Plastic is a petrochemical fabrication promoted by oil companies. To take the perceptual edge off the mountains of forever garbage that plastic becomes, the oil industry promoted the idea of recycling plastic. That was a scam and plastic producers knew it.
Category: Environment
Clean water is the elixir of life – as essential for keeping clean as for drinking. Its shortage during the covid-19 pandemic is putting more than half of the global population at risk.
A warming world spells more frequent and more intense wildfires. Animals play a part in engendering the spread of a blaze or tamping it down.
Though it’s not healthy food, Americans love steaks and burgers and consume lots of dairy. Their taste for beef and milk is draining the water supply.
Driven by the wind, the gyres of ocean circulation play a vital role in the marine biosphere and regulating weather & climate. Global warming is changing the way ocean gyres work.
As winter wanes and spring ushers warmth, trees get busy: putting leaves on branches and drawing more water from the soil. With global warming, spring is arriving earlier. This is likely to spell drier soils in summer.
Immigrant earthworms in the boreal forests of North America are causing trouble.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with 84 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. As it ages, methane oxidizes and loses much of its hotness.
Though they don’t cost as much as other seafood, shrimp are an environmentally expensive catch.
For decades, corporations have been promoting foods from genetically modified organisms (GMO) as a way to enhance their profits and garner monopoly power. GMO proponents claim that genetic modifications promise food abundance safely. History has already shown otherwise.
Though known since ancient times, petroleum came into prominence as an energy source in the last half of the 19th century. Oil became the predominant fuel for transport.
Ships have always been the cheapest, fastest way to move cargo over long distances. Most of the world’s populations live in coastal areas, and on waterways, for this very reason. Shipping is the lifeblood of economic globalization.
A recent study of insecticide use on American crops found that these biocides have become more toxic to honeybees in the past few decades despite significantly lowered application rates.
Despite over 75 years of concentrating radioactive matter and then generating waste from it, safely disposing of radioactive refuse has not been mastered.
Oil and gas extraction brings to the surface radioactive brine known as “formation water.” The water is separated from the fossil fuel and put into tanks or pits, becoming “produced water.”
The Arctic is warming at over twice the average rate of the rest of the planet, and is shedding sea ice at a staggering pace. Ozone-depleting gases not fully tallied in current climate model forecasts have contributed significantly.
Climate models forecast a best-case harbinger. What these models cannot forecast is the more imminent doom that looks likely.
A new study found extensive chemical pollution in American water supplies that federal, state, and local governments either don’t monitor or report if they do.
Fluoroform is a potent, long-lasting greenhouse gas which was supposed to be phased out worldwide. Instead, fluoroform emissions are alarmingly high and rising.
The Chinese government has announced pending restrictions on the production, sale, and use of plastic.
The modern lifestyle is defined by freedom of movement via motor vehicle transport. The cultural and societal impacts of autos have been incalculable. The health costs have been enormous. The environmental destruction has been horrendous.
The ‘war on drugs’ is driving deforestation in Central America.
Homo erectus discovering how to control fire would not have happened, and been for naught, had it not been for wood. Historians claim no Wood Age only because no such archaic artifacts remained to show wood’s importance; hence, prehistory begins with the Stone Age.
Industrialization has furnished a wondrous plethora of consumer products. The materials for these conveniences have come from gouging the earth for its metals and minerals. The costs of this environmental desecration include pollution that maims and kills life for miles around. China exemplifies the Faustian bargain of consumerism.
Russia is serious about climate change. Alas, it’s the wrong kind of seriousness.