Tree Hugger Thread

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Scientists uncover startling concentrations of pure DDT (and other shit) along seafloor off L.A. coast

Rachel Carson was correct, she just came along too late. Even if we weren't creating lakes of toxics every day our ability to cope with what's already been created is shaky.

[Vrede too]

The Ocean Cleanup: Videos

Guatemala's Rio Motagua:


Interceptor Trashfence Stops a Plastic Tsunami in the World’s Most Polluting River (Then Fails)



Interceptor 007 Faces the First Rain Event in LA (& stops 35,000 lbs of waste) | The Ocean Cleanup

Bravo!

[Vrede too]

Things are really bad when Boof is our champion.

Brett Kavanaugh broke from his fellow conservative Supreme Court justices and warned their ruling on the EPA could jeopardize water quality and flood control

... The majority ruling determined that the Clean Water Act does not have the authority to regulate wetlands unless they have a "a continuous surface connection" to larger bodies of water. That could exclude wetlands, bogs, and marshes that are adjacent to a body of water if not exactly connected on the surface, and that have been previously considered protected.

Some environmental groups and experts have estimated that the decision could remove protections for nearly half of all wetlands in the US.

Kavanaugh's concurring opinion, signed on by the liberal justices, said that the majority's "new test for assessing when wetlands are covered by the Clean Water Act" runs counter to the law, departs from decades of agency practice, and contradicts precedent set by the Supreme Court itself.

"By narrowing the Act's coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands, the Court's new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States," Kavanaugh wrote....

Crap.

In another concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested he'd be interested in curbing the EPA's authority even further, writing "wetlands are just the beginning of the problems raised by the agencies' assertion of jurisdiction in this case."

No surprise that extremist Clarence goes out of his way to pointlessly declare himself even more of an asshole than the assholes.

[GoCubsGo]

Crap.

In another concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested he'd be interested in curbing the EPA's authority even further, writing "wetlands are just the beginning of the problems raised by the agencies' assertion of jurisdiction in this case."

No surprise that extremist Clarence goes out of his way to pointlessly declare himself even more of an asshole than the assholes.

Is it just me or has he become even more extreme in his dotage.

(Maybe he was always this nutso and the court is just accepting more right wing friendly cases, idk. )

[Vrede too]

Crap.

In another concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested he'd be interested in curbing the EPA's authority even further, writing "wetlands are just the beginning of the problems raised by the agencies' assertion of jurisdiction in this case."

No surprise that extremist Clarence goes out of his way to pointlessly declare himself even more of an asshole than the assholes.

Is it just me or has he become even more extreme in his dotage.

(Maybe he was always this nutso and the court is just accepting more right wing friendly cases, idk. )

Could be that plus the authority that comes with being the elder justice on a court that's finally solidly con. It's being said that this is more the Thomas court than it is the Roberts court.

[GoCubsGo]

Could be that plus the authority that comes with being the elder justice on a court that's finally solidly con. It's being said that this is more the Thomas court than it is the Roberts court.

Yuh huh!

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Literal Tree Hugger story:

Jaw-dropping fine after allegedly cutting down neighbor’s trees: ‘The fine per tree is $1,000’
“They have to build a road, remove the debris, plant big trees, and water them for two years.”

... Twitter user Sam Glickman (@SamAsIAm) recently took to the platform to share a story relayed by the borough forester involved in the case, later identified as John Linson by Northjersey.com.

As Glickman explained, the alleged culprit, also identified by the local outlet as Grant Haber, “cut down 32 big mature trees on his neighbor’s New Jersey property to get a better view of New York City. He hired a guy who hired another guy.”

Unfortunately for Haber — but fortunately for the rest of the U.S. — most states have laws against cutting down another person’s trees since they’re so hard to replace, so valuable, and so important for purifying our air. Sometimes, the laws protecting them can be quite vicious.

“The fine per tree is $1,000, so the guy probably thought he was going to just pay a $32,000 fine,” Glickman said. “But the arborist wrote violations to all three parties, 96 in all, and there’s a provision requiring the replanting of like trees ‘of the same size.’”

In other words, the culprit and both the people hired to do the task may be held legally responsible for replacing the trees they removed — not just planting new saplings, but actually transporting full-grown trees to the victim’s lot and making sure they survive being transplanted.

