What Are the Odds

What are the odds that 5 - 500 year events will occur in 15 years?  Or, more likely what are the odds that 6 -  500 year events will occur in 16 years?

These extreme heat events are all connected to a slower jet stream that locks weather systems into place... The loss of sea ice in the Arctic is amplifying warming in the northernmost regions of our planet, and that is disrupting the natural jet stream patterns, said Dim Coumou of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and PIK. Jet stream winds are driven by the temperature difference between the icy air of the Arctic and hot air from the tropics. A rapidly warming Arctic—this past winter it saw its lowest ever ice cover—reduces that temperature difference and slows the jet stream.

Koch Brother's Militia Force Oregon to Abandon Climate Legislation

Over the last two weeks the Oregon state senate attempted to vote on a bill that would have established a statewide limit on carbon emissions and move Oregon into the Western Climate Initiative that creates a regional carbon credit market – a cap and trade system designed to reduce carbon emissions while allowing time for industries to implement emission improvements.  There is a great summary of the events and their links to industries and right wing militias in The Nation.  

Let’s start with the legislation, which shares a foundational principle with the Green New Deal: that corporate polluters should help pay for the transition to a clean economy. Referred to as a “cap and invest” policy, the measure would have put a statewide limit on carbon emissions, forcing Oregon’s largest polluters to pay for emissions allowances.

 

                                Tim Dickinson Rolling Stone

In the face of the imminent passage of this bill in the state senate where Democrats hold a majority, 11 Republican senators fled the state, thereby denying the senate the necessary quorum required to do business.  The Republican senators were immediately embraced by members of the state’s far right militia movement, who vowed to defend the senators from any attempt to force them to return to the state capital to restore a quorum and allow a vote on the bill.

The 11 missing GOP senators have particularly strong ties to industry players fighting the cap-and-trade bill. More than 65 percent of their campaign funding has come from corporations, including Koch Industries, whose subsidiary Georgia-Pacific operates mills that would be regulated under the cap-and-trade bill.

In the end, it wasn’t just the missing Republicans who sunk the bill.  A single Democrat stated her opposition to the bill forcing the senate leadership to pull the plug and abandon the effort.  

Laurie Monnes Anderson, who represents a suburban district just east of Portland and was expected to be the final critical vote in the bill’s favor. But this week she reportedly made it known she would not support the legislation, apparently out of deference to Boeing, which operates a factory in her district and lobbied against the bill.  Although Boeing wouldn’t be directly regulated by the measure, the company said in a statement that it was worried about higher energy costs. “I’m fighting for Boeing because they’re in my district,” Anderson had told a reporter a few weeks ago.

To recap, Koch funded Republicans aided and abetted by right wing militia members and paid stooges stood in the way of a modest attempt to mitigate the impact of climate change.  Hopefully, the survivors of the climate change apocalypse that the Koch and their fellow travellers are consciously bringing on the world will be able to hold these vile people accountable, since the current generation of political leaders don't seem to give a damn.

San Diego Sunset

June 29, 2019

"Up In Arms" - How the Criminal and the Ignorant Take Over Our Public Lands

John Temple's "Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America’s Patriot Militia Movement", follows the Bundy Family from their robbery of public lands in Nevada through their take over of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.  It documents how these yahoos built a movement of fellow travelers and disaffected loners to attack public land ownership in the American West.  Here's a link to the review in The Revelator:

While Up in Arms gives a detailed view of the ideology that motivates the Bundys, the story is much bigger than them. It’s also an exploration of the motivations of some of the most hardline anti-federal militants in the country — not just the Bundys, but the ragbag collection of so-called Patriot movement followers that flocked to their ranch, even when most of them lacked understanding of public-lands issues and the cause they were backing.

Sharks Under Attack (As Usual)

A new report from Greenpeace outlines the dire situation faced by sharks in the North Atlantic.

Shark fisheries suffer from chronic under reporting and deficient data collection and figures remain contested. A recent paper has estimated 100 million sharks are caught and killed in fishing nets every year, a vast proportion of which are unintended ‘accidental’ catch, yet serves to further the lucrative trade in shark fins. 

