Environment

Right now, 17 percent of the US is cropland while 51 percent is open and essentially unused. We have more open space in the US than the entire continent of Africa, only 3 percent of our land is urban, but you might not be aware of that because activists insist that urban blight is ruining the country. It's not so, the only segment where land is disappearing is the one that environmentalists have been warring on for decades; farms. Environmentalists hate farmers (except the boutique organic kind) and want every puddle of water on every farm micromanaged by a centralized government they can…

On coverage of the Ohio train derailment remembers the issue isn’t scary chemical names it’s what the chemical compounds are and their concentrations in the environment that are an issue. Anyone who tells you a big black cloud of chemical smoke is good to breath or ok to breath is obviously lying. At the same time don’t be scared by merely referring to normal substances by their chemical names.  The mainstream media is rightly not overblowing this disaster.  It is bad.  You wouldn't want to consume the released substances.  At the same time, it is not anything like…

Some food grown in the US, especially high-cost luxuries like almonds, are pollinated using bees. Since bees are most often rented and transported for such purposes, keeping them alive is important to owners and growers. As their value for higher-cost foods has grown, so have bee numbers; they are up 85 percent in the last 60 years. You would just never know it if your source is Greenpeace, so when you use verbiage identical to Greenpeace press releases in an academic paper press release your work is going to be suspect. And that is a paper on bee deaths we'll discuss today. No matter how…

For those who don’t know the background, NASA’s Perseverance rover is gathering rock samples in Jezero crater on Mars where there used to be a delta long ago. It is a very interesting place for past life. The samples are in tubes on Mars. They want to return them some time around 2033. Sadly Perseverance can’t drill and the surface deposits have been sterilized by ionizing radiation for billions of years. Though Mars used to have oceans it’s been dry now for billions of years but sometimes with occasional flooding and even lakes for a while. I am trying to find out what has happened as NASA…

First for anyone who doesn't know about it, NASA are planning to return its Mars samples of rock and some dust / soil to biosafety level 4 facilities (BSL-4). The samples are in tubes on Mars. They want to return them some time around 2033. Their plan to return them in a BSL-4 was fine from 1999 through to 2012.. However, in 2012 the European Space Foundation did a major report which concluded that a sample return mission has to contain the very small microbes we now know exist called ultramicrobacteria which can get through a very tiny 0.1 micron nanopore and still be viable. A BSL-4 can'…

And back at home, Congressman John Curtis (R Utah) tells National Public Radio that the “conservative climate caucus,” which he chairs, seeks climate solutions that “don’t demonize fossil fuels.”* Now, as many of you know, I’m a political centrist at heart, but because the country has drifted so far to the right, I’ve resolved to be a knee-jerk leftist – a flaming liberal, a yellow dog Democrat – until things come back into balance. That said, it has NEVER occurred to me to demonize fossil fuels. Fossil fuel companies, yes, you bet, but the substances themselves, no. Nor have I heard…

The book’s reviewers offer no clue that Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is the most important book published in this century. And it is that. Its fictional form makes climate science and climate remediation readable. It’s scary (pulling no punches about current perils and who’s responsible for them), hopeful (if we can get certain people off their asses, and get certain others to STFU), informative (with stunningly well-informed subplots on the political, science/engineering, and economic struggles ahead), and very, very long. Robinson is well known as a writer of hard…

Lately I’ve been thinking and writing about environmental governance. Here’s a summary. It has to do with the consequences of not thinking systemically; combining top-down and bottom-up policies; technology forcing; fairness and the SDGs; and prospects of violence. First, as we know, some people tend to see systemic interactions, while others seem able only to see direct, immediate cause-and-effect. The latter folks cause three kinds of troubles. First, they think Covid-19 is a single problem that will be solved, following which all will return to normal. And ditto, they believe, for climate…

This was potentially a good article by the BBC except that sadly it used an absurd click bait title and had several serious factual errors I recommend the Mongabay articles on the same topic as far better: The past, present and future of the Congo peatlands: 10 takeaways from our series and in more detail, their series: The ‘idea’: Uncovering the peatlands of the Congo Basin, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. The BBC article is scaring some of the vulnerable people I help with my fact checking,, because of the clickbait and hyperbole, so here is a debunk to help anyone else who got scared…

Some politicians and cultural activists may claim that humans are propelled by consumerism but a new paper finds that isn't true. And that it is not true is a good thing. If we were all driven by greed, there would be no poverty. Developing nations would embrace science and have plentiful food. But the environmental strain would be tremendous. In the real world, the environmental strain is not tremendous. The most scientific country, the United States, has grown more food using less water and energy and chemicals than ever believed possible. That reduced inequality and increased equity…