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Which Is the World’s Most Vegan City?

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Since Greggs announced a new vegan alternative to its meaty sausage roll at the start of the year, the Quorn pastries have “flown off the shelves”, the bakery chain says, selling hundreds of thousands in the first week alone.

Photo: pixabay

Its success is a testament to both a remarkable PR stunt and the seemingly unstoppable rise of veganism, which, according to a new study, has been led by Bristol.

The online food blog Chef’s Pencil used Google Trends data to look at the most popular cities for vegan-related searches, which were at record levels last year, rising 11% from 2017 and 35% from 2016.

According to Google Trends, the interest level around the world for all things vegan – restaurants, recipes, dog food – was highest in Bristol, followed by Portland, Edinburgh, Vancouver and Seattle. Six of the top 20 cities were in the US, with European and Australian cities also showing a strong interest in going meat-free.

Google searches won’t give you an accurate idea of how many people commit to vegan diets or buy vegan products, but Chef’s Pencil says the analysis does tell you there “is an intent in taking action about your diet” in these cities.

“In Bristol there is a vibrant local community,” says a spokesperson from Chef’s Pencil, “and having a core community of vegans plays a huge role because they’re so active and loud. If you have a vegan friend you will know it.”Bristol has long been seen as place for all things green and liberal. It’s home to the Viva! animal rights campaigning group. Three out of four Bristol MPs say they are vegan or veggie. And the online community Vegan Bristol has a long, thorough list of places that are meat-free.

Portland’s vegan voice is equally loud. Paul McCartney and the animal rights campaign group Peta named it the most vegan-friendly city in 2016, even handing the mayor a bouquet of vegetables. Portland has a vegan summer camp, a venue for punk music that also promotes veganism, a vegan shopping mall and even a vegan strip club.

The rise of veganism has undoubtedly been led by city dwellers. A 2016 UK survey by the Vegan enviroSociety found veganism was significantly more popular in urban areas rather than rural places. Two-thirds of those surveyed who said they didn’t eat meat and avoided dairy products lived in urban and suburban Britain.

This is partly due to a greater ease of access to vegan options, according to Sam Calvert from the Vegan Society. A vegan for 24 years, she remembers a lot of friends in previous years saying it would be “too hard” to eat out and find suitable alternatives. With more choices available now, people are more likely to make that leap.

“The typical vegan would be young and female, and you’re more likely to find young people in cities,” she says. “As with all communities it’s easier to find more people of the same in cities. There are lots of vegan meet-up groups, which tend to be in cities.”

Other cities have seen the veggie lifestyle promoted from a political level, mainly for environmental reasons and as a push towards sustainability. In 2016 Barcelona declared itself vegan- and vegetarian-friendly, encouraging residents to embrace a meat-free diet by promoting meat-free Mondays and creating a vegetarian guide to the city.

That same year Turin’s new mayor declared the Italian city to be the world’s first “vegan city”.

“The promotion of vegan and vegetarian diets is a fundamental act in safeguarding our environment, the health of our citizens and the welfare of our animals,” the city said in a statement. It was intended as programme to raise awareness of sustainability and alternatives to meat, but was unsurprisingly divisive.

If being a true “vegan city” involved banning the sale of meat or dairy products, then the Gujarat town of Palitana would be on the list. A hunger strike by Jain monks in 2014 led to the local government declaring the city and its holy sites to be meat-free zones.

Interestingly, while India is viewed by the rest of the world as a predominantly vegetarian country, research last year from the US-basedanthropologist Balmurli Natrajan and the India-based economist Suraj Jacob suggested only about 20% of India’s population are vegetarian – lower than official statistics suggest. The Indian cities with the highest proportion of people with vegetarian diets are Indore with 49%, Meerut with 36% and Delhi with 30%.

Most lists of vegetarian- or vegan-friendly cities are based on the number of veggie restaurants or cafes in a place rather than the amount of people interested in practising veganism.

