We have a new earthquake data set thanks to the US NWS Pacific Tsunami Warning Center! This animation shows all recorded earthquakes from 1901 – 2000. You’ll notice that more earthquakes appear as monitoring improved with time. Watch until the end to see a composite frame of all the earthquakes at once!
We have a new earthquake dataset thanks to the US NWS Pacific Tsunami Warning Center! This animation shows all recorded earthquakes from 1901 – 2000. You'll notice that more earthquakes appear as monitoring improved with time. Watch until the end to see a composite frame of all the earthquakes at once! Read more here: https://sos.noaa.gov/datasets/earthquakes-of-the-20th-century/And watch a flat version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhmF-IwP6uM&feature=youtu.be
Trump won’t save the air and water — but cities can
Alexander Nazaryan April 16, 2019
Firemen spray water on a tug boat as a fire, ignited in an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River, consumes the docks at the Great Lakes Towing Co., Cleveland, June 25, 1952. (Photo: Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — A wise man once said that you can’t step into the same river twice. Some rivers, you shouldn’t step into even a single time. That used to be true for the Cuyahoga, which snakes through downtown Cleveland before emptying into Lake Erie. For most of the 20th century, it was legal to dump waste into waterways. So the industries along the Cuyahoga dumped, and dumped — and dumped some more. The river’s surface crusted over with debris, and where the water was visible, it was black with oil.
Then, on June 22, 1969, a train crossing a bridge across the Cuyahoga near the Republic Steel mill caused sparking, which fell toward the oil-thick surface. It’s not hard to imagine what happened next. Timemagazine published images of the river aflame (the pictures were actually from an earlier Cuyahoga fire). “Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows,” the article read.
Randy Newman even wrote a song about the Cuyahoga fire. “Burn on, big river, burn on,” Newman’s song went, “Burn on, big river, burn on.” You’ll never guess the title of his ballad to the Cuyahoga: “Burn On.”
This from 1967 shows plumes of industrial waste emptying into Lake Erie. (Photo: EPA Ohio)
But 50 years later, the Cuyahoga is a point of pride for Cleveland, having been the focus of a $3.5 billion restoration effort that has helped anchor a broader revitalization of Cleveland. And it has just been named “River of the Year” by American River, a Washington-based organization focused on protecting the nation’s waterways. The near-miraculous recovery of the Cuyahoga is a testament to the efforts of local officials, begun by then Mayor Carl Stokes — and to the success of one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation in the nation’s history, the Clean Water Act, which the Trump administration is now attempting to undercut.
“It’s a dramatic comeback for the Cuyahoga,” says Chris Williams, vice president for conservation at American River. For Clevelanders, the comeback is also an affirmation of the Midwestern spirit.
“We were never the ‘Mistake by the Lake,’” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told Yahoo News, referencing the nickname with which Cleveland was tagged after 1969.
“We like to call ourselves ‘Gritty City,’” adds Matt Gray, Cleveland’s chief of sustainability. Like Brown, he plainly dislikes the image of Cleveland as a post-industrial landscape for ruin-porn aficionados. Cleveland, for him, is a “green city on a blue lake,” a slogan that has become popular in this once-sooty town. Under the guise of Sustainable Cleveland 2019, Gray and other city officials have pushed a plethora of green initiatives, from cleaning up brownfields to encouraging farm-to-table dining.
The Cleveland skyline is reflected on the Cuyahoga River, 2018. (Photo: Getty images)
This must all seem highly improbable to anyone who was there in 1969. Because by then Cuyahoga had burned plenty of times before, Clevelanders hardly noticed, with the city’s paper of record, the Plain Dealer, giving the story the dog-bites-man treatment. “Just another fire on a river that had ignited many times before,” as former Environmental Protection Agency engineer Michael Mikulka put it in a recent recollection of the incident. In fact, the river had been considered “an open sewer through the center of the city” as early as 1881.
It was Mayor Stokes, the first African-American to lead Cleveland, who realized that by publicizing the fire, he could bring attention to the Cuyahoga’s plight. The day after the fire, he went to the scene of the crime. Leaning against a wooden pillar on the river’s banks, with the bridge leading to Republic Steel behind him, Stokes treated the event like the newsworthy catastrophe it should have been — and would have been if such fires were not dismayingly commonplace. Stokes painted the city as a helpless victim of industry: “We have no jurisdiction over what’s dumped in there,” he complained.
