Climate Change This Week: Preventing Collapse, Solar Delivers US Jobs, and More!

Climate Change This Week: Preventing Collapse, Solar Delivers US Jobs, and More!
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NEED TO KNOW READERSHIP, so I’m taking a census: if you’re reading this, please say so in the comment section -- and how often: first time, rarely, occasionally, frequently. Thanks!

Today, the Earth got a little hotter, and a little more crowded.

And the chances of Donald Trump’s family and fortune surviving climate change are small, dwindling daily and irreversibly – as are ours.

Saving BUB, Beautiful Unique Biodiversity, as in this mountain bongo antelope in Kenya, is another reason to preserve carbon storing forests.

Forests: the cheapest way to store carbon

Karura forest, Kenya, Source www.jambonairobi.co.ke

OO Kenya: As Farms Dry Up, Women Switch To Clean Energy Businesses That Save Forests such as energy efficient cook stoves, and charcoal briquettes made from waste. Clean energy businesses are giving women steady income and protecting forests, which in turn help stave off drought.

When we harm forests, we harm ourselves.

CIVILIZATIONAL COLLAPSE, OR ACTION – YOU CHOOSE

As Resources Become Scarce, Population Levels Must Shrink Humanely or will do so inhumanely.

OO The Bust Of Cheap Fossil Fuels Will Ultimately

Require Shrinking Both Population and Economies For Civilization To Survive –

“For those who are paying attention” it’s only a matter of time before this happens;

Daily Climate Editor Pete Myers: This future is coming at us much faster than climate change.”

Takeaways:

  • · Our civilization has been able to boom extremely, Both in prosperity and technology,
  • · Via a one-time-only energy subsidy
  • · from tens of millions of years’ worth of bio-energy
  • · transformed into cheap fossil fuels by agonizingly slow geological processes.

Never Again Will We Have Cheap Fossil Fuels – Now We Must Transition Fast to Clean Energy and bring our populations and economies to sustainable levels. Our civilization depends on it.

No future human civilization will ever have the advantage of cheap fossil fuels again. And we have started exhausting our cheap fossil fuels:

  • · Saudi oil giant chief warns of a looming oil shortage
  • · Because the remaining reserves are too expensive to mine,
  • · So investments have fallen dramatically.

The Mayan Civilization Collapsed as conflicts developed from the depletion of resources. Source Wikimedia Commons

History lessons:

  • · Maintaining a civilization is always a delicate balancing act;
  • · Some combo of overpopulation, resource depletion, economic inequality, pollution, and climate change
  • · has undermined every complex society in the 7,000 years of recorded human history.

When Jackals and Lions Crash, Gazelles Boom showing how the crash of one species can temporarily benefit another. Source www.daviddarling.info

Urban centers can flourish temporarily but unsustainably by:

  • · by importing resources, exporting wastes and disorder,
  • · and using social stratification to generate temporary surpluses of wealth.
  • · But these processes all yield diminishing returns: eventually, every boom turns to bust.

Such civilizational cycles partly mirror the adaptive cycles in ecological systems, where one crashing cycle clears the way for a new one to start.

A Green Future With A Sustainable Population is implicit in this vision, in which swirling crowds are absent. Source byanajusta.blogspot.com

MEH: the author concludes by hoping the next civilization does better. Here’s my conclusion:

  • · Rather than hope the next civilization can collaborate internally and externally with the natural world,
  • · we should tackle these problems - population, pollution, resource depletion, and climate change - now
  • · because the next civilization will not have the advantages we have had to do so, or even prosper as much.

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TRUMP TRUMPED BY CLIMATE CHANGE

Under Trump, More US Children Will Die Prematurely From Asthma since his policies will worsen the air pollution that is linked to this lethal lung disease.

OO Tracking Trump’s Treachery: Environmental Deregulations – the Columbia Law School (NY) keeps an ongoing track of Trump’s efforts, abetted by the GOP, to cut environmental protections at its Climate Deregulation Tracker.

OO EPA Wipes Its Climate Change Site As Protesters March on Climate In Washington - both data and informationon the causes and effects of climate change disappeared. Welcome to the Dark Ages!