Since trees are so big and so hard to move without hurting them, the process comes with a hefty price tag. According to Glickman, the victim had been in touch with the only company willing to do the job.

“They have to build a road, remove the debris, plant big trees, and water them for two years,” Glickman said. “He quoted $1.5 million. And additional fines total $400,000.” If true, that would bring the grand total price tag for cutting down 32 mature trees to almost $2 million.

A preliminary hearing in the Kinnelon Municipal Court was held on June 27 over Zoom, Glickman said.

“Zoom was overwhelmed,” he explained, adding that some viewers were “asked to leave so the prosecutor could log in.” ...

x 32. Bleed the tree murderers dry. Too bad jail is not an option.

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But in most places you can still get a new gas water heater or oven if you switch to gas.

I did, but I put the tankless water heater outside. I refuse to have gas inside after having a gas furnace for a few years.

Smart.

New study reveals the home appliance that spews more benzene than secondhand smoke: ‘You’re at an elevated risk [of cancer]’


Will you be paying for this?

The first US nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.

Georgia Power Co. announced Monday that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has completed testing and is now sending power to the grid reliably.

Waynesboro is less than 192 miles from me, upwind some parts of the year . It's less than 430 miles from you.

At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity, Unit 3 can power 500,000 homes and businesses. Utilities in Georgia, Florida and Alabama are receiving the electricity....

A fourth reactor is also nearing completion at the site, where two earlier reactors have been generating electricity for decades. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday said radioactive fuel could be loaded into Unit 4, a step expected to take place before the end of September. Unit 4 is scheduled to enter commercial operation by March.

The third and fourth reactors were originally supposed to cost $14 billion, but are now on track to cost their owners $31 billion. That doesn’t include $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners to walk away from the project. That brings total spending to almost $35 billion.

The third reactor was supposed to start generating power in 2016 when construction began in 2009.

Vogtle is important because government officials and some utilities are again looking to nuclear power to alleviate climate change by generating electricity without burning natural gas, coal and oil.

“This project shows just how new nuclear can and will play a critical role in achieving a clean energy future for the United States,” Southern Co. CEO Chris Womack said in a statement.

Nukes are not "clean" and we can't even calculate the carbon footprint until we solve the waste issue, including monitoring for thousands of years.

... In Georgia, almost every electric customer will pay for Vogtle. Georgia Power currently owns 45.7% of the reactors. Smaller shares are owned by Oglethorpe Power Corp., which provides electricity to member-owned cooperatives, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and the city of Dalton. Oglethorpe and MEAG plan to sell power to cooperatives and municipal utilities across Georgia, as well in Jacksonville, Florida, and parts of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle....

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As work begins on the largest US dam removal project, tribes look to a future of growth

The largest dam removal project in United States history is underway along the California-Oregon border — a process that won't conclude until the end of next year with the help of heavy machinery and explosives.

But in some ways, removing the dams is the easy part. The hard part will come over the next decade as workers, partnering with Native American tribes, plant and monitor nearly 17 billion seeds as they try to restore the Klamath River and the surrounding land to what it looked like before the dams started to go up more than a century ago.

The demolition is part of a national movement to return the natural flow of the nation's rivers and restore habitat for fish and the ecosystems that sustain other wildlife. More than 2,000 dams have been removed in the U.S. as of February, with the bulk of those having come down within the last 25 years, according to the advocacy group American Rivers.

The removal of four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River is the movement's greatest triumph and its greatest challenge. When demolition is completed by the end of next year, more than 400 miles (644 kilometers) of river will have opened for threatened species of fish and other wildlife. By comparison, the 65 dams removed in the U.S. last year combined to reconnect 430 miles (692 kilometers) of river.

The project will empty three reservoirs over about 3.5 square miles (9 square kilometers) near the California-Oregon border, exposing soil to sunlight in some places for the first time in more than a century....

FlowRiversFlow

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Plastic Free with Daryl Hannah

Hooray for Mattel!!!

Spoiler:

It's a hoax. Did you figure that out? "outlets from the Washington Times (since removed) to People" fell for it. I read the headline and article first, so I don't know if I would have swallowed it or not.

