The environment thread

[Balta1701]

Trump shrinks Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by 85% and 50% respectively.

Patagonia.com homepage currently:

[StrangeSox]

Eight more National Monuments getting chopped down in size

 

[Soxbadger]

Not sure where you got that list, but Im surprised that he would touch any California or Oregon ones. That is just setting himself up for a huge fight.

[StrangeSox]

This tweet, which is based on the department of interior report listed today.

 

https://twitter.com/KieranSuckling/status/9...src=twsrc%5Etfw

 

 

[StrangeSox]

California is currently experience some of if not the worst wildfires recorded there.

 

 

Really looking forward to my work trip there next week. One of the places I'm supposed to go is literally the fire line right now based on the latest maps.

Edited December 7, 2017 by StrangeSox

[Reddy]

Not sure where you got that list, but Im surprised that he would touch any California or Oregon ones. That is just setting himself up for a huge fight.

It's accurate. I work at the National Parks Conservation Association.

[StrangeSox]

This could really go here or the financial thread given recent bitcoin chat, but

 

Why the bitcoin craze is using up so much energy

 

The exploding price of the cryptocurrency bitcoin in recent months has triggered doubts not only about the financial sustainability of the rally, but about the environmental sustainability of the currency itself.

 

One alarmist article in Newsweek said that bitcoin computer operations could consume “all of the world’s energy by 2020.” The website Digiconomist claims that bitcoin operations use as much energy as Denmark, or enough to power 3,071,823 U.S. households.

 

Other analysts say the true figure is smaller, albeit hard to measure because it is spread around the world, generated by an unclear mix of machines and co-mingled with other sources of electricity demand. But several experts told The Washington Post that bitcoin probably uses as much as 1 to 4 gigawatts, or billion watts, of electricity, roughly the output of one to three nuclear reactors.

 

That would amount to less than 1 percent of U.S. electricity alone and no more than 0.14 percent of global electricity generation.

 

That won’t devour the world’s entire electricity resources, but it’s a significant drain — and it’s growing fast. Moreover, some of the electricity used, in China in particular, may come from burning coal — a fossil fuel that contributes most heavily to climate change.

 

[Thinking about investing in bitcoin? The currency may be virtual, but the risk is real.]

 

The reason bitcoin uses a lot of energy is rooted in the way the bitcoin network operates. A digital currency, bitcoin is not controlled by any central bank or commercial clearinghouse but by a network of users who expend large amounts of computing power, and thus energy, building a so-called “blockchain” of bitcoin payments transactions.

 

To compile this comprehensive record, the bitcoin network relies on “miners.” Bitcoin miners have to perform a phenomenally large number of computer calculations to track and verify transactions and solve complex puzzles to obtain bitcoin rewards. As bitcoins become more popular and valuable, the puzzles miners face grow more difficult, and therefore the demand for high-powered computer processing grows as well. That means more energy usage.

 

“If the price of bitcoin continues to rise, it will continue to use more energy,” said Mike Reed, director of the Blockchain Program Office for Intel Corp. The reason, he said, is that the price represents “an economic incentive to add more mining equipment to the network … and that incentive is built in.”

 

And that price is soaring driven by everything from a craze in South Korea to the international CME Group electronic exchange, which started trading bitcoin futures Dec. 18.

 

“At the moment, the value of bitcoin is crazily high, a lot of people want to get into the mining game,” explains David Malone, a lecturer at Maynooth University in Ireland who co-authored a paper in 2014 finding that at that time, the bitcoin network was using up about as much electricity as his entire country. “And then … bitcoin responds by making the problems more difficult.”

 

The difficulty of uncovering a new block has increased along an exponential curve of late, even as the number of calculations per second has grown sharply as well since late last year. The bitcoin network is now generating some 14 million trillion “hashes” or possible solutions to a problem, per second.

 

It's too bad that all of this computational effort couldn't be directed at something actually beneficial like folding@home. It's pure waste.

[StrangeSox]

Heartbroken scientists lament the likely loss of ‘most of the world’s coral reefs’

 

For decades, marine scientists have been warning of the demise of coral reefs in a warming world. But now, those warning calls have reached a full-scale alarm, leaving researchers at a loss for exactly how best to save the reefs.