OO Trump’s Most Substantial Actions in His First 100 Days:

Slashing Environmental Regulations – he’s rolled back 23 regulations in that time.

OO Donald Trump Is Slashing Programs Linking Climate Change To US National Security despite the fact that over the last several decades, top government officials and even military brass have come to view climate change as a national security issue. He’s doing so via:

  • · Defunding agencies involved in protecting the nation from climate-related threats, and
  • · Cancelling Obama’s push to consider climate change in national security planning.

OO Trump's Climate Cuts Could Result In Half-Billion Extra Tons Of CO2 In The Air

A new analysis quantifies the 'Trump Effect' on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, finding emissions begin to flatten or increase by 2020 under his policy plans. InsideClimate News.

OO Trump Review Threatens To Rip Up Obama Protections For Wilderness Areas

OO US Oil Tech Giants Want Trump To Stay In The Paris Climate Agreement which presents both risks and opportunities for their businesses.

OO Trump To Press For Arctic Offshore Oil Opening

OO Trump Administration's Push For Gas Exports Faces Market Glut

OO With Trump Government In Retreat, Companies Step Up On Emissions - nearly half of the nation’s largest corporations have set emissions reductions targets, even as the Trump administration walks away from goals set by President Obama.

Sadly, if Trump acted, we could do even more.

OO China, India Become Global Climate Leaders As West Falters – and Trump fails to lead.

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CLIMATE MYTH BUSTERS!

OO The Reality of Climate Change - below are some of the biggest climate myths currently trending, compared to the reality. A good place for more details is here … where even more myths are busted!

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CLIMATE LEADERSHIP

OO Senators Merkley, Sanders Goal: US On All Renewables By 2050 - Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), along with Senators Edward J. Markey (D-MA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), introduced landmark climate legislation recently that would transition the USA to 100% clean and renewable energy by 2050.

Unfortunately, the bill has little chance in the GOP Congress, many of whom dismiss climate change, of even being considered.

OO UK: Lawmakers Create New Laws To Promote Bicycling to legally bind the government to long-term funding for cycling and walking provision.

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HOT NEWS

OO Atmospheric CO2 Just Exceeded 410 ppm – as scientists predicted it would in 2017.

  • · Carbon dioxide hasn't reached that height in millions of years.
  • · It’s a level that's trapping more heat
  • · and causing climate change to speed up.

OO Global Warming Never Paused a new statistical study says.

Why a Slight Heating Can Cause Far More Hot Weather – the shift might seem slight, but the amount of significanly warmer weather is not. Source www.climatesignals.org

OO Climate Signals: Increased Extreme Heat And Heat Waves Takeaways:

  • · Climate Change strengthens the intensity, duration and frequency of extreme heat events.
  • · Roughly 75% of extreme heat events globally are attributed to climate change.
  • · 85% of recent record-hot days globally are attributed to climate change.
  • · Record high temperatures are outpacing record low temperatures

And…

The More Extreme the Heatwave, the More Likely the Event is Due to Global Warming

And these events are now impacting 10x greater areas than in 1951-1980.

US health is being harmed by increased heat, with:

  • · extreme heat now a leading cause of weather-related mortality;
  • · heat waves increasing in frequency
  • · night time temperatures increasing, cutting needed recovery time from day heat;
  • · new record high outpacing record low temperatures, 2 to 1;
  • · predictions of a 400-600% increase in very hot (95+F) days by 2050.

OO Climate Change Likely Aggravated Tucson's Record March Heat researcher says. MEH: and likely played a role in worsening a recent nearby wildfire.

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MELTDOWN

OO Climate Change Altering The Arctic Faster Than Expected A new report, authored by 90 Arctic experts, finds:

· Skyrocketing temperatures are altering the region,

  • · melting ice on land and sea,
  • · driving more intense wildfires,
  • · altering ocean circulation and dissolving permafrost.

