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Comments were made on 3/6/23.

The European Union reached an agreement Tuesday to ban the import of products including coffee, cocoa and soy in cases where they are deemed to contribute to deforestation. The draft law, which aims to ensure "deforestation-free supply chains" for the 27-nation EU, was hailed by environmental groups as "groundbreaking". It requires companies importing into the EU to guarantee products are not produced on land that suffered deforestation after December 31, 2020, and that they comply with all laws of the source country. The scope encompasses palm oil, cattle, soy, coffee, cocoa, timber and rubber as well as derived products such...

In less than two weeks, one of the world's biggest democracies will hold what many are describing as its most important presidential election in years. The US has been watching this vote in Brazil closely. Why? There aren't many issues that staunch opponents in Washington ever agree on. But they are united on this. "This is going to be one of the most intense and dramatic elections in the 21st Century," former Trump aide Steve Bannon tells the BBC. "The fate of Brazil's democracy and of US relations with Brazil will be decided in the upcoming election," says Senator Patrick...

Deforestation, Poaching, and White People Created the Man-Eater of Champawat In the first decade of the 20th century, the most prolific serial killer of human life the world has ever seen stalked the foothills of the Himalayas. A serial killer that was not merely content to kidnap victims at night and dismember their bodies, but also insisted on eating their flesh. A serial killer that, for the better part of ten years, eluded police, bounty hunters, assassins, and even an entire regiment of Nepalese Gurkhas. A serial killer that happened to be a Royal Bengal tiger. Specifically, a tiger known...

<p>A major nickel mine in a Philippines rainforest has continued to expand, mowing down acres of trees as global demand for minerals essential for electric vehicle manufacturing surges.</p><p>The Rio Tuba mine in the region of Palawan supplies an important mineral for electric vehicle batteries in Tesla and Toyota cars, but the mine is nearing an expansion that would cause it to grow from four square miles to 14 square miles, according to an NBC News investigation. The growth of the mine would cause massive deforestation of the land which environmentalists warn could destroy the area’s ecosystem.</p>

Drought has dried up what was Mexico’s second-biggest lake, destroying a once thriving fishing economy in Michoacán. The scale of the problem? Lake Cuitzeo should have 800 million cubic meters of water, but today it doesn’t even have 200. Now, the more than 300-square-kilometer reservoir has become a cemetery for fishing boats and a shortcut for motorists to reach Morelia, the state capital of Michoacán. The water disappearance also creates frequent and prolonged dust clouds that sometimes reach nearby communities, affecting health of residents, as well as causing allergies, respiratory illnesses and gastrointestinal complications from the bacteria they transport. Everything...

My address to the Colorado Independent Cattlemen’s Association I’m not a cattleman and I’m not going to pretend I know everything you are facing. But I do know that the major weapon being used against your industry is the misnamed control devise called Sustainable Development. I know why and I know who the players are. I hope I can leave you today with some ideas on how to fight them. To begin, let’s set the terms and make one thing very clear. The use of the word sustainable may sound like a comfortable term, not threatening. After all, you, your...

Two prototypes and new partnerships have brought Danish brewing giant Carlsberg a step closer to releasing a paper beer bottle. Carlsberg said in a press release that it was close to selling beer in paper bottles, in part to the partnership. Having worked on development of sustainable packaging since 2015, the company is scheduled to present two prototype paper bottles in Copenhagen on Friday. […] A “paper bottle union” between Carlsberg, The Paper Bottle Company (Paboco) and three other global companies — Coca-Cola, L’Oréal and The Absolut Company — is driving the development, according to the Danish brewery. …

Brasília (AFP) - Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro suggested Friday that people "poop every other day" as a way to save the environment, after he came under fire for a surge in deforestation of the Amazon since he came to power. The far-right leader offered this idea in response to a journalist's question as to whether it was possible to simultaneously spur economic growth, feed the world's hungry and also preserve the environment. "It's enough to eat a little less. You talk about environmental pollution. It's enough to poop every other day. That will be better for the whole world," said...

