Sustainable World -Farm Environmental – Page 142

Plague of ravenous, destructive mice tormenting Australians

Associated Press

Plague of ravenous, destructive mice tormenting Australians

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Australia Mice Plague

Mice scurry around stored grain on a farm near Tottenham, Australia on May 19, 2021. Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)

BOGAN GATE, Australia (AP) — At night, the floors of sheds vanish beneath carpets of scampering mice. Ceilings come alive with the sounds of scratching. One family blamed mice chewing electrical wires for their house burning down.

Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork.

“We’re at a critical point now where if we don’t significantly reduce the number of mice that are in plague proportions by spring, we are facing an absolute economic and social crisis in rural and regional New South Wales,” Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said this month.

Bruce Barnes said he is taking a gamble by planting crops on his family farm near the central New South Wales town of Bogan Gate.

“We just sow and hope,” he said.

The risk is that the mice will maintain their numbers through the Southern Hemisphere winter and devour the wheat, barley and canola before it can be harvested.

NSW Farmers, the state’s top agricultural association, predicts the plague will wipe more than 1 billion Australian dollars ($775 million) from the value of the winter crop.

The state government has ordered 5,000 liters (1,320 gallons) of the banned poison Bromadiolone from India. The federal government regulator has yet to approve emergency applications to use the poison on the perimeters of crops. Critics fear the poison will kill not only mice but also animals that feed on them. including wedge-tail eagles and family pets.

“We’re having to go down this path because we need something that is super strength, the equivalent of napalm to just blast these mice into oblivion,” Marshall said.

The plague is a cruel blow to farmers in Australia’s most populous state who have been battered by fires, floods and pandemic disruptions in recent years, only to face the new scourge of the introduced house mouse, or Mus musculus.

The same government-commissioned advisers who have helped farmers cope with the drought, fire and floods are returning to help people deal with the stresses of mice.

The worst comes after dark, when millions of mice that had been hiding and dormant during the day become active.

By day, the crisis is less apparent. Patches of road are dotted with squashed mice from the previous night, but birds soon take the carcasses away. Haystacks are disintegrating due to ravenous rodents that have burrowed deep inside. Upending a sheet of scrap metal lying in a paddock will send a dozen mice scurrying. The sidewalks are strewn with dead mice that have eaten poisonous bait.

But a constant, both day and night, is the stench of mice urine and decaying flesh. The smell is people’s greatest gripe.

“You deal with it all day. You’re out baiting, trying your best to manage the situation, then come home and just the stench of dead mice,” said Jason Conn, a fifth generation farmer near Wellington in central New South Wales.

“They’re in the roof cavity of your house. If your house is not well sealed, they’re in bed with you. People are getting bitten in bed,” Conn said. “It doesn’t relent, that’s for sure.”

Colin Tink estimated he drowned 7,500 mice in a single night last week in a trap he set with a cattle feeding bowl full of water at his farm outside Dubbo.

“I thought I might get a couple of hundred. I didn’t think I’d get 7,500,” Tink said.

Barnes said mouse carcasses and excrement in roofs were polluting farmers’ water tanks.

“People are getting sick from the water,” he said.

The mice are already in Barnes’ hay bales. He’s battling them with zinc phosphide baits, the only legal chemical control for mice used in broad-scale agriculture in Australia. He’s hoping that winter frosts will help contain the numbers.

Farmers like Barnes endured four lean years of drought before 2020 brought a good season as well as the worst flooding that some parts of New South Wales have seen in at least 50 years. But the pandemic brought a labor drought. Fruit was left to rot on trees because foreign backpackers who provide the seasonal workforce were absent.

Plagues seemingly appear from nowhere and often vanish just as fast.

Disease and a shortage of food are thought to trigger a dramatic population crash as mice feed on themselves, devouring the sick, weak and their own offspring.

Government researcher Steve Henry, whose agency is developing strategies to reduce the impact of mice on agriculture, said it is too early to predict what damage will occur by spring.

He travels across the state holding community meetings, sometimes twice a day, to discuss the mice problem.

“People are fatigued from dealing with the mice,” Henry said.

Climate: World at risk of hitting temperature limit soon

BBC News

Climate: World at risk of hitting temperature limit soon

David Shukman – Science editor May 26, 2021

Nantou in Taiwan during a drought this year

It’s becoming more likely that a key global temperature limit will be reached in one of the next five years.

A major study says by 2025 there’s a 40% chance of at least one year being 1.5C hotter than the pre-industrial level.

That’s the lower of two temperature limits set by the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The conclusion comes in a report published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The analysis is based on modelling by the UK Met Office and climate researchers in 10 countries including the US and China.

In the last decade, it was estimated that the chance of any one year reaching the 1.5C threshold was only 20%.

This new assessment puts that risk at 40%.

Leon Hermanson, a senior Met Office scientist, told BBC News that comparing projected temperatures with those of 1980-1900 shows a clear rise.

“What it means is that we’re approaching 1.5C – we’re not there yet but we’re getting close,” he said.

“Time is running out for the strong action which we need now.”

The researchers point out that even if one of the next five years is 1.5C above the pre-industrial level, it’ll be a temporary situation.

Natural variability will mean the following few years may be slightly cooler and it could be another decade or two or more before the 1.5C limit is crossed permanently.

The Paris Agreement established the goal of keeping the increase in the global average temperature to no more than 2C and to try not to surpass 1.5C – and that’s understood to mean over a long period rather than a single year.