The overfishing of sharks in the North Atlantic mirrors the situation found in many other parts of the world. A 2014 global review of the status of 1,041 chondrichthyan fishes – sharks, rays and chimaeras – estimated that a quarter of them are threatened according to IUCN Red List criteriadue to overfishing (targeted and incidental).

Humans can't kill everything in the ocean except the fish they want to catch without destroying the whole ecological system.  And, by the way, we are drastically overfishing the species we intend to eat.

Cement Production Generates Massive Amounts of CO2

Here's the link to TreeHugger.

Cement production produces more CO2 than all the trucks in the entire world.

Whenever anyone complains about the carbon footprint of making cement and how it is responsible for 7 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions, the industry responds, saying, “We’re working on it!” And it’s true, they are. But as Vanessa Dezem writes in Bloomberg, that doesn’t mean anyone is buying it, or that the customers care.

Mussels Cooking In Their Shells

In the "old normal" world, this time of year would be cold and windy along the Northern California coast, but this year we are seeing the "new normal" - sunny days with temperatures in the 80s.  Sounds nice, unless you are a mussel.

In all her years working at Bodega Bay, the marine reserve research coordinator Jackie Sones had never seen anything like it: scores of dead mussels on the rocks, their shells gaping and scorched, their meats thoroughly cooked. 

A record-breaking June heatwave apparently caused the largest die-off of mussels in at least 15 years at Bodega Head, a small headland on the northern California bay. And Sones received reports from other researchers of similar mass mussel deaths at various beaches across roughly 140 miles of coastline. 

Sones expects the die-off to affect the rest of the seashore ecosystem. “Mussels are known as a foundation species. The equivalent are the trees in a forest – they provide shelter and habitat for a lot of animals, so when you impact that core habitat it ripples throughout the rest of the system,” said Sones.

One more piece of evidence that climate change will have devastating impacts that as they impact foundational species on land and in the oceans.

The University of British Columbia biologist Christopher Harley documented a mussel cook-off at Bodega Head in 2004, but he and Sones believe this one was probably bigger. 

“These events are definitely becoming more frequent, and more severe,” said Harley, citing diminishing mussel beds along the west coast, up to British Columbia. “Mussels are one of the canaries in the coal mine for climate change, only this canary provides food and habitat for hundreds of other species.”

Republicans Don't Care About Your Children

Stunning evil. 

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue cited weather patterns and said "it rained yesterday, it's a nice pretty day today" when asked about the cause of the global climate crisis in an interview with CNN.

Perdue joins President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence as the latest senior administration official to question the near universal consensus in the scientific community that the global climate crisis is man-made. 

Ice will melt, seas will rise, weather events will become more extreme and millions will become refugees, but the Trump cult leaders will continue to lie to themselves and the rest of their cult.

Stunning Photo - Raikoke Volcano Eruption From Space

Raikoke is an island between Russia and Japan in the Sea of Okhotsk.

One of the images was shot by an Expedition 59 astronaut at the International Space Station on the morning of the eruption. The largely dormant volcano erupted for the first time in nearly 100 years at 4 a.m. local time (6 p.m. GMT on June 21), sending a cloud of thick volcanic plumes 8 to 10 miles (13 to 17 kilometers) above sea level, according to the European Space Agency, whose Copernicus Sentinel satellite imaged the eruption from orbit. 

Forests Are Burning and Roads May Fall Apart

                                              Jaume Sellart/EPA

Europe is in the grip of a record setting heat wave.  A massive forest fire in Spain continues driven by hot dry air from Africa.  In Germany, a speed limit has been implemented on sections of the autobahn due to concerns the intense temperatures could cause cracking in some sections of the usually limit free roadways.

In Spain:

“We’re facing a serious fire on a scale not seen for 20 years,” the region’s interior minister, Miquel Buch, said in a tweet. “It could burn through 20,000 hectares. Let’s be very aware that any carelessness could lead to a catastrophe.”

In Germany:

State authorities are reducing speeds to as low as 100 kilometers per hour (62 miles per hour) on some stretches because of fears that the unusually high temperatures could create potentially deadly cracks on Autobahn surfaces, a highways agency spokesman said. Temperatures in Germany on Wednesday could surpass a June high of 38.2 degrees Celsius (101 Fahrenheit), according to the country’s DWD weather service. The all-time record of 40.3 degrees, set in July 2015, could also fall.

