Tag Archives: parks

Pizza ovens are firing up the coal industry

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As the interminably salty April Ludgate of Parks and Recreation once said, “Time is money, money is power, power is pizza, and pizza is knowledge.” Well, there’s something about pizza you knead to know: It’s helping the coal industry.

Before you freak out, you should know that not all types of pizza are equally guilty in harming the planet. We’re specifically talking about pizza cooked in coal-fired ovens (though wood-fired pizza is also pretty bad for the environment). Now you may be thinking, “Dude! It’s just pizza,” but slow down there, Ninja Turtle. It turns out the pizza-powered coal market is pretty significant.

Pennsylvania mining company Blaschak Coal Corporation had a blockbuster 2018, selling a record-breaking 382,000 tons of coal. That’s because it mines anthracite coal, the super hot-burning fuel used in many personal pizza ovens. Demand for the centuries-old style of cooking has been growing since 2015. And anthracite coal isn’t just used to cook pizza; it’s also used by steelmakers and for home heating.

Not ready to think about a pizza-less planet yet? One option is to cut down on coal-fired pizza and, y’know, just eat oven-baked pizza like a normal person. But there’s also good news about the coal industry in general: coal is on the decline. Last year was a terrible year for the toxic stuff — the U.S. retired around 15 gigawatts of coal capacity.

So if Americans can keep their insatiable desire for coal-fired pizza under control, we might be able to kick our coal habit after all. But I’m not holding my breath. Also, I’m hungry?

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Pizza ovens are firing up the coal industry

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Off-roading, chopped Joshua trees, overflowing toilets: Our national parks during a shutdown

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Ever wanted to cut down an iconic Joshua tree in order to create space for some off-roading? No? Well, we thank you. But during the government shutdown, some fine folks did just that.

National parks are filling with garbage, and not just the kind that comes in trash bags. Since the government shut down 20 days ago, Joshua Tree, which is about the size of Delaware and located two hours east of Los Angeles, has been forced to reduce its number of rangers from 100 to only eight. The lack of staff is making it difficult to keep up with the mayhem that is illegal off-roading and road creation, damage of federal property, overflowing garbage and toilets, out-of-bounds camping, and the chopping down of literal Joshua trees.

And it isn’t just Joshua Tree bearing the brute force of the barbaric human. Reports have been surfacing of human waste and trash pile-up in a number of national parks, from Yosemite to Death Valley.

“I think there are a number of things that are not very obvious to the general public, like the trash and toilets [are], that are pretty consequential when you have a shutdown,” National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis told the the National Parks Traveler.

While the sight of overflowing waste and cut Joshua trees is shocking (and quite frankly repulsive), there is also major damage happening out-of-sight. The longest-running research initiative in the Shenandoah National park — 200,000 acres in the mountains of Virginia — has come to a grinding halt during the government shutdown. The study examines the impact of acid rain in the mid-Atlantic forests, and the research has been used to understand the effects of air pollution on natural systems. No big deal, unless you like breathing clean air.

Earlier this month, Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt instructed all national parks to use fee revenues in order to keep parks open during the shut down. Parks that require an entrance fee often save 80 percent of that revenue for ongoing projects such as park maintenance, visitor services, wildlife habitat needs, and law enforcement.

But just as we have knuckleheads, we too have good samaritans: Volunteers across the country are showing up to clean toilets and take out the trash, helping to tidy up the government-made mess.

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Off-roading, chopped Joshua trees, overflowing toilets: Our national parks during a shutdown

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Obama’s Expansion of a Vast Pacific Reserve, Built on a Bush Foundation

President Obama’s expansion of a vast marine monument near Hawaii builds on Bush-era moves spurred by passionate ocean communicators. This article is from: Obama’s Expansion of a Vast Pacific Reserve, Built on a Bush Foundation ; ; ;

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Obama’s Expansion of a Vast Pacific Reserve, Built on a Bush Foundation

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Time to Follow Teddy Roosevelt’s Advice: ‘Drop Politics’ and Enjoy a Park

In 1903 Teddy Roosevelt dropped politics and took a hike. One result was the National Park System. Continued here:  Time to Follow Teddy Roosevelt’s Advice: ‘Drop Politics’ and Enjoy a Park ; ; ;

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Time to Follow Teddy Roosevelt’s Advice: ‘Drop Politics’ and Enjoy a Park

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The Woman Behind Texas’ Muhammad Cartoon Contest Compares Herself to Rosa Parks

Mother Jones

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After two gunmen opened fire at a Muhammad drawing contest in Texas over the weekend, the head of the group that organized the controversial event has appeared on several television programs explaining the legitimacy of the contest. Today, Pamela Geller’s defense reached a new height of tone-deafness when she compared herself to civil rights activist Rosa Parks.