 

A study published Thursday in Science by some of the world’s top coral experts amounts to a last rites for the ecosystems often referred to as “the tropical rainforests of the sea.” Scientists surveyed 100 reefs around the world and found that extreme bleaching events that once occurred every 25 or 30 years now happen about every five or six years.

 

The new study finds that 94 percent of surveyed coral reefs have experienced a severe bleaching event since the 1980s. Only six sites surveyed were unaffected. They are scattered around the world, meaning no ocean basin on Earth has been entirely spared.

 

The implications of these data in a warming world, taken together with other ongoing marine stressors like overfishing and pollution, are damning.

 

“It is clear already that we’re going to lose most of the world’s coral reefs,” says study coauthor Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch program. He adds that by 2050, ocean temperatures will be warm enough to cause annual bleaching of 90 percent of the world’s reefs.

[StrangeSox]

Nearly all members of National Park Service advisory panel resign in frustration

 

Three-quarters of the members of a federally chartered board advising the National Park Service abruptly quit Monday night out of frustration that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had refused to meet with them or convene a single meeting last year.

 

The resignation of nine out of 12 National Park System Advisory Board members leaves the federal government without a functioning body to designate national historic or natural landmarks. It also underscores the extent to which federal advisory bodies have become marginalized under the Trump administration. In May 2017, Zinke suspended all outside committees while his staff reviewed their composition and work.

 

In a letter to the secretary, departing board chairman Tony Knowles, a former Alaska governor, wrote that he and eight other members “have stood by waiting for the chance to meet and continue the partnership . . . as prescribed by law.” All of the signatories had terms set to expire in May.

[StrangeSox]

The planet just had its hottest 4 years in recorded history. Trump is dismantling efforts to fight climate change.

[BigSqwert]

The planet just had its hottest 4 years in recorded history. Trump is dismantling efforts to fight climate change.

 

Well, to be fair to him, it was pretty cold on the east coast for a couple of weeks.

[StrangeSox]

There's been hardly any arctic sea ice this year, reaching a record low in January. Temps have been about +20°C for weeks now.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/s...g-a8215706.html

 

The world’s sea ice shrank to a record January low last month as the annual polar melting period expanded, experts say.

 

The 5.04 million square miles of ice in the Arctic was 525,000 square miles below the 1981-to-2010 ice cover average, making it the lowest January total in satellite records, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

 

The news comes just days after researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder said the rate at which sea levels are rising was increasing every year, driven mostly by accelerated melting in Greenland and Antarctica.

 

The experts said this year’s data suggested the situation in the Antarctic was also worrying. “In the southern hemisphere, after January 11 sea ice began tracking low, leading to a January average extent that was the second-lowest on record. The lowest extent for this time of year was in 2017,” the NSIDC report said.

 

At the end of last year the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agency reported that the Arctic had “reached a new normal” of air temperatures warming at double the rate of global air temperature rises, with the region showing “no signs of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades”.

 

It said there were “pronounced decade-long declines in cover and extent of sea ice and winter snow cover”, and that ”Arctic paleo-reconstructions which extend back millions of years indicate the magnitude and pace of 21st-century sea ice decline and surface ocean warming is unprecedented in at least the last 1,500 years and likely much longer”.

 

Scientists say melting sea ice matters because it feeds back into a vicious circle of climate change and rising temperatures. It also damages ecosystems and wildlife from walruses to polar bears, and threatens to drive mass migration away from low-lying countries.

 

Ms Onarheim said: “If we want to keep the ice cover, we have to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions. The faster we emit the CO2, the faster we will lose the sea ice.”

 

gonna be cool when the jet stream permanently collapses

[StrangeSox]

Energy and Environment

Pruitt to unveil controversial ‘transparency’ rule limiting what research EPA can use

Quote

 

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is expected to propose a rule Tuesday that would establish new standards for what science could be used in writing agency regulations, according to individuals briefed on the plan. The sweeping change, long sought by conservatives, could have significant implications for scores of issues.

The rule, which Pruitt has described in interviews with select media over the past month, would only allow EPA to consider studies for which the underlying data are made available publicly. Advocates describe this approach as an advance for transparency, but critics say it would effectively block the agency from relying on long-standing, landmark studies linking air pollution and pesticide exposure to harmful health effects.

