Environmentalism

Leaky European lavatories could be banned in Britain under water-saving plans.
Ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have convened a “leaky loo taskforce” to stop hundreds of litres of water a day being lost from malfunctioning loos.
Policymakers are considering a ban on “eco” dual-flush lavatories, which are designed to save water but are prone to leaking.

The very thing devised by the bureaucrats to save resources in fact wastes resources. So, so, unlike planning, eh?

Of course, we’ve still that little problemette of our own bureaucrats now doing their own designing. Sigh. On as island as wet at this one the idea that we need to closely monitor a loo’s use of water is ridiculous in itself. And domestic is only 5% of national water usage anyway…..

Rainwater harvesting, the use of grey water in homes and an urgent campaign to reduce water usage across society are vital to prevent water shortages of 5bn litres a day by 2055, the government has been told.

I assume, at least, that “rainwater harvesting” means “build some fucking reservoirs”.

Ah, no, silly me:

Changes to building regulations to require new homes to achieve a maximum water usage of 105 litres a person a day and accelerated grey water reuse.

We must all return to stinking as the peasants we are viewed to be.

Fuck ’em.

But instead of simply passing offshore, increasing numbers are now diverting into San Francisco Bay and lingering for days or even weeks inside the crowded estuary – a shift scientists increasingly link to climate change. Warming temperatures and shifts in sea ice in the Arctic are disrupting the food web gray whales rely on during summer feeding months, according to a 2023 study in Science, leaving many malnourished during migration.

Well, mebbe. Perhaps it is the omnicause. Another view is possible. Given that I’ve between little and no knowledge in this field this is, of course, just rampant speculation from an ignorant.

But what if it’s just that there are more whales?

The effort comes amid an alarming rise in gray whale deaths in the bay. Last year, 21 dead gray whales were found in the wider Bay Area – the highest number in 25 years, according to the Marine Mammal Center – with at least 40% killed by ship strikes. At least 10 more have died in the Bay Area so far this year.

Scientists say those figures probably underestimate the true toll as many whale carcasses sink or are swept back out to sea before they are ever found or reported.

There are indeed many more whales than there used to be. This is good – I do not think that wiping species out is a good idea. But there’s not much natural predation upon live and adult whales. It’s not like wildebeest, where there’s always a lion or five ready to take the one that first stumbles. The natural end of a species without such predation is to die of illness or starvation – as happens to lions in fact, to polar bears. So, if there are more whales around there are more to be hit by ships, more to shelter in SF bay and, yes, we’d expect the marginal member of the species to be malnourished.

Yes, agreed, not hitting them with ships is probably a good idea. But the why there are so many more is because there are so many more.

Thjere is the more general observation that cetacean starndings seem to be rising in number. But then there are more cetaceans – this is good – in general too.

And?

Malé is one of the world’s most overcrowded cities, but it faces double pressure. As well as a growing population, the capital of the Maldives is also threatened by rising sea levels. Owing to climate breakdown, its living space is shrinking.

So the justification for a land reclamation project seemed clear. Take sand from elsewhere in the archipelago and use it to build up the land available for Malé’s people. What could go wrong? After all, it’s only sand, right?

Around the world, urban development and industry is using sand at a rate of 50bn tonnes a year, a figure that is expected to grow. But a new UN report warns that sand is being extracted faster than it can be replenished..

And, well, yes:

Sand and gravel resources are plentiful throughout the world. However, because of
environmental regulations, geographic distribution, and quality requirements for some uses, sand and gravel
extraction is uneconomical in some cases. The most important commercial sources of sand and gravel have been
glacial deposits, river channels, and river flood plains. Use of offshore deposits in the United States is mostly
restricted to beach erosion control and replenishment. Other countries routinely mine offshore deposits of aggregates
for onshore construction projects.

It is true that taking a specific bunch of sand from a specific place might not be all that good an idea. It could be worth more in place for example. But an overall and general shortage of sand? Jeebus, the stuff’s $10 a tonne in the US. That isn’t something in short supply.

Sanctions on American businessmen:

The foul men – they are mainly men – burning the planet should have access to as little of it as possible. Trump’s own name should not adorn the gates of his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, and his minion Lee Zeldin, who leads the ironically named Environment Protection Agency (EPA), should not be flown to Munich to lecture Europe about its destructive policies. No billionaire in Trump’s orbit should be able to ski in the Alps, nibble vintage jamón in Mallorca, be served champagne at the Cheval Blanc, or splash out upwards of €100,000 a week for luxury villas in the Algarve or the Côte d’Azur if they are complicit in an active ecocide that threatens the very existence of all these places.