According to Happy Cow, a crowdsourced list of veggie and vegan restaurants, London is the most vegan-friendly city in the world. It was the first on the site to surpass 100 completely vegan restaurants, in 2017, and currently has 110 vegan eateries in a five-mile radius within the city. It is closely followed by Berlin, with 65 vegan restaurants within a five-mile radius.

Source: Guardian

Hitachi Scraps £16bn Nuclear Power Station in Wales

Foto-ilustracija: Unsplash

Japanese giant unable to agree deal with UK as fears grow for Anglesey atomic plant.

Source: Guardian

U.S. Oil and Gas Industry Is Drilling Us Towards Climate Disaster

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As the 116th Congress commences, in the wake of dire reports from climate scientists, the debate over U.S. climate policies has taken a welcome turn towards bold solutions. Spurred on by grassroots pressure from Indigenous communities, the youth-led Sunrise Movement and communities from coast to coast fighting fossil fuel infrastructure, Capitol Hill is alive once again with policy proposals that edge towards the scale required to address the crisis we’re in.

A new study released Wednesday by Oil Change International and 17 partner organizations makes it clear that managing a rapid and equitable decline of U.S. fossil fuel production must be a core component of any comprehensive climate policy.

Here’s a breakdown of what we find in the report:

Existing Fossil Fuel Projects Are Too Much Already

Previous analysis of the global disconnect between fossil fuel industry plans and climate goals underlies our U.S. report. Existing oil and gas fields and coal mines around the world already contain enough carbon to push the world beyond the goals of the Paris agreement—and well beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) of temperature rise (Figure 1). There is already no room for new fossil fuel development anywhere in the world. Meeting the Paris agreement goals requires stopping new exploration and extraction projects and managing the decline of the fossil fuel industry over the next few decades.

The U.S., as one of the world’s largest extractors and emitters of fossil fuels—and as a wealthy country with the resources to manage a rapid and just transition to renewable energy—should be moving first and fastest to phase out fossil fuel production. Yet …

Photo: Pixabay

 U.S. Oil and Gas Extraction Is Rapidly Expanding

Our analysis shows that the U.S. is set to drive nearly 60 percent of global growth in oil and gas supply between now and 2030—expanding production by four times the amount of any other country (Figure 4). By contrast, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s recent Special Report on 1.5°C of Global Warming warns that the world needs to cut carbon emissions nearly in half by 2030 to keep warming within that limit.

Between 2018 and 2050—the time span over which fossil fuel emissions should be zeroing out—new U.S. drilling projects could unleash 120 billion tons of new carbon pollution (Figure 5). If left unchecked, this would amount to the world’s largest burst of new carbon emissions from oil and gas development through 2050. It would be equivalent to the lifetime carbon pollution of nearly 1,000 average U.S. coal-fired power plants.

To summarize: At precisely the time when the world must rapidly decarbonize to avoid climate disaster, the U.S. is moving further and faster than any other country to expand oil and gas extraction.

If not stopped, this continued drilling spree would be a disaster not only for the climate but for communities on its front lines. Our analysis indicates that communities living atop and around the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico and the Appalachian Basin underlying Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia face the biggest onslaught of new drilling (Figure 9).

Upwards of 90 percent of the projected drilling expansion analyzed in our report would depend on fracking. This would bring with it more air and water pollution, health risks, heavy trucks taking over roadways and growing competition for water. It would mean more dangerous pipelines threatening the sovereign land and water sources of Indigenous peoples. It would mean more communities being entangled in a volatile industry that has no viable future on a livable planet.

What Does Real Climate Leadership Require?

Over the past decade plus, community-led movements have come together across North America to fight new pipelines, fracking rigs, export terminals and, increasingly, petrochemical plants. They’ve won crucial victories: Case in point, while still being pushed by its Canadian backers and the Trump administration, the Keystone XL pipeline still isn’t built.

But too few U.S. politicians have used their own power to stop this spread of fossil fuel infrastructure and extraction. This is a major reason the oil and gas industry is in a position to drill us towards climate disaster. The industry is riding high off of decades of compounding policy decisions to lease federal and state lands and waters for extraction, to approve permits for new wells, pipelines and other infrastructure, to leave fracking woefully unregulated, to maintain billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies, and, at the end of 2015, to lift the four-decade-long ban on crude oil exports.