Daryl Hannah announced a new 'EcoWarrior' plastic-free Barbie. Turns out, it was an elaborate hoax by climate-change activists. (Exclusive)
Fake press release purportedly from Mattel was meant to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

... The trick came courtesy of longtime political pranksters the Yes Men, comprising Igor Vamos and Jacques Servin (better known as their activist alter egos, Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum), and Hannah herself, who starred in the fake commercial about the line of EcoWarrior Barbies and was scheduled to host a late-day press conference on Tuesday to reveal the hoax. Together, the activists decided to seize this Barbie-obsessed moment to sound the alarm on the climate crisis.

... “Barbie is still literally made out of oil by sweatshop workers....

To say the doll is feminist now when the toy is contaminating the environment that the future of all humanity and all life depends on is kind of a colossal and bizarre joke."

... The fake EcoWarrior Barbies announcement was actually a reprise of a project called the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), which, back in 1993, saw Vamos and a team of activists pull off a major stunt in protest of the newly released Teen Talk Barbie, which said, among other objectionably sexist phrases, "Math is hard." In response, the underground team purchased hundreds of the Barbies, along with the same amount of talking G.I. Joe dolls; they then switched the voice boxes and put all the toys back on shelves, with the military doll saying things like "Let’s go shopping!" and Barbie uttering, "Vengeance is mine!" It prompted a flurry of gobsmacked media coverage.

... Even before Gerwig's movie, nearly 60 million Barbies were sold globally, equivalent to more than 100 sold every minute, "contributing emissions equivalent to burning 381 million gallons of gasoline," noted a recent analysis of toys in the Yale Environment Review....

Indeed, major environmental organizations including Greenpeace have declared recycling to be "a dead-end street," and extensive reporting has called it out as a "myth."

... Instead, stresses the campaign, companies must stop making harmful products in the first place — Vamos believes a "wartime approach," such as when the U.S. shut down car production during World War II in favor of focusing all resources on the war effort, is what's called for.

To that end, a centerpiece of the BLO's prank was that Barbies would now be made out of 100% biodegradable matter — like mushroom mycelium (used more and more in shoes and bags as a vegan alternative to leather), algae and seaweed.

Is that even possible?

Yes, Vamos claims, though "it would take a tremendous effort to get up to scale," and it would be expensive. "But what better time than now, when their stock price went up and they’re in the position to actually do it?"

YT comments:

Absolute genius, thank you Ms. Hannah & Co.

This is bloody brilliant

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Elections have consequences:

Amazon rainforest: Deforestation in Brazil at six-year low

I did some forest campaigning in the Brasilian Amazon 20 years ago. It's mostly been heartbreaking since, but this is a positive sign. We'll see if the change is sustainable.

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Couple’s feud with heavy-handed HOA over lawn leads to change in state law: ‘If they fight back, they can win’

... Despite the benefits of a rewilded yard, the Crouches’ local homeowner association was more concerned with making sure the neighborhood looked uniform. In 2017, they sent a letter demanding that the Crouches restore their lawn and remove the native plants, saying “Your yard is not the place for such a habitat.”

However, the Crouches sought help from environmental organizations and local politicians. Using their case as a basis, Maryland passed the first law in this country protecting native plants from HOA bans. Dr. Tallamy praised the law, saying it’s “a big deal” that homeowners now know they can win similar cases....

GOMarylandGo!

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California's Mojave National Preserve, San Bernardino County:

In a charred moonscape, a band of hopeful workers try to save the Joshua tree

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Conditions on Earth may be moving outside the ‘safe operating space’ for humanity, according to dozens of scientists

Human actions have pushed the world into the danger zone on several key indicators of planetary health, threatening to trigger dramatic changes in conditions on Earth, according to a new analysis from 29 scientists in eight countries.

The scientists analyzed nine interlinked “planetary boundaries,” which they define as thresholds the world needs to stay within to ensure a stable, livable planet. These include climate change, biodiversity, freshwater and land use, and the impact of synthetic chemicals and aerosols.

Human activities have breached safe levels for six of these boundaries and are pushing the world outside a “safe operating space” for humanity, according to the report, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

The nine boundaries, first set out in a 2009 paper, aim to establish a set of defined “limits” on changes humans are making to the planet – from pumping out planet-heating pollution to clearing forests for farming. Beyond these limits, the theory goes, the risk of destabilizing conditions on Earth increases dramatically....


A deforestated area near the limit of the Cordillera Azul National Park, in Peru's Amazon.

We're screwed.

[GoCubsGo]

We're screwed.