According to Dr Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, “the 1.5C in the Met Office announcement should not be confused with the 1.5C limit in the Paris Agreement”.

“The Paris targets refer to global warming – that is, the temperature increase of our planet once we smooth out year-to-year variations,” he explained.

“A single year hitting 1.5C therefore doesn’t mean the Paris limits are breached, but is nevertheless very bad news.

“It tells us once again that climate action to date is wholly insufficient and emissions need to be reduced urgently to zero to halt global warming.”

Wildfire consumes house in St Helena, California — A house is consumed by flames during the Glass wildfire in California last year

A landmark report by the UN climate panel in 2018 highlighted how the impacts of climate change are far more severe when the increase is greater than 1.5C.

At the moment, projections suggest that even with recent pledges to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, the world is on course to heat up by up to 3C.

The WMO’s secretary-general, Prof Petteri Taalas, said the results of the new research were “more than mere statistics”.

“This study shows – with a high level of scientific skill – that we are getting measurably and inexorably closer to the lower target of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change,” he explained.

“It is yet another wake up call that the world needs to fast-track commitments to slash greenhouse gas emissions and achieve carbon neutrality.”

Prof Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, told me that if the new forecast is proved right “it does not mean that we have exceeded the Paris Agreement limit”.

He points out that two individual months in 2016 saw a rise of 1.5C.

“As the climate warms, we’ll get more months above 1.5C, then a sequence of them, then a whole year on average above 1.5 and then two or three years and then virtually every year,” Prof Hawkins said.

He also stresses that 1.5C is “not a magic number that we’ve got to avoid”.

“It’s not a sudden cliff edge, it’s more like a slope that we’re already on and, as the climate warms, the effects get worse and worse.

“We have to set a line in the sand to try to limit the temperature rise but we clearly need to recognize that we’re seeing the effects of climate change already in the UK and around the world and those effects will continue to become more severe.”

The report comes in the approach to the COP26 summit on climate change, due to be held in Glasgow in November.

The summit aims to raise ambition among world leaders on tackling the climate crisis.

New Mexico Stuck With $8 billion in Cleanup for Oil Wells, Highlighting Dangers From Fossil Fuel Dependence

DeSmog

New Mexico Stuck With $8 billion in Cleanup for Oil Wells, Highlighting Dangers From Fossil Fuel Dependence

The oil industry boasts that it fills state coffers with revenues from drilling, but a new study finds a serious gap in funding available to tackle the environmental legacy of abandoned wells.

Nick Cunningham May 26, 2021

New Mexico is facing more than $8 billion in cleanup costs for oil and gas wells, an enormous liability that taxpayers could be left to pick up if drillers go out of business or walk away from their obligations.

Cleaning up old wells at the end of their operating lives can be expensive, and typically states require drillers to cover part of the cleanup cost at the outset, known as financial assurance requirements. The money is tapped later on when the well or pipeline must be dismantled and cleaned up.

But a study commissioned by the New Mexico State Land Office published on April 30 found that “financial assurance requirements do not exist for much of the oil and gas infrastructure explored in this study, and in some cases where such requirements are imposed, operators may have multiple ways of minimizing or avoiding those requirements.” The study was conducted by the Center for Applied Research, an independent analytical firm.

Inadequate bonding requirements means there is a serious gap in available funding to properly clean up after the fossil fuel industry. According to the report, it could cost as much as $8.38 billion to clean up the state’s tens of thousands of wells and associated pipeline infrastructure. Alarmingly, however, New Mexico only has $201 million tucked away for cleanup, leaving a hole of $8.1 billion.

“That’s $8.1 billion that we don’t have,” New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard said in a statement. “Enormous sums of taxpayer money and money meant for public schools, along with the long-term health of our lands, are on the line.”

The industry likes to boast that oil and gas revenues contribute roughly a third of the state’s general fund — a fact that the New Mexico Oil & Gas Association (NMOGA) triumphantly advertised in a recent report and regularly highlights on social media.

Indeed, drilling accounts for a large source of state revenues. In April 2021, for example, the state took in $109 million in royalties, a record high. Those funds will be funneled into public services, including schools and hospitals.

As the report exposed, however, the massive liability put onto the public in cleanup costs somewhat undercuts the notion that the oil and gas industry is a financial godsend.

The industry has helped fill state coffers in recent years, with oil production booming to roughly 1 million barrels per day, more than double production levels from five years ago. According to the report, last year the oil and gas industry produced nearly 370 million barrels of oil and 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from roughly 60,000 wells, which was transported on 35,000 miles of pipelines.

But as the State Land Office study highlights, the industry is leaving behind enormous costs for the state and the general public to deal with at a later date, a liability that is mostly obscured from public discussion.

The average cost to plug an old well and reclaim the surface is over $182,000 per well, but the state only has the finances to cover a little over $3,200 per well. The funding gap is even more staggering for pipelines. Decommissioning and reclamation costs are roughly $211,000 per mile of pipeline, but available financial assurance only totals about $51 per mile.

A pump jack in Roswell, New Mexico. Credit: BLM. (CC BY 2.0)

The risk to the public from inadequate bonding requirements is compounded by the fact that oil and gas drillers can go out of business long before wells are cleaned up, which can be years or even decades later. The U.S. shale industry has burned through hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, and there have been more than 250 bankruptcies of North American oil and gas companies since 2015. And as the clean energy transition accelerates, the financial challenges to the industry are likely to only grow more severe.