Ash On Ice in Greenland came from continental wildfires far away. Source www.redorbit.com

The report warns that:

  • · even if global warming stays below a 2°C rise, some of these shifts could be permanent,
  • · such as the disappearance of sea ice by the 2030s
  • · and more land ice melt than previously thought,
  • · pushing seas to more extreme heights.

If carbon pollution isn't slowed, parts of the Arctic could warm a whopping 16°F by the 2050s.

MEH: AND the loss of this ice cap, this planetary heat shield, will speed global heating yet further.

Our Ice Caps Help Cool the Earth by reflecting away sunlight that could otherwise be absorbed and transformed into heat. Image, NASA

OO The Arctic As It Is Known Today Is Almost Certainly Gone - On current trends, the Arctic will be ice-free in summer by 2040, worsening current harmful effects:

  • · Melting ice speeds local warming as the resulting darker waters absorb more heat;
  • · Permafrost is melting, releasing yet more climate-changing gases;
  • · Warmer weather is causing polar winds to move cold weather south and import heat north;
  • · As the land heats, spurring wildfires, the settling dark ash on ice speeds its melt,
  • · Including the Greenland ice sheet, which adds to sea level rise.
  • · Ocean currents can also be slowed by the addition of meltwater,
  • · Affecting the movement of heat globally, and thus the weather.

We must adapt by cutting emissions as soon and far as possible, to slow this accelerating train of climate destruction.

A River Runs Red In Antarctica – aptly named Blood Falls, it’s caused by rust in the surrounding rocks – and the melting ice…. Source Wikipedia

OO The Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Draining Huge Quantities Of Water Out To Sea – say new reports. Takeaways:

  • · much like Greenland is doing in the Arctic:
  • · what started with melting edges creating icebergs
  • · has expanded to surface melt ponds and streams
  • · sending meltwater directly into the sea, raising sea levels.

BUT…

· This contribution to sea level rise is currently negligible,

  • · Altho the darker melt ponds can speed surface ice melting,
  • · And ice melting is predicted to double by 2100.

OO Guess Coreectly When The Ice Melts, And Win $300,000! When the ice breaks up on the Tanana River at the city of Nenana, Alaska, that is. It’s happening earlier and earlier due to global warming. This year it happened on May 1st – appropriately enough, May Day, and 42 people won.

Frozen Methane Waiting For Spring to Melt and release it into the atmosphere; previously it was frozen on the lake’s bottom, until warming released it to the top, capped by ice. Credit Chip Phillips at Flickr

OO Giant Ancient Climate-Changing Methane 'Burp' Could Happen Again - New research indicates:

  • · a giant release of climate changing methane occurred
  • · during a warming period 110 million years ago
  • · in the Arctic Ocean,

This indicates it could happen again during our current warming:

  • · Undersea deposits of frozen methane could melt,
  • · But those bubbles would then have to rise through mud –
  • · so it’s unclear if the melted methane could push up into the atmosphere.
  • · No one knows.

OO An Ancient Ice Sheet Collapse Indicates The Future For Us – At the end of the last Ice Age, an ice sheet covering Iceland melted and collapsed. Research indicates that:

It melted far faster than it grew initially:

  • · It took about 10,000 years to reach maximum size,
  • · But about 3,000 years to reduce, then 1,000 more to collapse to a third of its size,
  • · Under warming comparable to our present warming trajectory –
  • · And melt rates comparable to how fast Greenland ice is melting.

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GOOD CLEAN NEWS

OO Today's US Energy Jobs Are In Solar, Not Coal - in 2016, solar employed 370,000+ people, nearly as many as employed by natural gas, and more than coal – but without the same level of government subsidies. Wind employed another 100,000. Trump refurses to focus on these job generators, though.

OO Powerhouse: The Startup Making Solar The Most Accessible Energy In The World

OO Crowdfunding Helping Scale Up Solar Power For Africa's Poor via a community of young European investors, who are helping solar firms thrive on the African continent when local banks are reluctant to offer loans.

Harvard Divestment Movement Starts Yielding Results

OO Harvard 'Pausing' Investments In Some Fossil Fuels and green groups welcome the breakthrough after a five-year campaign.

