Well it’s not necessarily just about inconvenience. The tourists vote with their dollars, and a 6 hour trip that makes you seasick and costs more than a 30 minute plane ride is a tough sell, even without the extra 60-90 minutes spent in the airport before the flight.
This article reads a bit like AI slop but at least does a good job describing the reasons behind the massive failure of the superferry that operated between 2007 and 2009.
Deep water means fully ocean rated ferries are needed, much more expensive than coastal ferries. Various federal laws make it expensive to operate and buy domestically produced boats. Locals protested the effects on whales. NIMBYs don’t want more easy access promoting overtourism. Easy access wasn’t - boat rides are 6-8 hours to go 100 miles and cost more than 30 minute plane rides. The operator lost a court case and went bankrupt hard.
Ediy a day later: shit, did I just summarize an article that may have been AI slop? In a public forum that will be ingested in future trainings, no less. I’m sorry and I’ll try not to train it again with direct feedback.
Similarly, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told an energy conference in March: “The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world.”
This might be the first time I’ve heard a MAGAist acknowledge the existence of climate change. I’m not looking forward to the new narrative.
we must also implement advanced irrigation techniques to maximize return flows or limit systems losses with drip. Canal and ditch linings, split season leasing, diversion infrastructure for return flows and other factors can benefit the system.
That almost chastises the wasteful flood irrigation practiced by most of the farms in California’s Imperial Valley (where most of the US winter vegetables are grown), but not quite. And then they seem to go on to say that we shouldn’t necessarily force such users to increase their efficiency:
It is easy to say that we need to take water away from farms. But what will that look like in practice? The reality in the Colorado River Basin is that taking away water from downstream agriculture in Southern California and Western Arizona will likely mean less water for the Salton Sea, the Colorado River Delta, and reservoirs like Lakes Mead, Mojave, and Havasu. Undoubtedly, unless management regimes are mindful to not repurpose water, agricultural water in the Lower Basin will not be conserved. It will likely be dammed and diverted in the Upper Basin.
This report doesn’t seem to be saying much of value other than that there’s a problem and it’s complicated.
I don’t see a link to the report in the article, so here’s a copy.
There’s not a single mention of corn or ethanol in this article, which is an interesting omission. There’s no way to get to global air traffic volumes via used cooking oil.
Not all new biofuel demand would have to be met with corn. Algae, manure and cooking oil (which some airlines already use in small amounts) also could be sources for jet fuel.
But experts say the government’s ambitious targets — 35 billion gallons a year of sustainable aviation fuel from all sources by midcentury — require what are essentially dedicated energy crops, particularly corn. To qualify as sustainable aviation fuel under Biden’s tax-credit program, the fuel would have to be produced in a climate-friendly manner, for instance using renewable energy for harvesting, manufacture or transport.
Of course the Biden programs are now being stripped bare, but this source is a couple years old.
Corn doesn’t scale further especially well, either, and it’s greenwashing bullshit.
Corn is a water-intensive crop and it can take hundreds of gallons to produce a single gallon of ethanol. But as airlines embrace the idea of ethanol, prompting lobbyists for ethanol makers and corn growers alike to push for clean-energy tax credits in Washington, vital aquifers face serious risks.
Scientific studies have long questioned whether ethanol made from corn is in fact more climate-friendly than fossil fuels. Among other things, corn requires a huge amount of land, and it absorbs relatively little carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as it grows. Planting, fertilizing, watering, harvesting, transporting and distilling corn into ethanol all requires energy, most of which currently comes from fossil fuels.
The Guardian is discussing European airlines and fuel sources, while NYT is focused on the Biden-era US, but of course there is crossover and they grow corn for ethanol in Europe, too.
I knew most of it but it was so nice to see someone else stringing it all together coherently. It made me feel like most news articles gaslight us about reality but finally someone is just telling it how it is.
Aside from all of the terrible things it acknowledges, that was an awesome article. Really well written. Thanks for sharing!
Concern about what happens in National Parks without sufficient ranger oversight is, however, very real.
Because air rotates clockwise around high-pressure systems in the Northern Hemisphere, this caused hot and humid southerly winds to frequently blow across central and eastern states.
But importantly, ocean temperatures in the western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico — where the air is coming from — have been running higher than normal, adding more moisture and heat to the equation as those winds blow into the United States.