The state has long suffered from the roller coaster cycles of extractive industry, according to James Jimenez, executive director of New Mexico Voices for Children, a health, education, and economic advocacy organization. “We’ve made policy choices in boom times that have really exacerbated our over-dependence on oil and natural gas revenues,” Jimenez told DeSmog.

“Because of the really volatile nature of the oil and gas industries, we haven’t had sustainability in the programs,” he said. A dependence on a boom-and-bust industry has forced the state to make cuts to school systems during downturns in the past.

“We need to reduce this over reliance we have on oil and natural gas to fund really basic important programs like our K-12 education and higher education systems,” Jimenez said. He added that the state should diversify its revenue base, such as through progressive taxation on the wealthy and supporting non-extractive business sectors.

Even as money flows to the state from drilling today, the unfunded liabilities of cleanup that are dumped onto the public also highlight the downside to such high levels of drilling. “The $8 billion that it would take to do the cleanup would have to come from somewhere,” Jimenez said. Dollars spent on cleaning up the waste from the oil and gas industry, are dollars not spent on other important needs, such as rural broadband or road infrastructure, he added.

“The answers are simple and urgent — raise royalty rates and taxes on the industry, stash away the revenues in our Permanent Fund to stabilize cash flows, and spend current budget dollars on investments to diversify our economy,” Thomas Singer, senior policy advisor at the Western Environmental Law Center, told DeSmog via email.

NMOGA did not respond to a request for comment.

Well pad near Roswell, NM. Credit: BLM. (CC BY 2.0)

On top of the financial risks from abandoned wells, the fossil fuel industry brings numerous environmental and public health hazards as well. Oil and gas operations have contributed to a deterioration in air quality in the state. And in northwestern New Mexico, there have been more than 300 accidents since 2019, including oil spills, fires, blowouts, and gas releases, and much of it has occurred on Navajo land, as reported by Capital & Main.

A recently published peer-reviewed study found that shut-in conventional oil wells in the Permian basin could be leaking a substantial amount of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that exacerbates climate change.

“New Mexicans must recognize that while industrialization of our landscape to produce oil and gas brings revenue today, if not properly cleaned up, it also jeopardizes our economy of the future,” Singer said. Allowing drillers “to defer this obligation indefinitely puts the state and taxpayers at great risk that they will have pick up the tab or leave these areas as polluted sacrifice zones.”

Nick Cunningham is an independent journalist covering the oil and gas industry, climate change and international politics. He has been featured in Oilprice.com, The Fuse, YaleE360 and NACLA.

Turn off the gas: is America ready to embrace electric vehicles?

The Guardian

Turn off the gas: is America ready to embrace electric vehicles?

Tom Perkins May 23, 2021

Joe Biden inside the new Lightning last week. ‘This sucker’s quick,’ he declared. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Ford unveiled its new F-150 Lightning pickup this week – but the success of EVs in this car-loving nation is far from certain

In Detroit, auto plants have for decades churned out trucks built with Motor City steel and fueled by gasoline. But this week’s rollout of the Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck offered a vision of the future in America’s automotive heartland: aluminum-clad pickups running off of electric powertrains with lithium batteries.

An electric model of the nation’s best-selling vehicle at an accessible $40,000 has the potential to shift the auto industry’s course, and do more to advance the transportation sector’s electrification than any recent development, analysts say.

“Offering a well-known vehicle at a competitive price could really help push the EV agenda in the US,” said Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at Edmunds.com.

Meanwhile, Ford characterized the Lightning’s introduction as a “watershed moment”, but it also represents a major gamble. The F-150 embodies American ruggedness, and it raises the question: is the truck market’s meat-and-potatoes base ready to embrace environmentally friendly electric vehicles (EVs)?

It’s uncharted territory, said Michelle Krebs, Autotrader executive analyst. The success of the Lightning or any EV hinges on a major infrastructure build-out that’s far from certain.

“There’s no EV pickup market at the moment, so we just don’t know how big it could be, or what consumer acceptance will be,” she said.

Truck consumers are generally unwilling to switch to cars just to go electric, Krebs said. So pitching them on the Lightning not only opens a new market for Ford, but is a critical step in the nation’s efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, of which the transportation sector accounts for 29%. The EV transition is a key component of Joe Biden’s climate plan, which calls for the nation to cut emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030, and net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050.

Though EVs only make up less than 2% of new-vehicle sales in the US, there’s perhaps no better line to push the needle on those figures than the F-Series. Last year, Ford generated about $42bn in the sale of over 800,000 F-Series trucks, according to data from the company and Edmunds.com. Sales of the F-150, the line’s light-duty truck, exceeded 556,000.

The Lightning feature that seems to be catching the most attention isn’t under the hood or in the cab, but on the price tag. With EV tax incentives, the truck’s base model could cost about $32,000 – less than a $37,000 gas-powered F-150 with a crew cab. By contrast, the GMC Hummer EV and Rivian R1T, are priced at $80,000 and $70,000 though they are slightly flashier.

The Lightning also marks one of the first attempts to electrify a well-known, everyday vehicle that appeals to a mass market. Previously, EVs were mostly small, unconventionally designed cars that appealed to environmentally minded people who made a personality statement with their vehicle, Caldwell said. The “pendulum has swung” in terms of design, she added.