The move reflects a broader effort already underway to change how the agency conducts and uses science to guide its work. Pruitt has already changed the standards for who can serve on EPA’s advisory committees, barring any scientists from serving if they received EPA grants for their research while still allowing those funded by industry.

In an interview Sunday with radio host John Catsimatidis on 970 AM in New York, Pruitt described the change as a way to let the public judge “the data, the methodology, the analytics” behind any scientific analysis presented to the EPA as it drafts regulations.

“That’s transparency,” he told Catsimatidis. “It gives people the opportunity in real time to peer review. It goes to the heart of what we should be about as an agency.”

The individuals briefed on the rule, which will be subject to a 30-day comment period, spoke on the condition of anonymity in advance of the announcement.

Many scientists argue that applying a standard to public health and environmental studies that is not currently required by peer-reviewed journals would limit the information the EPA could take into account when crafting federal limits on everything from power-plant emissions to which chemicals can be used in agriculture and in homes.

Some researchers collect personal data from subjects but pledge to keep it confidential — as was the case in a major 1993 study by Harvard University that established the link between fine-particle air pollution and premature deaths. That practice would not be allowed under the new rule.

In an interview Tuesday, former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said that requiring the kind of disclosure Pruitt envisions would have disqualified the federal government from tapping groundbreaking research, such as studies linking exposure to lead gasoline to neurological damage. Scientists will have trouble recruiting study participants if the rule is enacted, she predicted, even if they pledge to redact private information before handing it over to the government.

“The best studies follow individuals over time, so that you can control all the factors except for the ones you’re measuring,” said McCarthy, who now directs the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard’s public health school. “But it means following people’s personal history, their medical history. And nobody would want somebody to expose all of their private information.”

 

Quote

 

Gretchen Goldman, an expert on air pollution and research director for the organization’s Center for Science and Democracy, said the proposed rule could put some scientists in a quandary: Keeping personal health data or propriety information private would mean having their work ignored by the EPA.

“We have this incredible science-based process that works, and it has worked, by and large, even in the face of tremendous political pressures to not go with a science-based decision,” Goldman said.

Geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who is president of the National Academy of Sciences, said Tuesday that she is concerned the rule would prevent the EPA from relying on the best available scientific evidence.

“This decision seems hasty,” she wrote in an email. “I would be fearful that the very foundations of clean air and clean water could be undermined.”

While the administration presses ahead, legal experts warn that the rule may be vulnerable to a court challenge. In unanimous decisions in 2002 and 2010, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Appeals said the EPA is not legally obligated to obtain and publicize the data underlying the research it considers in crafting regulations.

In the 2002 case, brought by the American Trucking Associations, Inc., two judges appointed by Ronald Reagan and one named by Bill Clinton wrote that they agreed with the agency that such a requirement “would be impractical and unnecessary.” The government’s defense had noted that “EPA’s reliance on published scientific studies without obtaining and reviewing the underlying data is not only reasonable, it is the only workable approach.”

 

 

[StrangeSox]

Quote

Scott Pruitt's EPA and the White House sought to block publication of a federal health study on a nationwide water-contamination crisis, after one Trump administration aide warned it would cause a "public relations nightmare," newly disclosed emails reveal.

The intervention early this year -- not previously disclosed -- came as HHS' Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry was preparing to publish its assessment of a class of toxic chemicals that has contaminated water supplies near military bases, chemical plants and other sites from New York to Michigan to West Virginia.

The study would show that the chemicals endanger human health at a far lower level than EPA has previously called safe, according to the emails.

[...]

More than three months later, the draft study remains unpublished, and the HHS unit says it has no scheduled date to release it for public comment. 

[...]

Pruitt's chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, defended EPA's actions, telling POLITICO the agency was helping "ensure that the federal government is responding in a uniform way to our local, state, and Congressional constituents and partners."

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/14/emails-white-house-interfered-with-science-study-536950

[caulfield12]

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/05/15/are-electric-cars-worse-for-the-environment-000660

Are electric vehicles actually WORSE for the environment (and for the poor/lower middle class)?

[southsider2k5]

The US Government has a long and proud history of covering up the militaries bigger environmental disasters.  Between Agent Orange, Area 51, and Gulf War syndrome, not to mention the infectious disease testing done on troops in secret, this is all par for the course.

