Environment – Page 175 – The Tarbabys Blog

Oceans be dammed! To spite Dems, team Trump rakes in $200,000 in one weekend selling plastic straws

MarketWatch

Team Trump rakes in $200,000 in one weekend through the sale of plastic straws — buy a pack to ‘own the libs’

By Shawn Langlois, Social Media Editor July 22, 2019

Politics aside, paper straws are lame.

The movement to ban the plastic version many of us have used our entire lives, while surely well-intentioned, took aim at a problem without offering a proper solution. Anybody who’s tried to suck a milk shake through one of those disintegrating wood-pulp-based tubes knows this all too well.

So Team Trump sensed an opportunity to “own the libs” and announced last week the sale of “Trump Straws,” an alternative to those “liberal paper straws.”

These straws have been a hit so far, according to Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, who celebrated the marketing coup with this tweet:

The sale comes after several cities in recent months have tried to curb the use of plastic straws in an attempt to minimize plastic pollution. In San Francisco, for example, a city ordinance took effect this month that bans the sale and distribution of plastic straws along with other plastic dining items.

Interestingly, the Trump straws are promoted as BPA-free and recyclable:

The Dutch are building floating dairy farms

Quartz

The Dutch are subverting nature again—with floating dairy farms

By Chase Purdy July 22, 2019

REUTERS/ALEXANDER DEMIANCHUK. The dairy industry evolves. BOVINE BOAT

Marooned, that’s what they are. All 32 of them. Single file they lined up one day and marched onto a floating platform. This is now where they live.

And it’s a sight to behold. A small herd of well-fed dairy cows standing—probably bored—on a $2.9 million waterborne contraption in Rotterdam, Holland, just off the banks of the Nieuwe Maas, which branches off the Rhine River.

But are they happy? Minke van Wingerden seems to think so. She’s the co-founder of The Floating Farm, a project she started in an effort to promote urban farming.

“One week ago we were ready to let them graze outside,” van Wingerden says. A ramp was erected, connecting the platform to a field, and workers opened up the cows’ fence. “We had in mind that they would go out immediately, but they waited to see what was going on,” she says. “I think they are very happy.”

These cows are part of a Dutch experiment to rethink how cities are supplied with dairy products while promoting a sustainable food cycle. The cows are fed with grass from local soccer fields, potato peels discarded by the french fry industry, and leftover bran from area windmills. Those resources are picked up and delivered to The Floating Farm with electric cars.

The cows—a native Dutch breed called Meuse Rhine Issel—are milked by robots, each heifer producing up to 25 liters (6.6 gallons) of milk per day. There are other robots on the island, too, but they’re tasked with the less desirable job of cleaning up manure, which is then recycled back into the neighborhood as fertilizer. Currently, about 23 retail outlets in Rotterdam carry milk from The Floating Farm.

Leave it to the Dutch to once again subvert the natural order of things. They were ingenious enough several hundred years ago to erect a system of dikes and canals so they might exist in a land that would otherwise be swallowed up by flood waters. The idea of sustainable cell-cultured meat is also a Dutch one, with leading start-up Mosa Meat headquartered in Maastricht, a 2.5 hour train ride southeast of Rotterdam.

“We are eager to shape things by our own hands and make things happen,” van Wingerden says.

The idea to build the farm came about after she and fellow founder, Peter van Wingerden, watched Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012. In the wake of the storm, it was initially tough to get fresh food into the city. So the pair started brainstorming ways to cut down on the time and energy it takes to deliver agricultural goods to urban areas. Their floating platforms can operate in cities that abut oceans, ports, rivers, and lakes. They can also be easily moved to new locations in the event of big storms.

The global population is growing, says Minke van Wingerden, but the amount of available agricultural land will stay the same. As sea levels rise, hurricanes barrel up coastlines more frequently, and droughts in agricultural zones become more punishing, food will still need to be produced to match the global demand. For those reasons, the floating farm model may prove useful.