The Lightning’s range is also notable. One charge will take a base model Lightning 230 miles, or, for an additional $20,000, the extended range trim will travel 300 miles. It can haul up to 2,000lb of payload and tow up to 10,000lb. However, Ford doesn’t offer any data on range with a heavy payload or tow, and Car And Drive estimated it at as little as 100 miles.

That’s the type of detail that could keep consumers away from not just the Lightning, but all electric pickups. On a 150kw DC fast charger, the extended-range trim targets up to 54 miles of range in 10 minutes, or just under an hour for a full charge.

It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which someone who may be buying a truck to tow a camper a long distance once or twice per year opting for a gas-powered F-150 instead being inconvenienced with an hour-long stop to recharge every 100 miles or so, Caldwell said.

But several once-in-a-while Lightning features are generating a buzz, like a drain hole in case the cab needs to be hosed out. Its dual battery system can power tools in the field, or a house for three days during an outage. The F-150 Hybrid was utilized as a mobile generator in the recent deadly Texas blackouts.

Ford’s chief executive engineer Linda Zhang unveils the Ford F-150 Lightning in Dearborn on Wednesday. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP

The Lightning’s power is another selling point – it can go 0-60mph in just over four seconds, offers 775lb-ft of torque, and the extended range model targets 563 horsepower.

That was enough to impress the president, who test drove a Lightning during a Michigan stop last week. “This sucker’s quick,” he declared.

Among those who will need to harness the truck’s full power and hauling capacity are contractors. It’s worth consideration, said Dave Alder, an electrician in Detroit, especially if it could save on gas money. But he worried about where he would charge it, and said it’s a bit of a “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” situation with his gas-powered Chevy Silverado.

The Lightning has the support of the United Auto Workers union, which at times has been skeptical of electrification. The truck will be built at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, which sits just outside of Detroit and next to the Dearborn Truck Plant that produces gas-powered and hybrid F-150s. Lightning production is slated to start next spring, with the trucks hitting the lot in mid-2022.

Critical to its success is an infrastructure build out, and Biden’s $2tn infrastructure plan includes $174bn to support the EV transition.

Biden has framed his pitch by repeatedly claiming the US is in an electrification race with China.

“The future of the auto industry is electric. There’s no turning back,” he said during the Lightning’s unveiling. “The question is whether we will lead or we will fall behind in the race to the future.”

Buy-in from the auto industry could help Biden push his proposal with Congress, though it’s uniformly opposed by the GOP. Republican leadership has pointed to the lack of infrastructure as a chief reason for opposing spending on the EV transition, but at the same time opposes funding an infrastructure build-out.

American consumers have said they won’t buy an EV without the infrastructure in place, Krebs said, which leaves the industry facing a “chicken and egg” situation.

“That’s key – they have got to have the charging infrastructure in place or this will all go kaput,” she said.

A couple just moved into a 3D printed concrete home for about $1,400 a month- see what it’s like to live in

Business Insider

A couple just moved into a 3D printed concrete home for about $1,400 a month- see what it’s like to live in

Brittany Chang May 23, 2021

3d printed concrete home with project milestone — A 3D printed concrete home with Project Milestone. Bart van Overbeeke

A couple recently moved into a 1,012-square-foot 3D printed concrete home in the Netherlands.
It’s one of five homes that are part of the first 3D printed concrete “commercial housing project.”
The home’s makers say concrete 3D printed homes could help alleviate housing shortages.

On April 30, a Dutch couple began calling a 3D printed concrete house their home.

The home is located in Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

It’s the first of five 3D printed homes under Project Milestone, a collaboration among the Eindhoven University of Technology, the municipality, industry experts, architects, and several private companies.

Project Milestone serves as the world’s first 3D printed concrete “commercial housing project,” according to its maker.

The five homes are being built one at a time, which allows the makers to apply learnings from previous builds into each new home. Each house is meant to be more complex than its predecessors.

The housing crisis has been escalating in recent years, especially in the US.

The project’s teams hope to make 3D concrete printing a sustainable home-building option to help alleviate housing shortages, according to its makers.

Source: 3D Printed House

Creating a 3D printed home is often seen as more sustainable and faster than traditional homebuilding …

… especially because the precise printer used in Project Milestone uses less concrete than traditional construction methods.

Aesthetics-wise, the printer can also create a more creative and nontraditional home, as seen with this new boulder-shaped house.

“In addition to affordable homes, the market increasingly demands innovative housing concepts,” Yasin Torunoglu, the housing and spatial development alderman at the municipality of Eindhoven, said in a press release.

“With the 3D printed home, we’re now setting the tone for the future: the rapid realization of affordable homes with control over the shape of your own house,” Torunoglu continued.

As of now, 3D printed homes aren’t more affordable than “traditional” homes despite reduced labor costs. But it’s a goal the project is working toward.

This new home is made up of 24 concrete pieces that were printed at a printing plant.

The pieces were then trucked to the home’s final site and assembled on the house’s foundation.

A roof and frames were later added.

The homes are described as durable despite this multipiece process: The units are meant to serve as functioning homes for a few decades.

The 3D printed bungalow is now owned by Vesteda, a real-estate investor. It’ll be rented out to private occupants via six-month contracts at about $1,400 a month.

The home is now occupied by two retirees from Amsterdam, The Guardian reported.

