“Nothing is ever as bad as it seems.”---Greg Gutfeld
The daily news is not always cheery in the era of Trump the Planetkiller, but hidden away in the onslaught of environmental atrocities are tales of wonder from the outside world. Much-maligned China has tripled its New Energy Vehicle (electric car) sales from 331,000 in 2015 to over one million in 2018. Globally, total 2015 sales were 540,000, up to 1,800,000 by the end of last year. The U.S. is tagging along with totals of 116,000/400,000. As a result of the strong growth of electric vehicles, China has seen a surge of start-ups focusing on building New Energy cars. Singulato Motor announced at the Beijing Auto show that it has received a new round of funding worth three billion yuan (U.S.—$473 million) and has established a 10 billion yuan fund for EVs with the Suzhou municipal government for investing in related areas such as batteries, engineering, motors and artificial intelligence.
Despite all those smoggy newsreels from Beijing—and maybe because of them—the Chinese government has been at the forefront in driving the switch to New Energy vehicles. It also has the notion it can lead and dominate the EV market. Those wily Chinese are aiming to have electric cars account for 12% of overall sales by 2020. That’s some vision. On the other hand, EVs still remain a niche market in the United States where growth actually declined last year.
U.S. sales are slogging along due to the limited mileage an EV can travel without being recharged and the limited number of charging stations, whereas these little depots are popping up like KFC franchises all over China. The State Grid Corporation of China, the world’s largest utility, said earlier this year that it planned to build 120,000 public charging stations for electric cars by 2020. “Without great expansion of the grid, EV sales cannot grow,” advises Christian Meunier of Infiniti. “When you have the grid, there’s no reason to come back to internal combustion engines.”
Electric car prices have steadily decreased and Tesla, Inc. now produces a Model 3 automobile for $35,400. Tesla’s new China factory intends to start production soon of at least 1,000 Model 3s a week, the centerpiece of its ambitions to boost sales in the world’s biggest auto market and avoid higher import tariffs imposed on U.S. cars. All new Teslas, by the way, will be outfitted with Autopilot, which does not mean you can go to sleep while your little vehicle tootles off to Omaha. Try that in China and they’ll put you in the jianyu.
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| Getting a big charge in China |
In For A Dime, In For A Dollar
Brazilian photographer Sebastian Salgado is not fooling around. Irked at the destruction of large swaths of tropical forest to make way for mining operations near his home in southern Brazil, Salgado and his wife Lelia decided they would rebuild the entire forest. No, really, all of it. That was twenty years ago. Since then, Salgado and a small team of professional planters have installed more than 4 million trees and no, they weren’t all snorting cocaine at the time. The merry band restored more than 1,500 acres of forest, one of the greatest environmental initiatives in history. So don’t feel like a big shot next time you insert a couple of dogwoods in the back yard.
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| Forest saviors Sebastian and Lelia |
The Empire Strikes Back
Despite Der Fuerher’s successful attempts to sell off previous national lands, including almost half of the Grand Staircase Escalante in southern Utah, the Big Cheese has been foiled in efforts to peddle the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Coulee Dam and Smokey The Bear. And on April 19, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration couldn’t simply sidestep an Obama-era moratorium on selling coal dug from federal lands. In response to a lawsuit from four states and a host of environmental groups, His Honor ruled that the government must consider the environmental impacts of coal mined on federal lands. Trump’s evil elves had reversed the earlier moratorium but failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which requires government agencies to assess environmental impacts on any project. Before more coal mining can occur on public lands, the government will be forced to negotiate with the case’s plaintiffs.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Donald’s Doofus Brigade suffered a series of ringing defeats in its daily attempts to weaken environmental regulations. Jayni Hein of the New York University School of Law tells us “they’ve won only two of 39 environmental regulation cases. They are in such a hurry to overturn Obama-era actions, they’re taking short cuts. Courts are finding that they aren’t doing enough to comply with bedrock environmental and administrative laws.”
A court ruling in March blocked the Orange Menace from expanding offshore drilling in Alaska and off the northeastern coast. In that case, the administration tried to overturn a moratorium on drilling put in place to protect rare and endangered species like polar bears and some deep-water corals in the Atlantic. The judge found that the president had no power to lift the moratorium, which was based on the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953. “This bodes well for upcoming legal actions to protect national monuments,” says Hein.
Finally, the Trump administration’s ploy to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments, a fraud created using the Antiquities Act, may not stand up to closer examination the next time it hits the courts. Stay tuned for all the beautiful details.
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| Inside the Grand Staircase |
Well, Blow Me Down!
A new report from the International Energy Agency released last Friday claims that wind power could be a $1 trillion business by 2040 and the power provided by this technology has the potential to actually outstrip global energy needs. Talk about a breath of fresh air.
