We killed the last thylacine about a century ago. Can we correct that mistake?

Of all the species that humanity has wiped off the face of the Earth, the thylacine is possibly the most tragic loss. A wolf-sized marsupial sometimes called the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine met its end in part because the government paid its citizens a bounty for every animal killed. That end came recently enough that we have photographs and film clips of the last thylacines ending their days in zoos. Late enough that in just a few decades, countries would start writing laws to prevent other species from seeing the same fate.

On Tuesday, a company called Colossal, which has already said it wants to bring the mammoth back, is announcing a partnership with an Australian lab that it says will de-extinct the thylacine with the goal of re-introducing it into the wild. A number of features of marsupial biology make this a more realistic goal than the mammoth, although there's still a lot of work to do before we even start the debate about whether reintroducing the species is a good idea.

Landmark stones recorded low-water levels during droughts to warn future generations.

Invasive species can damage the ecosystems they wind up in. But in parts of the world, endangered predators make hearty meals out of them.

The change coupled enhanced photosynthesis with improved nitrogen use. //

Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. Extracting and burning natural gas is harming life on our planet, so we should probably stop doing it (or at least try to cut back considerably). But food crops, like all plants, need that nitrogen. It’s quite the conundrum, especially since the human population relying on those crops is slated to grow over the next few decades, while the acreage of arable land is slated to drop.

In response, genetic engineers in China have been developing crops that can thrive with less nitrogen, and they made a strain of rice with a yield that’s 40 to 70 percent higher than that of regular rice. It has more grain per branch, each grain particle is bigger and denser, and the plants flowered earlier. Most breeding methods currently used in cereal crops can only generate a yield increase of less than 1 percent, so this is a pretty big deal.

From sharks' livers to endangered plants – some claims about "natural" products should be interpreted with caution. Anna Turns investigates whether we should be more willing to use synthetic alternatives.

The Left’s animus towards energy independence and corresponding human flourishing must be challenged. //

A new book from philosopher Alex Epstein, however, argues continued use of fossil fuels and its byproducts will positively impact our future.

Epstein’s new book, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less, masterfully makes the case for continued usage of coal, oil, and natural gas against so-called “renewables.”

The author articulates to readers the importance of refuting hostile viewpoints concerning fossil fuels. //

Epstein notes fossil fuel benefits far outweigh the negative side-effects attributed to them. Oft-dismissed benefits, he writes, include “affordable food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.” //

Nuclear energy, in Alex’s view, especially raw materials for it, are “far more abundant in nature than even fossil fuels” because it has massive scalability potential. And it boasts a reliable base load and isn’t intermittent like solar or wind.

Talk about an inconvenient truth. //

In his book, Epstein challenges readers to advance the “human flourishing framework” and associate it—not the “anti-impact framework” espoused by “designated experts”— with cleaner environmental standards and overall climate safety.

An unimpacted environment, he says, leads to more disasters —like high-intensity fires raging across the American West. And vice versa.

This framework parallels the debate surrounding conservation stewardship versus preservationist environmentalism. Preservationists intentionally conflate preservation (no use of natural resources) with conservation (wise use of natural resources).The former admonishes human input and calls for nature to take its course compared to the latter, which welcomes positive human impact (including multiple-use management of public lands) on the landscape.

On this token, environmental policies shouldn’t prefer nature over people but safeguard the interests of both. After all, this is the essence of America’s true conservationist ethos.

Over 170 million U.S.-born people who were adults in 2015 were exposed to harmful levels of lead as children, a new study estimates.

Researchers used blood-lead level, census and leaded gasoline consumption data to examine how widespread early childhood lead exposure was in the country between 1940 and 2015.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, they estimated that half the U.S. adult population in 2015 had been exposed to lead levels surpassing five micrograms per deciliter — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention threshold for harmful lead exposure at the time.

In 2017, congressional investigators found that a money trail linked Russia to millions of dollars funding U.S. nonprofits to work against U.S. shale gas in order to influence the U.S. energy market. Specifically, investigators found that NRDC, Sierra Club, and Climate Action Network were all found to have received millions of dollars of funding in grants from a shady San Francisco-based company called “Sea Change” that a money trail linked back to the Russians. Indeed, it is an open secret that Russians have funded anti-fracking and anti-natural gas propaganda in America for decades, as environmental groups funded the campaigns of Democrats and pressured them to ban fossil fuels.

