Washington Post (April 7)
Numerous conflicts are “pitting the environment against, well, the environment. Solar plants and wind farms, transmission lines and carbon-capture projects face opposition from conservationists and other environmental groups asking courts to stop new infrastructure from encroaching on wetlands, forests and other ecosystems.” Trade-offs like these “generally lean against developers,” but they were “written in an era before those developers included promoters of the green power that humanity needs to stave off climate change.” Things need fixing. We should not “let environmentalism sabotage green energy.”
Tags: Carbon capture, Climate change, Conservationists, Ecosystems, Environmentalism, Forests, Green power, Opposition, Solar, Trade-offs, Transmission lines, Wetlands, Wind
San Francisco Chronicle (September 14)
“Recent research shows that warmer weather and less precipitation has more than doubled the frequency of autumn days with extreme fire danger in California. The situation is expected to worsen.” Tackling climate change would help as would better forest management, but climate change complicates thinning the forests. “The state’s fire season has grown by an estimated 75 days in recent decades,” narrowing the window then “crews can safely light fires to manage forest health.”
Tags: California, Climate change, Fire danger, Forest health, Forests, Precipitation, Research, Thinning, Weather, Worsen
The Economist (August 3)
“Still a livelihood for 1.5bn people, forests maintain local and regional ecosystems and, for the other 6.2bn, provide a—fragile and creaking—buffer against climate change. Now droughts, wildfires and other human-induced changes are compounding the damage from chainsaws. In the tropics, which contain half of the world’s forest biomass, tree-cover loss has accelerated by two-thirds since 2015; if it were a country, the shrinkage would make the tropical rainforest the world’s third-biggest carbon-dioxide emitter, after China and America.”
Tags: Buffer, Chainsaws, China, Climate change, CO2, Damage, Droughts, Ecosystems, Forests, Livelihood, Tropical rainforest, U.S., Wildfires
Economist (September 23)
There is hope for the world’s forests. Nations known for chopping down trees “have started to hug them.” For example, Brazil’s deforestation rate dropped from 2.8 million hectares in 2004 to 750,000 hectares in 2009. The “progress made in recent years shows that mankind is not doomed to strip the planet of its forest cover.” Yet the change “is not happening fast enough,” leading the Economist to call for quick action.
Tags: Brazil, Deforestation, Environment, Forests