Source: The Guardian

“It has the feel of a bunker – it feels safe,” Harrie Dekkers, one of the occupants, told The Guardian.

Now, let’s take a look at the home.

The almost 1,012-square-foot home has a living room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms.

Its distinct “large boulder-shaped” appearance was designed to fit into its surroundings and show off the 3D printer’s ability to create free-formed buildings.

The unit’s curved walls and spaces are different from spaces of other 3D printed homes.

Besides its eccentric shape, the interior of the concrete home doesn’t look any different from that of a traditional home.

The front door can be locked and unlocked using a digital key.

Source: The Guardian

It’s also well insulated and comes with connections to a heating system, similar to any modern home.

The home is also full of large windows for more natural light.

The living room has an open concept …

… which means the kitchen space opens out into the conjoined dining and living room.

There’s even room for a home office inside one of the two bedrooms.

And of course, there’s a bathroom with necessities like sinks and a shower.

The first unit stands at one story tall. But future homes in Project Milestone are expected to be multilevel.

The fifth home in the project, which will be two stories tall, will be printed on-site.

Cannibal Mice Threaten Sydney Homes and Australian Farms

Bloomberg

Cannibal Mice Threaten Sydney Homes and Australian Farms

Sybilla Gross May 24, 2021

(Bloomberg) —

The plague of mice attacking parts of Australia is turning into a horror story, with the rodents threatening to invade Sydney, reports of the vermin eating their own, and the farming industry being thrown into turmoil.

Millions of mice have swarmed schools, homes and hospitals in the eastern states of New South Wales and Queensland, wreaking havoc and leaving entire towns suffocating from a lingering pungent odor. Now there are reports of them munching on the remains of dead rodents and even predictions that they could reach Sydney in a matter of weeks, riding on freight trucks and food crates.

While the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority hasn’t approved the use of a highly toxic chemical to tackle the scourge, the state of New South Wales is already gearing up for the permit. Local authorities have secured 5,000 liters of Bromadiolone, one of the strongest mice killers, for distribution across 20 treatment sites in the worst affected areas of the region.

Giant Mice Plague Forces Australia to Turn to Banned Poison

The swarm is also threatening Australia’s $51 billion agriculture industry. Mice numbers have exploded after a bumper crop last season. With the crisis showing no signs of abating, some farmers are refraining from planting winter crops for fear of damage to freshly sown seeds and ripened grain, according to Matthew Madden, the grains committee chair for industry group NSW Farmers.

Abandoning Crops

“People are actually just abandoning crops because they think — why am I going to plant this if it’s going to get eaten?” he said from his Moree farm in northern New South Wales. “The anxiety is — even if I get it to spring, if these vast numbers are still here they’ll just eat the crop as it ripens.”

Some sorghum crops harvested earlier this year have sustained significant damage, ranging from 20% to 100% in some fields, Madden said, adding that the grains in storage from last year, if they weren’t eaten, have been subject to contamination from mouse droppings. That’s leading to extra cleaning costs for farmers, or in some cases, outright rejection of shipments at ports.

The financial pain isn’t just confined to farms. Damage to machinery, storage vessels, homes and health of people have also been reported. Madden, who himself recently lost a tractor to fire after mice bit through a live cord, said the devastation could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Lost opportunity costs are hard to quantify, he added.

“We won’t know until harvest time,” Madden said. “It’s just unimaginable.”

The situation has spiraled ahead of buoyant expectations for a record Australian canola output this year, as a combination of high oilseed prices and optimal weather created perfect conditions for the crop. The disruption to seeding due to the mice in New South Wales has tempered enthusiasm about production this season, according to the Australian Oilseeds Federation.

The risk that the situation will escalate in spring continues to weigh on the outlook. Rodent numbers usually start to dwindle during the colder months heading into winter, but this year has bucked the trend. That’s a problem if numbers keep building ahead of the typical surge during warmer months.

Last year’s plentiful rains, which offered farmers a respite after a prolonged drought, paved the way for an explosion in mice numbers, Madden said.

“Over the drought we didn’t have these issues,” he said. “It’s been a perfect storm.”

Raging bees: Lamborghini studies bees for environment protection

Carmudi

Raging bees: Lamborghini studies bees for environment protection

Dylan Afuang May 23, 2021

In 2016, Lamborghini launched an environmental bio-monitoring project and made an apiary in the Lamborghini Park in Sant’Agata Bolognese.

Since then, the apiary has grown from a total of eight hives to the current 12, with a population of about 600,000 bees, of which 120,000 forage around the area. Foraging describes bees that fly to collect nectar and pollen.

And on the occasion of World Bee Day last May 20, established by the United Nations (UN) in 2017, Lamborghini emphasized its commitment to environment protection.

Thanks to the Audi Environmental Foundation, this year the Lamborghini apiary benefits from a “technological beehive.”

The hive has two video cameras, one inside and one outside the hive, which make it possible to observe the behavior of the insects up close. The cameras provide more detailed data to the studies being conducted.

From the analyses of the bees, with their honey and wax, the company and entomological and apicultural experts, can detect a wide range of pollutants. Pollutants can range from pesticides used in agriculture and on urban and private green spaces, heavy metals, aromatic compounds, and dioxins.

This analysis is important in controlling pollution in the environment inside and outside the Sant’Agata Bolognese production plant, Lamborghini said.