A surprising scientific study released Thursday presents troubling news about the enormous forests of the planet’s tropical midsection — suggesting that they are releasing hundreds of millions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere, rather than storing it in the trunks of trees and other vegetation. The results contradict prior work in suggesting that these forests — including the Amazon rain forest - have become another net addition to the climate change problem. However, the accounting also implies that if the current losses could be reversed, the forests could also rapidly transform into a powerful climate change solution. “The losses...

The trees that shade, cool and feed people from Ventura County to the Mexican border are dying so fast that within a few years it’s possible the region will look, feel, sound and smell much less pleasant than it does now.“We’re witnessing a transition to a post-oasis landscape in Southern California,” says Greg McPherson, a supervisory research forester with the U.S. Forest Service who has been studying what he and others call an unprecedented die-off of the trees greening Southern California’s parks, campuses and yards. Botanists in recent years have documented insect and disease infestations as they’ve hop-scotched about the...

The global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere. We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.39 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.61 trillion in temperate regions. Biome-level trends in tree density demonstrate the importance of climate and topography in controlling local tree densities at finer scales, as well...

Every so often you will see articles warning that some species is going extinct. And usually it's not really a species -- you never hear about "leopards" going extinct, usually it's "purple dotted left handed bisexual Nepalese leopards" or some subvariety.  We are assured they are going extinct because fewer have been seen recently. But the Earth is so big, how can we really be sure that some subspecies is going extinct just because we see fewer of them? After all, only three percent of the land mass of the Earth is urbanized. Animals could easily be hidden in...

It seems that scientists were a little off in calculating the number of trees on the planet. You remember trees: they turn CO2 into oxygen and water. In fact, if you buy a “carbon credit,” you are paying to plant trees to buy an indulgence for your private jet travel -- just like Al Gore and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supposedly do. Well, all those calculations of doom over purported CO2-caused global warming may be a little more unsettled. The Wall Street Journal reports:

There are just over three trillion trees in the world, a figure that dwarfs previous estimates, according to the most comprehensive census yet of global forestation. Using satellite imagery as well as ground-based measurements from around the world, a team led by researchers at Yale University created the first globally comprehensive map of tree density. Their findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. A previous study that drew on satellite imagery estimated that the total number of trees was around 400 billion. The new estimate of 3.04 trillion is multiple times that number, bringing the ratio of trees...

The global map of tree density at the square-kilometer pixel scale. Credit: Crowther, et al A new Yale-led study estimates that there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, about seven and a half times more than some previous estimates. But the total number of trees has plummeted by roughly 46 percent since the start of human civilization, the study estimates. Using a combination of satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies, the international team of researchers was able to map tree populations worldwide at the square-kilometer level. Their results, published in the journal Nature, provide the most comprehensive...

Not long ago, quinoa was just an obscure Peruvian grain you could only buy in wholefood shops. We struggled to pronounce it (it's keen-wa, not qui-no-a), yet it was feted by food lovers as a novel addition to the familiar ranks of couscous and rice. Dieticians clucked over quinoa approvingly because it ticked the low-fat box and fitted in with government healthy eating advice to "base your meals on starchy foods". Adventurous eaters liked its slightly bitter taste and the little white curls that formed around the grains. Vegans embraced quinoa as a credibly nutritious substitute for meat. Unusual among...

Humans were tampering with nature long before the Industrial Revolution’s steam and internal combustion engines arrived on the scene. The invention of agriculture around 8,000 years ago, some argue, significantly changed ecosystems as it spread around the globe. Although scientists are only just beginning to understand how these ancient alterations shaped our world today, a new study in Scientific Reports suggests that millennium-old development along the Danube River in Eastern Europe significantly changed the Black Sea ecosystem and helped create the lush Danube Delta in Romania and Ukraine. “My team had a big surprise,” said Liviu Giosan, a geologist at...

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University. “We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident...

Dear Barbie, it’s over, from Ken. Last Tuesday, the Greenpeace environmentalist organization staged a protest outside of Mattel Inc.’s head office in El Segundo, California near Los Angeles. Activists hung a giant poster with a picture of a sad Ken doll with the message: “Barbie, it’s over. I don’t date girls that are into deforestation.” Although the California protest was expected to be much more powerful and theatrical, it did elscalate enough for firefighters to arrive and police officers to make 10 arrests. One of the people arrested was a woman by the name of Elise Nabors, who was dressed...