America’s aging dams are in need of repair

By Troy Griggs, Gregor Aisch, and Sarah Almukhtar23 February 2017 (The New York Times) – After two weeks that saw evacuations near Oroville, Calif., and flooding in Elko County, Nev., America’s dams are showing their age. Nearly 2,000 state-regulated high-hazard dams in the United States were listed as being in need of repair in 2015, […]

Global hydropower boom will add to global warming – “Reservoirs are major emitters of methane, a particularly aggressive greenhouse gas”

By Claire Salisbury14 February 2017 (Mongabay) – From the Amazon Basin to boreal forests, and from the Mekong to the Himalayan foothills, rivers worldwide are being targeted for major new dams in a global hydropower boom that also aims to supply drinking water to exploding human populations and to facilitate navigation on the planet’s rivers; […]

Documenting the consequences of palm oil production beyond Southeast Asia – “Guatemala was probably the scariest”

6 February 2017 (Mongabay) –  Most of the attention around palm oil production has focused on where the crop has the largest footprint: Southeast Asia. Yet oil palm plantations are rapidly mushrooming throughout the tropics, from the species’ ancestral home in West and Central Africa to Pacific islands to Latin America. A new film, Appetite […]

Honduras politicians and U.S. aid are implicated in killings of environmentalists – “There’s an awful lot of corruption around these mega-projects, these big investment projects”

By Sandra Cuffe1 February 2017 (Mongabay) – Global Witness, a London-based NGO, published a report yesterday examining the involvement of government officials and foreign aid in violent conflicts over mining, hydroelectric, tourism, and palm oil projects in Honduras. The result of a two-year investigation, the report includes several case studies and a series of recommendations […]

60 percent of primate species face impending extinction, and 75 percent have declining populations globally

By Russell A. Mittermeier and Anthony B. Rylands24 January 2017 (mongabay.com) – The Year of the Monkey has just ended, and won’t come around again for another 12 years. In the meantime, what is happening with our closest living relatives, the nonhuman primates? A recent paper in Science Advances by 31 of us indicates that […]

Carbon capture needed to make carbon dioxide emissions fall – Wind and solar alone won’t meet Paris Agreement goals

By Ker Than30 January 2017    (Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment) – Without a significant effort to reduce greenhouse gases, including an accelerated deployment of technologies for capturing atmospheric carbon and storing it underground, and sustained growth in renewables such as wind and solar, the world could miss a key global temperature target set by […]

China air pollution crisis shows no sign of ending as nation fails to lower coal use – “The reality is China has big plans for coal”

By Matthew Carney7 January 2017 (ABC News) – For weeks northern China has been covered in a thick toxic smog. It is one of the worst episodes of air pollution the country has seen, affecting 460 million people. Coal is the major cause, and will continue to be the country’s biggest source of energy and […]

New look at rivers reveals the toll of human activity

By Jim Robbins4 January 2017 (Yale e360) – The Yellowstone River has its headwaters in the mountain streams and snowy peaks of the famous U.S. national park with the same name, and makes an unfettered downhill run all the way to the Missouri River, nearly 700 miles away. It is the longest undammed river in […]

Tenfold jump in green technologies needed to meet global emissions targets – “We must scale them up and spread them globally at unprecedented speeds”

3 January 2017 (Duke University) – The global spread of green technologies must quicken significantly to avoid future rebounds in greenhouse gas emissions, a new Duke University study shows. “Based on our calculations, we won’t meet the climate warming goals set by the Paris Agreement unless we speed up the spread of clean technology by […]

Trump to pick foe of U.S. climate agenda to run EPA: source

By Valerie Volcovici and Timothy Gardner7 December 2016 (WASHINGTON) – Donald Trump will pick an ardent opponent of President Barack Obama’s measures to curb climate change as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a Trump transition team source said on Wednesday, a choice that enraged green activists and cheered the oil industry. Trump’s choice, Oklahoma […]

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