The U.S. is now the world’s largest oil and gas producer and, increasingly, dumping our excess oil and gas into global markets, which drives down prices and undermines policies aimed at reducing demand for fossil fuels.

This report should be a wake-up call for elected officials and policymakers at all levels of U.S. government who consider themselves to be climate leaders. Real climate leadership requires decisively saying “no” to further expansion of the fossil fuel industry while enthusiastically saying “yes” to a renewable energy transition on the pace and scale of a Green New Deal.

Every decision around a new fossil fuel lease, permit, subsidy or setback is an opportunity for U.S. politicians to stop fossil fuel expansion and champion a just transition to an economy powered by clean energy. The U.S. fossil fuel industry is gearing up to swing a giant wrecking ball through global climate goals. U.S. politicians cannot afford to stand by and let them … or worse yet, help swing it.

Source: Eco Watch

2018 Was the Hottest Year Ever Recorded for Our Oceans

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The year 2018 was the hottest year for the planet’s oceans ever since record-keeping began in 1958, according to a worrisome new study from international scientists.

The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, noted that the five warmest years for our oceans were the last five years—2018, 2017, 2015, 2016 and 2014 (in order of decreasing ocean heat content).

Photo: Pixabay

This increase in ocean heat is “incontrovertible proof that the Earth is warming,” the study states.

To illustrate, the heat increase from 2017 to 2018 alone is roughly 388 times more than China’s total electricity generation in 2017, according to a press release of the study.

“The new data, together with a rich body of literature, serve as an additional warning to both the government and the general public that we are experiencing inevitable global warming,” lead author Lijing Cheng, an oceanographer from the Beijing’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in the release.

A slew of recent scientific reports have sounded the alarm on our warming oceans. The same group of scientists behind the current study revealed in Science last week that the world’s oceans are warming about 40 percent faster than previously thought.

Also this month, a different team of scientists showed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesthat the average heating of the oceans in the last 150 years was equivalent to the dropping of 1.5 atomic bombs per second.

Earth’s seas, which absorb more than 90 percent of the extra solar energy trapped by greenhouse gasses, are vital to our existence. This continued ocean warming has potentially devastating consequences, including sea level rise, stronger and wetter storms and melting polar ice. Marine life, especially coral reefs, are also vulnerable.

“The ocean and global warming have already taken place and caused serious damage and losses to both the economy and society,” Cheng said in the press release.

The researchers, who predict that ocean heat will continue to rise, urged immediate action to slow this alarming trend.

Source: Eco Watch

Production Is Love in the Long Run

Fotografija: Eko sistem(privatna arhiva)

Novi Sad-based company “Eko-sistem” creates new products from waste tires: mats for playgrounds, speed bumps, wheels for bins and containers. The possibilities are not exhausted. The recycled tire can change its shape and obtain new “life chance” through numerous other products. By applying new technologies, “Eko-sistem” closes the circle; thus, waste can be reused, while resources are being saved, and the environment is being protected from pollution.

Photography: Eko sistem(private archive)

This young company, which was registered in 2015 as a branch of a renowned company “Plava Frajla”, has made a breakthrough with its products on the European market in a short time. They are proud to say that they cover more than half of the market of the former Yugoslavia. Natasa Bozicevic Stankovski, the responsible person for waste management in “Eko-sistem”, says that the success is even greater when taken into consideration that they have beenoperating only for three years, and regular orders from the European countries confirm that the quality of domestic products of waste tires does not lag behind the well-known European producers in this field.

Photography: Eko sistem(private archive)

“Our work is all about great passion. We are in love with the process of making a product. We are constantly trying to find a way to be faster and better. We also research which machines we should purchase to improve our production. We work in three shifts without shutting down the machines, 24/7 throughout the year.” Giving the fact that this production process is preceded by recycling, the company is registered as an operator of specific waste – a recycler, which means that it has all the necessary permits following the legal regulations in Serbia, they purchase tires from legal and natural persons.