To be sure, The Floating Farm model isn’t a complete answer for the changes inflicted by the global climate crisis. Future operations are being designed to house 110 cows. That may help supply some urban neighborhoods with milk, but the vast majority will still be produced by land-based farming operations. In the US, for instance, California is the nation’s largest dairy-producing state. There, farms with at least 500 cows still account for 88% (pdf) of the state’s milk each year. That makes The Floating Farm more a stop-gap measure, or thought experiment, than a disruptive invention.

Still, the current dairy cow island is a small-scale laboratory for what they hope to build. Already a handful of cities in Asia have expressed interest in using the floating farm model. And while van Wingerden is mostly tight-lipped about which cities her company is speaking with, Hakai Magazine reports that Singapore and Chinese cities Nanjing and Shanghai are exploring the idea. Both the city-state and the Chinese government have in recent years been looking for ways to be more sustainable

Minke van Wingerden says she is already working to create floating farms for chickens and small-scale vertical farms for food plants. Whether farm animals are ready to embrace a Water World future is uncertain, but if the Dutch have anything to do with it, the poultry may not have a choice in the matter.

The Environmental Protection Agency skirted some of its usual procedures and ethics rules when it overhauled key agency advisory boards.

Associated Press

GAO: EPA skirted procedures in overhaul of science boards

Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press July 15, 2019

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency skirted some of its usual procedures and ethics rules when it overhauled key agency advisory boards, slashing the numbers of academic scientists on the panels and appointing more industry figures, the Government Accountability Office said Monday.

Senate Democrats had asked for the GAO probe. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and one of those requesting the review by the government watchdog, said the administration’s trimming of scientists on EPA scientific panels has slowed the agency’s regulatory decisions overall, and rigged the advisory boards “to favor its polluter backers.”

The EPA disputed one of the key findings in Monday’s GAO report, denying that the agency’s senior political appointees privately picked new members for the boards in a way that shut out recommendations by career EPA staffers and left little of a paper trail.

And the agency said it is dealing with the other main GAO criticism — that EPA ethics staff skimped on proper review of financial disclosures by some of the new panel appointees. The disclosures are required to guard against conflicts of interest for panel members. The agency has doubled the size of its career ethics attorney staff to make sure all agency appointees comply with the disclosure rules, spokesman Michael Abboud said.

President Donald Trump’s first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, remade many of the panels advising the agency. Pruitt’s moves included barring scientists from serving on the advisory boards if they had received EPA research grants. Pruitt, one of the most enthusiastic agents of Trump’s rule-cutting, business-friendly mission, resigned amid ethics scandals last summer.

In the first few years of the Trump administration, the share of scientists on the agency’s Science Advisory Board dropped by 27 percent, the GAO said. On the Board of Science Counselors, the decline was 45 percent.

Meanwhile, the number of representatives of regulated industries on the Science Advisory Board increased from three to five, the report said. On the other board, it went from one to three.

Pruitt and other EPA political officials strayed from some of the agency’s long-standing, documentation-heavy procedures of weighing staff recommendations for new appointees to the panels, the GAO said. EPA officials denied doing anything improper, saying the decisions were hashed out in briefings among senior managers instead.

Chris Zarba, who retired early last year from his EPA job coordinating two of the main advisory panels, questioned the EPA’s account Monday, saying the administration’s overhaul of the boards meant there were far too many candidates to consider each adequately in meetings.

“There’s no way you can do that verbally,” Zarba said. “That would be like designing an aircraft and doing it verbally.”

Zarba has criticized the remaking of the panels’ membership since leaving. “My opinion is that the intent is to make the science more favorable to special interest,” he said.

These Solar Panels Make Water from Sunlight and Air!

Video – World Economic Forum

July 8, 2019

Backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

📕 Read more: https://wef.ch/2D2SPBP

These solar panels make drinking water from sunlight and air

Backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. 📕 Read more: https://wef.ch/2D2SPBP

Posted by Video – World Economic Forum on Monday, July 8, 2019

Honeybees hit by Trump budget cuts!

