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The Environment Thread

And sure voting here will actually change something.an interesting point
The Green candidate in my seat:
From the green own website
https://greens.org.au/qld/person/benedict-coyne
not a SINGLE reference to the environment, or even surprisingly on the infamous global warming that is so obviously caused by australia CO2 and cow farts
Can anyone imagine that?not even a reference
Outstanding, not even watermelon anymore, just tomato red
 
Where I am in the Adelaide hills the hobby farms usually take up untouched marginal land,unproductive for farmers.With new roads and constant traffic,dogs,goats etc.Before this these areas supported more native flora and fuana.In some countries the delineation between town and country are very easy to observe...not so where we are.Once animals and birds lose their home range etc they are gone forever.They cannot encroach elsewhere as a rule.Same as clearing native forests.
You may have a point in some places, here i see dairy cleared land turning into much more diversified ecosystem, but agree on dogs threat, welost the last wallabies,and soon last koalas to the vegans home schooled antivacs 2 or 3 barking dogs brigades moving in after the usual council bribed illegal but exception provided subdivisions
 
Where I am in the Adelaide hills the hobby farms usually take up untouched marginal land,unproductive for farmers.With new roads and constant traffic,dogs,goats etc.Before this these areas supported more native flora and fuana.In some countries the delineation between town and country are very easy to observe...not so where we are.Once animals and birds lose their home range etc they are gone forever.They cannot encroach elsewhere as a rule.Same as clearing native forests.

I live on 5 acres and over the years normal housing has come to us, your observation are spot on.

We have planted trees and native plants to encourage native animals and birds but foxes, cats and dogs have smashed the wild life, bandicoots sadly wiped out a couple of years ago..
 
Radioactive 'Nuclear Coffin' May Be Leaking Into The Pacific

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has sounded the alarm over a giant concrete dome built 40 years ago in the Marshall Islands to contain radioactive waste from Cold War-era atomic tests.

runit%20dome.jpg


According to Guterres, the dome - which houses approximately 73,000 cubic meters of debris on Runit island, part of the Enewetak Atoll - may be leaking radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean, as the porous ground underneath the 18" thick dome was never lined as originally planned. It was constructed in the crater formed by the 18-kt Cactus test. More...
 
The effects of CC on the environment and ecosystems. Interesting read.

Why Hundreds of Puffins Washed Up Dead on an Alaskan Beach
This latest mass-mortality event is another sign of the Arctic’s rapidly changing climate.

Lauren Divine first heard that the birds were dying on October 13, 2016, when one of her colleagues stumbled across the corpse of a tufted puffin while walking along a beach on Alaska’s St. Paul Island. The next day: another carcass. Soon, several of the island’s 450 residents started calling in with details of more stranded puffins. Some were already dead. Others were well on their way—emaciated, sick, and unable to fly.
 
This looks like an exceptionally worthwhile business/environment operation.

Recycling plant gains environmental approval to give end-of-road tyres new life as oil, steel and carbon

A regional town in central-west New South Wales is set to become a major player in oil production and the renewable fuels market.
Key points:

  • 20 million tyres are disposed of in Australia every year and end up in landfill
  • They pose an environmental threat due to pollution and extreme fire danger
  • A new recycling plant in regional NSW will turn old tyres into oil, steel and carbon

The NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) has issued a licence allowing the first green tyre-recycling plant to operate in the town of Warren, north-west of Dubbo.

The project aims to solve the current problem of mass waste caused by tyres and offers a new way to create oil, steel and carbon.

The proponent, Green Distillation Technologies, has already partially constructed the plant in Warren, but the project was stalled for years by negotiations with the EPA.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-02/recycling-australias-tyre-piles/11169386

 
What is the problem with plastics ? How serious is billions of tons of plastics in our water, soil, food and now inside us? (rhetorical..)

This is another view. In my view certainly cuts to the chase.
Recycling Is Like a Band-Aid on Gangrene’
Jun 13, 2019 | 755 videos
Video by Taylor Hess and Noah Hutton

The documentary filmmaker Noah Hutton was at a scientific symposium when he first encountered Max Liboiron. “I kept hearing some of the sharpest, smartest critiques of [scientific] status-quo assumptions I’ve ever heard,” Hutton told me. “She engaged with other’s viewpoints totally empathetically, but would then forcefully challenge their assumptions in a way that wasn’t personal. It was completely intoxicating and invigorating, like a voice from the future.”

What was most compelling to Hutton, however, was that Liboiron wasn’t just pondering changes to the scientific method on a theoretical level—she was living them. Her Newfoundland lab, the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), interrogates what Liboiron believes to be systemic problems in science. CLEAR conducts its research on microplastics from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. This epistemic approach informs the lab’s scientific protocols, ethics, and research designs. Taylor Hess and Hutton’s short documentary Guts is an inside look at the lab, the research it conducts on plastic pollution and sustainability, and the way Liboiron empowers citizens to engage in science at the community level.

