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©Ashley Cooper
March 23, 2022 Circular Economy / Climate Change / Correcting False Information / Energy / Environment / Failed Policies / Future Costs / Integrated Waste Management Systems / Landfill / Legislation / Methane / News & Updates / Policies / Recycling / Resource Management / Waste / Waste-to-Energy
County wants input for plan to develop Cedar Hills Regional Landfill

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Advocates of sustainable energy and waste management have been critical of the King County Solid Waste Division’s apparent push to expand the landfill. In September 2021, the Institute for Energy and Resource Management issued a public statement calling the King County Solid Waste Division’s environmental impact statement a “boondoogle,” and accusing the county of “going through the motions but having the conclusion decided well before hand.”

President of the Institute for Energy and Resource Management, Philipp Schmidt-Pathmann, has been increasingly vocal in his criticism of the King County Solid Waste Division and what he believes has been a lack of investment in recycling infrastructure and systems improvements. He cited stagnate rates of recycling in the region over the years.

Schmidt-Pathmann also has expressed his disbelief in the county’s studies, which claim the possibility of high rates of methane recapture from the landfill. Schmidt-Pathmann believes that the county has overinflated the rates of methane that can be captured as a way of making a landfill look like a more viable and sustainable waste management method than he believes it truly is.

He expressed his skepticism regarding the county’s reported rates of methane capture in a letter to the director of the King County Solid Waste Division in November of 2021.
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March 4, 2022 Climate Change / Environment / Failed Policies / Future Costs / International / News & Updates / Policies / Public Health / Science & Society
‘Delay is Death,’ said UN Chief António Guterres of the New IPCC Report Showing Climate Impacts Are Outpacing Adaptation Efforts

Ecologist Camille Parmesan, one of the lead authors of the report, said it shows that climate impacts will arrive faster and be “much more widespread than we thought.” The science assessed for it by the IPCC opened “a whole new realm on infectious diseases emerging in new areas,” and documents species extinctions and mass mortalities of mammals caused directly by climate change. Local losses of key species are already affecting the stability and integrity of ecosystems, she added.

Even to the authors, the intensity of some impacts from the current level of warming were surprising and disturbing, she said. Insect-ravaged forests, dried-up peatlands and “even intact, undisturbed Amazon rainforest” are losing their ability to remove carbon dioxide from the air, she said. “Maybe not every year,” she continued, but at a pace that could further accelerate warming.

Meanwhile, global emissions are still going up, and the panel’s report warned how risky it would be to shoot past the Paris agreement goal and rely on unproven carbon dioxide removal technologies to reduce the temperature quickly.

“We are concluding that going above our targets would increase risk of irreversible impacts,” Parmesan said, while other impacts would be “difficult to reverse after overshoot.”

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March 3, 2022 Climate Change / Energy / Environment / Fossil Fuels / Future Costs / International / News & Updates
World’s first electric ‘Infinity Train’ recharges its batteries using gravity

“The Infinity Train will not only accelerate Fortescue’s race to reach net zero emissions by 2030, but also lower our operating costs, create maintenance efficiencies and productivity opportunities,” said Dr Andrew Forrest, founder and chairman of Fortescue.

“To move business leaders and politicians globally to the realisation that fossil fuel is just one source of energy and there are others now, like gravitational energy, rapidly emerging, which are more efficient, lower cost and green. The world must, and clearly can, move on from its highly polluting, deadly-if-not-stopped epoch of fossil fuel.”

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February 9, 2022 Climate Change / CO2 Emissions / Correcting False Information / Environment / Future Costs / International / Methane / News & Updates / Science & Society / Time for Action is Now
To Counter Global Warming, Focus Far More on Methane, a New Study Recommends

The Environmental Protection Agency is drastically undervaluing the potency of methane as a greenhouse gas when the agency compares methane’s climate impact to that of carbon dioxide, a new study concludes.

The EPA’s climate accounting for methane is “arbitrary and unjustified” and three times too low to meet the goals set in the Paris climate agreement, the research report, published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found.

The report proposes a new method of accounting that places greater emphasis on the potential for cuts in methane and other short-lived greenhouse gasses to help limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

“If you want to keep the world from passing the 1.5 degrees C threshold, you’ll want to pay more attention to methane than we have so far,” said Rob Jackson, an earth system science professor at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.

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February 5, 2022 Climate Change / Environment / Failed Policies / Future Costs / International / Legislation / News & Updates / Policies / Science & Society / Time for Action is Now
Climate Change Is Harming the Planet Faster Than We Can Adapt, U.N. Warns

The dangers of climate change are mounting so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm the ability of both nature and humanity to adapt unless greenhouse gas emissions are quickly reduced, according to a major new scientific report released on Monday.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, is the most detailed look yet at the threats posed by global warming. It concludes that nations aren’t doing nearly enough to protect cities, farms and coastlines from the hazards that climate change has unleashed so far, such as record droughts and rising seas, let alone from the even greater disasters in store as the planet continues to warm.

Written by 270 researchers from 67 countries, the report is “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” said António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general. “With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.”

…The report also carries a stark warning: If temperatures keep rising, many parts of the world could soon face limits in how much they can adapt to a changing environment. If nations don’t act quickly to slash fossil fuel emissions and halt global warming, more and more people will suffer unavoidable loss or be forced to flee their homes, creating dislocation on a global scale.

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