CNN posted an episode of CNN Replay.

July 9, 2019

Honeybees are getting hit by the Trump administration, as the US Department of Agriculture suspended data collection for its annual Honey Bee Colonies report — a critical tool for understanding the plummeting honeybee population — citing cost cuts. https://cnn.it/2JCdNK9

Honeybees hit by Trump budget cuts

Honeybees are getting hit by the Trump administration, as the US Department of Agriculture suspended data collection for its annual Honey Bee Colonies report — a critical tool for understanding the plummeting honeybee population — citing cost cuts. https://cnn.it/2JCdNK9

Posted by CNN on Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Every Mississippi Beach Is Closed Due to Toxic Algae

EcoWatch – Algae Blooms

Every Mississippi Beach Is Closed Due to Toxic Algae

By Jordan Davidson July 8, 2019

CrackerClips / iStock / Getty Images Plus

If you’re looking to cool off in the waters of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, think again.

A toxic algal bloom has made the waters dangerous to humans and their pets. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality has shut down swimming at all of its beaches due to a blue-green harmful algal bloom, according to CNN.

Toxic algae are dangerous to touch and poisonous when swallowed. It can cause rashes, stomach cramps, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting, the state agency warned.

While the sand on the beaches is still open, the state’s DEQ said beachgoers should avoid water contact or consumption of anything from the waters “until further notice,” as CNN reported. The agency also advised anyone exposed to the water to wash with soap and water and to not eat fish or any other seafood taken from affected areas.

The blooms are not technically algae, but cyanobacteria — aquatic and photosynthetic bacteria. Many things, including changes in water temperature and fertilizer run-off, can trigger its bloom. Once the conditions are right for the cyanobacteria to spawn rapidly, they produce harmful toxins, as The Week reported.

“I had a feeling it was going this way. Water always flows west to east,” Pascagoula resident Bill Kenan told Biloxi ABC affiliate WLOX. “It just keeps going and going and going. I don’t know if it’s ever going to get better. I hope it does.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that the climate crisis and increases in nutrient levels of bodies of water due to fertilizer run-off are potentially causing harmful algal blooms to occur more often and in areas not previously affected, ABC News reported. Warmer waters with a marked increase in surface temperature or a change in sea currents are particularly susceptible to the bloom. A harmful algal bloom can look like foam, scum or mats on the surface of water and can be different colors, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This bloom was triggered in part by the opening of the Bonnet Carre spillway in Louisiana, which introduced an excessive amount of freshwater to the coastline, according to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

The spillway was opened to offset a rising Mississippi River that experienced massive swelling after an especially wet winter that caused flooding in along the river’s coastlines.

The spillway is expected to close mid-July after the river’s waters recede. Experts believe its closure will prompt the algae bloom to dissipate. “Once they close the structure, conditions will start to change pretty quickly,” said John Lopez, of Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, a conservation organization that monitors water conditions throughout the Gulf Coast region, as reported by CBS New Orleans.

That prognosis will offer little relief to residents and tourists along the Mississippi Gulf Coast where temperatures will hover in the mid-90’s all week.

Trump’s USDA Suspends Honeybee Survey

EcoWatch – Bees

Trump’s USDA Suspends Honeybee Survey

Olivia Rosane July 08, 2019

U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service entomologist Dr. Jeff Pettis examines a bee colony in California. Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) annual honeybee count has fallen victim to budget cuts, CNN reported Saturday.

The suspension of the Honey Bee Colonies report is at least the third bee-related data set to be halted or reduced under the Trump administration, and comes three weeks after Trump’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the emergency use of bee-killing pesticide sulfoxaflor on 13.9 million acres. It also comes as the population of bees, which help pollinate a third of edible crops, has been declining since 2006.

