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Backed by International Investors, Mining Companies Line Up to Expand in or Near the Amazon’s Indigenous Territories

2/22/2022

 
As of November, nine major mining companies considered key players in the extraction of rare metals for electric vehicle batteries had 225 active applications to expand operations into or near Indigenous territories in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. U.S.-based financial institutions are among their top funders, according to a new report by Amazon Watch and the Association of Brazil’s Indigenous People, or APIB. In the past, those mining companies caused environmental damage that sickened Indigenous communities, stirred social discontent and contributed to the “trail of destruction” of the Amazon rainforest.  - Inside Climate News
Right - Aerial view of Brazilian mining multinational Vale at the Corrego do Feijao mine in Brumadinho, Belo Horizonte's metropolitan region, Minas Gerais state, Brazil, Dec. 17, 2019.
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Coal Seam Fires Burn Beneath Communities in Zimbabwe

2/18/2022

 
As Zimbabwe’s coal industry expands, residents around the western town of Hwange are experiencing the effects of underground coal seam fires. Residents, particularly children, and livestock are at risk from falling into the smoldering fires beneath unstable ground. Unfenced areas above the fires are often used as outdoor toilets, playgrounds, and grazing areas. Victims suffer burned legs, and in one case, a young girl died of her burn injuries. “The [Hwange] community is living in fear of these fires as the number of people getting burned increases by each passing day. Livestock, especially in the Madubasa, Hwange area, have also fallen victim to these fires,” said Fidelis Chima, coordinator of Greater Whange Residents Trust. - EOS


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Amazon deforestation: Record high destruction of trees in January

2/12/2022

 
The number of trees cut down in the Brazilian Amazon in January far exceeded deforestation for the same month last year, according to government satellite data. The area destroyed was five times larger than 2021, the highest January total since records began in 2015. Environmentalists accuse Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro of allowing deforestation to accelerate. Protecting the Amazon is essential if we are to tackle climate change. Trees are felled for their wood as well as to clear spaces to plant crops to supply global food companies. At the climate change summit COP26, more than 100 governments promised to stop and reverse deforestation by 2030. - BBC
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Conservation Commitment for French Polynesia

2/12/2022

 
The Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy Project today applauded French Polynesian President Édouard Fritch’s commitment to conserve roughly 1 million sq km (386,000 sq mi) by creating a new large-scale marine protected area and establishing artisanal fishing zones around 118 islands in the South Pacific Ocean. During the One Ocean Summit in Brest, France, earlier today, President Fitch pledged to launch an effort to create a 500,000-square-kilometer (193,000 square miles) marine protected area in the SW area of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ)—a move long supported by local mayors and community members. In fact, President Fritch acknowledged the local proposal, calling it by the name Rāhui Nui, or “big rāhui”—a Tahitian reference to the traditional Polynesian practice of restricting access to an area or resource to conserve it. - Pew Trust
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Shell offered South African villagers jobs. They chose their heritage instead.

2/4/2022

 
Mashona Dlamini knew his land was rich long before any mining company told him so.  As a child, he often followed his father, a healer called an inyanga, down through the silver-flecked red dunes around their village to the coast. There, they gathered the octopuses, sea urchins, and seawater that his father used to make medicine. In winter, the land on either side of their path heaved up sweet potatoes and corn, in summer thick bunches of bananas. As long as they took only what they needed, Mr. Dlamini’s father explained as they walked, there would always be more. So when international mining companies began to arrive in the early 2000s – first for titanium in the dunes, and later for gas they said might be beneath the ocean floor – Mr. Dlamini, along with many of his neighbors, wasn’t particularly interested in their pitch.  - CS Monitor
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The Maldives is being swallowed by the sea. Can it adapt?

1/30/2022

 
As the pace of climate change accelerates, this tiny nation is trying to buy time, in hopes that the world’s leaders will reduce carbon emissions before the Maldives’ inevitable demise. The archipelago has bet its future—along with a substantial sum from the national purse—on construction of an artificial, elevated island that could house a majority of the population of nearly 555,000 people. Meanwhile, a Dutch design firm plans to build 5,000 floating homes on pontoons anchored in a lagoon across the capital. - National Geographic
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Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project projected to serve thousands of people

