Daily Quick Read - July 18, 2019

Trump Puts Turtles At Risk

                                                                                    NOAA

The Trump administration has issued permits for long line fishing off the west coast.  Long line fishing poses a grave danger to seals, bird and sea turtles.  Of greatest immediate concern is the impact of this technique on West Pacific leatherback sea turtles, which face extinction.  A lawsuit to revoke the permits has been filed.

Pacific leatherback sea turtles are one of eight turtle species the Fisheries Service has identified as most at risk of extinction. The number of West Pacific leatherback sea turtles declined about 6% a year from the 1980s through 2011.

An estimated 562 nesting female adults survive now. In 2040, that number is projected to drop to 260 adult females in 2040, so few that leatherbacks likely could not make a comeback.

Despite this, in April the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a two-year permit to allow two boats to fish for swordfish 50 to 200 miles off the coast of California and Oregon using fishing lines with hundreds of baited hooks. The lines, up to 62 miles long, also catch turtles, seals and birds.

Mass Extinctions and Stored Carbon

Stored CO2 in the ocean fluctuates dramatically over time -  540 million years to put a number on it.  And, when that stored CO2 reaches a certain level, bad things happen.

Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics and co-director of the Lorenz Center in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, has found that when the rate at which carbon dioxide enters the oceans pushes past a certain threshold — whether as the result of a sudden burst or a slow, steady influx — the Earth may respond with a runaway cascade of chemical feedbacks, leading to extreme ocean acidification that dramatically amplifies the effects of the original trigger.

Rothman looked through these geologic records and observed that over the last 540 million years, the ocean’s store of carbon changed abruptly, then recovered, dozens of times in a fashion similar to the abrupt nature of a neuron spike. This “excitation” of the carbon cycle occurred most dramatically near the time of four of the five great mass extinctions in Earth’s history.

Trash Flows South

As states in the Northeast increase the cost of waste disposal, communities in the South are taking in the trash often at great detriment to public health. 

…the mounting trash leaves many of these communities now threatened by toxin exposure and groundwater contamination highlighted amid the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Estill County in Edelen’s home state of Kentucky is an example. It bears the slogan “Where the Bluegrass Kisses the Mountains.” But in 2015, its beauty was marred after out-of-state trucks illegally dumped 2,000 tons of radioactive fracking waste in a landfill across the street from the local middle school in Irvine. Three years later, Kentucky has yet to excavate that toxic playground. It fined eight companies a total of $3 million, an amount locals complain was simply “the cost of doing business” for culprits like Fairmont Brine...

Alabama, which doesn’t even keep a count of statewide imports, has emerged as a particularly odious example. In the western suburbs of Birmingham, locals were furious after trains carrying 10 million tons of raw Northern sewage sat festering for months last summer, breeding swarms of mosquitoes. “I never dreamed somebody could flush a load in New York City and have it run into my backyard,” says Charles Nix, the mayor of the city of West Jefferson in Alabama.

Blowhards Gotta Blow

Trump worries that when the wind stops blowing in Scotland, the Scots won’t be able to watch Fox News on TV.  Scotland says, the wind never stops blowing, just like Trump.

In the first half of 2019, Scottish wind generated enough electricity to power the equivalent of 4.47 million homes, almost double the number of homes there.

Some people don't love the sight of humanity fighting dirty power by means of clean energy – like, say, a certain U.S. president who once filed a lawsuit in Scotland vowing to “spend whatever monies are necessary to see to it that these huge and unsightly industrial wind turbines are never constructed.”

Scotland did not cave in and guess what: In the first six months of 2019, the country's "horrible idea of building ugly wind turbines" (same president) has paid off handsomely. Between January and June, wind turbines in Scotland generated 9,831,320 megawatt hours – enough electricity to power the equivalent of 4.47 million homes for six months ... almost double the number of homes in Scotland, reports CNBC.