Environment-Resource Extraction
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Foundational-Resource Extraction
High rises made out of wood? What matters in whether ‘mass timber’ buildings are sustainable
by Brent Sohngen 12/11/24 The Conversation
Companies behind these “mass timber” projects say that wood is a lower-carbon alternative to steel or concrete and brings other benefits, such as faster construction time and lower cost than concrete and steel. Advocates say the wood materials, made of compressed layers of wood with glue, offer good fire safety as well.
How to harvest water from clouds of fog
by Kat Lonsdorf, Claire Harbage npr
LAARE, Kenya – Jacob Murungi and his wife don't sleep much. Instead, they spend their nights in the local forest high in the mountains of central Kenya collecting water — from the trees.
Scientists find DNA proof of swine feces in North Carolina homes
by Daily Yonder 7/6/25 NC Health News
In Duplin County, North Carolina, there is a pollutant that hangs in the air, the water and the soil. It tumbles in the breeze and into homes through open windows, settling as a thin film of dust on their kitchen tables. It gloops together in masses of sludge in the surface water that feeds their creeks and streams. The fresh, nostalgic smell of seawater along the county coast has dissipated, replaced by a permanent foul smell from nearby swine factory farms, similar to that of a decomposing body, residents say. Policymakers have long ignored their complaints but new research from Johns Hopkins University publishing soon could finally show scientific evidence of pollution that officials can’t ignore.
It’s democracy v plutocracy – this is the endgame for our planet
by George Monbiot 6/7/22 The Guardian
The day before, in the UK, the government’s climate change committee reported a “shocking” failure by Boris Johnson’s administration to meet its climate targets. So stupid and perverse are its policies on issues such as energy saving that it’s hard to see this as anything other than failure by design. On the day of the supreme court ruling, the UK government also announced that it intended to scrap the law protecting the UK’s most important wildlife sites.
Revealed: oil sector’s ‘staggering’ $3bn-a-day profits for last 50 years
by Damian Carrington 21/7/22 The Guardian
The oil and gas industry has delivered $2.8bn (£2.3bn) a day in pure profit for the last 50 years, a new analysis has revealed.
Bitcoin miners align with fossil fuel firms, alarming environmentalists
By Olivia Solon NBC News Sept. 25, 2021
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, essentially a shared database of transactions, where entries must be confirmed and encrypted. The network is secured by “miners” who use powerful computers to compete in an enormous guessing game that ultimately verifies the transactions. If a computer “wins” the game, it’s rewarded with a newly created bitcoin, currently worth about $40,000. The process consumes a lot of electricity, and the computers generate a lot of heat, which means they require industrial cooling systems that need even more energy.
Kenyan recycles plastic waste into bricks stronger than concrete
The plastic waste is mixed with sand, heated and then compressed into bricks, which are sold at varying prices, depending on thickness and colour. Their common grey bricks cost 850 Kenyan shillings ($7.70) per square metre, for example.
Coal: Is this the beginning of the end?
The report by three energy experts - published in the online journal Carbon Brief - draws on energy sector data from around the world for the first seven to 10 months of the year.
The record drop raises the prospect of a slowing of global CO2 emissions growth in 2019.
But the authors warn that, even with this decline, coal use and emissions remain far higher than the level required to keep the global temperature rise below 2C.
'Plastic recycling is a myth': what really
If you look at plastics, the picture is even bleaker. Of the 8.3bn tonnes of virgin plastic produced worldwide, only 9% has been recycled, according to a 2017 Science Advances paper entitled Production, Use And Fate Of All Plastics Ever Made. “I think the best global estimate is maybe we’re at 20% [per year] globally right now,” says Roland Geyer, its lead author, a professor of industrial ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Academics and NGOs doubt those numbers, due to the uncertain fate of our waste exports. In June, one of the UK’s largest waste companies, Biffa, was found guilty of attempting to ship used nappies, sanitary towels and clothing abroad in consignments marked as waste paper. “I think there’s a lot of creative accounting going on to push the numbers up,” Geyer says.
WELLS, WIRES, AND WHEELS
"We calculate that to get the same amount of mobility from gasoline as from new renewables in tandem with EVs over the next 25 years would cost 6.2x-7x more. Indeed, even if we add in the cost of building new network infrastructure to cope with all the new wind and/or solar capacity implied by replacing gasoline with renewables and EVs, the economics of renewables still crush those of oil. The clear conclusion of our analysis is that if we were building out the global energy system from scratch today, economics alone would dictate that at a minimum the road-transportation infrastructure would be built up around EVs powered by wind- and solar-generated electricity. And that is before we factor in the other advantages of renewables and EVs over oil as a road-transportation fuel, namely the climatechange and clean-air benefits, the public-health benefits that flow from this, the fact that electricity is much easier to transport than oil, and the fact that the price of electricity generated from wind and solar is low and stable over the long term whereas the price of oil is notoriously volatile."
How you're recycling plastic wrong, from coffee cups to toothpaste
While recycling continues to be an essential tool for dealing with the flood of plastic inundating the planet, it’s time for a reality check.
NY Times Rollback Car Rules- Marathon Petrol 12-2018