[iamshack]

6 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/05/15/are-electric-cars-worse-for-the-environment-000660

Are electric vehicles actually WORSE for the environment (and for the poor/lower middle class)?

I can buy the subsidies part...and yes, if you are buying an EV in Wyoming or Idaho or WV and charging off the grid, then yes, your EV is probably indirectly dirtier than many recent vintage gas combustion vehicles. But as much of the country becomes more deeply penetrated by renewables, it is beneficial for the EV industry to mature now, so that when EVs really begin representing a sizable portion of overall vehicles, they will be utilizing much cleaner electricity. 

 

[caulfield12]

29 minutes ago, iamshack said:

I can buy the subsidies part...and yes, if you are buying an EV in Wyoming or Idaho or WV and charging off the grid, then yes, your EV is probably indirectly dirtier than many recent vintage gas combustion vehicles. But as much of the country becomes more deeply penetrated by renewables, it is beneficial for the EV industry to mature now, so that when EVs really begin representing a sizable portion of overall vehicles, they will be utilizing much cleaner electricity. 

 

Of course, this completely flies in the face of the "Trump (No) Plan" for preserving the environment and EV industry.

It doesn't help that Elon Musk isn't doing himself any favors with his relationship with both Trump AND the press...along with some of the recent high-profile accidents involving Tesla and/or autonomous drivers.

Individual states like CA can obviously do their part, as well, but they still need to move beyond 9 states to get closer to "critical threshold" level.

Edited May 16, 2018 by caulfield12

[Balta1701]

15 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/05/15/are-electric-cars-worse-for-the-environment-000660

Are electric vehicles actually WORSE for the environment (and for the poor/lower middle class)?

If a study doesn't take into account the time of day that the car is charging compared to the time when the electric grid is at peak demand then you have wasted my time. If you are running a plant overnight to charge extra cars you are dramatically increasing the efficiency of the entire system because even for gas systems there is a benefit to keeping them running (Coal, nuclear, and wind have much larger benefits if you charge overnight).

This is a standard lobbyist type paper. Take into account the factors that are most beneficial to you, neglect a few other ones casually, and then hope that people aren't educated enough to notice.

[Jerksticks]

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth

 

This toxic lake is one of the most disgusting things ever.   Glad I don’t live in china 

 

I love the author’s line:

”The thought that it is man-made depressed and terrified me, as did the realisation that this was the byproduct not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket, but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so smugly excited about in the West. Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos and shoot video on my cerium polished iPhone.”

[iamshack]

9 hours ago, Balta1701 said:

If a study doesn't take into account the time of day that the car is charging compared to the time when the electric grid is at peak demand then you have wasted my time. If you are running a plant overnight to charge extra cars you are dramatically increasing the efficiency of the entire system because even for gas systems there is a benefit to keeping them running (Coal, nuclear, and wind have much larger benefits if you charge overnight).

This is a standard lobbyist type paper. Take into account the factors that are most beneficial to you, neglect a few other ones casually, and then hope that people aren't educated enough to notice.

Interesting point, Balta, and you are correct. The reason many utilities offer special time of use rates or EV rates overnight is to encourage load consumption during off-peak hours which does aid in keeping plants online and reduces costs. California, due to their abundance of solar, is actually going to begin shifting their EV rates to hours in the late morning and early afternoon, to hopefully raise consumption during those hours so they aren’t paying other states to take their solar. 

There are a lot of different factors here at play, and it is very complex, but I find it hard to believe that on the whole, the growing prevalence of EVs won’t be much cleaner on balance, including cleaning up a lot of the emissions in cities. 

[iamshack]

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nv-energy-contracts-more-than-1gw-of-new-solar-100mw-of-battery-storage#gs.QR7DmX8

I recently joined this part of our organization, and will be working on projects like this for the foreseeable future. Incredibly exciting area to be involved in. 

[StrangeSox]

Oh hey NV energy, I was just working on a quote for you guys for a substation that keeps getting shot at from a makeshift firing range on BLM land

[iamshack]

3 hours ago, StrangeSox said:

Oh hey NV energy, I was just working on a quote for you guys for a substation that keeps getting shot at from a makeshift firing range on BLM land

Really? That’s interesting! Gotta love substations doubling as target shooting.

 

[StrangeSox]