“This is yet another example of the Trump administration systematically undermining federal research on food safety, farm productivity and the public interest writ large,” Union of Concerned Scientists economist Rebecca Boehm told CNN.

The survey began in 2015 and tracks the number of honeybees in each state by quarter. The most recent report, scheduled to be released in August, will only include data taken from January 2018 to April 2019, the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service said in a statement released July 1.

“The decision to suspend data collection was not made lightly but was necessary given available fiscal and program resources,” the statement said.

A USDA spokesperson told CNN the suspension was “temporary” but did not say how long it might last.

The loss of the data set comes at a crucial time for honeybees. A University of Maryland-led study released in June found that U.S. beekeepers lost 38 percent of their colonies last winter, the greatest winter loss since the university’s research began in 2006, The Washington Post reported.

“We don’t seem to be making particularly great progress to reduce overall losses,” Geoffrey Williams, survey co-author and assistant professor of entomology at Auburn University, told The Washington Post.

The survey, organized by the University of Maryland-led Bee Informed Partnership, is the second major colony survey after the USDA count. However, the USDA survey is considered more accurate because it has access to a list of all registered beekeepers in the country, CNN reported.

Mace Vaughan, co-director of the Pollinator Conservation Program at Xerces Society, told CNN the loss of the USDA study meant there was “no redundancy” in the study of bee decline.

“We need some sort of thermometer to be able to determine, at a big scale, are we actually helping to turn around hive loses, to turn around pollinator declines,” Vaughan said. “Understanding what’s going on with honeybees is incredibly important to having a sense of what’s impacting pollinators in general.”

Honeybees have suffered from something called colony collapse disorder since 2006, as The Washington Post explained, when bees began to abandon otherwise healthy colonies.

The Obama administration introduced policies to protect pollinators, but the Trump administration has moved to reverse them, CNN reported. Under Trump, the USDA has also suspended or scaled back two other bee-related surveys: The Cost of Pollination survey, which studied how farmers paid for honeybees, was halted, and the Honey survey has stopped collecting data on honey production from operations with less than five colonies.

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The President’s Latest Rant About Wildfires Is Mind-Numbingly Stupid

Esquire

The President’s Latest Rant About Wildfires Is Mind-Numbingly Stupid

What an embarrassing end for our species.

By Jack Holmes July 9, 2019

GETTY IMAGES

It’s important to remember that, as the climate crisis deepens and we begin to feel some of its most disastrous effects—more powerful storms, raging wildfires, massive floods, searing drought—we’ve seen fit to elect as president a guy who knows nothing about anything and cares less. Donald Trump, American president, has a primal sense of what motivates people, of how to identify their weaknesses, and of how the media functions. But he knows absolutely nothing about any actual field of study, and he is not by any account a “reader.” His operating principle is to start with a conclusion about the world, then find a way to justify it. If that means repeating some nonsense over and over again until enough people believe it, then so be it.

Exhibit Z came to us yesterday in an appearance at the White House, when the world’s most powerful man got going about wildfires. “You don’t have to have any forest fires,” you see, but nobody knew about forest management before he came along and told them, you know, and forest management means “cleaning” the forests, which are dirty, unlike in other countries—”forest nations”—where they do the forest management and they don’t have the wildfires. Not like California, anyway, whose governor he talked to and told about the forest management, which the governor had never heard of about a year ago, and then he mocked the idea, but now he agrees with President Smokey. Also, many tremendous things are happening and a lot of people are looking at it.

This is so unbelievably dumb and insane, and it is a measure of how much we’ve lost touch with reality as a nation that we scarcely even comment on it anymore. The president is ranting about cleaning the forests and how there could be zero wildfires, as if wildfires are not a natural part of forest ecosystems that have spun out of control, perhaps because the human race has thrown things off-balance by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for more than a century.

More to the point, the president did not somehow invent forest management. It has its own page on the U.S. Forest Service website. He just made this up and kept saying it, and will keep saying it until he thinks people believe it. (Meanwhile, the “forest nation” whose leader he referenced talking to is likely Finland, whose citizens roundly mocked the president last time he trotted this out.) As a true bullshitter, he convinces himself it’s all true along the way.