OO California's Landmark Climate-Change Program Would Also Fight Air Pollution Under Proposal

OO Australia’s Sapphire Wind Farm To Power 49,000 Homes within months.

OO Investors Understand Climate Change Risks And Are Taking Action

OO Corporations Are Getting Into The Business Of Protecting The Environment

OO Free Bicycles Reducing Pollution In China and India, where innovative schemes, such as providing free bicycles for public use.

A Solar Sign of Indian Times: Kochi Airport runs on solar power. Source www.gizmag.com

OO Africa Rejects Europe′S ′Dirty Diesel′: Ghana, Nigeria Enact Stricter Limits On Fuel Quality

OO India's Coal Plants Are Being Shelved At A Rapid Pace even as it ramps up its solar power capacity.

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SOCIAL REPERCUSSIONS

@@ Climate & Extreme Weather News: April 21st-April 30th 2017

OO Understanding Climate Change: A Weekly Video Compiliation Of Climate News – often has more than just a summary of extreme weather: check out this source for developments in solutions, consequences, and insights as well.

OO Wild Storms Bring Floods, Death, Destruction From Texas To Missouri

OO California Drought Boosted Electricity Bills, Smog says a new study of the recent 5 brutal years.

OO The Arctic Is Melting And Guess Who Faces More Flooding — That’s Right, South Florida

which will face higher sea rise than previously thought, says a new assessment.

How can this be? Gravity, literally. All masses have an attraction proportional to their size, which is how gravity works: the attraction exerted by the giant mass of the Earth on far smaller objects (that glass you just “dropped,” a falling body, etc.).

As an ice sheet melts, it loses mass (the ice itself), which decreases its gravitational attraction: the net effect is that surrounding water (including the added meltwater) flows away from it and towards other larger masses, such as land. So, sea levels decrease around the shrinking ice sheet, but increase elsewhere – in this case, Florida.

If An Ice Sheet Loses Weight, It Loses Attraction – gravitational attraction, that is, which results in sea levels decreasing around it, but increasing elsewhere. Credit Simon Werdmuller, courtesy of Maureen Raymo

OO US Western Drought Linked To Climate Change, shows new research. Takeaways:

  • · snowpack, a major source of water, has declined 10-20% since 1980s
  • · the west will likely lose a further 30% of the snowpack by 2050,
  • · if carbon emissions are not dramatically lowered.
  • · That loss could be as much as 60% if carbon emissions remain high.

Hurricane Katrina Caused an Internal US Refugee Migration of nearly 1 million people, illustrates how increasingly extreme weather can cause US refugee crises that affect the entire USA. Source nca2014.globalchange.gov

OO Population Of Inland American Cities Face Vast Refugee Influxes As Coastal Cities Flood if predictions of dramatic sea level rises by 2100 are correct, new report suggests.

OO US Vulnerable To Worst Of Extreme Sea Rise from the beginning of a collapse this century of sections of the Antarctic ice sheet, which would disproportionately inundate coasts circling the U.S.

OO The Effects Of Climate Change Will Force Millions To Migrate - Droughts, floods and severe weather, for instance, have increasingly put more people on the move:

  • · Environmental migration will strain human resource security, as in water supplies.
  • · Most communities are unprepared for extreme weather events, likely to displace more people.
  • · Many displaced people head to nearby cities, adding to coastal city growth, as seas rise.
  • · Environmental migrants include both internal and international refugees from climate calamities.
  • · "Planned relocations" will occur more often, as rising seas flood islands and coasts.

OO Warming Climate Worsens Insurgency, Terrorism And Organised Crime Takeaways:

  • · Climate change is upping social fragility as it worsens conflicts over scarce resources
  • · and is harming the livelihoods globally through rising food insecurity;
  • · both factors make it easier for terrorist groups to recruit and thrive.
  • · Terrorist groups are using scarce local natural resources, such as water, as weapons of war.

Global Warming Is Costing All Nations Via Extreme Weather that it generates.

OO Most Global Investors Recognize Financial Risk Of Climate Change new report finds, even if Trump doesn’t.