“Every time you decide what question to ask or not ask others, which counting style you use, which statistics you use, how you frame things, where you publish them, who you work with, where you get funding from … all of that is political,” Liboiron says in the film. “Reproducing the status quo is deeply political because the status quo is crappy.”

Hutton said that while science—and environmental science in particular—is often viewed as a monolithic force for good, sometimes the scientific status quo “lends itself to universalizing, extractive, and colonial tendencies, even if it starts with good intentions.”

Liboiron’s critiques aren’t limited to methodology. In the documentary, she asks a group of well-intentioned recyclers to look closely at their individual consumer behaviors. The data on waste management, she says, suggest that recycling doesn’t do much to mitigate the problem of plastic pollution. “The only mode of attack is to deal with a heavy decrease in the production of plastics, as opposed to dealing with them after they’ve already been created,” she tells the group. “Your consumer behaviors do not matter. Not on the scale of the problem ... It’s the cessation of production that will make the big-scale changes.” She also advocates for removing subsidies from oil.

“When most people think of plastic pollution, they think of plastic bottles floating around in the ocean,” Hess told me. “They don’t think of the hidden world of toxin-bearing microplastics that also float around in the ocean. These microplastics are ingested by ocean-dwelling animals and then passed up the food chain and ‘biomagnified’ to the humans who eat them.” The plastics then become a part of our biome and may pose various health risks, the extent of which researchers are only beginning to understand.

Liboiron has made conducting research on plastic pollution accessible to members of her community—a growing trend often referred to as “citizen science.” “Max and the CLEAR lab have invented these brilliant, cheeky devices that allow anyone, anywhere, to conduct microplastics testing on their waterways for readily available or cheap materials,” Hess said. In the film, Liboiron explains how her inventions—“equitable tools,” as she calls them—make it possible for rural Newfoundlanders to monitor the level of microplastic contamination in local water sources.
 
This very short video from Harrison Ford looks at the big picture of dealing with CC and highlights how a critical element of the solution is protecting and enhancing our natural ecosystems.

 
The Amazon burns while the climate denying Brazilian President tries to blame environment groups for the wall to wall fires.
In a very short period of time scientists will be able to show a significant increase in global CO2 as a direct result of these fires and the loss of millions of acres of rainforest. And after that ?

Brazil says it lacks resources to fight Amazon wildfires as dispute rages over who is to blame
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08...acks-resources-to-fight-amazon-fires/11440998


Brazilian minister booed at climate event as outcry grows over Amazon fires
Political storm over rainforest devastation as Ricardo Salles attends summit
https://www.theguardian.com/environ...imate-event-as-outcry-grows-over-amazon-fires


 
The new guy based his campaign on Trump and cut the EPA and allowed more logging etc. Probably got a beachfront property.
 
Is that technically possible ?
yes, petrol is a heaven in term of diversity of the aromatics carbon chains available..not sure of the terms in English and my French last chemistry studies are too many decades ago but in short:
a lot of carbon chain available in petrol: we should not burn it;
Coal can be transformed back into a liquid equivalent, less complex but definitively near enough to be a plastic manufacturing stock feed.From memory, South Africa did it to bypass embargo a few decades ago
as for the quantity of coal available, we have hundreds of years of consumption already known.
Back from the time when C02 concentration was hundreds of time higher in the atmosphere and the then garden of Eden created layers after layers of carbon deposits..
but shhhhh do not spoil a great CO2 is creating climate change and we are doom story
I try to find a few links
 
Is the Amazon "the lungs of the Earth" ? And if it isn't why not just turn it into grasslands and make money?

A long read but well worth it IMV

The Amazon Is Not Earth’s Lungs
Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply.

As tongues of flame lapped the planet’s largest tract of rainforest over the past few weeks, it has rightfully inspired the world’s horror. The entire Amazon could be nearing the edge of a desiccating feedback loop, one that could end in catastrophic collapse. This collapse would threaten millions of species, from every branch of the tree of life, each of them—their idiosyncratic splendor, their subjective animal perception of the world—irretrievable once it’s gone. This arson has been tacitly encouraged by a Brazilian administration that is determined to develop the rainforest, over the objections of its indigenous inhabitants and the world at large. Losing the Amazon, beyond representing a planetary historic tragedy beyond measure, would also make meeting the ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement all but impossible. World leaders need to marshal all their political and diplomatic might to save it.

The Amazon is a vast ineffable, vital, living wonder. It does not, however, supply the planet with 20 percent of its oxygen.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/amazon-fire-earth-has-plenty-oxygen/596923/
 
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