With the clean surroundings, bees were able to forage within a radius of approximately three kilometers.

The bee project has also recently taken an experimental study of bio-monitoring of solitary bee colonies.

Solitary bees are said to differ from social bees for their shorter foraging radius of 200 meters, and because each female takes care of her own offspring, unlike social bees which only take care of the queen bee’s offspring.

The colonies, made up of houses located inside Lamborghini Park and near the production site, make it possible to monitor more specific areas thanks to the shorter foraging radius. The shorter foraging radius allows for more effective studying of the environmental impact in the Park.

The bee bio-monitoring project is part of a broader environmental sustainability strategy that Lamborghini has been pursuing since 2009, the Italian marque said.

It has led the company to be awarded certification as a CO2-neutral company in 2015, which has been maintained even following the recent expansion of the production site.

On Earth Day last April 22, Lamborghini was also awarded the Green Star 2021, which ranked it among the most sustainable companies in Italy thanks to its commitment to reducing environmental impact.

Aside from the apiary, Lamborghini has planted 10,000 oak trees inside the Lamborghini Park, and made one of the largest photovoltaic (solar power) systems in Emilia-Romagna.

Lamborghini-bee-study. **Photos from Lamborghini**

‘Impending disaster.’ Worsening algae bloom on Lake Okeechobee threatens coasts again

Miami Herald

‘Impending disaster.’ Worsening algae bloom on Lake Okeechobee threatens coasts again

Adriana Brasileiro May 14, 2021

The scene at Pahokee marina on Lake Okeechobee last week was a warning sign: A thick mat of algae in various shades of green, brown, gray and fluorescent blue covered the area around boat slips. In some spots, the gunk was so dense it stuck out two inches above the water.

Elsewhere on the lake, the algae wasn’t as chunky, but satellite photos were just as shocking: NOAA monitoring images on Wednesday showed nearly two-thirds of the lake, or 500 square miles, were covered with blue-green algae, the potentially toxic stuff that has fouled rivers and canals in the west and east coasts of Florida in past years, killing fish and scaring tourists away. Green streaks of algae are already visible moving down from the Moore Haven lock on the Caloosahatchee River, which has received Lake Okeechobee water releases in recent weeks to lower lake levels.

Is South Florida in for another summer of slime? The answer has a lot to do with how much water will be flushed from the lake to Florida’s west and east coasts. Already, Lake Okeechobee is at 13.6 feet, 2.5 feet higher than what it was at this time last year. Forecasters are predicting a “well above average” hurricane season this year.

“This is an impending disaster,” said John Cassani, of Calusa Waterkeeper. He and other activists are asking Gov. Ron DeSantis to declare a state of emergency to protect the Caloosahatchee from harmful lake discharges as the rainy season approaches and the need to lower water levels will be unavoidable. “Think of the lake as a giant cesspool being flushed into the Caloosahatchee every day with no end in sight. It’s a catastrophic situation.”

Workers from Breen Aquatics vacuum up thick blue-green algae as they try to clean up blooms at the Pahokee Marina on May 3.

The bloom, which expanded quickly over the past few weeks as temperatures rose, is fueling heated debate about how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers should manage lake waters considering conflicting interests: the need to send water south for Everglades restoration and the guarantee of sufficient supplies for farming while also managing flood protection structures such as its aging Herbert Hoover dike.

The Corps is currently revising its lake management policies to take into account a massive $1.8 billion upgrade of the dike that is scheduled to be completed next year as well as Everglades restoration projects that will come online in the next few years. The projects include a vast reservoir and stormwater treatment area that, once completed in 2023, will allow managers to send more water south when lake levels rise, reducing discharges to estuaries on the east and west. The aim is to produce water clean enough to replenish the Everglades amid efforts to recreate something close to the original flow of the River of Grass, going south through Shark Valley in Everglades National Park, taking much-needed fresh water all the way south to Florida Bay.

The Corps recently presented five conceptual plans for its new Lake Okeechobee System Operating Manual (LOSOM) that will receive public comment before more detailed proposals are presented in July.

But water quality activists want the state to act now under an emergency order to try to avoid a repeat of the devastating 2018 season when massive blooms of cyanobacteria in the lake were discharged to estuaries, killing marine life and making pets and even people sick. The blooms coincided with a widespread red tide that started in the Gulf Coast but spread as far as the Panhandle and St. Lucie County on the Atlantic coast, fouling beaches with dead fish and hundreds of marine animal carcasses.

On Friday the Corps said it will reduce discharges to the Caloosahatchee to 1,500 cubic feet per second from the current 2,000 cfs as a result of the blooms. Col. Andrew Kelly, the Corps commander for Florida, said releases will be made in pulses to try to flush out algae-laden freshwater and allow for water with higher salinity levels to move up the river.

“Some types of algae don’t do as well in higher salinity so we are trying to get some of the higher salinity up into the Caloosahatchee, which will support the degradation of some of that algae, by doing a pulse release of freshwater,” he said during a call with reporters.

Send ‘all that you can’ south

Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Conservancy of South Florida and several water quality advocacy groups sent DeSantis a letter earlier this week saying the state must waive restrictions that stop water managers from moving more water south into conservation areas. Some of those restrictions exist to make sure the water is clean enough to go into conservation areas and beyond, into the Everglades.