This is, after all, a guy who just got caught retweeting a meme featuring a fake quote Ronald Reagan supposedly (read: never) said about him. You’d think you would be able to remember whether or not a former president said something about you, but observable reality is not at all relevant to Donald Trump. Will people believe it? Will it make them like me, and think I’m smart and strong? Say it.

The first African woman to receive the Nobel prize.

Brut Nature

May 22, 2019

She was theC. Here is the extraordinary story of Wangari Maathai, one of the world’s most important ecologist.

Portrait of Wangari Maathai

She was the first African woman to receive the Nobel prize. Here is the extraordinary story of Wangari Maathai, one of the world's most important ecologist.

Posted by Brut nature on Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Algae blooms. Iguanas headed north. That’s climate change.

Tampa Bay Times – Editorial

Algae blooms. Iguanas headed north. That’s climate change. | Editorial

Alarm bells that a warming climate is impacting the Sunshine State.

July 5, 2019

An aerial photo shows blue-green algae enveloping an area along the St. Lucie River in 2016. Algae has been spotted in Gulfport and Treasure Island in recent weeks. Associated Press (2016).

It’s been a tough week for anyone who cares about Florida’s environment and the effects of climate change. First, we learned that blue-green algae is infecting waterways in Treasure Island and Gulfport. There’s no way to know exactly what caused the most recent outbreak of the foul smelling ooze, but it’s a good bet we brought this on ourselves, or at least helped make it worse. Whether it’s leaky septic tanks, runoff from our lawns or too much farm waste flowing into waterways, we’ve created conditions ripe for algae to take hold. And don’t forget that a 2014 Climate Assessment Report predicted more blooms in Florida as the globe warms.

In recent years, massive algae blooms contaminated the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers, which flow from they highly polluted Lake Okeechobee. The algae choked ecosystems and killed fish and other marine life. Fishing guides, retailers and other businesses that rely on the rivers lost money. Aerial images of the bright green menace were beamed around the world, hardly the best advertisement for a state that relies heavily on tourism.

Algae blooms can happen naturally, without human help. But there’s growing evidence that we are providing fuel for more blooms that grow larger and stick around longer. We shouldn’t think of that as a new normal, another reality of living in Florida that we can’t do anything about. We can and we should. Gov. Ron DeSantis took a good first step recently by creating the Blue-Green Algae Task Force. But it can’t be window dressing. The task force needs to come up with practical solutions. This is not the time for partisan bickering.

This week we also learned how roseate spoonbills have adapted to the changing climate by migrating away from South Florida and into central and north Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. While the spoonbills have so-far thrived, the same article reiterated that 40 percent of the Earth’s 10,000 bird species are in decline, thanks in large part to human interference.

A separate report came out about how green iguanas have moved further north in Florida thanks to a warming planet. The invasive species already plague several south Florida counties. Their digging causes erosion and undermines water control projects including canals and sea walls. Green iguanas are such a scourge that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission encourages homeowners to kill any that wander onto their property.

Finally, an analysis of satellite imagery showed that sprawling mats of sargassum seaweed floating in the Atlantic are much more prevalent than before 2011. Reports of sargassum-clogged oceans date back to at least Christopher Columbus, but something has changed in recent years, the researchers concluded. They correlated the sargassum explosion to an increase in fertilizer used on farms that continue to replace the Amazon rainforest. Florida’s beach communities should expect more of the seaweed, which stinks as it decays, they said.

Too many of Florida’s leaders have been slow to react to climate change and the assault on the state’s environment. Too many denied anything was happening before moving onto the equally absurd notion that humans have little or no influence on the changes. That’s dangerous thinking, and fortunately it seems to be on the decline in Tallahassee. The state must be cleared-eyed about the environmental realities. This week’s news highlights why.