Energy & the Environment News and Discussions

weatheriscool
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Ivory-billed woodpecker officially declared extinct, along with 22 other species
Source: Washington Post


The “Lord God Bird” is dead. The ivory-billed woodpecker, a ghostly bird whose long-rumored survival in the bottomland swamps of the South has haunted seekers for generations, will be officially declared extinct by U.S. officials after years of futile efforts to save it. It earned is nickname because it was so big and so beautiful those blessed to spot it blurted out the Lord’s name. Even the scientist who wrote the obit cried.

“This is not an easy thing,” said Amy Trahan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who reviewed the evidence and wrote the report concluding the ivory bill “no longer exists.” “Nobody wants to be a part of that,” she added, choking up in a Zoom interview. “Just having to write those words was quite difficult. It took me awhile.” The Fish and Wildlife Service proposal Wednesday to take 23 animals and plants off the endangered species list — because none can be found in the wild — exposes what scientists say is an accelerating rate of extinction worldwide.

A million plants and animals are in danger of disappearing, many within decades. The newly extinct species are the casualties of climate change and habitat destruction, dying out sooner than any new protections can save them. The species pushed over the brink include 10 types of birds and bats found only on Pacific islands, as well as eight types of freshwater mussels that once inhabited riverbeds from Illinois to Georgia. The best available science suggests these creatures are no longer swimming, scampering or soaring on this planet, obliterating the need for any federal protection.

With a range that once spanned from the coastal plains of North Carolina to the bayous of East Texas, the ivory-billed woodpecker’s numbers suffered their most precipitous drop during the 1800s. Marksmen gunned them down for private collectors and hat makers, while loggers felled the old-growth stands where the birds roosted and foraged for grub. “The fact that this bird is so critically endangered has been true since the 1890s, and it’s fundamentally a consequence of the fact that we cut down every last trace of the virgin forest of the southeastern U.S.,” said John W. Fitzpatrick, director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We took all that away.”
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... oodpecker/
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Yuli Ban
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday said he's a proponent of nuclear power and was "surprised by some of the public sentiment against nuclear."

"I'm not saying we should go build a whole bunch of nuclear plants, but I don't think we should shut down ones that are operating safely," Musk said at the Code Conference in Los Angeles.

Musk pointed to Germany's push to decommission its nuclear power plants, which he said forced the country to rely more heavily on coal-fired power plants. Research published last year concluded that Germany's nuclear energy was being replaced primarily by sources such as coal plants and estimated that the increased pollution most likely led to 1,100 deaths a year.

"I don't think that was the right decision," Musk said of Germany's approach.

Musk's comments came in response to a question about rising energy demands that might come with a shift to electric vehicles. Despite his support for nuclear power, Musk said meeting this increased demand would depend on "large sustainable power-generation developments, primarily wind and solar."
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Yuli Ban
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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Yuli Ban
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weatheriscool wrote: Tue Sep 28, 2021 4:47 pm Oil prices rise above $80 a barrel for first time in three years
https://www.ft.com/content/14d4980b-816 ... 2b7f7d2c27
Remember when they went negative?
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
weatheriscool
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Researchers propose expanded evolutionary concept
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-evolutionary-concept.html
by Kiel University
New work from the Kiel Evolution Center suggests that somatic gene variations play a larger role in evolutionary adaptation mechanisms than previously thought.

The variability of genetic information within a species is a central basis for the expression of different individual characteristics of its individual organisms. It determines the phenotype, for example, how the external shape or resistance to disease develops individually. At the same time, the genetic variability within a population allows evolutionary adaptation of a species, for example in changing environments. During sexual reproduction, most genetic variability emerges through new composition of genetic information, a process called recombination. Here, the genes of the female and male individuals are divided and recombined in the resulting offspring. This mechanism ensures an almost infinite number of combination possibilities in the offspring.
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raklian
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weatheriscool wrote: Fri Oct 01, 2021 6:45 pm Researchers propose expanded evolutionary concept
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-evolutionary-concept.html
by Kiel University
We all know incestuous relations is taboo, except maybe for Alabama. ;)
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
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caltrek
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Arguments Favoring Nuclear Power as a Climate “Solution” are Fundamentally Misframed
by Amory B. Lovins
October 6, 2021

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/06 ... misframed/

Introduction:
(Counterpunch) The view that climate protection requires expanding nuclear power has a basic flaw in its prevailing framing: it rarely if ever relates climate-effectiveness to cost or to speed—even though stopping climate change requires scaling the fastest and cheapest solutions. By focusing on carbon but only peripherally mentioning cost and speed, and by not relating these three variables, this approach misframes what climate solutions must do.

