I don’t like DeSantis, but he’s doing a few good things. So far he beats the crap out of Scott.
Florida was having epic tidal blooms that were killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fish. Fish that were washing ashore and causing a horrible smell. And basically driving tourists away.
Tourism being Florida’s most important industry.
The problem being the main culprit of the tidal blooms was agricultural runoff.
So, yeah, there’s a lot of pressure to clean it up from everyone who isn’t a Florida farmer.
It’s not INCREDIBLY surprising that the governor of a state that derives so much of its GDP from tourism would take steps to protect the state’s beaches. But since he’s got an “R” next to his name… yeah, still surprising.
Anecdotally, I’ve spoken to a few people here in Virginia who had rented beach houses down in FL and pretty much had their vacation ruined due to the Red Tide or other algae-related issues. My current office-mate actually cut her family’s vacation short and headed home because the smell was so terrible that it made her nauseous; I think she successfully got her vacation insurance to refund half her money.
So I’m sure that a lot of pols down there are pretty worried about environmental issues.
RE-EDIT: Dang, Woolen_Horde beat me to the punch with basically the same rant. Screw it, I’m hitting “post”.
Nothing says climate change and ecological crisis than people going to the beach, smelling something so horrific that they don’t want to stay or potentially ever return again.
Yeah, baby. Let’s get this party started.
Sounds like Hollywood needs to rush out a disaster movie.
Actually a fairly heartwarming story (if a story about teenage girls fighting for the future can be called heartwarming), but I’m going to leave the buzzkill quote.
Despite the huge scale of recent environmental protests in many countries, they have not produced anywhere near the levels of political attention of smaller protests dominated by older people. The Yellow Vest protests in France, a movement dominated by middle-aged activists who rallied in opposition to a hike in the tax on gasoline, are still driving French politics.
A French minister skipped out on the December climate talks in Poland because of the protests, and French President Emmanuel Macron announced he would reverse the tax, which was introduced to combat global warming. But an environmental protest last week drew more than 80,000 people to the streets of Paris alone, larger than the latest Yellow Vest protest. But it received little attention in French media.
One might cynically wonder if there is some financial incentives at play.
After all the advertisers probably have some vested interest in the status quo, and if protests against environmental legislation are favored by your financiers, perhaps you are more likely to care about that?
Hmm… no, there can’t be anything to that.
Some good news for a change:
Landmark Australian ruling rejects coal mine over global warming
The case is the first time a mine has been refused in the country because of climate change.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00545-8
In his ruling, chief judge Brian Preston said the project should be refused because “the greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGs) of the coal mine and its product will increase global total concentrations of GHGs at a time when what is now urgently needed, in order to meet generally agreed climate targets, is a rapid and deep decrease in GHG emissions.”
No pithy comment comes to mind.
https://www.ippr.org/research/publications/age-of-environmental-breakdown
Mainstream political and policy debates have failed to recognise that human impacts on the environment have reached a critical stage, potentially eroding the conditions upon which socioeconomic stability is possible. Human-induced environmental change is occurring at an unprecedented scale and pace and the window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic outcomes in societies around the world is rapidly closing. These outcomes include economic instability, large-scale involuntary migration, conflict, famine and the potential collapse of social and economic systems. The historical disregard of environmental considerations in most areas of policy has been a catastrophic mistake.
In response, this paper argues that three shifts in understanding across political and policy communities are required: of the scale and pace of environmental breakdown, the implications for societies, and the subsequent need for transformative change.
- Scale and pace of environmental change – the age of environmental breakdown
Negative human impacts on the environment go ‘beyond’ climate change to encompass most other natural systems, driving a complex, dynamic process of environmental destabilisation that has reached critical levels. This destabilisation is occurring at speeds unprecedented in human history and, in some cases, over billions of years.
Global natural systems are undergoing destabilisation at an unprecedented scale.
• The 20 warmest years since records began in 1850 have been in the past 22
years, with the past four years the warmest ever recorded.