The Time story appeared a few months after that. Far more importantly, in 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act — in part thanks to testimony Stokes and his brother, U.S. Rep. Louis Stokes provided — that made illegal the kind of dumping that had turned the Cuyahoga into a tinderbox of horrors. In the years that followed, Washington, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio’s capital, were not always models of cooperation, but they did well enough to make sure that the Cuyahoga would never catch fire again. In 1998, it was declared an American Heritage River, one of 14 around the nation given such designation by the EPA. Today, its waters are inhabited by 60 species of fish. Bald eagles nest on its banks.
And Cleveland is a growing city, with luxury condominium buildings rising on the formerly blighted shores of the Cuyahoga. “You’re not gonna have stuff like the Flats on a river that’s full of oil,” explains Bob Wysenski, a retired Ohio EPA official, in an EPA video about the Cuyahoga. The reference is to the Flats East Bank, a massive redevelopment near where the Cuyahoga flows into Lake Eerie. The Flats represents the kind of upscale initiative that would have been unthinkable two decades ago.
The Cleveland Clinic, one of the top-rated hospitals in America. (Photo: Ron Antonelli/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
There are now 737,031 people across 12 Midwestern states working in renewable energy jobs, according to Clean Jobs Midwest, a nonprofit organization that studies the renewable energy sector of that region. Ohio, according to Clean Jobs Midwest, now employs 112,486 people in clean energy, which puts the state in eighth place nationwide for jobs in the renewables sector. By contrast, only 51,000 people around the country are employed in coal mining, an industry President Trump has promised to restore.
In the meantime, the Trump administration has moved to cancel or delay many of the environmental regulations that it believes hamper growth in the extractive industries and heavy manufacturing. Those are many of the same regulations that have kept river fires from becoming a normal occurrence of American life, on the order of say, early morning presidential tweetstorms.
Brown calls Trump a “tool of the oil and gas industry.” As harsh as that charge may be, Trump does have Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, heading the EPA, and Department of Interior chief David Bernhardt, also a former lobbyist, carries a card with all of his potential conflicts of interests.
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. (Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
Wheeler’s predecessor at the EPA, Scott Pruitt, led a sustained assault on the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act before being forced to resign in ignominy last year. Pruitt cancelled the Waters of the United States rule, an Obama-era directive that had expanded the provisions of the Clean Water Act. According to Williams, the American Rivers vice president, that rollback could endanger 18 percent of the nation’s rivers and half of its wetlands. Pruitt also repealed Obama’s clean power plan, which would have hastened the transition away from fossil fuels. Bernhardt’s predecessor, Ryan Zinke — who like Pruitt ended his career as a public official in disgrace — wantonly leased public lands to oil and gas companies, endangering pristine areas across the West.
Wheeler, the current EPA chief, has spoken about returning the EPA to “its core mission,” but his favorite version of the EPA appears to be the one before there was any EPA to speak off. He has overseen — without any seeming concern — the attrition of hundreds of scientists from the agency and supports Trump’s proposed budget for his agency, which would see a 31 decrease in funding.
But as Williams of American River says, “the Trump administration can’t simply strip away protections by fiat.” It falls to cities and states to fight the administration in court. Attorneys general like Maura Healey of Massachusetts and New York’s Barbara Underwood, who has since left office, fought Pruitt in court, keeping him from critical victories in Trump’s war against the regulatory state. That battle will continue as long as Trump is in office: for the Cuyahoga, the Hudson and every other river in the nation.
Trump’s Trade War With China Doesn’t Look Like a Win
Noah Smith, Bloomberg April 16, 2019
(Bloomberg Opinion) — In March 2018, President Donald Trump uttered his famous declaration that “trade wars are good and easy to win.” A little more than a year later, it looks as if Trump is losing the trade war he started with China.