European officials and the public clearly understand that this intense heat wave is the product of global climate change. 

Meteorologists blame climate change for sending a blast of air from the Sahara desert into Western Europe. The sweltering heat echoes a sustained drought in 2018 across Germany that halted shipping on the Rhine River, hampered power generation, sparked forest fires and forced the country to import grain for the first time in 24 years. Rising temperatures are making violent convective storms more likely, mirroring a trend in the U.S. Midwest.

In Germany, protesters were arrested at the country's largest open pit coal mine.  They are demanding that Germany accelerate the pace at which coal is phased out of electrical power production.

“Nothing less than our future is at stake,” said Nike Malhaus, spokeswoman for protest group Ende Gelaende. “We are taking the coal phaseout into our own hands, because the government is failing to protect the climate.”

Meanwhile, in the United States of Climate Change Denial:

The Trump administration on Wednesday completed one of its biggest rollbacks of environmental rules, replacing a landmark Obama-era effort that sought to wean the United States's electrical grid off coal-fired power plants and their climate-damaging pollution.

Renewable Power Exceeds Coal

In the US renewable power generation in April exceeded the power generated by coal fired power plants.  As more wind and solar comes on line, the volume of electrical power generated will continue to grow.  On the other hand, the share of electrical power generated by coal will rapidly shrink.  In April 23% of the US electrical power came from renewables with 20% from coal.

“The fate of coal has been sealed, the market has spoken,” said Michael Webber, an energy expert at the University of Texas. “The trend is irreversible now, the decline of coal is unstoppable despite Donald Trump’s rhetoric.”

Trump has repeatedly promised to revive the fortunes of the coal industry, to the delight of voters in mining regions in states such as West Virginia, by repealing various clean air and climate regulations.

However, at least 50 coal-fired power plants have shut since Trump entered the White House in 2017. The falling cost of renewables and gas has caused coal to be dislodged as a favored energy source for utilities.

"Sides of a Horn" - Painful and Thought Provoking

"Sides of a Horn" is difficult to watch.  In just 18 minutes the film indicts so many powerful people in this world without moving its focus from the conflict within one impoverished family.  At the front line, wildlife poachers are often extremely poor people with few options. It's when the rhino horn, elephant tusk or pangolin scales move up the chain that organized crime reaps the massive financial gains.  This short film illustrates how income inequity and poverty create horrific choices for people who have virtually nothing.  [Side note:  Unemployment for black South Africans exceeds 30%.  For whites the rate is less than 7%.]

Here is the site for the film that includes more details and how you can help.

HT:  TreeHugger.

Europe Feeling the Heat - Climate Change

Unprecedented!  It's the new normal.

Forecasters say Europeans will feel sizzling heat next week with temperatures soaring as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in an “unprecedented” June heatwave hitting much of Western Europe.

This latest intense heatwave again shows the impact of global warming on the planet, and such weather conditions are likely to become more frequent, meteorologists said.

500 Vultures Killed In Botswana

Ivory poachers have two sets of victims - the elephants they kill so that they can ripe their tusks from their bodies and, frequently they poison the dead bodies of the killed elephants in order to kill the animals that scavenge the carcasses.  The reason for this is to cover their track as a large gathering of vultures around the carcasses would attract rangers and other anti-poaching forces.  In Botswana over 500 birds were poisoned as they fed on the carcasses of three elephant  that had been killed by poachers.

More than 500 endangered vultures died after eating three dead elephants whose carcasses were poisoned by poachers, the Botswana government said in a statement Thursday.

The 537 vultures and two tawny eagles were found dead in one of the country's protected wildlife management areas (WMA) in the eastern Central District.

Among the animals killed were 468 white-backed vultures, 28 hooded vultures, 17 white-headed vultures, 14 lappet-faced vultures and 10 cape vultures.

All are classified as either endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. 

Vultures perform a critical function in nature.  They have physical features that allow them to strip the carcasses of the dead completely and a digestive system that is a marvel of evolutionary design.

