Category Archives: Environment

5% chance of us dying off?!?

Holy fuck this is serious, we need to take the threat of climate change seriously!!!

A new study evaluating models of future climate scenarios has led to the creation of the new risk categories “catastrophic” and “unknown” to characterize the range of threats posed by rapid global warming. Researchers propose that unknown risks imply existential threats to the survival of humanity.

Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

1 in 20 chance of catastrophic or existential threat to humanity by 2050, absolutely insane why are we not focusing all our efforts on this…  Oh ya some companies need to make some more money while they can, you can’t make money anymore after all the humans die right.

Climate change is REAL!

Climate change is a potentially civilization ending issue that we’re not dealing with because the oil industry and its cancerous minions want to make a bit more money.  It’s wrong when people say we’re trying to save the planet, Earth and life will go on, whether we’ll be around or not though is another question.

I rather enjoyed this short documentary on the effects the Koch brothers have had on sowing doubt about climate change in the US…  The science is settled, it has been for decades but the oil industry is doing what the tobacco industry did previously to great success.

Stupidity upon stupidity

So by now I’m sure you’ve heard that Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris climate accords and of course he would, he doesn’t give a shit about humanity or the future. I have to say I also LOL’ed when I heard VP Mike Pence say this…

“We’ve demonstrated real leadership. We’ve demonstrated real progress,” Pence said in an interview with Fox News late Thursday. “But for some reason or another, this issue of climate change has emerged as a paramount issue for the left in this country and around the world.”

Source: The Hill

Yeah dumbass we want to survive as a civilization!  Ugh the stupidity from Republican politicians knows no bounds, even if I grant that climate change is a farce which I don’t but for argument’s sake; it still makes sense to go renewable!  Once the infrastructure is in place the energy is essentially free ugh.

Park cleanup!

Last year when we did the spring park cleanup I remember sweating because it was so hot but this year it was pretty darn cold.  With that said and knowing we’d be outdoors for a few hours I bundled Brandon up with his winter clothing and I wore quite a few warmer layers too.  We also wore waterproof clothing in case the rain came but thankfully it held off.

The L’Amoreaux North Park is the one we always clean up and man this time around it was pretty disgusting.  I don’t know how people can simply throw out their trash in the woods or fields of such a beautiful park…

The kids did a great job at cleaning up the mess left over from others and thankfully there was nothing that was dangerous for the kids to pick up.  I’m almost always the odd one out since I’m always taking the picture but in the last one, that’s the only time it’s ever ok to stand take pictures standing in front of garbage. 🙂

WHAT?

We’re doomed…

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said Thursday that he does not believe carbon dioxide is a “primary contributor” to climate change.

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” Scott Pruitt said on CNBC Thursday morning from an oil industry conference in Houston, where he plans to speak.

Source: The Hill

It’s absolutely insane that someone like this leads the EPA, there’s a consensus by scientists that climate change is a real threat to our civilization but because a few more bucks can be made in the short term, who gives a shit about the future.  

Wow go China!

China’s success with renewable energy should be an inspiration to the world and it appears like when green energy is ready for prime time, that we’ll be buying the technology and goods from them.  As I’ve told my conservative friends many times in the past, this is why you subsidize emerging technology yes it may be expensive to implement now but it would have been better to be the leader and sell our technology than to buy someone else’s.  Sigh short term thinking that’s always their problem…

In 2016, Chinese coal consumption fell for the third consecutive year, Beijing reports, while it installed almost twice as many solar panels as it had in 2015, which was also a record-setting year. Beijing projects both trends will continue in 2017.

China’s solar installation target for 2020 is likely to be achieved in 2018, which as Greenpeace’s Energy Desk noted in January, is “a pretty impressive feat given that the target was set only a couple of months ago.”

All of these policies have helped make China a new global leader in climate action, as their own CO2 emissions have plateaued and declined since 2013.

Source: ThinkProgress

The bold emphasis is mine.  While the Western world is spewing out CO2 like there’s no tomorrow and saying China & India have to be on board or else there’s no point in trying to combat climate change, China has taken the lead and its CO2 emissions are actually declining!

President Trump scrapped Obama’s climate change plans and Canada is no better, our internationally “impressive” PM Justin Trudeau is maintaining Harper’s fossil fuel policy, great…

When there’s the will

This is absolutely amazing, if Canada was smart the government would promote more investment in green energy and leave the crap in Alberta in the ground.

On December 1st, the machine produced 215,999.1 kWh over a 24 hour period, a new record for a commercially-available offshore wind turbine. Given the success of this test, the company is hoping to increase the energy production of its customer’s fleets, but with fewer turbines and at a lower cost. The new machine is part a broader push to get more bang for the buck out of offshore turbines in general.

Source: Gizmodo

Good for Denmark, Europe & China will lead the way in renewables and the rest of the world will adopt their technology. Sigh we could be the leaders in this field if there were the political will.

Woo more oil!

So today President Trump wrote two executive orders conditionally approving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, isn’t that great.  He ran as an outside and is governing just like every other Republican.  The claim is that it’ll create thousands of jobs, sure the Keystone XL for one is suppose to create a ton of temporary construction jobs, after all someone’s got to build the actual pipeline but once it’s complete in a few years, CNN Money says there will a total 35 permanent positions, isn’t that great.

But even TransCanada only expects that building the pipeline will take about 7 million hours of labor. That works out to about a year’s worth of work for 3,400 workers. If the work were spread evenly across 13,000 workers, it would only mean three months of work for each.

Source: CNN Money

Granted this article is a few years old but the jobs numbers should be about the same.  I get why people voted for Trump, the current political system is serving the interests of multinational corporations and the rich but anyone who thought Trump was an outsider was conned lol.  He’s the great corruptor, the one that buys off politicians, why the hell would he care about the average person.

I just hope that both projects now are not financially viable due to the low cost of oil but I guess we’ll see what the future brings.

Very scary

So in the US one species of bumblebee is now on the endangered species list.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday on its website that the rusty patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis), once a common sight, is “now balancing precariously on the brink of extinction.” Over the past two decades, the bumblebee’s population has declined 87 percent, according to the announcement.

The news comes just a few months after the first ever bees were declared endangered in the U.S. In September, seven species of Hawaiian bees, including the yellow-faced bee (Hylaeus anthracinus), received protectionunder the Endangered Species Act. (Read “For the First Time, Bees Declared Endangered in the U.S.”)

The threats facing those seven species are similar to the ones that have depleted rusty patched bumblebee populations: loss of habitat, diseases and parasites, pesticides, and climate change. This is a big deal not only for bees but for humans, too—after all, bees pollinate a lot of our food.

Source: National Geographic

This is certainly very scary, while this is only one species bee populations have declined as a whole dramatically and they’re so darn important in our ecosystem.  While we try to achieve this human make believe concept of monetary wealth, our planet is dying.  Future generations will look back at us and curse us for our short sightedness and stupidity.