GEOLOGY WITH JEFF SIMPSON
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‘They Failed Us’ - How Mining and Logging Devastated a Pacific Island in a Decade

5/31/2021

 
There is perhaps nowhere in the Pacific where the costs of extractive industries are as heartbreakingly clear as Rennell Island. The island, a tiny dot in the vast South Pacific that lies at the southern tip of Solomon Islands, is home to a few thousand people. And it’s starkly divided.  On one side is pristine East Rennell, a Unesco world heritage site, which offers a glimpse of Rennell unspoiled. But in the last decade, West Rennell has suffered the triple assault of logging, bauxite mining, and a devastating oil spill from when a bulk carrier, hired by a mining company, ran aground on a reef. - Guardian
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A Wartime Plan for Electrifying America - Podcast (1:06:26)

5/25/2021

 
What if someone told you that we have everything we need to decarbonize most of the economy?   We would just need to start electrifying every new car, furnace, water heater, drier, and cookstove, and industrial process starting right now. And yeah, and put solar on every roof that can handle it.  If we are on a wartime footing for decarbonizing the economy, our guest, Saul, could be considered a 5-star general of the “electrify everything” movement. He founded or co-founded around a dozen companies and organizations. And he has a PhD from MIT in materials science and information theory.  Saul is now trying to marshal the world around his “a defensible and believable” pathway for decarbonizing America with clean electricity. - Energy Gang

Mangroves Regrow in Iloilo City

5/25/2021

 
It is good to know that we can worth with nature. 

​Like many port cities in the Philippines, Iloilo City is susceptible to intense flooding and massive landslides each year. In 2011, the government completed the construction of an artificial waterway—the Jaro Floodway—to help divert floodwaters away from the city and mitigate the deadly events. But the new channel also brought an unexpected surprise: a resurgence of mangrove trees. - NASA Earth Observatory
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Declining Lake Powell Levels Prompt Colorado River States to Form New Plan

5/25/2021

 
Declining levels at the second-largest reservoir in the U.S. have spurred officials in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico to search for ways to prop it up.  Lake Powell on the Colorado River is dropping rapidly amid one of the southwestern watershed’s driest years on record. It’s currently forecast to be at 29% of capacity by the end of September – the lowest level since the reservoir first started filling in 1963. Its sister reservoir downstream on the Colorado River, Lake Mead, also is approaching a record low this year. - Cronkite News
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Texas’s Oil/Gas Industry Defends Billions in Subsidies Against a Green Energy Push

5/25/2021

 
The state's energy business has long counted on special tax breaks and other largesse not available to others. Whether renewables or fossil fuels get more depends on how you do the math. - Texas Monthly
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The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking

5/25/2021

 
In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp.  Corcoran is sinking.  Over the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11.5 feet in some places — enough to swallow the entire first floor of a two-story house and to at times make Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas in the country, according to experts with the United States Geological Survey. - NYTimes
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Beavers Are Firefighters Who Work for Free

5/19/2021

 
Since Kenneth McDarment was a kid in the 1980s, he’s seen the foothills of the Sierra Nevada change. As a councilman of the Tule River Tribe, a sovereign nation of around 1,000 members living on 56,000-odd acres in the foothills of the Sierras, McDarment deals with everything water-related on the reservation. Today there’s less rain and less snow than there was even a decade ago, which means that the land in the foothills was dangerously dry during the last fire season, when wildfires were sweeping across the state. “If you don’t got water,” says McDarment, “we don’t got nothing.  In 2014, McDarment began looking into getting ahold of some beavers. McDarment hoped that beaver dams would create soggy areas on tribal lands that wouldn’t dry out during heat waves. “We’re hoping that means our land will be less likely to burn during fire season,” he says. “Beavers were here originally. So why not bring them back and let them do the work they do naturally?  There was just one problem—it is illegal to move beavers without a permit. And a permit to move a beaver isn't easy to come by. - Sierra

Our Own Survival Is at Stake: AZ Is Using Up Its Groundwater

5/19/2021

 
In 1980, AZ began regulating groundwater in the largest cities and suburbs under a landmark law that called for most of these areas to achieve an overarching goal by 2025: a long-term balance between the amount of water pumped from the ground and the amount seeping back underground to replenish aquifers. Forty-one years later, the state’s latest data shows most of the areas where groundwater is managed remain far from achieving a long-term balance, a goal known as “safe yield.” Groundwater is still overpumped in most of the state’s “active-management areas,” or AMAs.  In many places, aquifer levels continue to decline. ASU researchers warn that groundwater has been seriously over-allocated under the current laws, allowing for unsustainable pumping that threatens AZ's water future. Leaders urgently need to reform Arizona’s groundwater rules to safeguard these finite reserves and prevent aquifers from continuing to drop. - AZ Central
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As the West Faces a Drought Emergency, Some Ranchers are Restoring Grasslands to Build Water Reserves