Change or Die

Puzhal Reservoir  Chennai              Weather Channel

The global climate crisis is an inconvenience in the United States.  Yes, tornados and storms are worse, Miami Beach is frequently flooded and in the drought stricken Western states, fire season is now a year round event.  Fortunately, we have an infrastructure in place and the financial resources to mitigate the worst effects of climate change for a while longer.  But, the previews of things to come are available if we want to look.

In India, millions are without water as a multi-year drought driven by climate change is showing no signs of abating.

Chennai, the sixth-largest city in India is running out of water for its nearly 4.6 million residents as four of the city’s reservoirs are nearly dry due to a heat wave and drought. Many people are reported to have been waiting hours in line for water being provided through government tankers.  

The water crisis is being felt throughout India—at least 550 people were reportedly arrested Wednesday during protests in Coimbatore, about 300 miles southwest of Chennai, alleging negligence by the municipal government. Some political parties are calling on more protests.

The current crisis is just a preview of the projected combined impact of climate change driven reduced rainfall, population growth, industrialization and government inaction.  

India is suffering from the worst water crisis in its history and millions of lives and livelihoods are under threat. Currently, 600 million Indians face high to extreme water stress and about two lakh people die every year due to inadequate access to safe water. The crisis is only going to get worse. By 2030, the country’s water demand is projected to be twice the available supply, implying severe water scarcity for hundreds of millions of people and an eventual ~6% loss in the country’s GDP.

India's population is projected to grow to 1.5 billion by 2030 (from the current 1.4 billion).  In 11 years the world's most populous nation is not going to have water for half of its people.  So, a nation with what is currently a struggling and often ineffective government is going to have to figure out how to deal with what could arguably be the largest crisis in humanity.  Hard to be optimistic.

Elephant Poaching Success in Mozambique

CREDIT: WCS Mozambique

Anti-poaching success isn't easy in Africa, but when a concerted team effort is put in place with sufficient funding, amazing things can be done.  For example, in the 17,104 square mile Niassa National Reserve in northern Mozambique, over a five year period (2009-2016) poaching had reduced the elephant population from 12,000 to 3,675.  A coordinated effort starting in 2018 has resulted in tremendous success in the reserve.

To fight elephant poaching head on, a group of Niassa National Reserve partners, comprised of the Government of Mozambique, WCS, and the Niassa Conservation Alliance, began to implement a coordinated anti-poaching strategy in early 2018, with the generous support of various donors such as USAID. This strategy included deploying a year-round Cessna aircraft and chartering a helicopter during the wet seasons of early 2018 and again through December 2018 through May, 2019 to transport scouts and supplies to remote poaching locations, deploy response teams when poaching was detected, as well as aerial surveillance.

A strong government effort to remove illegal mining and fishing camps in the reserve and more aggressive prosecution of poachers in combination  with improved coordination of anti-poaching resources and the addition of the resources noted above resulted in:

... an 87 percent reduction in the number of illegally killed elephants in 2018 compared to 2017. The last illegally killed elephant was reported on May 17, 2018.

As a side note - the Trump administration proposed to slash the USAID budget by 25% in the most recent Federal budget submission.

Greenland Is Melting - Alarm Bells Should be Ringing

This Should be Ice                         Danish Meteorological Institute / Steffen M. Olsen

Melt water on top of what should be solid ice in Greenland.  This should send shock waves to politicians, but ...... silence.......

"The news coming out of the Arctic over the last few days is further evidence of our rapidly evolving climate emergency, which has ramifications for all of us."

The Arctic is recording record temperatures and ice melt from Alaska to Greenland, where the ice sheet is melting 3 times faster and much earlier than at any time for which we have records.

Jaguars and Leopards - A Tutorial

Jaguar

Leopard

They live oceans apart, but people often mistake one for the other.  One thing that is unmistakable - they are in trouble in the wild.

If big cats had superhero personas, leopards would be Spider-Man and jaguars would be Aquaman. Leopards are the only wild cats that are known to drag their meals into trees. They do this to protect themselves and their food from lions and other predators who would try to steal it. The jaguar’s “superpower” is that it's the most aquatic of all seven big cat species. 

