Environment
Hank |
Electric cars are popular, thanks to government mandates and subsidies, but they have a problem in the distance; massive amounts of battery waste.
The EU, for example, wants to have 30 million electric cars by 2030 and while politicians can ignore the fossil fuel demands and strain on the grid, electric cars bring something they can't ignore; the environmental impact of giant toxic batteries in landfills.
Politicians say they will just recycle those, and that may make people feel better, but where is the science? There has been no science in California, for example, though politicians…
Hank |
Is it more sustainable to have 2 billion people burning wood and dung for energy than to have centralized coal? Any objective look at the science says coal, while not perfect, is better for emissions, public health, and quality of life than individual fires but the U.S. government, guided by lobbyists, refused to provide World Bank funding for developing nations to create centralized energy - unless it was wind or solar.
All those countries could afford to maintain was coal. Instead of giving them centralized energy we put the sustainability buzzword as a mandate.
Nearly a billion people don…
With the climate crisis being a consideration at the forefront of energy generation today, it's no surprise that solar power is receiving so much good press. However, despite that, there's very slow adoption of the alternative energy source. In the US, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy mentions that there's enough solar power generation to power twelve million American households. Yet, in a country with over three hundred million residents, this seems like a drop in the bucket. Why has solar not garnered the sort of traction one would expect for a population that's so…
Hank |
A small fish in central Texas, a freshwater mussel in the Mobile River basin, and another mussel in Alabama’s Coosa and Cahaba Rivers have something strange in common; they appeared on an EPA list of threatened species “likely to be adversely affected” by a popular herbicide named atrazine.
I don't see how could things get worse for the San Marcos gambusia, the Upland Combshell and the Southern Acornshell. They're all extinct. I lived in the southern US in the early 1970s and never saw a Southern Acornshell. It would have been impossible, it was gone by then.
So why does EPA think that today…
Once upon a time, it was important that farmers - the first agricultural scientists - create seeds that were larger, more nutritious, and more resilient to environmental stress. Nature might bring rain, it might not, pests were going to eat their way through whole fields if they could.
As agriculture improved, civilization followed. Seeds such as wheat, rice and corn directly provide about 70% of the calories eaten by people every day. What isn't directly eaten is still contributing, either by providing feed for livestock or by being grown into fruits and vegetables. …
The Arsinoite nome (now called Faiyum) region 60 miles south-west of Cairo was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire but by the end of the third century most settlements there had been abandoned.
The problem was climate change. Attempts by local farmers to adapt to the new dryness and desertification of the farmland didn't work and they had to move.
Nature gave the area a one-two punch. Climate data indicates that the monsoon rains at the headwaters of the Nile in the Ethiopian Highlands suddenly and permanently weakened, which meant lower high-water levels of the entire river in summer,…
Hank |
After suffering 80 percent losses in sugar beet crops due to the yellows virus, and now being free from the EU's activist-dominated politicization of science, the UK has decided to put a halt to the 80 percent decline and reverse course for crops before farmers went bankrupt.
The EU had already beaten them to it. Their experiment banning neonicotinoids in 2018 have been disastrous and countries from Denmark to France had already brought them right back - an 'exemption' from the ban that will last indefinitely.The Guardian did what it could to try and undermine the science for the alternatives…
Hank |
When your Xbox is a gaming console and a 4K Blu-Ray player, you don't need two devices, and when your phone is a camera and a video recorder, there are two fewer things to buy - and eventually throw away.
As smart devices have become more integrated, and more commodities like a dishwasher than technology events, people own fewer things and keep them longer. That means less electronic waste. Yet the story we get from environmental groups is that e-waste is the fastest growing material pollution and only donations to lawyer-run groups can stop it.
It's not true, as a recent paper shows. E-waste…
Everyone recognizes that less less food means fewer pests but when you have to grow food to keep billions from starving, yields matter. Farming has gotten more efficient, thanks to big data tools leading to targeted pesticide use and modern pesticides that are less toxic to the environment while still getting rid of pests, such as neonicotinoids.
That's important. Even with modern science, insects cause losses of up to 18 percent and in older practices that use less-effective pesticides like the organic manufacturing process, those yield losses are even higher - along with food costs.…
Hank |
A recent paper finds that if just 15 percent of farmland reverted to nature, it would wipe out nearly a third of the carbon we've generated since the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
The good news; we can do that easily. The bad news; it involves science, and western elites in environmental activism, from Environmental Working Group in the U.S. To Swiss Public Eye in Europe, are never going to allow that without a fight.
America actually does quite well protecting the environment. We have more open land than Africa does. Because America leads the world in scientific approaches to…