These same environmental groups relentlessly attacked President Trump and his appointees (I was one) as “anti-science,” “enemies of the EPA,” and “climate change deniers,” pulling out all the stops to frame President Trump’s pro-American energy agenda as harmful to the environment. President Trump knew then what we are all seeing now: Energy independence is crucial to our security, and we don’t have to shut down industry with duplicative and costly regulations to protect our environment.

After spending millions to elect Biden, the environmental left got its wish: Biden canceled America’s Keystone XL pipeline, blocking the safe transport of oil from one of our closest allies and killing thousands of jobs. At the same time, Biden removed President Trump’s sanctions on the Russian NordStream2 pipeline, giving Putin the green light to move forward.

Biden canceled oil and gas leasing on 2.46 billion acres of federal on and off-shore lands, effectively crushing American energy supplies. He unleashed his federal regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and more to hamper energy exploration, production, and transportation with new regulations. Finally, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent, Biden’s regulators at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission took one more step to embolden Russian oil by clamping down on pipeline permits and LNG-export terminals, which could have helped supply American gas to the rest of the world.

https://legacy-assets.eenews.net/open_files/assets/2017/07/07/document_pm_02.pdf //

very few of Biden’s punitive moves against American energy would actually help the environment. Numerous studies have shown that pipelines have no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions since crude oil would still be extracted, and shipping it by rail or tanker instead of pipeline results in up to 42 percent higher emissions and more leaks.

Furthermore, American natural gas is far cleaner than Russian gas. A major 2019 study by the U.S. National Energy Technology Laboratory found that Russian gas piped to Europe has up to 22 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than European coal. U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) delivered to the EU, in contrast, has up to 56 percent fewer total emissions than EU coal, the report shows.

Means of Transport CO2 equivalent emissions per passenger km
Short Flight ✈️ 255g
Medium Car (Gasoline) 🚗 192g
Medium Car (Diesel) 🚗 171g
Medium Flight ✈️ 156g
Long Flight ✈️ 150g
Bus 🚌 105g
Medium Motorcycle 🏍 103g
Gasoline Car (Two Passenger) 🚘 96g
Medium Electric Vehicle 🚙 53g
National Rail 🚂 41g
Ferry ⛴ 19g
Eurostar (International Rail) 🚞 6g

Flying on a short flight or driving alone are the most carbon-intensive travel methods. However, adding one more passenger to your car ends up cutting the emissions in half, making driving more efficient.

, it’s worth breaking down categories of flights more, as their emissions depend greatly on their route length:

• Short Flights: For example, domestic flights within a European country, or flights within a U.S. state have the highest individual carbon footprint.
• Medium Flights: For example, international travel within Europe, or between U.S. states, have a significantly lower carbon footprint per person.
• Long Flights: Flights over 3,700 km (2,300 mi), about the distance from Los Angeles to New York, have the lowest carbon footprint per person.
  Why are longer flights far more eco-friendly than short-range flights? It’s because take-off uses much more energy than the ‘cruise’ phase of a flight. For short flights, the efficient cruise phase is relatively short-lived.

The U.S. is preparing to save the world from climate change because of fossil fuels by preparing to pockmark the planet’s surface with mineral mines. //

The session started with Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) reviewing the bidding the mineral resources risks faced by the United States in a post-climate change industrial base world. In it, the need for metals and minerals to build and maintain post-oil infrastructure will make the United States far more dependent on countries like Russia, China, and countries in Africa, where the mines that produce chemicals needed for computers, vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and other accouterments of a renewables-based world will change the power balance of global stability. //

Bottom line, we’ll be digging new holes in the ground because our cars will need four to 10 times as much metal and mineral content per vehicle. It must come from somewhere. So much for the pristine wilds of Alaska, or anywhere else we happen to find rare earth minerals in the New World. //

Murkowski noted in her remarks that the U.S. must also be thinking in terms of strategic mineral reserves for defense and security purposes. The tensions of limited resources and zero-sum competition begin anew. //

In the next 100 years, it’s only going to be a portion of the First World that will make the conversion to this expensive, mineral-based system. The rest of the world will keep burning oil and gas. And most of the human race’s population growth will take place in those parts of the world. So, by my reckoning, the trajectory of the carbon emission curve of planet Earth isn’t going to change much. It is just what it is.

