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'Everything is drying.' Springs on Hopi Land Decline. Sacred Connection Lost.

12/7/2020

MISHONGNOVI — At the base of a sandstone mesa, the ground descends in a series of stone terraces and steps, forming an oval-shaped ceremonial gathering place with flat rocks arranged around a central pit. At the bottom, a pool of water shimmers in the sun. This natural spring, called Toreva Spring, is a sacred place for Hopi people. For centuries, they have held religious ceremonies here while looking into its serene waters. When he was a boy, Howard Dennis sat by the water during ceremonies and dangled his feet in the cool spring. “See that little ledge right there? At the bottom, that’s how high it used to be,” Dennis said, motioning to the dry edge of the pit. Over the past four decades, he said, the water level in the spring has dropped 8 to 10 feet. - AZ Central

Scientists Solve Mystery of Mass Coho Salmon Deaths - A Chemical from Car Tires

12/3/2020

When officials in Seattle spent millions of dollars restoring the creeks along Puget Sound — tending to the vegetation, making the stream beds less muddy, building better homes for fish — they were thrilled to see coho salmon reappear. But when it rained, more than half, sometimes all, of the coho in a creek would suffer a sudden death. These mysterious die-offs — an alarming phenomenon that has been reported from Northern California to British Columbia — have stumped biologists and toxicologists for decades. Numerous tests ruled out pesticides, disease and other possible causes, such as hot temperatures and low dissolved oxygen. Now, after 20 years of investigation, researchers in Washington state, San Francisco and Los Angeles say they have found the culprit: a very poisonous yet little-known chemical related to a preservative used in car tires. - LA Times

EVs ARE A Silver Bullet For Zero Emissions – Don’t Believe The Fossil Fuel Hype

12/3/2020

A report has been hitting the headlines in the UK about the carbon footprint of producing EVs. The main story is that (mostly due to the batteries) the manufacture of an electric vehicle means that it will need to drive 50,000 miles before an equivalent fossil fuel car becomes less green. This is not a complete lie – the carbon footprint of EV manufacture is (generally) higher than for fossil fuel cars at the moment. But leading on this headline figure obscures a lot of detail, and when you dig deeper, the motivations for the report become more questionable. The first eyebrow gets raised by the fact that this “new” report, entitled "Decarbonising Road Transport: There Is No Silver Bullet" borrows heavily from information released over two months ago. The main example for battery EV carbon footprint is the comparison between the production of a Polestar 2 EV and a conventional Volvo XC40, stating that the former produces 24 tons of CO2 during manufacture where the latter only takes 14 tons. This is a fair comparison because both cars come from the same parent company, Geely. In fact, Polestar itself released the information in September, so the numbers seem legitimate. The reason why this report is rehashing the information as new appears to be in reaction to the UK government announcement of a ban on sales of new fossil fuel cars in 2030. The problem is that most of the articles are leading on the worst-case scenario and either not stating the detail or burying it as far down their pieces as possible. The 50,000-mile figure is assuming the EV is being charged with the average blend of electricity sources on the UK national grid, which includes a lot of renewable input now but still regularly uses a lot of fossil fuels as well, particularly natural gas. There are a number of live tools where you can see this blend, but my favorite can be found here.- Forbes

Burning Fossil Fuels Helped Drive Earth’s Most Massive Extinction

12/3/2020

Paleontologists call it the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, but it has another name: “the Great Dying.” It happened about 252 million years ago, and, over the course of just tens of thousands of years, 96 percent of all life in the oceans and, perhaps, roughly 70 percent of all land life vanished forever. The smoking gun was ancient volcanism. But volcanism on its own didn’t cause the extinction. The Great Dying was fueled, two separate teams of scientists report in two recent papers, by extensive oil and coal deposits that the Siberian magma blazed through, leading to combustion that released greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
“There was lots of oil, coal and carbonates formed before the extinction underground near the Siberian volcanism,” said Kunio Kaiho, a geochemist at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and the lead author of one of the studies, published this month in Geology which presented evidence for the burning of ancient fossil fuels by magma. “We discovered two volcanic combustion events coinciding with the end-Permian land extinction and marine extinction.” - NYTimes

In rocks that formed in Northern Italy’s Dolomites and elsewhere around the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, researchers detected spikes of a molecule formed from fossil fuel combustion.Credit...Renato Posenato, Ferrara University

Trump Rushes To Lock In Oil Drilling In Arctic Wildlife Refuge Before Biden's Term

12/3/2020

In a last-minute push, the Trump administration announced Thursday that it will auction off drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in just over a month, setting up a final showdown with opponents before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. The sale, which is now set for Jan. 6, could cap a bitter, decades-long battle over whether to drill in the coastal plain, a pristine expanse that's home to migrating caribou, polar bears and other wildlife. The Trump administration has made it a priority to open the land to development. - WBUR

Caribou from the Porcupine Caribou Herd migrate onto the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska. The refuge has long been eyed for oil exploration. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/AP)

'Everything is drying.' Springs on Hopi Land Decline. Sacred Connection Lost.

Scientists Solve Mystery of Mass Coho Salmon Deaths - A Chemical from Car Tires

EVs ARE A Silver Bullet For Zero Emissions – Don’t Believe The Fossil Fuel Hype

Burning Fossil Fuels Helped Drive Earth’s Most Massive Extinction

Trump Rushes To Lock In Oil Drilling In Arctic Wildlife Refuge Before Biden's Term

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