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Archive for the ‘Water Conservation’ Category
Why This City of 21 Million People Is Sinking 3 Feet Every Year
Posted by EcoWatch: None Given on March 5th, 2016
EcoWatch: Mexico City is sinking. Home to 21 million people, who consume nearly 287 billion gallons of water each year, the city has sunk more than 32 feet in the last 60 years because 70 percent of the water people rely on is extracted from the aquifer below the city.
"There`s no fixing it," journalist Andrea Noel told producer Alan Sanchez in the video below from Fusion. "Once land is subsided, it`s subsided."
The water table is sinking at a rate of 1 meter (3.2 feet) per year. As the city population...
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Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 5th, 2016
New York Times: On a recent frigid night, anxious residents, many in "Protect Our Coast" sweatshirts, packed the town hall here, spilled onto the lawn, and then erupted in cheers as their town government gaveled in a resolution urging President Obama to block oil drilling off their shoreline. "Some things are just too precious to risk," Mayor Emilie Swearingen said.
That afternoon, 140 miles inland in Raleigh, the state capital, Obama administration officials and oil company representatives had outlined plans...
How do we ditch dirty coal power without sending miners to unemployment line?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 5th, 2016
LA Times: The nation - in fact, the world - needs to wean itself from fossil fuels if it is to have any hope of managing climate change. Burning coal is particularly bad for the environment, pumping far higher quantities of global-warming compounds into the atmosphere than natural gas, oil or other carbon-based products do. So it's heartening that the U.S. has been using less coal to generate electricity in recent years. An unrelated drop in coal-fired steel production in China has also reduced the amount...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on How do we ditch dirty coal power without sending miners to unemployment line?NASA: Drought in 1998-2012 in Mideast worst in 900 years
Posted by Associated Press: Daniella Cheslow on March 5th, 2016
Associated Press: A recent, 14-year dry spell in the Middle East was the worst drought in the past 900 years, according to a new NASA study released this week. NASA's researchers examined records of rings of trees in several Mediterranean countries to determine patterns of dry and wet years across a span of 900 years. They concluded that the years from 1998 to 2012 were drier than any other period, and that the drought was likely caused by humans. The study's lead author Ben Cook said the range of extreme weather...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on NASA: Drought in 1998-2012 in Mideast worst in 900 years$1m for devising best way to map Indonesia’s peatlands
Posted by Mongabay: Philip Jacobson and Sapariah Saturi on March 5th, 2016
Mongabay: Want to make a million dollars? Find the most efficient way to map Indonesia’s peatlands. That’s the ticket to winning the Indonesian Peat Prize, announced by the cartographically challenged Southeast Asian country last month. The competition will establish a national standard for mapping peatland extent and thickness, a process deemed essential to stopping the annual forest and peat fires which grow more devastating by the year. Last dry season, they burned an area the size of Rwanda, afflicted...
A drying Great Salt Lake spells trouble for Utah
Posted by City Lab: Laura Bliss on March 5th, 2016
City Lab: The Great Salt Lake is drying up, thanks to 150 years of human diversions from the rivers that feed it. That’s the takeaway of a white paper released by a team of Utah biologists and engineers. And if those diversions continue ramping up, as a bill working its way through the Utah legislature proposes, the waterbody may face a withering fate similar to other dried-up salt lakes around the world. The namesake of Utah’s capital city, the Great Salt Lake is the the state’s defining geographic feature...
The burning issue in climate change
Posted by Irish Times: None Given on March 5th, 2016
Irish Times: The idea of ethical investment has been around for several decades. High-profile campaigns saw charities withdraw their investments from the armaments and tobacco industries, for example, and from South Africa under the apartheid regime.
Ethical investment has had a new target in the past few years, as environmental campaigners have encouraged charities, universities and other public-interest organisations to exclude fossil-fuel industries from their investment portfolios. They see fossil-fuel...
Mud shortage eroding California’s climate defenses
Posted by Climate Central: John Upton on March 4th, 2016
Climate Central: As the birdwatchers of Arrowhead Marsh strain through binoculars for glimpses of California clapper rails, they could easily miss the warning signs of an obscure threat to the species' survival.
Grassy banks at the heart of the marsh are sloughing at the edges. With a spike in sea levels looming, chunks of mud are already dissolving into the tidal waterway, shrinking one of the few remaining homes of a species that once nested throughout the marshes that ringed San Francisco Bay's sweeping watershed....
Pursuit of clean energy will restrict water availability
Posted by Bangalore Mirror: Nirad Mudur on March 4th, 2016
Bangalore Mirror: At a time when a major push is being given to nuclear and solar energy as clean energy initiatives in India and across the world, a new study has posed a major roadblock in the efforts to develop clean energy for the future, even threatening to adversely affect agriculture in the future.
The research conducted by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)-led 2012 Global Energy Assessment, has found - and warned - that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Pursuit of clean energy will restrict water availabilityUS top court denies bid to block mercury air pollution rule
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 4th, 2016
Reuters: The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Obama administration on Thursday in rebuffing a bid by 20 states to halt an Environmental Protection Agency rule to curb emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants from power plants.
The action came about a month after the high court put on hold federal regulations to curb carbon dioxide emissions mainly from coal-fired power plants, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's strategy to combat climate change.
Chief Justice John Roberts denied a petition...
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