Environmentalist still have little idea just how much strip mining and ore processing the climate change community has bought into to meet the goals of their global advocates. There will be a lot of money to be made, as ordinary people’s lives are forced to change. I’m anticipating this clash of values among the “woke” is coming as reality sets in. //

Humanity is quite literally exchanging one form of scorching the earth for another one. The whereabouts of the resources will change who has political and economic power. It’ll create economic competition among the world’s industrialized societies for minerals that will cause stress, embargoes, and wars. It’s how matrices work. This is the sound of inevitability.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with this “woke” version of climate change. //

What we will see in the remainder of the 21st century will be the consequence effects of the decisions Climate Change policies are creating now. My instinct says they won’t be pretty. Turning over apple carts never is. The constant is the voracious energy appetite of the First World. All we are doing is changing its diet.

After listening to how the policy community is talking about planning for the future, it may not be for the better. Bit of a Pandora’s Box. Either naively not well thought through or rife with hubris flying on wings of wax that will melt all too soon.

Efforts to reduce carbon pollution using ethanol appear to have backfired. //

For over a decade, the US has blended ethanol with gasoline in an attempt to reduce the overall carbon pollution produced by fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks. But a new study says that the practice may not be achieving its goals. In fact, burning ethanol made from corn—the major source in the US—may be worse for the climate than just burning gasoline alone.

Corn drove demand for land and fertilizer far higher than previous assessments had estimated. Together, the additional land and fertilizer drove up ethanol’s carbon footprint to the point where the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions—from seed to tank—were higher than that of gasoline. Some researchers predicted this might happen, but the new paper provides a comprehensive and retrospective look at the real-world results of the policy. //

Today, most gasoline sold in the US contains 10 percent ethanol, and about a third of the corn crop in the country is used to produce the fuel. While other sources would qualify, including ethanol derived from cellulose, “most RFS biofuel production has come from conventional corn ethanol,” the study’s authors pointed out. //

Expanding biofuels production would only add to the inflation, the researchers found. “Our estimates imply that for every billion gallons per year (BGY) expansion of ethanol demand, we would expect a 5.6% increase in corn prices; 1.6 and 0.4% increases in the areas of US corn and cropland, respectively; and attendant increases in GHG emissions, nutrient pollution, and soil erosion,” they wrote.

Beginning in June, all sunrooms included in new construction projects will be required to show they will not create “unwanted solar gain.” The change, noted Daily Mail, is part of “a raft of measures” aimed at “future-proofing” homes against summers where temperatures are predicted to reach 104º F. Though “well above what is currently experienced in Britain,” such highs would “cause conservatories to become unbearably hot, often increasing the temperature uncomfortably indoors too.”

Wait — so would 200 degrees, but so what?

Incidentally, the average daily temperature in the UK in July is 70 degrees. (More than half of the United States just laughed out loud and said “Hold my beer.”)

And not to nitpick, here — but whose business is it to determine whether a sunroom becomes “unbearably hot” or “uncomfortably warm” throughout a particular residential home, anyway — the homeowner or the British government?

The site, also called “Door to Hell,” is located in the middle of the desert about 160 miles north of the capital, Ashgabat, and has become an attraction for the country’s few visitors.

The hellish hole, which measures 190 feet wide and 70 feet deep, was formed in 1971 following a Soviet Union gas drilling collapse, according to Turkmen news site Turkmenportal.

Geologists reportedly set fire to the site to prevent the spread of gas. It was expected to burn out after several weeks.

Would love a detailed breakdown from Ars on the impact of these launches on the climate and environment. Thank you!

Everday Astronaut has an excellent article on this: https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/

Summary: some exotics suck, but modern rockets are inconsequential at current volumes.

The impact of rocket pollution is mostly symbolic, especially tourist flights. They're seen as the most conspicuous consumption by much of the general public. Why should an average Joe who is struggling to get by sacrifice to combat climate change while billionaires are dumping hundreds of tons of carbon into the air to fly to space?

There are already good answers to that question, but they are nuanced, and the answer could be quite clear. Bezos' rocket already runs on Hydrogen, he should be paying a little extra for green Hydrogen, just for PR reasons. Musk has already committed to using synthetic methane on Starship. Branson doesn't have an easy answer, but he's mostly irrelevant in the symbolism arena. //

Would love a detailed breakdown from Ars on the impact of these launches on the climate and environment. Thank you!

~16.25 billion gallons of jet fuel burned per year.

