Environmental News

@tochatihu 759 I'm the forgiving sort, and new enough around here not to matter anyway.

Southwest is still slowly healing from their cowling separation problem on the NG planes. They had that big blowout on flight 1380 last year more or less over my house, with one passenger fatally injured and an emergency landing in Philadelphia.

But back to my newly introduced subtopic... the thought experiment started as "how do we get big oil to promote electric autos, since they generally get what they want"

 

Bumper sticker gold, right there.

 

Most of big oil is also big natural gas.

Well, I can't say if it was common, but it was used in some spark engine, and by Diesel, prototypes.

Now the official term is alluding me, but there is work going on with a refined coal powder. The raw coal is ground up, and much of the nastier elements removed. This powder could work as a fuel in current ship engines.

 

That ties into what I was thinking about earlier, relating to HFO-powered shipping. I reckon there's a better way to use HFO, something hotter, with more scrubbing and better-monitored than a boiler under a container-carrier.

I figure if we can find a cleaner way to use all of that material for energy on land, marine shipping would pretty much have to move up to cleaner fuel.

 

Those massive diesels are quite efficient. The fuel they use is because it is cheap, and it is cheap because no one on land wants to deal with it. My work place upgraded from no. 6 fuel oil a few years ago.

According to this, Oil-fired power plants provide small amounts of U.S. electricity capacity and generation - Today in Energy - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the petroleum plants still around avoid running because of the higher price for the fuel. Natural gas isn't completing with transportation needs.

The sulfur content of shipping fuel is being drastically cut next year.

 

EXTINCT: Climate change’s first mammal victim
Before you even knew they existed, the Bramble Cay melomy — an adorable little rodent from Papua New Guinea — has become the world’s first mammal victim of extinction because of climate change.

These little guys are gone forever, and now we fear that another tiny mammal, the pika, could be next.


Pikas are a small, hamster-like, grass gathering mammal that live at high altitudes where their survival depends on cool temperatures. Like the Bramble Cay melomy, pikas can only survive in an extremely specialized habitat, where even the slightest sustained shift in temperature would mean disaster for the entire species.
Following the loss of the Bramble Cay melomy, the pika could be the mammal most impacted by climate change on Earth.

Found throughout the high mountains of the North American west, the pika is being left with nowhere to go as its cool habitats warm up.

One study in the Lake Tahoe area of the Sierra Nevada showed that the pika is disappearing. If warming trends continue, this particular pika ecosystem would shrink by 97% by 2050. Other mountain habitats would suffer a similar fate.

Burning fossil fuels and financing infrastructure like oil pipelines is impacting people and wildlife alike. We strive to protect wildlife like pikas — and every other living plant, animal, and person — by stopping these pipelines before they start.

Your friends at Rainforest Action Network
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if only the rodents around here would meet the same misfortune

 

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Thirty years ago, on March 24, 1989, an oil tanker called the Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil in pristine Alaska waters.

This was one of America’s most catastrophic environmental disasters of all time and it could easily happen again if we don’t stop the Trump administration from pursuing offshore oil drilling in the Arctic.

President Trump wants to open virtually our entire Arctic and Atlantic coastlines to offshore drilling. It’s only a matter of time until another oil spill occurs that would cause irreparable harm to our shorelines, wildlife and coastal communities.

Cleaning up an oil spill in an environment like the Arctic is close to impossible. 30 years after the Exxon Valdez spill, oil still lurks under the surface of Prince William Sound’s beaches, impacting wildlife and Alaska’s coastal communities.

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bring back double hulls

 

A landmark new study warns us that 40% of the world's insect species are declining and a third are endangered -- having a catastrophic effect on our planet’s ecosystems.

The scientists don’t mince their words. This dramatic decline in insect numbers would be the largest extinction event on Earth for millions of years, as insects are a crucial food source for other wildlife and pollinate our plants.

Half of all the bumblebee species found in Oklahoma in the US in 1949 had disappeared by 2013. And the number of honeybee colonies in the US has also been slashed in half.

The report is clear that the world must change the way it produces food as industrial-scale, intensive agriculture is killing our ecosystems.

And it’s only by fighting the pesticide industry, to protect our bees and other pollinators, that we can reverse this worrying decline.

 

love the bluebirds, i put out clean houses every spring/late winter

 

I'm not much of a birdwatcher but could not fail to notice the dozen robins that took up in my front yard this week. And one lost pigeon with bands on its legs.

I kind of want them to skedaddle. I just introduced a large quantity of live, farm-raised earthworms into my garden and lawn to improve soil conditions and would hope to give them a proper go of it.

 

birds ate all my grass seed last fall, watareyagonnado?

 

Picture the iconic, snowy landscape of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ... withoutpolar bears.

It's an unsettling thought. But as the Trump administration barrels closer to tearing open the Arctic Refuge to invasive oil and gas exploration, it could become reality sooner than we think.

Rapidly melting sea ice from climate change is already forcing more pregnant polar bears to move off the ice to den in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But if their dens are overrun with 90,000-pound "thumper" trucks and oil drilling rigs, these majestic bears will be left with nowhere to nurse and protect their cubs. And we're running out of time to save them.

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Polar bears need us to protect their habitat and save them from extinction. Polar bears are one of our best barometers for understanding our overheating planet.

That's because their Arctic home is warming twice as fast as the planet's average ... melting sea ice, softening the land, and threatening Alaska's fragile ecosystems.

PRIUSchat ... we're up against an administration that flat-out denies the dangers of our warming planet — and moreover, an industry that sees melting sea ice as an opportunity to expand offshore drilling to the Arctic Ocean's Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

If the current administration succeeds in auctioning off Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas companies like ConocoPhillips or ExxonMobil, it will drive even faster global warming. And the polar bears? Tractors and massive thumper trucks will swarm the land, threatening their denning grounds and their cubs, making it even harder for them to survive.

 

not upsetting at all. if you can't control it, ignore it.

 

How much of that is known specifically to be from Exxon Valdez, vs many WWII spills that didn't get public notice at the time?

 

All of it is from the Exxon Valdez spill.