The tariffs that Trump slapped on Chinese goods — and the additional tariffs he threatened — may have dinged China’s economy. Most data sources indicate that Chinese growth slowed a bit in 2018. That dip could have been due to government efforts to constrain credit growth, but many believe that Trump’s tariffs hurt business confidence and slowed investment. That makes sense, since any company thinking about making their products in China would have to worry that Trump would make it hard to sell those products in the U.S. The trade war has given multinationals an incentive to accelerate their plans to shift production out of China, and has probably made Chinese companies more cautious as well:
But the U.S. was also sideswiped by the trade war. Taxing Chinese-made products raised prices for American consumers and factories alike. A pair of studies by trade economists put the losses to the U.S. economy in the tens of billions of dollars annually.
And that doesn’t count the impact of Chinese retaliation. Although the U.S. runs a trade deficit with China, it still exports almost $200 billion a year to that country. Chinese tariffs hit American farmers hard, as the country halted most imports of soybeans from the U.S.
Inventories piled up. U.S. agricultural exports, which had been growing exponentially, started to fall, and farm incomes declined. Desperate farmers appealed to Trump for help, and he responded with a wave of direct payments to farmers. But going on the government dole isn’t a sustainable business model, and a wave of farm bankruptcies has begun. So far, farmers haven’t abandoned Trump politically, but the threat is clearly there.
This demonstrates why China was always in a better position to win a trade war with the U.S. China’s autocratic regime is much less vulnerable to the shifting winds of politics than the U.S.’s democratically elected politicians. Also, China much more recently escaped from poverty, and its residents are more accustomed to enduring economic hardship. And since China is still catching up with the rest of the world, a slowdown there means going from 6.5 percent annual growth to 6 or 5.5 percent, while a slowdown in the more mature U.S. economy means a significant hit or even a halt to growth.
Trump is now beating a retreat. A trade truce with China, enacted in late 2018, left most of the U.S.’s biggest goals — intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, forced technology transfer and access to the Chinese market — unfulfilled. Essentially, China will buy more U.S. farm products and a few other exports, and Trump will back off. A final deal is likely to look even more like an ignominious defeat for the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, there are signs that the Chinese slowdown has bottomed out, as the government unleashes some fresh stimulus.
But tariffs are only one aspect of the trade war. Although it has been less in the public eye, the struggle to control the future of high technology is arguably even more important to the balance of economic power between the U.S. and China. And the U.S. may also be losing on this front as well.
The U.S. has recently been putting pressure on Huawei Technologies Co., China’s leading telecommunications manufacturer. It has tried to pressure American allies not to buy 5G wireless technology from the company, which some believe to be an arm of the Chinese military. American security services worry that Huawei-made 5G products would be able to spy on communications around the world. But in a big blow to that effort, Germany recently said it would not shut Huawei out.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has implemented export controls on many technology products. Many Chinese manufacturers rely on sophisticated American technology — for example, some Chinese circuit makers rely on U.S.-made semiconductors. Export controls will hurt Chinese tech in the short term, but in the long term it could merely push China to accelerate its efforts to replicate and surpass U.S. technology. In the past, the U.S. has benefited from retaining the high-value parts of the supply chain, even as it outsourced the lower-value parts to China. But if China becomes a technological peer, its companies will begin to compete more directly with American ones, as Japanese companies did in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
So Trump’s trade war is looking shaky on all fronts. His ferocious attacks inflicted some damage, but China could take the losses, and is now battling back with great effectiveness. It turns out that trade wars weren’t quite as easy to win as Trump believed.
To contact the author of this story: Noah Smith at nsmith150@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion
The Insect Apocalypse Is Coming: Here Are 5 Lessons We Must Learn
By Robert Walker, Truthout April 10, 2019
Scientists estimate that populations of ladybugs in the U.S. and Canada have declined by 14 percent between 1987 and 2006. Pixabay
In a new report, scientists warn of a precipitous drop in the world’s insect population. We need to pay close attention, as over time, this could be just as catastrophic to humans as it is to insects. Special attention must be paid to the principal drivers of this insect decline, because while climate change is adding to the problem, food production is a much larger contributor.
The report, released by researchers at the Universities of Sydney and Queensland and the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences, concluded that 40 percent of insect species are now threatened with extinction, and the world’s insect biomass is declining at 2.5 percent a year. In 50 years, the current biomass of insects could be cut in half. Such a sharp decline could trigger a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.”