As ever it’s the defiition of the claimed crime that is a problem:

Putin’s world has been constrained and shrunk by an international criminal court (ICC) warrant to face justice for alleged war crimes. But as the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s environment minister, Marie Nyange Ndambo, wrote in the Financial Times recently, “ecocide is a crime against humanity” and should be recognised as such. And make no mistake, ecocide is exactly what the Trump administration is perpetrating. In just the past few months alone, it has pursued the destruction of millions of acres of US east coast forests through logging and a million acres of what is known as the American Serengeti in Alaska to drilling; a seabed mining rampage across who even knows how many millions of miles of underwater ecosystem (despite the global moratorium imposed by 40 countries); and creating the conditions for the entire Gulf of Mexico to suffer the consequences of a second oil-drilling catastrophe like 2010’s Deepwater Horizon.

Do anything a Guardianista doesn’t like and go to prison, basically. Growing cows is ecocide, off you go etc…..

Acton summarised the results: “The main surprise was particle pollution in the fan areas around the stadium. For a spectator attending a full day of events, their daily exposure would be more than doubled.”

Particle pollution peaked before each stadium session, and reached a maximum just before the closing ceremony, when it was 10 times greater than other parts of the city.

The main source was not traffic but catering, which was dominantly fast-food that included burgers, hotdogs and stir-fries. Other research, including a study of the UK’s “eat out to help out” scheme, has shown particle pollution from catering and restaurants, mainly from frying.

Lesley Fitt, who was wearing a gas mask to make her point, said: “The dangers of glyphosate are well known.

I know there are many who claim such dangers but I’m unaware of any actual ones. You know, other than “Chemicals, nasty!” type statements.

“The UK’s glyphosate addiction has spiralled out of control,” said Nick Mole of Pesticide Action Network UK, a campaign group which carried out the analysis. “We know that glyphosate has links to a range of cancers and other life-threatening diseases. And that it damages the environment, polluting our waters and harming wildlife.

“The government urgently needs to commit to phase out – and ultimately ban – glyphosate and support farmers and local councils to adopt safe and sustainable alternatives.”

There are no alternatives that actually do the job. That’s why we use it.

“The primary use of glyphosate in the UK is it’s applied before the crop is planted to kill off all the weeds that are growing in the field,” said Helen Metcalfe, an agricultural ecologist at Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, Hertfordshire.

The turn toward less destructive “regenerative” farming is a key reason for the increase in the use of glyphosate, Metcalfe said. The alternative would be to plough the field, destroying the weeds. But that would also damage the soil “and that’s what farmers are trying to protect”, she said. “They’re trying to protect their soil, trying to prevent erosion, trying to build up carbon in the soil and all that good stuff. To be able to do regenerative farming well you need to apply glyphosate.”

Quite.

UK must double down on renewables as wars drive up energy costs, experts say
Fossil fuel price surge after US-Israeli attacks on Iran prompts calls to end dependence on ‘volatile’ energy source

Should we have cheaper but volatile or more expensive and less volatile?

It’s possible to make philosophic arguments for both or either. Myself I think I’d prefer cheaper yet volatile. I also think most people would if only the choie were explained to them in this manner. Which, of course, it never is.

A North Dakota judge has said he will order Greenpeace to pay damages expected to total $345m in connection with protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline from nearly a decade ago, a figure the environmental group contends it cannot pay.

In court papers filed Tuesday, Judge James Gion said he would sign an order requiring several Greenpeace entities to pay the judgment to pipeline company Energy Transfer. He set that amount at $345m last year in a decision that reduced a jury’s damages by about half, but his latest filing did not specify a final amount.

They caused damage to people. Why shouldn’t they have to pay?

And can populations of wild animals that have proliferated since the disaster be controlled in a way that makes coexistence with humans possible?

Evidence of the relentless march of the natural world is everywhere in Okuma and other communities located in the shadow of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.

The plant, which is now being decommissioned, suffered a triple meltdown after tsunami waves knocked out its backup power supply, sending large quantities of radiation into the atmosphere.

Gardens have become jungles and homes places of nocturnal refuge – and food – for the wild boar, raccoons and black bears that now have free rein to roam streets long deprived of artificial light.

‘Mazin‘ how fast nature returns when just left alone to do so.

Which does lead to a thought. We’ve people demanding that humanity restreat and leave vast areas just for wildlife. Hmm, well, OK. But given the way fertility rates are going this is going to happen over the next century and two anyway. We don;t actually have to “do” anything, just carry on having as few kiddies as we do and it will happen anyway.

Studies claiming to have revealed micro and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years.

However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked.

Gosh, now isn’t that a surprise?

One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study.

Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue.

Oh, my.

Or claims even:

US plan to exploit Venezuela’s oil could eat up 13% of carbon budget to keep 1.5C limit
Exclusive: ClimatePartner analysis shows how move would risk plunging Earth further into climate catastrophe

From which we can derive two claims.

1) US intervention in Venezuela is bad, see, because broiling Flipper.

2) Socialism in Venezuela crippled the oil industry so was good, see?