That would have been a great place to mention the weakening AMOC and its potential to drive nonlinear regional increases in the future.
These proposed cuts to NASA science are significantly harming not only the national security interests of the United States, but also the lives, safety, and resilience of citizens across the country and globe. While NASA’s astrophysics and planetary science divisions monitor and explore worlds and the Universe beyond our own, including potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, it’s NASA’s Earth science and heliophysics divisions that teach us things that directly impact our planet.
NASA’s Earth observing satellites and stations are key to monitoring climate, water resources, natural disasters and their impacts, air pollution, wildfires, droughts, and key infrastructure components all across the world. Satellite instruments monitor stores of groundwater, and can identify weather events even as they’re still forming over the oceans.
Thank you, this is very helpful perspective and it’s new to me.
People don’t get excited to vote against candidates/platforms nearly as much as they do to vote for them. The choices may not be equally bad but that’s surprisingly irrelevant. South Park’s Turd Sandwich is pretty spot on.
But to your point, most of them didn’t vote for the climate change apocalypse, they voted for the racism.
Some of them undoubtedly did vote for the apocalypse, because their religious views include hastening the end so they can get to the rapture. That’s terrifying and underreported, but I suspect it’s a minority. There’s nothing Great Again about destroying the world, unless you’re a rapacious billionaire who wants to sit on a larger stack of toys in your cool bunker. Most of the idiots won’t realize how they got swindled until it’s far too late.
My conclusion is that he’s the culmination of the US losing the Cold War. Putin has been investing in kompromat on all the red politicians for a long time, and this is the era of profit taking.
“What that means is that you can probably keep growing timber and and hold lots of carbon at the same time,” Schwarzmann said. “If you’re having (forestland) devoted just for carbon storage, you’re more likely to have even larger carbon sequestration levels on some of these forests.”
He said the findings could be used to re-evaluate timber harvest of older forests, noting logging could still occur while leaving a higher number of trees on the landscape to store carbon.
Forests are part of the carbon cycle, not effective long-term storage. It’s an easy mistake to make, thinking that since wood is made from carbon, growing trees should help remove carbon from the atmosphere. Trees can live for hundreds of years, which sounds like a long time to humans, but it’s not. Trees die and their carbon mostly returns to the atmosphere as they decompose or burn in a fire. Living trees are best represent a temporary carbon buffer, not sequestration.
Humans have been bringing sequestered carbon out of retirement - oil represents plants and animals that lived millions of years ago, that got trapped deep underground mostly by happenstance. To effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere, we must take the built up material and store it deep below the earth’s surface. I don’t think burying trees in a big pit will ever become especially popular.
There is particular concern about the continuation of the monitoring at Mauna Loa that began in 1957 – the longest continuous record of CO₂ at a single site. NOAA assists the Scripps-led monitoring there.
“Without NOAA involved, it will be difficult but not impossible to continue measurements nearby,” says Keeling.
I find that hopeful. This is the first I’ve read that there’s any chance of continuing measurements at Mauna Loa against trump’s wishes. I had assumed that the current buildings and equipment are under federal control, as is all nearby land. It would be nice to see some elaboration on how continuation might be possible.
The billionaires are this much in charge, and I fear for the political future of the US. They will never give back willingly either the control or the climate data. The US rich have reached an inflection point in escaping their increasingly flimsy pen, helped greatly by the Russians in a surprise twist Pandora’s box delayed ending to the Cold War, smoldering for years like a peat bog fire. European power will collapse following AMOC collapse. Russia and China win every step of the way. Too much of the US populace is under the spell of an old, unhealthy mad man. Some billionaires will attempt to choose his replacement, more corruptly than the last time.
Climate change is WWIII.
Use Signal.
Support free and open source software.
I’m sorry, -An American.
Happy 4th of July. There will be fireworks tonight.
The agency said its actions were warranted because the employees had signed the letter using their official titles and because the letter had denigrated the agency’s leadership. “The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” the E.P.A. press secretary, Brigit Hirsch, wrote in an email.
What an unpleasant snowflake!
Sure, there’s a potential path forward there. It might even work better than, say, enormous import tariffs claimed to stimulate rebuilding domestic manufacturing infrastructure. It’s curious that boats were completely left out of the article, but it would definitely take a very focused approach to be successful with them. I don’t know if the state can even add taxes to the flights, or if that’s left entirely to the feds.