1/27/2022

 
Arizonans are facing water shortages as the Colorado River declines, but Teddy Lopez and many other residents of the Navajo Nation have lived without easy access to clean water for decades. Lopez, 66, has learned that nothing is guaranteed – with water or in life. “I just take it one day at a time and try to work what I can, what I can do,” said Lopez, who in August received news no one wants to hear. “I have cancer, so I just take care of my family, I guess,” said Lopez, who lives with his wife in Lybrook, New Mexico, and his daughter and grandchildren come to cook meals for him every day. - Cronkite News
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​It's Time to Drain Lake Powell

11/13/2021

 
The date is Feb. 9, 1997, and the man responsible for one of the most egregious environmental follies in human history is sitting at a restaurant in Boyce, Virginia, with the leader of the movement seeking to undo his mistake. Of the hundreds of dams Floyd Dominy green lit during his decade running the Bureau of Reclamation, none are as loathed as his crown jewel, the Glen Canyon Dam. In 1963, Dominy erected the 710-foot (216-meter) tall monument to himself out of ego and concrete, deadening the Colorado River just upstream of the Grand Canyon, drowning more than 250 square miles (648 square kilometers) in the heart of the Colorado Plateau, and inventing Lake Powell in the middle of a sun-baked desert. - Gizmodo
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Renewable energy is cheaper, a game changer in the climate change battle

10/24/2021

 
Renewable energy prices have fallen far more quickl than the industry anticipated, says a new report. And they are fast becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. A rapid transition to emissions-free ‘green’ energy could save many trillions of dollars in energy costs - and help combat climate change. The global energy sector has an impressive record of scaling-up renewables like wind and solar – but it is not so good at predicting future price changes of the clean energy these renewables produce, according to a new report. Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Institute of New Economic Thinking suggest early pricing prediction models have consistently underestimated both how far the costs of renewable energy sources might fall, and the benefits of an accelerated switch to clean energy. - WEForum / Oxford University
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Is the Amazon near a tipping point? Three real-world studies are ominous

10/24/2021

 
Near the Freire home, there was a stream so wide that the children – aged between 5 and 12 when they arrived – would dare each other to reach the other side. They called it Jaguar's Creek. Now it's not a meter wide and can be cleared with a single step. The loss of such streams, and the wider water problems they are a part of, fill scientists with foreboding.Covering an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States and accounting for more than half of the world's rainforest, the Amazon exerts power over the carbon cycle like no other terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. The tree loss from an extremely dry year in 2005, for example, released an additional quantity of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere equivalent to the annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined, according to a 2009 study published in Science magazine. - Reuters 
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Is Chevron’s Vendetta Against Steven Donziger Finally Backfiring?

10/5/2021

 
Steven Donziger, the human rights lawyer who spent nearly three decades fighting Chevron on behalf of 30,000 people in the Ecuadorian rainforest, has been sentenced to six months in federal prison for “criminal contempt.” On October 1, in a lower Manhattan federal courtroom, Judge Loretta Preska justified imposing the maximum penalty by asserting that Donziger, now 60, had not shown contrition. She said, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law.” In May, Preska had found Donziger guilty after a trial without a jury. And now Donziger, along with his family and scores of supporters, had to listen to the federal judge compare him to a mule who needed to be beaten with a piece of wood before complying. - The Nation

Want to learn more?  Read this related NYTimes article. 
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The Upper Skagit Indian Tribe Calls on Seattle to Remove the Gorge Dam

7/16/2021

 
The Skagit River runs about 150 miles through what is now British Columbia into northwest Washington, from the Cascade Mountains to Puget Sound. Along the way, three major hydroelectric dams owned by the city of Seattle — Ross Dam, Diablo Dam and the Gorge Dam — block the river’s flow. Now, as part of a once-every-few-decades federal relicensing process, the ecological alterations caused by those dams are being re-examined by scientists and regulators. The license renewal is exposing other changes, too, including how Indigenous nations are increasingly asserting their sovereignty and rights. Looked at from one angle, this regulatory process is simply a bureaucratic hoop Seattle must jump through to keep using the Skagit River to generate power. From another, however, it’s a chance to reconsider the value of the river itself. The relicensing process has triggered many different conversations on the Skagit’s future; this is one of a pair of stories that focus on a few of them. - HCN
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    GeoNews

    This is a way to share science-based info from reliable sources. Click the source link after text to read more. Use this Google Doc or this Google Slides template to summarize an article. An occasional podcast featuring news and topic experts will be included.

    The sources below often include quality energy, climate, & geology news.
      Geology.com
      EENews
      Wash Post Climate / Env
      NYTimes
      Bloomberg Green
      Grist Energy
    ​
      Grist Climate

    Contact Prof Jeff to share items.

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