Why is it that everyone including wingnuts accepts that man created the ozone layer problem and effectively fixed it with massive international cooperation but man made climate change is bunk?

Probably involves too much sacrificing of their precious way of life?

[billy.pilgrim]

We're screwed.

Why is it that everyone including wingnuts accepts that man created the ozone layer problem and effectively fixed it with massive international cooperation but man made climate change is bunk?

Probably involves too much sacrificing of their precious way of life?

Accepted then (it was the 70s)
Or accepts it now (I bet they don't - they now refuse to accept what ddt did then and what happened after it was removed)

[Vrede too]

We're screwed.

Why is it that everyone including wingnuts accepts that man created the ozone layer problem and effectively fixed it with massive international cooperation but man made climate change is bunk?

Probably involves too much sacrificing of their precious way of life?

Accepted then (it was the 70s)
Or accepts it now (I bet they don't - they now refuse to accept what ddt did then and what happened after it was removed)

Relatively little financial pain in removing CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals, and in fact the same corps profited by replacing them. Otoh, Big Oil and King Coal will be hurt by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, despite their efforts to take over alternative energy, and the right is uber-gullible whenever a little fake news (or a lot in this case) is applied. The massive misinformation campaign began in the 1980s, well before most had ever heard of AGW.

Feed Wall Street, nothing else matters.

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300-Year-Old Tree Made Famous in Kevin Costner Film Cut Down (with video)

A 300-year-old tree was illegally cut down in England. The Sycamore Gap tree was located at Hadrian’s Wall, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Hadrian’s Wall is believed to have been constructed around 1,900 years ago in what is now Northumberland National Park. The tree was featured in the 1991 Kevin Costner film, “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.” A 16-year-old boy has been arrested, police say, on suspicion of criminal damage.

I would have hugged that tree.



Presente!

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Biden makes decision that will impact more than 10 million acres of land: ‘It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of today’s announcements’

In a win for wild lands and wildlife, President Joe Biden recently moved to protect more than 10 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope from oil development. The action permanently bans drilling across large swaths of this region.

In a separate move, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland also canceled drilling leases, which were issued under the Trump administration, inside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

These new policies didn’t come without criticisms from some lawmakers, like Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, who threatened to sue.

On the other end of the spectrum, some environmentalists said the new protections were not enough to erase the administration’s March approval of the controversial ConocoPhillips Willow project, which is predicted to produce 576 million barrels of oil over the next 30 years.

... By and large, environmentalists praised the administration’s recent actions.

“Conservation is a very long game and takes decades,” Chris Wood, president of the conservation group Trout Unlimited, told The Washington Post. “It’s rare to have these big-stroke opportunities. So it’s terrific and heartening to see the administration demonstrate they have a bit of a bold streak when it comes to protecting our lands and waters.”

Jamie Williams, president of the Wilderness Society, told AP News, “It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of today’s announcements for Arctic conservation. Once again, the Arctic Refuge is free of oil leases. Our climate is a bit safer and there is renewed hope for permanently protecting one of the last great wild landscapes in America.”

Again,
Joltin' Joe is making 1st term moves that Obama waited until his 2nd term to do.

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A huge python built its lair in a trailer park and grew 13ft long eating the neighborhood cats

Animal control is hunting down a 13-foot-long python thought to have eaten half of the neighborhood cats since it showed up in an Oklahoma trailer park.

The animal appeared in Oklahoma City's Burntwood Mobile Home Park about five months ago, Oklahoma news channel KFOR reported.

Since then it's been eating opossums, rats, and cats in its lair under a mobile home, the channel reported.

Opossums occur naturally, but I'll bet their historic predators have been eradicated from Oklahoma City. The rats can be a human health hazard, and outdoor cats wreck the ecosystem. GoMontyGo.

The python is believed to have doubled in size on his steady cat diet, according to another Oklahoma City channel, News9.

In five months? I didn't know that snakes can do that.

... "The constricting is what can be the dangerous part," said (Trevor) Bounds per KFOR.

Brilliant insight on constrictors from "an animal-control expert".

"You can't have small children or pets going near this thing that's why this should've been tackled a whole lot sooner," he said.

"small children" aren't great for the ecosystem, either.

He's now rigged the house with trapping equipment and cameras and is confident he'll be able to catch the snake soon ...

Of course I support removing this exotic. Just sayin'.