The IEA expects global offshore wind capacity to increase fifteen-fold and attract at least a trillion dollars of cumulative investment by 2040, driven by falling costs, supportive government policies and some remarkable technological progress, such as larger turbines and floating foundations. The IEA report finds that offshore wind technology has the potential to grow far more strongly with stepped-up support from policy makers. “Offshore wind currently provides just 0.3% of global power generation, but its potential is vast,” says IEA executive director Fatih Birol. “All it takes is a major infrastructure commitment to develop wind power. There’s no question that offshore wind power is capable of producing more electricity than the world currently uses today.”
Whodathunkit? Civilization is racing willy-nilly down the highway to oblivion. Someone should take note of those clever hitchhikers at the side of the road.
Shooing Sequoia Paranoia
The conservation group Save The Redwoods League has recently purchased Alder Creek, a 530-acre forest north of Yosemite National Park billed as the largest privately-owned giant sequoia property in the world. Someday, when the darkness lifts and the White House has been returned to humans, the group will relinquish the land to the U.S. Forest Service for safeguarding.
Alder Creek’s sequoia trees number 483, many with diameters of 6 feet or greater and include the mighty Stagg Tree, believed to be the fifth-largest tree in the world. The Stagg is 250 feet tall with a width of 25 feet.
Giant sequoias can reach heights of 300 feet and are esteemed for their rarity. What sets them apart from almost all other trees is their ability to live up to 3,000 years, or almost as old as Mick Jagger and Willy Nelson combined. Only two other species, the Great Basin bristlecone pine and the Patagonian cypress have members older than giant sequoias.
The sequoia trees are only found in 73 groves across 48,000 acres of Sierra Nevada territory, mainly in Calaveras Big Trees State Park, Sequoia-King’s Canyon National Park, Sequoia National Park and Yosemite. “Old growth of any species is extraordinarily rare,” says Samuel Hodder, president and SEO of Save The Redwoods League. “There is precious little left of the natural world as we found it before the Industial Revolution. Alder Creek is the natural world at its most extraordinary.” The property has been owned by the Claude Albrert Rouch family since the 1940s and primarily used for logging. While the family were basically lumbermen, they always made sure the sequoias remained unscathed.
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| The mighty Stagg tree, one of the five largest trees extant |
Reefer Madness
With the climate changing faster than many species can adapt to, scientists are trying to speed up evolution by fostering the spread of creatures who can take the heat. Think of it as natural selection with a boost from humanity. To that end, Australian scientists Peter Harrison and Matthew Dunbabin recently teamed up for a brilliant field experiment. A robot designed by Dunbabin carried coral larvae that Harrison had gathered and dispersed them on a section of the Great Barrier Reef. What makes these larvae unique and the experiment promising is that they are heat-tolerant, meaning they might not only survive but flourish in warmer waters. Harrison had collected the larvae from corals which had survived deadly marine heat waves in 2016-18.
“These surviving larvae are likely to have greater ability to withstand heat stress as they survive and grow,” he assures. “I first thought about the larval restoration concept some decades ago when I was part of the team that discovered the mass coral spawning phenomenon on the Great Barrier Reef in the early 1980s. Literally billions of coral larvae are produced during mass spawning events from healthy corals, but as coral cover and health have declined to the point where too few larvae are producing from remaining remnant coral populations, we now need to intervene to give nature a helping hand.”
The robot has the capacity to carry around 100,000 microscopic coral larvae per mission, and Dunbabin expects to scale up to millions. The robot gently releases the larvae onto damaged reef areas, allowing them to settle and develop into full-grown corals over time. “We call this the Swiss-army-knife of underwater robots,” says Dunbabin. “It was designed to do multiple tasks with customizable payloads, such as photo surveys, water quality monitoring, marine pest surveillance and control. And now we have coral larvae dispersal. It will be like spreading fertilizer on your lawn. The robot is very smart. It even has an onboard vision system that allows it to see its way through reef environments. We should start to see juvenile corals after about 9 months when they grow large enough to become visible on the reef. Coral reefs are spectacular. Even now, when I jump in the water and see all the fish and colors, I am still in awe of these eco-cities of connected life. I can’t help but feel I need to do something to help restore them to what they were.”
We’ve Got The Fever! We’re Hot! We Can’t Be Stopped!
The world’s leading scientists have calculated that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 in order to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees centigrade. Last time we looked, 2020 was….well….the day after next month! The good news is that 30 of the world’s largest cities, representing over 58 million urban citizens, have taken it upon themselves to reach that crucial milestone already.
The 30 cities are: Athens, Austin, Barcelona, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Milan, Montreal, New Orleans, New York, Oslo, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, Rome, San Francisco, Stockholm, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, Venice, Warsaw and Washington, D.C., in spite of the Big Cheeseball. All it takes is committed, intelligent city leadership and a little determination. Do you know where is your city councilman is tonight? If he’s not on the E-Train, find him and poke him with a stick. You’ll be glad you did.
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