Thanks Panthera.

Bow Down to Our Canine Overlords

Evolution molded them to rule us.

Researchers have found that dogs have evolved muscles around their eyes, which allow them to make expressions that particularly appeal to humans.

A small facial muscle allows dog eyes to mimic an "infant-like" expression which prompts a "nurturing response".

The study says such "puppy eyes" helped domesticated dogs to bond with humans.

"Just one word for you......PLASTICS!"

Plastics in one form or another have been around since the 1860s, however it wasn't until World War II that large scale manufacturing of various plastics (long chain polymers such as nylon) became an important part of the war effort.  The post war economic boom combined with newly freed manufacturing capacity saw plastics make inroads in many applications.  In 1950,  2 million metric tons (4.41 billion pounds) of plastics were produced globally.  In 2015, 400 million metric tons (882 billion pounds) of plastics produced globally.  Forty percent of those plastics are for single use packaging.

What happened?  In the 1950s smoking was not just socially acceptable -it was cool, gasoline cost 22 cents a gallon, Ray Kroc began franchising McDonalds fast food restaurants and the concept of the convenience of disposability had become well entrenched in society.  

In 1956, a member of the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) named Lloyd Stouffer exhorted his colleagues in the industry to not think of plastics in packaging as reusable resources, but instead to see them as disposable.  At an industry conference in 1963 he congratulated them on the great beginning that had made to achieve his vision.

Back in 1956 when I spoke to an SPI conference in New York I pursued a theme which brought some rather startling reactions. I was quoted, in one sentence, in a newsletter, as saying that "the future of plastics is in the trash can."

What I had said in the talk was that it was time for the plastics industry to stop thinking about "reuse" packages and concentrate on single use. For the package that is used once and thrown away, like a tin can or a paper carton, represents not a one-shot market for a few thousand units, but an everyday recurring market measured by the billions of units. Your future in packaging, I said, does indeed lie in the trash can.

It is a measure of your progress in packaging in the last seven years that this remark will no longer raise any eyebrows. You are filling the trash cans, the rubbish dumps and the incinerators with literally billions of plastics bottles, plastics jugs, plastics tubes, blisters and skin packs, plastics bags and films and sheet packages--and now, even plastics cans.  

The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.  (emphasis in mine)

Today the Society of the Plastics Industry has a new name, the Plastics Industry Association and a K Street address in Washington, D.C.  There is no question that plastics have improved the quality and/or reduce the cost of a myriad of products across multiple industries - automotive, construction, medical....  But, it is also unquestionable that petrochemical companies are counting on the continued growth of single use packaging plastics to generate profits.

The result of our demand for convenience and an industries desire for profits is a planet choked (buried) in plastic waste.

"Recycling is like a Band-Aid on gangrene"

A clear eyed assessment of the industry and politics of single use plastics.

"The only real mode of attack is to deal with the heavy decrease in the production of plastics, as opposed to dealing with them after they've already been created. Your consumer behaviours do not matter, not on the scale of the problem. On the scale of personal ethics, yes. Recycling has skyrocketed [with] no impact on the scale of plastic production whatsoever. Really it's the cessation of production that will make the big-scale changes."

Thanks TreeHugger.

Recycling Plastics Is Massive Failure

Sihanoukville, Cambodia                                                          Niamh Peren/The Guardian

Americans generate 34.5 million tons of plastic waste every year.  That's 69 billion pounds of waste or to make it more personal - that's just over 200 pounds of plastic waste per year for every man, woman and child in the United States.  Of that total, only 9% is recycled - and over half of that is being shipped to other countries.

...China and Hong Kong handled more than half: about 1.6m tons of our plastic recycling every year. They developed a vast industry of harvesting and reusing the most valuable plastics to make products that could be sold back to the western world.

But much of what America sent was contaminated with food or dirt, or it was non-recyclable and simply had to be landfilled in China. Amid growing environmental and health fears, China shut its doors to all but the cleanest plastics in late 2017.

The waste problem has become so acute that after China began to refuse our trash, many other countries tightened their standards as well.  Leaving the waste to be shipped to the poorest countries with the lowest standards.

