Blog Archives

How the Fossil Fuel Industry Convinced Americans to Love Gas Stoves

8/22/2021

Over the last hundred years, gas companies have engaged an all-out campaign to convince Americans that cooking with a gas flame is superior to using electric heat. At the same time, they’ve urged us not to think too hard—if at all—about what it means to combust a fossil fuel in our homes. - Mother Jones

These Ladies Love Natural Gas! Too Bad They Aren’t Real.

8/22/2021

The website Women for Natural Gas is a pink-tinged, fancy-cursive-drenched love letter to the oil and gas industry. A prominently featured promo video shows women in hard hats and on rig sites. “Who’s powering the world? We are!” enthuses the narrator. Viewers can click through to a “Herstory” timeline of women working in the oil sector. Another page, about the group’s grassroots network of supporters, announces, “We are women for natural gas,” and shows three professionally dressed ladies alongside their testimonials. There’s a Carey White gushing, “The abundance of oil and gas in Texas helps keep prices at the pump lower.” One Rebecca Washington raves, “Natural gas is a safe, reliable source of energy that provides countless numbers of jobs.” But there’s a catch: The women don’t exist. - Mother Jones

How to Feed the World Without Destroying the Planet

8/17/2021

Agriculture already uses almost half of the world’s vegetated land. It consumes 90 percent of all the water used by humanity and generates one-quarter of the annual global emissions that are causing global warming. And yet of the seven billion people living today, 820 million are undernourished because they don’t have access to—or can’t afford—an adequate diet. “We have to produce 30 percent more food on the same land area, stop deforestation, [and] cut carbon emissions for food production by two-thirds,” says Waite in an interview. All of that must be done while reducing poverty levels and the loss of natural habitat, preventing freshwater depletion, and cutting pollution as well as other environmental impacts of farming.- National Geographic

Starving cows. Fallow farms. The Arizona drought is among the worst in the country

8/17/2021

The alfalfa barely exists. “Can you even call this a farm?” asked Nancy Caywood, standing on a rural stretch of land her Texas grandfather settled nearly a century ago, drawn by cheap prices and feats of engineering that brought water from afar to irrigate central Arizona’s arid soil. The canals that used to bring water to the fields of Caywood Farms have gone dry due to the drought. On the family’s 247 acres an hour south of Phoenix, Caywood grew up tending to cotton and alfalfa, two water-intensive crops that fed off melted mountain snows flowing from a reservoir 120 miles away. She grew up understanding the rhythms of the desert and how fields can blossom despite a rugged, sand-swept terrain where sunlight is a given but water is precious. Now more than ever. Looking out at her farmland recently, Caywood held back tears. - LATimes

IPCC Report Says We're Going to Pass the 1.5°C Climate Threshold. What's Next?

8/17/2021

Three years ago the United Nations climate science body issued a landmark report warning that the planet was on track to blow past efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, a threshold that it warned would bring catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change. But in that same report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasized that many paths remained open for us to limit that damage—so long as we acted immediately. On Monday, the IPCC published a new document with a far less optimistic frame. In it, the group says that the pathway to limit warming to the 1.5°C mark has narrowed and lays out only one plausible scenario to meet that goal—one that would require an extraordinary level of action, and even then, would offer no guarantee. - Time

Russian Investigators Probe Big Black Sea Oil Spill

8/17/2021

Russia's top criminal investigation agency on Thursday probed an oil spill off the country's Black Sea coast that appeared hugely bigger than initially reported. The spill occurred over the weekend at the oil terminal in Yuzhnaya Ozereyevka near the port of Novorossiysk that belongs to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which pumps crude from Kazakhstan. The oil spilled while being pumped into the Minerva Symphony tanker, which sails under the Greek flag. - Phys.Org

She asked CNN where her recycling goes. See what we discovered

8/17/2021

CNN found out why. Lilly Geisler goes to a lot of trouble to recycle. So she left CNN a voicemail asking: How much of my recycling actually gets recycled? John Sutter travels to Muncie, Indiana, to find out. See more from our "Let's Talk About the Climate Apocalypse" series. (A lot of your plastic isn't being recycled.) - CNN

Don’t Call It a Supervolcano

8/13/2021

Scientists dismantle the myths of Yellowstone: Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first and arguably most famous national park, is home to one of the planet’s largest and potentially most destructive volcanoes. The 50- by 70-kilometer Yellowstone caldera complex is so massive that it can really be appreciated only from the air. But although the caldera isn’t always visible on the ground, it’s certainly no secret: Copious thermal features like hot springs and geyser basins dot the landscape and have attracted people to the uniquely beautiful and ecologically rich area for at least 11,000 years. - EOS

Right - The movement of the North American tectonic plate over the Yellowstone hot spot has created a trail of volcanic activity across southern Idaho into Wyoming over the past 16.5 million years. Credit: USGS. Click image for larger version.

