DAILY QUICK READ - JUNE 13, 2016

Namibia's Skeleton Coast

Just a beautiful photo from Namibia.

Epic Migrations

Technology helps us understand the awesome natural world.

The extraordinary secrets of the thousands of species of birds, fish, mammals, insects and reptiles that make epic journeys to feeding or breeding grounds are being unlocked by a fast-emerging “animal internet”.

“We are at a time of great, new and rapid understandings about migrations,” says RSPB senior scientist John Mallord. “Technology is driving a revolution. With birds, it is showing us a far fuller picture of where they go and where they stop. We see now that birds may spend different lengths of time in different places. Some months are spent moving, some feeding up. In the past we had only pinpoints provided by ringing. We had no idea what happened along the route.”

Read about the convergence of nature and technology.

Free Electricity

Using the proceeds from extraction industries to improve the lives of the people.  What a novel concept.  Think about the devastated communities in the United States that have been provided with no future by the coal companies that have polluted and looted their communities.

  

In a new Bloomberg report, Chile Has So Much Solar Energy It’s Giving It Away for Free, solar capacity from the country’s central grid has increased four fold to 770 megawatts since 2013. Another 1.4 gigawatts will be added this year with many solar power projects under development.

Thanks to an economic boost from increased mining production, Chile now has 29 solar farms and another 15 in the pipeline. Enel Green Power Chile Ltda. recently commissioned Chile’s largest solar PV project connected to the grid. The 160-megawatt facility will be located in the northern part of the country in the municipality of María Elena, about 1,300 kilometers north of Santiago.

With so much clean power available, the price of solar has cost absolutely nothing for certain regions in recent months.

Infrastructure development is now a critical factor in expanding the availability of this inexpensive power.

However, the article points out that Chile’s rapid solar expansion isn’t all good news. Due to the nation’s bifurcated power grid, the central and northern grids are not connected.

PV Insider noted that most of the demand is in the central grid, yet the best solar resource in the country resides in the Atacama desert in the north. The northern grid represents approximately 24 percent of installed capacity whereas the central grid holds the majority of capacity at 74 percent of installed megawatts.

Grinding Up Live Baby Chickens

Drill down in this story and you discover what the chicken industry has grown to be.  Specialized chickens for eggs and meat production.  

Most egg farmers in the United States will stop grinding male baby chickens to death over the next four years.

United Egg Producers, the industry group that represents 95 percent of egg producers in the country, announced Thursday that they would end the process of “culling” male chicks by 2020. Instead, they’ll use technology that determines the sex of a chicken embryo still inside an egg.

Let’s back up a minute. Why were egg producers ever grinding up newborn chicks to begin with? Basically, because they’re useless to the egg industry, explained David Coman-Hidy, executive director of The Humane League, a farm animal protection group that negotiated the agreement.

Norway Takes the Lead

First the Norwegians consider a ban on fossil fueled vehicles, now an expanded government policy to ban the purchase of products that result from or in deforestation.

Norway has become the first country to commit to a zero deforestation policy.

The announcement comes two years after Norway issued a joint declaration with Germany and the United Kingdom stating that it would “promote national commitments that encourage deforestation-free supply chains, including through public procurement policies to sustainably source commodities such as palm oil, soy, beef and timber."

Norway's announcement is the latest in a series of impressive steps the Scandinavian country has taken to fight deforestation, says EcoWatch. The Norwegian government paid the South American country of Guyana $250 million between 2011 and 2015 to stop logging and protect its forests.

In 2015, Norway paid $1 billion to Brazil, which is home to 60 percent of the Amazon forest, for completing a 2008 agreement to prevent deforestation. The investment helped save more than 33,000 square miles of rain forest from clear-cutting; deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has decreased more than 75 percent over the last decade.

Photo Album of the Emoya 33

Great review of the some of the history and current status of the 33 rescued lions at the Emoya Big Cat Sanctuary.  And, many beautiful photos.