One Falcon 9 launch, 25,000 gallons of Kerosene in the 1st stage (the 2nd stage is effectively burning it above the atmosphere, so not sure you can count that).

30 launches in 2021. 750,000 gallons of kerosene.

Total around the world launches of Rockets in 2021 was, what? 60 ish? Many smaller rockets. Let's just double that though and say 1.5 million gallons.

That is ~3.33% of all of the jet fuel burned...in one day. For an entire YEAR of launches at the current rate.

Metholox will produce somewhat lower emissions per joule of energy released to launch a rocket.

So basically, you are talking less than 1/10th of 1% of the entire aviation industry. It would be nice if it was zero emissions. Also of note, SpaceX is looking to do carbon capture and generate methane for launch at some point (though not soon, they will be using in situ wells at their launch facility for the methane).

Until such a point as rocket launching maybe approaches >1% of aviation emissions I think we can safely consider it a rounding error.

edit actually the above should be less than 1/100th of 1%. //

Would love a detailed breakdown from Ars on the impact of these launches on the climate and environment. Thank you!

A very large percentage of the information about those hurricanes comes from satellites. So there’s a pretty big impact from rocket launches.

The Nez Perce Indians of northern Idaho received the state’s first large-scale battery from Tesla in November.

About the size of a standard shipping container, the Tesla Megapack will store power from solar panels, enabling the tribe to reduce its dependence on local dams. For decades, the Nez Perce have demanded the destruction of four hydropower plants along the Lower Snake River with claims the concrete barriers hamper a near-extinct salmon population.

The Tesla Megapack, installation company RevoluSun CEO Josh Powell told Public News Service, “allows people like the Nez Perce to control their energy where it’s being produced where they have lands.” //

A primary component of the megapack power station is lithium. The U.S. Geological Survey says the United States is home to some of the richest reserves of lithium but mines less than 1 percent of global production, according to the Wall Street Journal. The world’s top three lithium producers are Australia, Chile, and China, respectively, with the Chinese dominating refinement. Tesla sources its lithium from Chinese companies.

While reaping the rewards of Chinese lithium, the Nez Perce have become the primary opponents against mining on American soil. Their fight was chronicled by “CBS Saturday Morning” in August as tribal members protested operations on the retired site of the Stibnite Mine in Idaho. If the mine was opened, the United States would be able to tap the nation’s largest reserves of antimony, a critical mineral for missile defense systems.

Meet Nate Laps, a former gas industry land agent who switched sides and now fights for landowners. He may well change how FERC and pipeline builders treat the people who live in the path of major energy projects.

Laps, 38, is brawling with two multibillion-dollar natural gas companies — Cheniere Energy Inc. and Spire Inc. — along with FERC itself.

Laps has bird-dogged Cheniere’s Midship pipeline through Oklahoma and Spire’s STL pipeline near St. Louis for years on behalf of his landowner clients. It’s no coincidence that both projects are in trouble with FERC for their treatment of landowners.

One of the fossil fuel and plastic industries’ favorite “solutions” to the plastic pollution crisis may finally be coming under greater scrutiny from the federal government.

Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, formally announced it was considering tighter regulations for pyrolysis and gasification — controversial processes that are associated with “chemical recycling.” Industry advocates have named these processes as key steps toward building a circular economy — one that minimizes waste — but environmental groups have called them an “industry shell game” meant to keep single-use plastics in production.

Solar Panels Will Create 50 Times More Waste & Cost 4 Times More Than Predicted, New Harvard Business Review Study Finds //

Three years ago I published a long article at Forbes arguing that solar panels weren’t clean but in fact produced 300 times more toxic waste than high-level nuclear waste. But in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone, solar panel waste risks exposing poor trash-pickers in sub-Saharan Africa. The reason was because it was so much cheaper to make new solar panels from raw materials than to recycle them, and would remain that way, given labor and energy costs. //

A major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world’s leading energy analysts thought. “The economics of solar,” write Atalay Atasu and Luk N. Van Wassenhove of INSEAD, one of Europe’s leading business schools, and Serasu Duran of the University of Calgary, will “darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash." //

The solar industry, and even supposedly neutral energy agencies, grossly underestimated how much waste solar panels would produce. The HBR authors, all of whom are business school professors, looked at the economics from the point of view of the customer, and past trends, and calculated that customers would replace panels far sooner than every 30 years, as the industry assumes.

