast and circular. Take GM’s cuts: The auto industry is cyclical, and layoffs are no surprise. Reshaping the current GM line-up also seems to this reporter (the child and grandchild of auto workers) to be a part of that cycle.

What’s interesting to me about this auto show is the feeling of déjà vu. American car makers are turning away from sedans, just as they did in the early 2000s The shift may not be forever — especially considering that some companies, such as Honda, are investing MORE money in its small cars. As Honda executive Sage Marie pointed out, the company is both investing in sedans and looking to emerging markets, while the American car companies stay wedded to pickups.

So when it comes to predicting the future of the auto industry, don’t get trapped by what’s just around the bend. Automakers are still, in general, looking toward a greener future… but there might be a few pit stops along the way.

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What the Los Angeles Auto Show tells us about the future of cars

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The radical tools that could save coral reefs

by ChristoHogben Posted on December 4, 2018

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

Coral reefs, considered the canaries of the world’s oceans, are being cooked. As many as 50 percent of reefs worldwide have been lost over the last few decades, with major die-offs in recent years due to mass bleaching events brought on by warmer ocean temperatures.

As the planet heads toward potentially catastrophic climate change, scientists have come to a sobering realization: Coral reefs, sensitive ecosystems that provide habitat for more than 25 percent of marine species and are vital to coastal communities around the globe, may not persist without radical human intervention.

On Wednesday, a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a 200-page interim report that identifies more than two dozen intervention strategies, many of them experimental, that could make corals more resilient to the effects of climate change.

Coral scientists have reached an “unheard-of state of urgency,” recognizing that the status quo likely won’t be enough to stabilize reef ecosystems in a warming world, Stephen Palumbi, the committee’s chair and a marine biology professor at Stanford University, said at a briefing on Wednesday. This sense of urgency was on full display at the committee’s first meeting in February, where Mark Eakin, the coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, said the situation facing corals is dire.

The new report — the first of two that the 12-person committee is tasked with producing — provides an in-depth look at 23 techniques scientists could use to give corals a fighting chance, from relocation and genetic manipulation of coral species to antibiotic use and spraying salt water into the atmosphere to shade and cool reefs.

This is the “first time anyone has looked into what abilities we might have to stabilize any major world ecosystem,” Palumbi told HuffPost. In much the same way that the agricultural sector is planning for changing climate conditions, the committee set out to identify the range of resilience tools available to the field of coral science, he said.

The good news is, there are many.

“Not all of them are usable. Not all of them will work. Not all of them are actually feasible at the scale we want,” Palumbi said at the briefing. “But the fact that the coral reef community is pulling together to produce this list right now is, in fact, I think, the take-home message. The toolbox is not empty.”

The report primarily focuses on ways of protecting corals against bleaching, a phenomenon in which heat-stressed corals turn white after expelling their algae, which provide most of the coral polyps’ energy. If not allowed to recover free of stressors, the corals can perish. The most recent bleaching event, which lasted from June 2014 to May 2017, was the “longest, most widespread, and possibly the most damaging coral bleaching event on record,” Coral Reef Watch says. Among the reefs hardest hit was Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where an estimated 29 percent of shallow water corals perished.

Scientists say failing to rein in greenhouse emissions, the primary driver of global climate change, will spell the end of coral reefs as we know them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading United Nations consortium of researchers studying human-caused climate change, issued a dire report in October that found reefs could decline by 70 to 90 percent if the planet warms 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, and by 99 percent at 2 degrees Celsius. And the latest federal climate assessment, released last week by the Trump administration, concluded that the loss of unique coral reef ecosystems “can only be avoided by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”

Palumbi emphasized Wednesday that the known interventions are not a substitute for cutting carbon emissions or reducing other environmental stressors.

“These interventions will help coral reef ecosystems be resilient enough to hang out while we figure out fixing climate change,” he said.

The “huge lift,” he added, will be finding ways to implement them on regional or global scales. So far, none have made it beyond lab or field trials, “making their efficacy and impacts uncertain,” the report states.

The project, sponsored by NOAA and called Interventions to Increase the Resilience of Coral Reefs, is expected to take up to two years. The committee’s second report, due out next year, will provide a decision-making framework for world leaders to assess the risks and benefits of intervention strategies and to implement them to help protect reefs.

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The radical tools that could save coral reefs

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