5 Graphs from the U.N. Climate Report & Our Path to Halting Climate Change

8/13/2021

It has been 8 years, one pandemic, and a slew of wildfires, storms, and heat waves since the last United Nations climate assessment report was released in 2013. During that time, 191 parties signed the Paris Agreement; the United States (the world’s second-largest emitter) left and reentered the agreement; renewable energy outpaced coal in the United States and all fossil fuels in Europe for the first time; and greenhouse gas emissions crashed worldwide during stay-at-home orders before springing back. It is with this backdrop that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) unveiled its new assessment of global climate science. - EOS

Right - For the past 2,000 years, global surface temperatures stayed relatively constant until an unprecedented rate of warming began in the mid-20th century. Today, the planet’s temperature is 1.09°C (0.95°C to 1.20°C) above what is was in 1850–1900. Historical data came from paleoclimate archives, and recent observations are direct measurements. Shading shows 5% and 95% confidence intervals for historical measurements. Credit: Jenessa Duncombe. Source: IPCC [2021]

A mega-dairy is transforming Arizona’s aquifer and farming lifestyles

8/13/2021

Nobody knows how many wells have dried up in Sunizona, let alone the entire Willcox Basin, which covers 1,911 square miles in Arizona’s southeast corner, near the New Mexico border. But between 2014 and 2019, records from the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) show that around 20 wells in the Sunizona area were deepened after drying up. In the entire basin during that time, records show that 57 wells were deepened, but interviews and anecdotal accounts place the number at more than 100.- High Country News

Right: Thousands of dairy cows crowd the Coronado Dairy’s feedlot in the Kansas Settlement area near Sunizona, Arizona. - Roberto (Bear) Guerra / High Country News

How Yellowcake Shaped the West

8/13/2021

The ghosts of the uranium boom continue to haunt the land, water and people - High Country News

Right: Uranium processing mill at Monticello, Utah, owned by the government and operated for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission by the National Lead Company, Inc. This is the only government-owned uranium mill. c. 1957 - U.S. Department of Energy

How Death and Disaster Followed the Shale Gas Boom in Appalachia

8/13/2021

In the past decade, fracking has contributed to the deaths of more than a thousand people and the emission of more than a thousand tons of carbon dioxide in the Appalachian Basin. - EOS

Trees Talk To Each Other. 'Mother Tree' Ecologist Hears Lessons For People, Too

8/13/2021

Trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans, too, ecologist Suzanne Simard says. Trees are linked to neighboring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain, she explains. In one study, Simard watched as a Douglas fir that had been injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine tree then produced defense enzymes to protect against the insect. "This was a breakthrough," Simard says. The trees were sharing "information that actually is important to the health of the whole forest." - NPR

How the Fossil Fuel Industry Convinced Americans to Love Gas Stoves

These Ladies Love Natural Gas! Too Bad They Aren’t Real.

How to Feed the World Without Destroying the Planet

Starving cows. Fallow farms. The Arizona drought is among the worst in the country

IPCC Report Says We're Going to Pass the 1.5°C Climate Threshold. What's Next?

Russian Investigators Probe Big Black Sea Oil Spill

She asked CNN where her recycling goes. See what we discovered

Don’t Call It a Supervolcano

5 Graphs from the U.N. Climate Report & Our Path to Halting Climate Change

A mega-dairy is transforming Arizona’s aquifer and farming lifestyles

How Yellowcake Shaped the West

How Death and Disaster Followed the Shale Gas Boom in Appalachia

Trees Talk To Each Other. 'Mother Tree' Ecologist Hears Lessons For People, Too

GeoNews

Archives

Categories