Masses of toxic litter pours from Rhine into North Sea each year, research finds
Citizen scientists help in University of Bonn study showing river carries up to 4,700 tonnes of ‘macrolitter’ annually

I dunno. Perhaps we can work it out?

The Rhine River has an average discharge (volume flow) of about 2,900 cubic meters per second (m³/s),

OK, a m3 is a tonne in weight. So the solids discharge in a year is 1x, or perhaps 1.5x, the water flow in a second. There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year therefore the solids are 1/31,536,000 of the total flow. Or, 0.00003%.

Is that a lot?

The Seagreen wind farm off Scotland’s east coast is squandering vast amounts of its power because there is not enough grid capacity to transport it to areas of the country where it is needed most.

This inability to handle surplus electricity led to 77pc of Seagreen’s total output going to waste last year, new accounts show, from a total of 114 turbines.

This is likely to have sparked hundreds of millions of pounds in so-called constraint payments for the wind farm, which is run by Scottish energy giant SSE and France’s TotalEnergies.

These payments are made under a government scheme to encourage renewables, aimed at guaranteeing cash for green power even if it cannot be used.

So cheap, renewables, so cheap, eh?

Saying, well, just upgrade the grid doesn’t solve this problem either. Because that’s an extra cost, meaning that renewables are not so cheap, right?

German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin.

Because, of course and as you know, if the lefties get their way then all of society will suffer such outages regularly. There is no possible way to run an industrial society with the more extreme demands about power generation after all…..

In the distance, you can see the outlines of the reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which is in the slow process of being decommissioned at a cost so far of $35bn (£26bn) almost 15 years since it suffered a triple meltdown after being struck by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and a 15m (49ft) tsunami.

That plant is borked, yes.

The plan has been controversial with campaigners because it ditches attempts to reduce Japan’s reliance on nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster, calling instead for a “maximisation” of nuclear power, which will account for about 20% of total energy output in 2040: about 14 reactors have been restarted and the assumption is that 30 will be in full operation by then.

The others aren’t. And, of course, the very worst that could possibly happen to a nuclear plant led to zero direct deaths. So, pretty safe then.

Pity Germany heard the close it all down bit and not the restart them all bit, eh?

Céüze ski resort is fast becoming one of these pollutants. The little wooden cabin at the bottom of the first button lift is shedding insulation. Ropes once used to mark out the piste hang in tatters and bits of plastic are falling off a pylon. The old sheds at each end of the ski lifts often still contain transformers, asbestos, motor oils and greases. Over time, these substances seep into the soil and water.

Corrosion and rust from metal structures left over from the second world war, such as anti-tank rails and metal spikes, have led to changes in plant species in the surrounding area, potentially offering a vision of what could happen if pylons are left to rust over the coming decades.

Abandoning the old ski huts etc to rot isn’t allowable. A rotting hut is pollution, ‘ye see?

Or, alternatively, decades worth of grift for some local group to slowly take apart the huts, eh?

Wonder which is the real motivation here?

The UK’s largest proposed datacentre is understating the scale of its planned water use, according to an analysis.

The first phase of construction for the hyperscale campus in Cambois in Northumberland has been given the go-ahead by the local council. The US operator QTS, which is developing the site, has promoted its “water-free” cooling system as proof of its sustainability.

But research published this week calls that claim into question. A study of the power and water footprints of AI production by the data scientist Alex de Vries-Gao highlights the underestimated scale of indirect, or embedded, water consumption caused by datacentre operations.

QTS estimates the two initial data halls will consume 2.3m litres of water annually, according to documents it submitted to Northumberland county council. Yet applying De Vries-Gao’s methodology to the electricity generation required for the site’s AI servers produces a figure more than 50 times higher, at 124m litres a year, according to analysis by Watershed Investigations and the Guardian.

How much water does a data centre use?

How much does the data centre use?

How much does the 3lectricity to feed the data centre use?

The two are, clearly, quite different. But if you’re against a data centre (seems to be the latest Greenpeace et al shriek) then you’ll use the one that has water flowing in and out of a nuclear power plant as being the same as that evaporated off a data dentre cooling system.

Lyin’ bastards.

By comparison, Scotland is still feudal in scale.

OK.

Scottish ministers point out that by getting landowners to tell the government before any large-scale sale, they can give community groups a chance to put together a rival bid. But many big estates lie in sparsely populated upland areas where communities lack purchasing power.

So, the land currently belongs to those who value it the most. The problem with this is?

Mr Wightman, a former Green MSP, argues persuasively that the pattern of ownership results from a free market in land which privileges those with the deepest pockets.

And?

His reasoning is that Scotland’s land should be regulated as a shared resource in the public interest.

Doesn’t anyone ever read Ostrom? Or even regard the history of land as a shared resource in the socialist and communist countries? The shit and pollution that results?