DeSantis, who flew over Lake Okeechobee earlier this week to check on the problem, said he asked the District to send “all that you can south,” but didn’t respond to the request for an emergency order. He said he expects the Corps to come up with “a good regulation schedule that balances the equities” and mitigates negative impacts to coastal communities in the summer.

NOAA satellite images showed that cyanobacteria covered about 500 square miles of the lake earlier this week.

Treasure Coast Rep. Brian Mast threatened to sue the Corps to stop the discharges in an interview with CBS 12 on Thursday.

During a board meeting on Thursday, District staff said water conservation areas south of the lake were mostly full or couldn’t receive water because they were in the process of being restored or had projects under construction. Water Conservation Area 3, for instance, is undergoing restoration work after Tropical Storm Eta last year filled marshes to the brim, flooding tree islands and forcing deer to crowd onto levees to survive.

Communities around Lake Okeechobee said their needs must be taken into account. Hendry County Commissioner Ramon Iglesias expressed concern about a schedule that allows too much discretion and flexibility by the Corps every year. He said his fishing and farming community needs certainty so that residents can better plan their lives.

“No schedule should singularly prioritize the loudest people in the room,” Iglesias said during public comments. “We can have a schedule that takes everyone’s concerns into consideration, but not at the expense of my community or any other Floridian that depends on the lake when they need it for drinking, for fishing, for recreating, for farming and even for the environment.”

Sending water south to the Everglades during the dry season is common sense, but it’s important to hold the District accountable for how it manages water in the storm treatment areas, said Eve Samples from Friends of the Everglades. She said most of the water treated in these marsh-like reservoirs is runoff from farms and not water from the lake.

“Why is EAA farm runoff being given priority capacity in taxpayer-funded stormwater treatment areas when STAs could be cleaning water from the lake and sparing people east and west from exposure to these cyanotoxins?” Samples asked.

A decades-old fight for water

Organizations that defend agriculture said everyone is to blame. Nyla Pipes, a sugar industry advocate at One Florida Foundation, said nutrients come from multiple sources and all of them need to be addressed. She said people often blame agriculture because “the public really doesn’t understand that algae is already in our water” and it only gets out of control when there are too many nutrients.

“All this finger pointing … we need to be looking in the mirror because it’s all of us,” she said.

Blue-green algae blooms were observed in nearly two-thirds of the lake earlier this week.

The Everglades Foundation has said it’s about time the state started to manage the lake in a more equitable way and provided its own LOSOM idea to the Corps.

“Currently, we’re not managing Lake Okeechobee in a balanced way. It’s really managed for the needs of agriculture south of the lake, which is primarily sugar. They get the water when they want it. And when it rains, they dump all their stormwater into the Everglades,” said the foundation’s chief science officer, Stephen Davis.

The discussion highlighted the decades-old conflicts in lake water uses and needs. While higher levels benefit farmers that have for decades relied on consistently delivered lake water for their fields, environmentalists and coastal communities say the lake should be kept lower in the dry season and higher in the wet season, to prevent discharges of polluted water to the St. Lucie estuary in the east and the Caloosahatchee to the west.

To prevent a breach on the aging dike when there’s too much water in the lake, the Corps has historically discharged the excess to coastal estuaries. But Lake O is growing increasingly polluted with fertilizer from surrounding farms and communities, and decades of phosphorus and nitrogen that has accumulated on the bottom.

This “legacy pollution” can get stirred up by strong winds over the shallow lake, releasing nutrients that feed blooms. Davis said that’s probably the case now, as blooms are happening early in the season.

“Typically, we don’t see this much algal coverage on the lake until June or July, when we have the longest day lengths,” and sunlight drives the photosynthesis that makes algae grow and reproduce, he said.

Scuba divers begin 6-month effort to rid Lake Tahoe of trash

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Scuba divers begin 6-month effort to rid Lake Tahoe of trash

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Tahoe Cleanup-Scuba Divers

This photo provided by Clean Up The Lake shows a scuba diver beneath the surface of Lake Tahoe, cleaning up trash on Friday, May 14, 2021. A team of scuba divers on Friday completed the first dive of a massive, six-month effort to rid the popular Lake Tahoe of fishing rods, tires, aluminum cans, beer bottles and other trash accumulating underwater. (Clean Up The Lake via AP)

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. (AP) — A team of scuba divers on Friday completed the first dive of a massive, six-month effort to rid the popular Lake Tahoe of fishing rods, tires, aluminum cans, beer bottles and other trash accumulating underwater.

The team of between five and 10 divers plans to look for trash along the entire 72 miles (115 kilometers) of shoreline and dig it out in an endeavor that could be the largest trash cleanup in Lake Tahoe’s history, said Colin West, a diver and filmmaker who founded Clean Up the Lake, the nonprofit spearheading the project.

“We are still learning not to be so wasteful. But unfortunately, as a species we still are, and there are a lot of things down there,” West said after completing the first dive.

The team collected about 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of garbage during their one-tank session and found 20 large or heavy items, including buckets filled with cement and car bumpers, that will have to be retrieved later by a boat with a crane, he said.

They plan to dive three days a week down to 25 feet (7 meters) in depth. The clean-up effort will cost $250,000 — money the nonprofit has collected through grants — and will last through November.

West started doing beach cleanups along the lake after visiting Belize and seeing beaches there littered with trash. But in 2018, after a diver friend told him he and others had collected 600 pounds (272 kilograms) of garbage from the waters on Tahoe’s eastern shore, he decided to focus on the trash in the water.