• Vertebrate populations have fallen by an average of 60 per cent since the 1970s.
• More than 75 per cent of the Earth’s land is substantially degraded.
Destabilisation of natural systems is occurring at unprecedented speed.
• Since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times,
extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires sevenfold.
• Extinction rates have increased to between 100–1,000 times the ‘background rate’ of extinction.
• Topsoil is now being lost 10 to 40 times faster than it is being replenished by natural processes, and, since the mid-20th century, 30 per cent of the world’s arable land has become unproductive due to erosion; 95 per cent of the Earth’s land areas could become degraded by 2050
stackexchange says
“With current farming technology as actually practiced in the United States about 10 acres of land (40,000 square meters) is used to produce food for each average person.”
A lot of people are going to become vegetarian in the future.
Not exactly climate change related, but it fits with the Earth is Doomed theme of the thread.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/11/health/insect-decline-study-intl/index.html
The Earth isn’t doomed. Not for billions of years. The Earth will still circle the sun until the sun becomes a red giant and swallows the Earth.
Now, living things on the Earth. Those are certainly fucked in the near-future.
Here’s an interesting story: A hugely rich American travels to Pakistan to hunt and kill a rare goat. He does the typical “hunter poses with animal he just shot” thing, and of course Twitter explodes.
But there is an interesting twist here. The hunter (apparently an attorney from Texas) paid $110,000 to hunt and kill the goat, and one of his stated goals in doing so was to… save the goats from extinction.
For decades, the population of markhors, which are native to the Himalayan ranges of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, has been dwindling, the result of local poaching for meat, deforestation and logging, military activities, competition with livestock and uncontrolled domestic trophy hunting for their splendid horns. By 2011, there were only an estimated 2,500 markhors left.
Several years ago, regional officials and conservationists began taking action to save them. India designated five sanctuaries for markhors in the mountainous border state of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan banned all local hunting but started allowing a small number of foreign hunters to shoot 12 male goats per season in “community conservation areas” in Gilgit and elsewhere.
Most of the funds are supposed to be distributed to the impoverished, isolated residents in the goats’ mountainous habitat areas, which get 80 percent of the fee as well as income as hunting guides and hosts — all extra incentive not to poach the markhors. Government wildlife agencies get 20 percent.
As a result, the markhor populace had rebounded enough by 2015 that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature upgraded the species from endangered to “near-threatened.” According to the conservationist website Green Global Travel, the comeback of the markhor is “one of the world’s great but little known conservation success stories.”
This is often the case in these situations. I still don’t understand why they need to murder an endangered animal to protect the population instead of just donating the money, but as you can tell I’m not a hunter so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Yeah. That was exactly my first thought.
We have to murder the goat and pose with it to save the goat. Well not that goat obviously. But other goats! Damn it, just let me have my ‘OMG I killed a goat!’ moment!
Fuck him. Next up, hunting down starving folks in Ethiopia for $5M each. The proceeds go to building wells and food distribution.
Eh. You can be upset with the fact that he’s hunting an animal, I guess that’s fine.
The fact remains that when the goats were protected from ALL hunting, local poachers were hunting them to extinction. When they became a valuable resource that the locals saw should be protected so that their lives would improve, the animals stopped being poached/trapped/whatever and started to thrive.
And yeah, I guess if you rounded up a bunch of billionaires and convinced them to give $1.32M to local tribes each year on the condition that the wild goat population would increase rather than decrease, you’d accomplish the same thing with no animals being killed. Seems like a tough row to hoe, but I wish you luck.
Say the billionaire pays the locals to take a picture. Wouldn’t that accomplish the same goal? The same argument is used to kill all manner of endangered wildlife (elephants, rhinos, big cats, giraffes, the list is varied and long) and to me it’s just a thin justification to kill things.
But the billionaire doesn’t get the unique thrill of killing an endangered animal if he just takes a picture. Can’t get that on a simple photo safari!