The climate argument for using nuclear power assumes that since nuclear power generation directly releases no CO2, it can be an effective climate solution. It can’t, because new (or even existing) nuclear generation costs more per kWh than carbon-free competitors—efficient use and renewable power—and thus displaces less carbon per dollar (or, by separate analysis, per year): less not by a small margin but by about an order of magnitude (factor of roughly ten). As I noted in an unpublished 17 Aug letter to The New York Times:
  • …[The Times’s 14 August] editorial twice extols “wind, solar and nuclear power” as if all three had equal climate benefits. They don’t. New electricity costs 3–8 (says merchant bank Lazard) or 5–13 (says Bloomberg New Energy Finance) times less from unsubsidized wind and solar than from nuclear power. Renewables thus displace 3–13 times more fossil-fueled generation per dollar than nuclear, and far sooner. Efficiency is even cheaper, beating most existing reactors’ operating costs. Competing or comparing all options…saves more carbon.
Thus nuclear power not only isn’t a silver bullet, but, by using it, we shoot ourselves in the foot, thereby shrinking and slowing climate protection compared with choosing the fastest, cheapest tools. It is essential to look at nuclear power’s climate performance compared to its or its competitors’ cost and speed. That comparison is at the core of answering the question about whether to include nuclear power in climate mitigation.
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weatheriscool
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More microplastics are entering the ocean from disposable masks
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-microplas ... masks.html
by Patrick Lejtenyi, Concordia University
The enormous surge of face-mask use since the beginning of the global lockdown in March 2020 has saved countless human lives, a crucial component to limiting the transmission of the novel coronavirus. But with 129 billion masks being consumed globally every month, disposal has become a major issue with implications on human, animal and ecological health.

The problem becomes more acute as, according to a recent study by Concordia researchers, a single mask left exposed under natural conditions can release more than 1.5 million microplastics into the aqueous environment. In a new paper, Ph.D. student Zheng Wang and Chunjiang An, an assistant professor in the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, investigate how disposable masks break down in a shoreline environment and the environmental implications that poses. They examine changes in chemical composition and strength degradation of the three different mask layers caused by UV exposure and sand abrasion.

Shorelines, they write, are not only the main receptors of discarded masks; their unique environment also leads to further breakdown of masks into plastic particles.

The study was published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.
weatheriscool
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World's largest offshore wind turbine starts operating at 14 MW
By Paul Ridden
October 06, 2021
https://newatlas.com/energy/haliade-x-1 ... erational/
More than three years after revealing plans to build a monster offshore wind turbine called the Haliade-X, GE Renewable Energy has announced that the prototype of the latest and most powerful member of the family has started operating at 14 MW in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

The first version in the Haliade-X platform became the first offshore wind turbine to operate at 12 megawatts (MW) in November 2019. The uprated Haliade-X 13 model launched in 2020 and received its type certification in January of this year, and now GE Renewable Energy has become the first in the industry to run a turbine at 14 MW.

Essentially an enhanced version of the other turbines in the platform, each of the Haliade-X 14's blades measures 107 m (351 ft) long, it stands 260 m (853 ft) high and the company reckons that the turbine has the potential to produce up to 74 GWh of energy each year.

The flagship of the Haliade-X platform will make its commercial debut at the Dogger Bank C offshore wind farm some 130 km (80 miles) off the North East coast of England, where 87 turbines will be installed. Each of the three phases of the project is expected to have a generation capacity of 1.2 GW, with all three reported capable of powering some six million homes when the "world's biggest offshore wind farm" is up and running in 2026.
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