The Guardian found that each month throughout the second half of 2018, container ships ferried about 260 tons of US plastic scrap into one of the most dystopian, plastic-covered places of all: the Cambodian seaside town of Sihanoukville, where, in some areas, almost every inch of the ocean is covered with floating plastic and the beach is nothing but a glinting carpet of polymers.

The entire concept of recycling is more to assuage the conscience of American consumers than to reduce the amount of plastic being produced and discarded.  Only a tiny fraction of the millions of tons of plastic waste will find its way back into the supply chain.  The vast bulk of the material ends up in landfills in some of the world's poorest countries. 

It’s a familiar scene: you stand at the bin, trash in hand, and wonder: “Can I recycle this?”

We tend to throw it in the recycling bin anyway, in the hope that some unknown person, somewhere else, will sort it out. Recyclers call this aspirational recycling, or wish-cycling.

So, what's the impact of your plastic waste?

A study released this spring by the environmental group Gaia documented the human toll of US plastics exports on the countries that receive them.

“The impact of the shift in plastic trade to south-east Asian countries has been staggering – contaminated water supplies, crop death, respiratory illness from exposure to burning plastic, and the rise of organized crime abound in areas most exposed to the flood of new imports,” the report found.

“These countries and their people are shouldering the economic, social and environmental costs of that pollution, possibly for generations to come.”

The petrochemical industry (all the major oil companies) see plastics as their hedge to a world filled with electric and alternate fuel vehicles.  The more single use containers the world consumes, the better for their bottom line.  

The only solution to a world choked with plastic is to stop using so much of it.  

The Guardian will be reporting on this issue in depth all week and throughout the year.

Birds Dying Across the Globe - The New Normal

Dead Common Murres in Alaska                          (Mark Thiessen/AP/Shutterstock)

Man made climate change is devastating the natural world and the alarm bells are growing louder every day.  Here are some of the recent casualty reports from Alaska, Antarctica, Australia and the Netherlands.

Death - Coast to Coast

Climate change is alternating the environment for whales on both the east and west coasts of North America.  On the west coast, the bodies of 70 gray whales have washed up between California and Alaska.  This number represent twice the annual average and has been classified as an “unusual mortality event”.

The whales spend their summers feeding in the Arctic before migrating 10,000 miles (16,000 km) to winter off Mexico. Though they eat all along their route, they are typically thinning by the time they return north along the west coast each spring.

They eat many things, but especially amphipods, tiny shrimp-like creatures that live in sediment on the ocean floor in the Arctic.

...Scientists believe the loss of sea ice could have led to a loss of algae that feed the amphipods. Surveys show the amphipod beds moving farther north, said Sue Moore, a biological oceanographer at the University of Washington.

So many whales have ended up on west coast beaches that the federal government is asking for help to dispose of the bodies.

In the east, North America right whales bodies are showing up on Canadian beaches along the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.  Warming sea water has driven these whales from the Bay of Fundy north into the Saint Lawrence waters to find food.

NATHAN KLIMA FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

Before 2017, few right whales had ever been seen anywhere near the area. The whales, which can grow to 60 feet long and weigh more than 250,000 pounds, mainly spent their summers feeding farther south in the Bay of Fundy.

But in recent years, as the surrounding waters of the Gulf of Maine have warmed faster than nearly any other patch of ocean on the planet, the whales’ primary source of food, a fatty, rice-sized copepod known as calanus, collapsed in their traditional feeding grounds.

So they ventured to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where food was plentiful but where there were few regulations to protect them.

Northern Right whales deaths are often attributed to entanglements with fishing gear.  The whales had more extensive protection in the waters off the eastern US coast than in the Canadian waters into which food shortages forced them.  Despite some changes to fishing regulations, these whales face a far more difficult future as the are forced to forage in the Saint Lawrence.

Q & A - Artifishal - Fish Farming's Impact

Fish farming is a symptom of failing ecosystems.  Artifishal tells that story.  Overfishing and poor resource management can't be solved by raising fish in tanks or ocean cages.  That's a solution to a problem man created that creates more problems.