Fox News host Martha MacCallum asked Geller how she felt about criticism from conservatives including Donald Trump, who condemned Sunday’s contest as a “taunting” tactic solely used to incite Muslims. Geller dismissed Trump’s comments, saying, “He sure flaps his tongue and uses free speech and wishes to silence others. What would he have said about Rosa Parks? Rosa Parks should never have gone to the front of the bus. She’s taunting people.”

Shocked, MacCallum responded, “No, no, no. How do you make the Rosa Parks comparison?”

Geller refused to back down, and in fact seemed to be gaining steam, pledging she would not “abridge” her freedom for the sake of “savages”—a description she has used in past anti-Islam campaigns.

Insulting Donald Trump, Muslims, and the memory of Rosa Parks in one brief segment does demonstrate the unusual range of Geller’s ability to be downright offensive. Who needs the Southern Poverty Law Center when there’s material like this?

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The Woman Behind Texas’ Muhammad Cartoon Contest Compares Herself to Rosa Parks

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Parks and Wreck: The Feds Need $11.5 Billion to Fix Our Public Lands

Mother Jones

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In 2014, the 300 million visitors to US national parks may have noticed the potholes in the roads, the magnificent vistas obscured by dense brush, dirty visitors’ centers in need of basic repairs, trails that were not maintained, and overgrown campgrounds. Why? Blame Congress, which has routinely purchased new federal lands over the last 20 years while neglecting to fund the maintenance of existing national parks. National parks and historic sites need almost $12 billion in upkeep—or about four times the National Parks Service’s annual budget. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans proposed a budget that would slash spending by $5.5 trillion in 10 years.

So why the backlog? The NPS claims that stingy funding from Congress has forced park employees to make tough decisions about which repairs to perform and which to put off. But Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and many conservationists place most of the blame on the government, which has bought up new land instead of spending money maintaining the sites it already administers. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to acquire additional federal lands, but none of that funding is applied to the maintenance backlog,” she wrote in a 2013 op-ed in the Hill.

With an annual budget of $3 billion, the NPS is responsible for managing and maintaining 75,780 sites across the country—including such tourist destinations as the Grand Canyon, San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Ellis Island, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone—and many of the nation’s most iconic NPS-administered landmarks are fast falling into disrepair. When the agency released its annual maintenance report on Monday, the NPS noted a staggering $11.49 billion in deferred maintenance costs.

The NPS is urging Congress to fund its 2016 budget requests of $248.2 million for high-priority repairs and $300 million over three years for longer-term projects. And that’s just the start. For roads and transportation projects, NPS is hoping for $150 million in Obama’s proposed transportation bill.

Last year’s defense authorization bill, for instance, created seven new national parks and increased the size of nine others, though it provided no additional funding for the expansion or for maintenance costs. Former National Park Service director James Ridenour has referred to Congress’ penchant for creating new parks without authorizing new funding to care for the old ones as “thinning the blood” of national parks. Even 20 years ago, older national parks were neglected in favor of new projects.

Things have only gotten worse. Congressional funding tends to be directed to new projects that politicians can tout to their districts rather than upkeep of old ones, note Kansas City Star reporters Jeff Taylor and Jake Thompson in an article that delved into the national park funding debacle. Kurt Repanshek of the National Parks Traveler magazine made a similar point in a recent op-ed: “Members of Congress certainly like to point to a unit in their home districts, but if we can’t afford the park system we have today, how can we possibly justify new units?”

Another symptom of the funding problem is that there are too few seasonal employees to get all the work done, says Leesa Brandon, a press officer for the Blue Ridge Parkway in Asheville, North Carolina. “We don’t have the seasonal staff we want to have. Our visitors enjoy driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway, the 495-mile-long linear park…they see ditches, potholes, vistas with overgrown plants, and tell our workers,” she tells me. Blue Ridge Parkway, the scenic road that stretches from North Carolina to Virginia and is one of the most-visited national parks, needs nearly half a million dollars to make necessary repairs on roads. According to the Federal Highway Administration, 45 percent of the road is in need of repair.