We have, it appears, a lot to learn to avert the looming insect apocalypse. Here are five critical lessons.
1. Small things tend to get overlooked.
While the volume of scientific research on the threat of species extinction is growing rapidly, most of the focus has been on the declining population of fish and large mammals. Compared to larger species, insect species and their populations get very little attention. In making their report, the authors conducted a comprehensive review and found 73 historical studies of insect decline. That’s a tiny fraction of the reports written about the population loss of larger species. Yet arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans) account for about half of the world’s animal biomass — 17 times more than humans.
2. Small things matter.
When it comes to endangered species, large mammals get all the headlines, but insects are essential to the underlying web of life on which larger creatures depend. About 60 percent of bird species rely upon insects as a primary food source, and birds consume up to 500 million tons of insects every year. Moreover, it is estimated that 80 to 90 percent of wild plants depend upon insects for pollination. And while some insects feed off domesticated crops, other insects help to keep pest populations under control. A 2006 study estimated that insects in the U.S. provided “ecosystem services” worth $57 billion a year. These include pest control, crop pollination and serving as a vital food source for fish and small wildlife.
3. Environmental degradation is accelerating.
Climate change, pollution and the ongoing destruction of forests, wetlands, reefs and other vital habitats are taking an ever-increasing toll on nature. And it’s not just insects; environmental degradation is accelerating and rapidly diminishing non-human populations, including birds, fish and large undomesticated mammals. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that wildlife populations, on average, have declined 60 percent since 1970. The International Union for Conservation of Nature now classifies 26,000 species as threatened with extinction, and leading scientists publicly warn that a “sixth mass extinction” has commenced.
4. It’s not just our greenhouse gas emissions …
No one should underestimate the impact that rising greenhouse gas emissions are having on the web of life, but the authors of the insect report indicate that the three largest drivers of insect depopulation are, in order of importance: 1) habitat loss attributable to agriculture and urbanization; 2) pollution, mainly caused by pesticides and fertilizers and; 3) the introduction of invasive species. Climate change, which many believe is the largest driver of ecological ruin, ranked only fourth as a driver of insect decline.
5. … It’s us.
The principal drivers of insect extinction have a common denominator. Simply put, the insect decline, in one form or another (including climate change), is attributable to humans. Our growing numbers and our appetites are driving insects to extinction. There is no letup in sight. World population, presently 7.6 billion, is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by mid-century, and the world’s middle class is expected to rise at an even faster rate. Our demand for food, and particularly our appetite for meat products, is leaving less room for other creatures, including insects.
Humans already use a land mass about the size of South America to produce crops for consumption and an area nearly the size of Africa to feed our livestock. Add in the pesticides and fertilizers that we depend upon to boost crop yields, and it’s no wonder that insect populations are suffering mightily.
The authors of the report on insect loss warned that, “Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” Curbing our reliance on pesticides and fertilizers could reduce the loss of insects, but it’s our ever-growing need for higher crop yields that has given rise to their use in the first place. Given enough time and capital investments, the farmers of the world might be able to adopt sustainable farming practices without reducing crop yields, but we may not have the luxury of time.
To avoid insect apocalypse, we need to reduce the size of our agricultural footprint. That should begin by preventing runaway population growth and the unsustainable food demand that would go with it. We should increase our support for family planning programs that help to prevent unplanned pregnancies at home and abroad. At present, nearly 40 percent of the pregnancies in the world are unintended. We should also commit to reducing our meat consumption, particularly beef. Meat-based diets require the use of far more land and water and result in much bigger environmental impacts—from greenhouse gas emissions to land degradation—than plant-based diets do.
If insects head toward precipitous decline and extinction, humans can’t be far behind. We need to advance our thinking about insects, their importance and what can be done to save them.
Robert Walker is the president of the Population Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit educating the public about the environmental implications of population growth, and advocating for reproductive health and rights.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by Truthout.
