Wassup World? This is the Weekly Environmental Wrap Up from Wassup World News. Today is Wednesday September 26th, and as usual this Wednesday and every Wednesday moving forward we'll be rebreaking news regarding water, air, soil, urban spaces, power and people.
a Duke Energy dam containing a 1,100-acre reservoir in North Carolina has been breached, and may be causing coal ash to flow into the nearby Cape Fear River. North Carolina is already dealing with massive flooding, the danger and impact of which compounded by the overflow of 32 swine manure lagoons.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/09/21/duke-energy-says-dam-breached-at-north-carolina-plant-and-coal-ash-may-be-flowing-into-cape-fear-river.html https://deq.nc.gov/news/deq-dashboard#animal-operations---swine-lagoon-facilities
Research concerning a little-studied region called the Wilkes Subglacial Basin, which contains more than 10 feet of potential sea-level rise found that Temperatures not much warmer than the planet is experiencing now were sufficient to melt a major part of the East Antarctic ice sheet during one era about 125,000 years ago.. One of the authors said "It doesn’t need to be a very big warming, as long as it stays 2 degrees warmer for a sufficient time,"
Reef Ecologic a company out of Australia, is conducting a trial to see if a A low-voltage direct current is run through the steel the calls biorocks, can regrow the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) at an accelerated rate “,” he technique has been proven to be successful in the past but has never been studied at a large scale.
Researchers working on Lord Howe island, off the coast of Australia, where the flesh footed shearwaters nest, claim that on average every chick studied had between 30 and 40 pieces of jagged plastic in their stomachs before they were fully fledged. In one case scientists found a young bird with 260 separate items of plastic stuck in its gut. The birds have difficulty flying and many drown just off the beach due to the plastic's weight. Another study out this week, found that mosquito larvae gobble up microplastics, which they carry with them for the rest of their life, which is likely to have a profound affect on the entire food chain.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/23/seabirds-found-250-pieces-plastic-lodged-stomachs/ https://www.newsweek.com/plastic-eating-mosquitoes-disperse-animals-1129467
researchers from Arizona State University found that increased, incremental exposure to fine particle pollution over the course of a decade increases the chances of a dementia diagnoses by 1.3 percentage points. The pollutants they studied are known as PM 2.5 for their small size—invisible fragments thrown off by fields, factories, and fires that easily make their way into our lungs and correlate more closely with health effects than any other common pollutant.
U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen ruled this week that grizzlies weren't sufficiently recovered to sustain hunting, enforcing a ban on killing the large predators in the Yellowstone region and placing the animals back on the threatened species list.
The House of Representatives passed legislation Tuesday that would allow hunting or eviction of native tule elk from large portions of Point Reyes National Seashore in California’s Marin County, the only national park where these elk exist. The senate still needs to pass the bill for it to take affect.
the Trump administration on Monday rolled back a safety rule that would have required trains carrying oil and other flammable materials to install special electronic brakes. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration announced the rule reversal online, citing an updated federal analysis that found the high costs of implementation outweighed the benefits. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/oil-train-safety-rule
Heads of Nestle, PeopsiCo, Cocacola and Other beverage giants have been summoned by Pakistan's Chief Judge to determine if the companies are actually paying for the water they are extracting. The summons coms agter the Katas Raj Temple in Punjab's holy ponds dried up, likely due to sub-soil wells drawing operated by new cement factories in the area. Some of the cement facilities have already been shut down, but the aftermath has the Chief Justice looking for all water drawn by corporations in the country to be properly paid for.
A new study out of the University of Michigan has shown that the Meat-free Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, has 99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a quarter pound of U.S. beef. The study’s release coincides with the UN Environment organization awarding Beyond Meat the 2018 Champion of the Earth honor.
Chinese coal-fired power plants, thought to have been cancelled because of government edicts, are still being built. Satellite photos taken in 2018 of locations in China reveal cooling towers and new buildings that were not present a year earlier at plants that were meant to stop operations or be postponed by orders from Beijing. The total capacity of the planned coal power stations is about 259GW, which is greater than America's total coal power output.
a new paper from Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), a clean-energy advocacy group composed of retired military and business leaders found that The US military spends a minimum of $81 billion a year protecting oil supplies, incuding everything from guarding shipping lanes to maintaining troop commitments in key oil-producing nations, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/9/21/17885832/oil-subsidies-military-protection-supplies-safe
Today, four anti-fracking campaigners were sentenced for blocking shale gas drilling operations in northwest England. Three of the protestors recieved jail time greater than a year. The four men spent up to four days in July 2017 camping out on lorries that were carrying drilling equipment to a fracking site in Lancashire. They will be the first environmental protesters to be imprisoned in the UK in 86 years.
French President Emmanuel Macron told the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday that trade pacts shouldn’t be signed with countries that don’t respect the 2015 Paris climate treaty, a clear reference to the U.S. which pulled out of the carbon treaty last year.
That's it for this Weekly Environmental Wrap Up. Things may have changed by the time you're listening to this. don't forget to subrscribe and share this podcast with all your friends and family and neighbors and coworkers and random people on the train. Tune in next week to hear more about the flora, fauna, and planet you care oh so much about. I'm John Brindley. Thanks for caring. Peace out World.