OO Research Shows Global Warming Making Oceans More Toxic In many ways:

  • · As oceans heat up and absorb more CO2,
  • · They are acidifying
  • · And losing oxygen.

Too Toxic To Eat? Source www.oishiisushi.ie

Ocean life is:

  • · Migrating to the cooler poles,
  • · While toxic algae is blooming more frequently, broadly and intensely,
  • · Making some commercial shellfish species too toxic to eat.

OO Scientists Keep Upping Projections Of Sea Level Rise By 2100 - although a high end projection of 7 feet in San Francisco, for example, has a very small chance - 0.5 % - of occurring.

OO Climate Change Could Drive Coastal Food Webs To Collapse - Takeaways:

  • · warming could boost algae, at the base of the chain,
  • · but other stresses, like acidificaiton, pollution, and overfishing,
  • · will knock out seafood species higher up on the chain, such as fish and shellfish.

What can humanity do? Besides cutting carbon emissions, we can:

  • · Reduce oceanic pollution;
  • · Create well designed sanctuary zones to protect life from habitat loss;
  • · Reduce global overfishing.

OO Europe's Meat And Dairy Farming Vulnerable As Climate Change Worsens Water Scarcity half a world away caused by climate change could push up prices for meat and dairy products in Europe by disrupting supplies of south american soybeans, which are widely used as feed for livestock, new researchers say.

OO Climate Change Deepening Horn Of Africa's Hunger Crisis says Oxfam.

OO Huge Storms In Northern Africa Have Tripled Since The 1980s Scientists blame climate change.

The Ice In Back Waters The Green in Front in Santiago, Chile – and that source is shrinking. Photo MEHarte

OO Chile: Global Warming Costs Mount As Heatwave Shrinks Glaciers Takeaways:

  • · the glacier that supplies water to Chile’s Andean capital, Santiago,
  • · shrinking by a quarter in just 30 years, newe research shows.

The melt is expected to speed up:

  • · under continued warming, and other effects, such as
  • · Dark ash from recent record wildfires, fell on the glacier,
  • · And will speed melt even more by absorbing more heat.

Santiago needs glacial water for 5 months during the year – imagine what faces the city when that ends.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

@@ Climate Change 101: Why Care? What You Need to Know - Bill Nye tells it all in five minutes amid graphic, dynamic, engaging, compelling imagery. Check it Out!

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GOOD IDEAS

OO How A Professional Climate Change Denier Decided To Fight For Climate Science – Ex climate denier Jerry Taylor now works to transform deniers into activists. Takeaways:

  • · He was challenged to review the accuracy of past climate scientits predictions:
  • · he discovered that they were indeed unfolding accurately.

Two more factors pushed him to change his mind:

  • · He found fellow skeptics knew this, yet kept misleading the public.
  • · Economics favored transitioning to clean energy, and avoiding costly climate change risks for all.

His tips for talking to climate denying Republican and conservative elites:

  • · talk about the science in a dispassionate, reasonable, non-screedy, calm, careful way. This is powerful, because many do not know that much of what they think is either nonsensical or disingenuous.
  • · Make a conservative case for climate action: conservatively confronting the real risks of climate change continuing means we should not take the chance of inaction. We must hedge our bets, as we do in business.

Daily Climate editor Pete Myers: Yes, that's going to be hard. But convincing green growth optimists and 'eco-modernists' that their rose-tinted visions undermine serious efforts to confront imminent problems is also not easy.

Credit Joel Pett at USA Today

OO A Climate Activist Explains How To Spread A Message Of Hope Takeaways:

  • · Personalize the subject and educate others,
  • · But approach the subject lightly;
  • · Show the win-win sides of tackling climate change.

Source divestmentguide.org

OO Bill McKibben's Effect on the US Climate Change Debate:

Shifting the Institutional Environment Through Radical Flank Effects via divestment campaigns, which also increased attention and legitimacy of plausible policies for tackling climate change.

OO Massachusetts Carbon Fee Would Save $2.9 Billion In Health Costs Over Two Decades, study finds, based on the projected decrease in air pollution generated by a carbon fee.