“If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model,” they write, solar panels “can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than [International Renewable Energy Agency] IRENA anticipates.” //

The HBR authors found that the price of panels, the amount solar panel owners are paid by the local electric company, and sunlight-to-electricity efficiency determined how quickly people replaced their panels.

“Alarming as they are,” they write, “these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger.”

Beyond the shocking nature of the finding itself is what it says about the integrity and credibility of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency. It is an intergovernmental organization like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, funded by taxpayers from the developed nations of Europe, North America, and Asia, and expected to provide objective information. Instead, it employed unrealistic assumptions to produce results more supportive of solar panels.

IRENA acted like an industry association rather than as a public interest one. IRENA, noted the HBR reporters, “describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat.” IRENA almost certainly knew better. For decades, consumers in Germany, California, Japan and other major member nations of IRENA, have been replacing solar panels just 10 or 15 years old. But IRENA hadn’t even modeled solar panel replacements in those time frames. //

It’s now clear that China made solar appear cheap with coal, subsidies, and forced labor. And in the U.S., we pay one-quarter of solar’s costs through taxes and often much more in subsidies at the state and local level.

And none of this even addresses the biggest threat facing solar power today, which are revelations that perhaps both key raw materials and the panels themselves are being made by forced labor in Xinjiang province in China.

The subsidies that China gave solar panel makers had a purpose beyond bankrupting solar companies in the U.S. and Europe. The subsidies also enticed solar panel makers to participate in the repression of the Uyghur Muslim population, including using tactics that the US and German governments have called “genocide.”

CR reveals where most of the plastic you throw away really ends up and explains what to do to limit its environmental harm //

One of four things happens to plastic after you’re done with it. If it’s not recycled—and it’s usually not—it is landfilled, incinerated, or littered. The EPA estimates that in 2018, about 16 percent of U.S. plastic waste was incinerated. A relatively small amount was littered. Most of the rest ended up in landfills­—including a lot of the plastic people dutifully put into recycling bins. //

Certain types of plastic, however, are economically viable and relatively easy to recycle, and even in high demand. These include PET plastic bottles, like the ones soda and water are sold in, and HDPE milk jugs (respectively labeled with a number 1 or 2 inside the recycling triangle). But just 29 percent of the plastic used in these jugs and bottles was recycled in 2018.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)’s official projections assert that “large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s” and could total 78 million tonnes by the year 2050. That’s a staggering amount, undoubtedly. But with so many years to prepare, it describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat. The threat is hidden by the fact that IRENA’s predictions are premised upon customers keeping their panels in place for the entirety of their 30-year lifecycle. They do not account for the possibility of widespread early replacement.

Our research does. Using real U.S. data, we modeled the incentives affecting consumers’ decisions whether to replace under various scenarios. We surmised that three variables were particularly salient in determining replacement decisions: installation price, compensation rate (i.e., the going rate for solar energy sold to the grid), and module efficiency. If the cost of trading up is low enough, and the efficiency and compensation rate are high enough, we posit that rational consumers will make the switch, regardless of whether their existing panels have lived out a full 30 years. //

If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model, they can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than IRENA anticipates. That figure translates to around 315,000 metric tonnes of waste, based on an estimate of 90 tonnes per MW weight-to-power ratio.

Alarming as they are, these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger. //

The industry’s current circular capacity is woefully unprepared for the deluge of waste that is likely to come. The financial incentive to invest in recycling has never been very strong in solar. While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material. The long lifespan of solar panels also serves to disincentivize innovation in this area.

As a result, solar’s production boom has left its recycling infrastructure in the dust. To give you some indication, First Solar is the sole U.S. panel manufacturer we know of with an up-and-running recycling initiative, which only applies to the company’s own products at a global capacity of two million panels per year. With the current capacity, it costs an estimated $20-30 to recycle one panel. Sending that same panel to a landfill would cost a mere $1-2. //

The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies. For example, barring a major increase in processing capability, experts expect that more than 720,000 tons worth of gargantuan wind turbine blades will end up in U.S. landfills over the next 20 years. //

Compared with all we stand to gain or lose, the four decades or so it will likely take for the economics of solar to stabilize to the point that consumers won’t feel compelled to cut short the lifecycle of their panels seems decidedly small. But that lofty purpose doesn’t make the shift to renewable energy any easier in reality. Of all sectors, sustainable technology can least afford to be short-sighted about the waste it creates. A strategy for entering the circular economy is absolutely essential — and the sooner, the better.