This nonprofit created a village of tiny homes and RVs to help permanently solve homelessness in Austin, Texas. But more than just providing homes, the group is fostering communities and providing job opportunities to the men and women who live there. https://cnn.it/2Ii6Tev
This nonprofit created a village of tiny homes and RVs to help permanently solve homelessness in Austin, Texas. But more than just providing homes, the group is fostering communities and providing job opportunities to the men and women who live there. https://cnn.it/2Ii6Tev
Viral photo of 22-year-old woman becomes symbol of Sudan Uprising
Francesca Specter, Yahoo Style UK April 11, 2019
Viral ‘Nubian queen’ rally leader says women key to Sudan protests
A photograph of a woman leading a protest chant has come to symbolize the Sudan Uprising.
The photo, taken by photographer Lana Haroun, is said to summarize “this moment we have been waiting for for the past 30 years.”
Several news outlets have identified the woman as Alaa Salah, a 22-year-old engineering and architecture student.
The image features Salah standing on top of a car with her finger pointed towards the sky, surrounded by dozens of people recording on their phones.
This image from the Sudan Uprising has gone viral. [Photo: Twitter/Lana Haroun]
Accompanying video footage shows her chanting a poem that translates to: “The bullet doesn’t kill. What kills is the silence of people”, according to a tweet from Africa Digest.
It has achieved viral status, gaining tens of thousands of likes and retweets since it was posted earlier this week.People on Twitter have praised the image for its powerful depiction of the woman.Others have suggested the now-iconic image will make history books one day.“I’m very glad that my photo let people around the world know about the revolution in Sudan,” Salah told The Guardian about her viral fame.
“Since the beginning of the uprising I have been going out every day and participating in the demonstrations because my parents raised me to love our home.”
“The day they took the photo, I went to 10 different gatherings and read a revolutionary poem. It makes people very enthusiastic. In the beginning I found a group of about six women and I started singing, and they started singing with me, then the gathering became really big.”
Hind Makki, an interfaith educator, has revealed there’s even more than meets the eye to this image in a Twitter thread, where she spoke about the rich symbolism of her outfit.She also spoke of the significance of women-led protests in the country.Last Saturday, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the street in Kartoum, Sudan, to mark the 100th day of the protest movement against President Omar al-Bashir’s 30-year-long regime.
More than 3,000 people have been arrested since the protests began last December, according to CNN. While estimates vary, it is believed there have been between 32 and 78 fatalities during this period, according to the broadcaster.
Salah’s symbolic status is reminiscent of how a video of Neda-Aghar Soltan, who was shot dead at the age of 26 during the Iranian election protests, became iconic among protesters.
Sudanese Woman Goes Viral After Leading Chant at Khartoum Protest
A Sudanese woman rallied protesters outside the military headquarters in Khartoum on April 8, social media users reported.The image of the woman was widely shared by social media users in Sudan, who dubbed the woman ‘Kandake,’ according to the New Arab. Kandake is the title of ancient queens of the Kingdom of Kush and has been used as a historical symbol of Sudanese women, local media reported.Anti-government protests began across Sudan in December amid food shortages and rising prices. The demonstrations have been frequently marked by violence as security forces used live ammunition and tear gas to crack down on demonstrators. This footage shows the woman leading a chant in Khartoum on Sunday. Credit: Anonymous via Storyful.
Barr may push Dems to broach impeachment for full Mueller report
Rachel Maddow reviews Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before the House Appropriations Committee and notes that Barr’s refusal to ask a judge to release the grand jury material in the Mueller report could force Democrats to start an impeachment proceeding to create the proper judicial conditions to ask the judge themselves.
Rachel Maddow reviews Attorney General William Barr's testimony before the House Appropriations Committee and notes that Barr's refusal to ask a judge to release the grand jury material in the Mueller report could force Democrats to start an impeachment proceeding to create the proper judicial conditions to ask the judge themselves.
BRAVO! 🔥 “The fact that subsidies for fossil fuel corporations are somehow ‘smart’ but subsidies for development of solar panels are ‘socialist’ is bad faith, it’s incorrect.” 🔥
BRAVO! 🔥 "The fact that subsidies for fossil fuel corporations are somehow 'smart' but subsidies for development of solar panels are 'socialist' is bad faith, it’s incorrect." 🔥