OO Worry - It Does The Body (And Mind) Good done in moderation, of course, says new research, providing motivation to fix problems and improve lifestyles

OO Industrial Agriculture And Food Systems Help Fuel Climate Change,

But Ecological Farming Can Help Fix That

OO Rice Is A Big Polluter. It Doesn’t Have To Be - A new technique uses half the water, less fertilizer, cuts carbon.

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NATURAL REPERCUSSIONS

Caribou in Denali National Park Are Dying because the abundance of forage plants now peaks before the animals arrive at their summer breeding grounds. Source Design Pics Inc, National Geographic Creative

OO How Warming Is Profoundly Changing A Great Northern Wilderness As temperatures soar in the Yukon:

  • · A temperature-sensitive beetle has infested 900,000 acres of forest;
  • · While Mountain lions and deer are also moving in from the south.
  • · Wildlife populations from moose to hares are shifting or declining;

A Melting Glacier Is Drying This Lake as its melt channel blocks its intake. Credit Jim Best

  • · Mountain sheep and caribou disperse,
  • · As woody shrubs take over shrinking tundra and alpine ecossytems.
  • · A rapidly melting glacier has cut reversed a river’s flow,
  • · Threatening the existence of a 50 mile long lake.

This is, in many ways, “a sped-up version of what is happening throughout the world,” says one scientist.

Courtesy USGS Alaska Science Center

OO Rapid Arctic Warming Creating Vast Changes In Weather, Land And Ocean say 2 new reports.

The changes are happening fast, impacting both people and ecosystems, and include changes in:

  • · Weather: cloud cover, precipitation patterns, storms;
  • · Land: avalanches, melting permafrost, land ice, river runoff;
  • · Oceans: icebergs, acidification, ice cover.

OO Climate Change Is Making Algal Blooms Worse – as rising ocean temperatures drive more intense and longer lasting toxic outbreaks.

Racing For Its Survival – the Purple Emporer butterfly has migrated 125+ miles in a single decade, well above the 10+ mile average for land species; marine species migrate 4x faster than land ones, on aveerage. Credit Tim Melling

OO Half Of All Species Are On The Move—And We're Feeling It - As climate change displaces everything from moose to microbes, it’s affecting human foods, businesses, and diseases. Takeaways:

  • · Migration is happening faster to more species than scientists expected;
  • · Not all species migrate in predictable directions or at predictable speeds;
  • · As species disperse, ecological relationships are destroyed, while new hybrids develop;
  • · No one species’ survival is guaranteed by its migration.

OO Drylands Will Suffer If World Warms 2°C – both reducing arable croplands, and preventing many deeper-rooted shrubs and trees from growing at all.

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SPEAKING OUT

Ask Not For Whom The Bear Dies – continued global warming will spur the untimely deaths of many millions of people as it continues to heat the planet.

OO Many Thousands March Against Trump Climate Policies In D.C., Across USA in another 300 locations.

Keep your signs handy, folks – I have a feeling we’ll be marching for a long time to come, sigh.

OO Climate March Draws Thousands Of Protesters Alarmed By Trump’s Agenda in Washington DC, and hundreds of other cities on April 29, 2017.

OO 20 Of The Funniest Signs From The March For Science - enjoy the laughs, from all over the world. Tens of thousands of people in 600+ cities on seven continents across the globe came together at the March for Science. On April 22, 2017.

Credit Dan Beecham at BBC

OO Yes, I Am A Climate Alarmist.: Global Warming Is A Crime Against Humanity - There can be no greater crime against humanity than the destruction of conditions that make human life possible.

OO New York Times Rocked: Angry Readers Cancel Following Climate Denier Hire - Willful ignorance may be protected speech, but it does not deserve a place in the US’s most important newspaper.

Climate scientist Michael E. Mann launched the hashtag #ShowYourCancellation, while other scientists called for a boycott of the newpaper.