5/19/2021

 
It’s calving season and all across the West ranchers are watching the sizes of their herds grow. It’s also the beginning of a new season on most ranches, but in the midst of a historic, persistent drought, a growing herd brings difficult questions.  As average temperatures climb and the water that flows through many of the major rivers and creeks across the west is slowing, the availability of forage—grass, legumes, and other edible pasture plants—has become less predictable. As a result, many ranchers face complex calculations: Do they sell off some of their cattle and cut a profit, but risk flooding the market and getting a low price? Or do they hold onto their herd and buy extra hay and forage, rent additional pasture, or risk overgrazing—and further drying out—the land?- Civil Eats
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Renewables Should Overtake Coal Within 5 Years to Secure 1.5°C Goal

5/19/2021

 
The world needs a “radical” shift towards renewables to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and secure the 1.5C goal, says the International Energy Agency (IEA).  This would see renewable energy overtake coal by 2026, passing oil and gas before 2030. By 2050, it should go on to meet two-thirds of global energy supply and nearly 90% of electricity generation.  In a 227-page report, titled “Net-zero by 2050: A roadmap for the global energy sector,” the IEA calls for “a total transformation of the energy systems that underpin our economies”.  It says this is a “critical year at the start of a critical decade for these efforts”, which must start turning the world’s energy system from one dominated by fossil fuels into a future “powered predominantly by renewable energy like solar and wind”.  - Carbon Brief

20 Companies Are Behind 1/2 World's Single-Use Plastic Waste

5/19/2021

 
In 2019, more than 130 million metric tons of single-use plastics were thrown away, with most of that waste burned, buried in a landfill or dumped directly into the ocean or onto land. Now, a new report finds that just 20 companies account for more than half of all single-use plastic waste generated worldwide.  The report, published Tuesday by Australia's Minderoo Foundation, offers one of the fullest accountings, to date, of the companies behind the production of single-use plastics that researchers believe could account for as much as 10% of global greenhouse emissions by 2050. - NPR
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Anthropogenic Warming & Population Growth May Double US Heat Stress by the Late 21st Century

5/13/2021

 
Heat stress has led to massive human morbidity and mortality in recent years. Severe heat stress (HS) events in the Midwest and the Gulf of Mexico coastal plains during the summers of 2019 and 2020, as well as many others during the 2010–2019 decade, are representative of the types of extreme hot and humid events expected to become more common in the contiguous United States (CONUS) in future. The HS is expected to become more severe due to an increase in frequency, duration, severity, and spatiotemporal extent of extreme warmth and moisture, which is an important, nonlinear, and often‐neglected component. While these different contributing factors are often investigated independently, we argue that a holistic analysis that integrates them is more informative from the standpoint of the potential impact of HS exposure. The HS events likely to significantly increase across densely populated regions of the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, coastal Pacific Northwest, central California, and Great Lakes region. - AGU

China’s Carbon Pollution Surpasses All Developed Countries Combined

5/8/2021

 
Carbon pollution from China's bustling, coal-intensive economy last year outstripped carbon pollution of the US, the EU, and other developed nations combined, making up a whopping 27 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.  As China’s economy has grown in the last 30 years, so too have its emissions. While pollution from developed countries has largely been flat since 1990, it has more than tripled in China. The country’s soaring emissions and stable population mean that its per capita emissions have grown quickly, too. At 10.1 tons per person, emissions are just below the 10.5 ton average.  The US still leads the world in per capita emissions, at 17.6 tons per person - ARS TECHNICA
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New U.S. Climate ‘Normals’ Are Warmer Than Ever - NOAA

5/7/2021

 
The official calculation of what constitutes “normal” U.S. climate has been updated, and, to virtually nobody’s surprise, it’s a warmer picture than ever before. The NOAA released an updated set of climate averages for the contiguous United States based on the 30-year period from 1991 to 2020, including more than 9,000 daily reporting stations. It refers to these averages* as “climate normals,” and updates them once every decade. Compared with previous 30-year periods, the climate has turned unambiguously warmer. - Washington Post
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Widespread Drought in Mexico

5/5/2021

 
Mexico is experiencing one of its most widespread and intense droughts in decades. Nearly 85 percent of the country is facing drought conditions as of April 15, 2021. Large reservoirs across the country are standing at exceptionally low levels, straining water resources for drinking, farming, and irrigation. The mayor of Mexico City called it the worst drought in 30 years for the city, which is home to about 9 million people.  This drought doesn't stop at the Arizona borders . The entire SW USA and Mexico are affected.  - NASA
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    GeoNews

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