"Fish are really indicators of water quality. I think about that in terms of the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine. If a miner was descending into a mine and the canary dies, it says to the miner, 'don't go any farther.' Right? 

With fish it's like we're descending into that mine, the fish dies, and we just make more of them to put in the cage. It's telling us something. It's saying the environment can't support them. Fix that problem. Don't make more of them. We have to fix the disease, not just manage the symptom, which is a lack of fish. And until we do that, our future for wild fish, and our future for other wild things is in question."

Coal Continues to Set the Earth On Fire

Simply put - the growth in renewable power generation is being off-set by the continued growth in the use of fossil fuels for power generation in emerging economies.  

Spencer Dale, BP’s chief economist, says the world’s surging demand for energy – it rose by 2.9% last year – has cemented the defiant growth of coal. Consumption had climbed for a second consecutive year following three years of decline.

“The peak in global coal consumption, which many thought had occurred in 2013, now looks less certain,” Dale says. “Another couple of years of increases close to last year’s would take global consumption comfortably above 2013 levels.”

While mature economies in Europe and North America (and China and Japan) are making the transition to renewables, population growth and improved living standards are driving energy demands in much of the rest of the world.

The global power generation picture is “depressingly” unchanged from 20 years ago, he says. Three flat lines show an unwavering breakdown of the global electricity mix: last year coal made up 38%, non-fossil fuels reached 36% and the rest of the world’s power was generated by gas and oil. This is the same as in 1998.

Wind and solar renewable power is the world’s fastest-growing energy source: it grew by 14.5% last year, led by a surge of investment in China. But the strides do not go far enough, fast enough. “You have to run very fast just to stand still,” Dale says.

Is it any wonder that 2050 is being broadcast as the likely point where human civilization begins to collapse.

Conservation Groups Call on Disney to Feel the Love and Share

San Diego Zoo

Conservation groups are calling on the Disney company to share some of the profits from its newest version of the Lion King film.  Disney has committed $3 million to the lion conservation, but these conservation groups are suggesting the it would be appropriate for Disney to share just one percent (estimated a $80 million) of the films profits to lion conservation.

“The number of wild lions has plummeted by 42%  since the release of the original Lion King movie in 1994, despite the world’s love affair with this iconic and majestic animal,” says Donalea Patman, director of For the Love of Wildlife. “If Disney truly revered the King they would be committed to their survival in the wild (and) sharing their massive profits.” 

In a letter addressed to Disney CEO, Robert Iger, non-profit organisations For the Love of Wildlife, Blood Lions and Nature Needs More are calling on Disney to re-evaluate and increase its contribution from the Lion King blockbuster to lion conservation.

Hopefully Disney will have a change of heart and share the love with the lions they are so aggressively exploiting.

Credit:  CAT

Utah Needs Lawns

Water from the Colorado River is the life blood of much of the Southwestern United States.  It has turned desert cites like Phoenix, Los Vegas and water poor San Diego into sprawling metropolises.   Its waters make California's arid Imperial County into the nations winter salad bowl - generating the majority of the country's lettuce and many other vegetables for half the year.  However, for decades that water has been borrowed from the less populated states who are legally entitled to it through a series of water agreements.  So,  while a multi-year drought has reduced the river's flow, those loaner states are now taking possession of their water.  It appears that Utah really wants nice green lawns.

Despite the risk that the river resource is overcommitted and it is shrinking, four Upper Basin states — Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico — are pushing forward with dams, reservoir expansions and pipelines like the one at Lake Powell that will allow them to capture what they were promised under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, Nevada and California have been using that water downstream for nearly a century.

Ok, Not Really People - Just Chemicals and Stuff

A new report by the consulting firm ATKearney suggests that the world may be at "peak meat" and facing a rapid conversion from the slaughter house to the chemical lab as the primary source of "meat" like food.  

According to the study, vegans diets will be an option, but vegetable based meat substitutes and lab grown meat replacements will provide 60% of what we used to consider meat (including seafood) for those of us who still desire a "meat" and potatoes diet.  

The report estimates 35% of all meat will be cultured in 2040 and 25% will be vegan replacements. It highlights the far greater efficiency of the alternatives to conventional meat.