“I was blown away, and we started researching and going underneath the surface and we kept pulling up trash and more trash,” said West, who lives in Stateline, Nevada.

In a survey dive on September 2019, his team removed more than 300 pounds (136 kilograms) of debris from Lake Tahoe’s eastern shore and planned to launch his clean-up along the whole shoreline last year. The pandemic delayed those plans.

But the group of volunteers, which includes not only divers but support crew on kayaks, boats and jet skis, continued diving and cleaning both Lake Tahoe and nearby Donner Lake. By the end of the last summer, they had collected more than 4 tons (4 metric tons) of trash from both lakes.

2022 Ford F-150 Lightning revealed with 300-mile range, priced from $53K

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2022 Ford F-150 Lightning revealed with 300-mile range, priced from $53K

Joe Lorio May 19, 2021

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The much-anticipated battery-powered 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning pickup has finally made its debut, a moment that feels like a sea change in the U.S. auto industry. The F-Series pickup has for years been America’s bestselling passenger vehicle, and Ford’s decision to offer it as an electric vehicle sends the message with a bullhorn: The EV’s moment is upon us.

Now that the truck has been unveiled — officially, that is; we saw it demurely hanging out in the background during President Joe Biden’s speech yesterday pushing his plan for EVs in America — we can get a sense of how Ford’s big pickup will work as an EV.

The truck will come in a single body configuration: SuperCrew four-door with a 5.5-foot bed (the F-150‘s most popular configuration). The three Lightning trim levels are also from the heart of the lineup: XLT, Lariat, and Platinum — although there’s also “a commercial-oriented entry model.”

Ford will offer standard-range and extended-range battery packs, with the extended-range pack optional on the two lower trims and included on the Platinum. The truck comes standard with a dual-motor powertrain and four-wheel drive. The standard-range version makes 426 horsepower, while the extended-range model boasts 563 hp; both have 775 pound-feet of torque. For the larger-battery version, Ford estimates a 0–60 time in the mid-4-second range.

Ford is estimating 230 miles of range for the base battery pack and 300 miles for the extended-range version (although it appears the Platinum trim will come in slightly lower). There are multiple options for recharging, as outlined below:

The 32-amp mobile charger is standard, and the 48-amp unit is optional. The 80-amp unit is included in trucks with the extended-range battery pack, which also comes standard with a dual onboard charger for faster recharging. Some sample recharge times (standard-range battery /extended-range battery) are:

15%-80% using a 150-kW Level 3 fast charger: 44/41 minutes
15%-100% using the 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro: 10/8 hours
15%-100% using the standard 32-amp/240V mobile charger: 14/19 hours

Ford is partnering with Sunrun for in-home charger installations, while on the road, Ford is part of the EV America network.

Ford heavily emphasizes the electric pickup’s utility as a power source, which could be a key aspect of its appeal for those who might not be swayed by the green argument. The base truck will offer 2.4 kW of output available via eight 120-volt AC outlets sprinkled throughout the cab, bed, and front trunk. Upper trims (and the XLT, optionally) can crank out 9.6 kilowatts of power and adds two more 120-volt outlets plus a 240-volt outlet in the bed. Ford boasts that a connected truck with the 9.6-kilowatt system, working through the 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro and home-integration system, can supply an average house for three days during a power outage. And it would do so automatically, with the system switching back to charging once grid power is restored.

In more traditional measures of pickup utility, the F-150 Lightning with standard-range battery has a maximum tow rating of 7,000 pounds; with the extended-range battery, it’s 10,000 pounds. Payload capacity is 2,000 pounds with the standard-range battery and 1,800 with the heavier extended-range unit. (Note that Ford characterizes the range, towing and payload figures as “targeted.”) The standard front trunk under the power-operated hood measures 14.1 cubic feet and can be hosed out.

Ford says the Lightning rides on a new frame, and the chassis ditches the standard F-150’s live rear axle for an independent suspension. Exterior dimensions are not much different than the current truck, though, with the wheelbase 0.1-inch longer, overall length greater by 1 inch, width up by 0.1 inch, and cab height taller by 1.7 inches. Interior space is unchanged. Ground clearance at 8.9 inches is half-an-inch less than the standard 4×4.

The Lightning will offer a 12-inch digital instrument cluster, and upper trims get a 15.5-inch touchscreen running Ford’s latest SYNC 4A operating system. Ford’s BlueCruise hands-free highway-driving feature will be offered, part of a Co-Pilot360 option package. A new Pro Trailer Hitch Assist automatically steers, brakes, and accelerates when hitching up a trailer. A phone-as-key feature also makes its first F-150 appearance here. The F-150’s recently introduced onboard-scale feature, which can measure the weight of items in the truck bed, gets an EV twist here, as the truck can adjust the predicted range based on the weight of the current payload. Ford also promises the ability to provide over-the-air software updates (as on the current Mustang Mach-E).

Prices start at $52,974 for the XLT — you can find the trim breakdown here — with the commercial model (details and specs of which are still to come) at $39,974, and that’s before federal and any state tax credits. Ford says the Lightning effectively will be at cost parity with comparably equipped gasoline models. Here’s how you can reserve one.

Production is set to start at Ford’s Rouge River complex in Spring 2022. But Ford is happy to take some of your money now: a $100 deposit reserves your very own F-150 Lightning.