OO Coal Worker’s Granddaughter Becomes Local Leader Against Climate Change

Vermont Is Green In Other Ways – via community solar projects, for example. Source www.vermontbiz.com

OO Vermont Conservation Officials Push Lawmakers For Carbon Tax to replace or reduce other taxes residents currently pay, members of a dozen town energy commissions demand.

OO Millions Of Colombians At Risk From Climate Change says its environmental minister, resulting in worsening natural disasters like flooding and landslides, which could kill hundreds and cause serious infrastructure damage.

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FOSSIL FUEL FOLLIES

Trump’s Vision of BLM Lands – And This Is Exactly Where Coal Should Stay despite Trump’s obsession of reviving it as a fuel. screencapture of the BLM website

OO Big, Young US Coal Fired Power Plants Are Closing as cleaner options become more affordable choices.

OO West Virginia’s Biggest Utility: Burning More Coal Is “Not Going To Happen”

OO Canada: Mining Methane Emissions In Alberta Are 60% Higher Than Thought Takeaways:

  • · New data show that fossil fuel industries are vastly underreporting operation methan leaks,
  • · Even as their lobbies push for a weakening of methane emission regulations;
  • · The wasted methane represents $60 million worth of fuel (= 200,000 heated homes)
  • · This waste could be stopped if the government enacts smart regulations.

Source Gulf Monitoring Consortium via SkyTruth

OO How Satellite Data Caught Gulf Oil Companies Hiding Enormous Oil Spills - via an organization called SkyTruth.

OO Australia: Large Coal Mine At Heightened Risk Of Becoming A Stranded Asset report says.

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OO The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, And Coal Won’t Cut It. Fifteen charts about how Trump is building a dangerous “age of plenty on steroids.”

OO UK: Mood Black As Community Rakes Over Coal Mine Plan that would threaten the bore water they rely on.

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FIXING CLIMATE CHANGE

@@ A Simple And Smart Way To Fix Climate Change given by Dan Miller in 2014 at a Ted talk suggests a way to profit as we tackle climate change, by finally charging those who sell and use fossil fuels – and distributing the revenues back to all of us.

The strategy is sure to speed transition to clean renewable energy. What’s not to like? Check it out!

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If we do not live sustainably,

Our children will die inhumanely.

@@ The Cost of Unintended Pregnancy: Too Young

Teen childbearing cost US taxpayers $9+ Billion in 2010

And the costs of raising a child usually ensures decades, if not a life, of poverty for its mother.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Help prevent unintended pregnancies in your community:

publicize where women can access affordable contraception.

They can go here to find locations:

And there are many more actions you can do, right here.

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Check it out here, right now!

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WHY WE SHOULD ACT NOW: RISING RISKS

Daily Climate Change: Global Map of Unusual Temperatures, May 11, 2017

Source cci-reanalyzer.org

How unusual has the weather been? No one event is “caused” by climate change, but global warming, which is predicted to increase unusual, extreme weather, is having a daily effect on weather, worldwide.

Unusually heavy rains have released California from a SURFACE water drought, but significantly depleted California aquifers keep 60+% of the state in a GROUNDWATER drought, which will likely take decades to disappear. It also means this major US agricultural region has a small safety net, when the next dry year strikes.

Much of the US and its surrounding waters are experiencing warmer than normal temperatures, and much of the areas surrounding the North Pole are experiencing much warmer than normal temperatures – not good news for our Arctic thermal shield of ice. Hotter than usual temperatures continue to dominate human habitats.

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There is, of course, much more news on the consequences and solutions to climate change. To get it, check out this annotated resource list I’ve compiled, “Climate Change News Resources,” at Wordpress.com here. For more information on the science of climate change, its consequences and solutions you can view my annotated list of online information resources here.

To help you understand just what science does and does NOT do, check this out!

Every day is Earth Day, folks, as I was reminded by this blossom I photographed one spring. Making the U.S. a global clean energy leader will ensure a heck of a lot more jobs, and a clean, safe future. If you'd like to join the increasing numbers of people who want to TELL Congress that they will vote for clean energy candidates you can do so here. It's our way of letting Congress know there's a strong clean energy voting bloc out there.

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