According to NPS, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, visited by 13 million people every year, needs $232 million in upkeep. The White House itself needs more than $12 million in necessary and preventative repairs, such as the often postponed renovation of the West Wing, fixing the Harry Truman bowling alley, and buying the required 570 gallons of paint to cover the outside of the president’s home.

Nonprofit groups such as the Mesa Verde Foundation of Colorado and the National Park Trust are attempting to raise money to fill NPS’s funding gap and preserve parks all over the country, including the ancient cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde and the Santa Monica Mountains, the world’s largest urban national park, in Southern California. Many lawmakers and conservationists, including Murkowski, suggest that privatizing parks and outsourcing funding may shift the burden of maintaining the parks away from taxpayers.

Next year, the NPS celebrates its 100th anniversary, and the maintenance backlog is only expected to grow, unless Congress increases its budget or finds another way to fund the parks. The billions in unfunded repairs “show the result of Congress’ chronic underfunding of our national parks,” Craig Obey, a senior vice president for government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, tells Mother Jones in an email. “Failing to provide for the system’s basic maintenance needs has eroded our most treasured natural landscapes and historical sites.”

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Parks and Wreck: The Feds Need $11.5 Billion to Fix Our Public Lands

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Why Can’t Public Transit Be Free?

The main goal of transportation that costs riders nothing—getting people out of their cars—can’t be achieved by eliminating fares. Alessandro Colle/Shutterstock About 500 subway riders in Stockholm have an ingenious scheme to avoid paying fares. The group calls itself Planka.nu (rough translation: “dodge the fare now”), and they’ve banded together because getting caught free-riding comes with a steep $120 penalty. Here’s how it works: Each member pays about $12 in monthly dues—which beats paying for a $35 weekly pass—and the resulting pool of cash more than covers any fines members incur. As an informal insurance group, Planka.nu has proven both successful and financially solvent. “We could build a Berlin Wall in the metro stations,” a spokesperson for Stockholm’s public-transit system told The New York Times. “They would still try to find ways to dodge.” These Swedes’ strategy might seem like classic corner-cutting, but there’s a dreamy political tint to their actions. Like similar groups before them—Paris’s Métro-cheating “fraudster mutuals,” for example—they argue that public transportation should be free, just like education, parks, and libraries (and health care, in some parts of Europe). Planka.nu in particular laments the superiority of the car in what it calls “the current traffic hierarchy.” “The pure act of putting oneself behind the wheel seems, for almost everyone, to lead to egotistic behavior,” the group writes in one online manifesto. “We are confident that one is not born a motorist, but rather becomes one.” These fare-dodging collectives’ egalitarian dream happens to align with some hopes of U.S. policy makers. There’s an intuitive, consequentialist argument that making public transit free would get drivers off the road and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. In the U.S., where government subsidies cover between 57 and 89 percent of operating costs for buses and 29 to 89 percent of those for rail, many public-transit systems are quite affordable, costing in most cases less than $2, on average. If it might make transit more accessible to the masses and in the process reduce traffic and greenhouse-gas emissions, why not go all the way and make transportation free? Read the rest at The Atlantic. Original article:  Why Can’t Public Transit Be Free? ; ; ;

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Why Can’t Public Transit Be Free?

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Long Neglected, Lakes and Ponds in City Parks Will Get Some Attention

The parks department is assessing the challenges associated with cleaning up four-dozen bodies of water in the five boroughs. Original link:  Long Neglected, Lakes and Ponds in City Parks Will Get Some Attention ; ; ;

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Long Neglected, Lakes and Ponds in City Parks Will Get Some Attention

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Park Wants Visitors To Leave Cell Phones & Car Keys Behind

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Park Wants Visitors To Leave Cell Phones & Car Keys Behind

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A Partnership to Help the Tallest Residents in Yosemite Park

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

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Codex: Imperial Knights (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

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White Dwarf Issue 12: 19 April 2014 – White Dwarf

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Codex: Space Marines (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

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A Partnership to Help the Tallest Residents in Yosemite Park

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