The “Eko-sistem” products represent one of the best examples of the circular economy applied in Serbia

Read the whole article in the new issue of the Energy portal Magazine on CIRCULAR ECONOMY, September-November 2018

Insect Collapse: ‘We Are Destroying Our Life Support Systems’

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Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished.

“We knew that something was amiss in the first couple days,” said Brad Lister. “We were driving into the forest and at the same time both Andres and I said: ‘Where are all the birds?’ There was nothing.”

His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by far is global warming.

“It was just astonishing,” Lister said. “Before, both the sticky ground plates and canopy plates would be covered with insects. You’d be there for hours picking them off the plates at night. But now the plates would come down after 12 hours in the tropical forest with a couple of lonely insects trapped or none at all.”

“It was a true collapse of the insect populations in that rainforest,” he said. “We began to realise this is terrible – a very, very disturbing result.”

Earth’s bugs outweigh humans 17 times over and are such a fundamental foundation of the food chain that scientists say a crash in insect numbers risks “ecological Armageddon”. When Lister’s study was published in October, one expert called the findings “hyper-alarming”.

The Puerto Rico work is one of just a handful of studies assessing this vital issue, but those that do exist are deeply worrying. Flying insect numbers in Germany’s natural reserves have plunged 75% in just 25 years. The virtual disappearance of birds in an Australian eucalyptus forest was blamed on a lack of insects caused by drought and heat. Lister and his colleague Andrés García also found that insect numbers in a dry forest in Mexico had fallen 80% since the 1980s.

“We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet,” Lister said. “It is just horrifying to watch us decimate the natural world like this.”

It was not insects that drew Lister to the Luquillo rainforest for the first time in the mid-1970s. “I was interested in competition among the anoles lizards,” he said. “They’re the most diverse group of vertebrates in the world and even by that time had become a paradigm for ecology and evolutionary studies.”

The forest immediately captivated Lister, a lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic University in the US. “It was and still is the most beautiful forest I have ever been in. It’s almost enchanted. There’s the lush verdant forest and cascading waterfalls, and along the roadsides there are carpets of multicoloured flowers. It’s a phantasmagoric landscape.”

It was important to measure insect numbers, as these are the lizards’ main food, but at the time he thought nothing more of it. Returning to the national park decades later, however, the difference was startling.

“One of the things I noticed in the forest was a lack of butterflies,” he said. “They used to be all along the roadside, especially after the rain stopped, hundreds upon hundreds of them. But we couldn’t see one butterfly.”

Since Lister’s first visits to Luquillo, other scientists had predicted that tropical insects, having evolved in a very stable climate, would be much more sensitive to climate warming. “If you go a little bit past the thermal optimum for tropical insects, their fitness just plummets,” he said.

As the data came in, the predictions were confirmed in startling fashion. “The number of hot spells, temperatures above 29C, have increased tremendously,” he said. “It went from zero in the 1970s up to something like 44% of the days.” Factors important elsewhere in the world, such as destruction of habitat and pesticide use, could not explain the plummeting insect populations in Luquillo, which has long been a protected area.

Data on other animals that feed on bugs backed up the findings. “The frogs and birds had also declined simultaneously by about 50% to 65%,” Lister said. The population of one dazzling green bird that eats almost nothing but insects, the Puerto Rican tody, dropped by 90%.

Lister calls these impacts a “bottom-up trophic cascade”, in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain.

“I don’t think most people have a systems view of the natural world,” he said. “But it’s all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect.”

To understand the global scale of an insect collapse that has so far only been glimpsed, Lister says, there is an urgent need for much more research in many more habitats. “More data, that is my mantra,” he said.

The problem is that there were very few studies of insect numbers in past decades to serve as a baseline, but Lister is undeterred: “There’s no time like the present to start asking what’s going on.”

Source: The Guardian

Antarctic Melting Increased 6x in the Past 40 Years

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The results of what researchers say is the longest-running study of Antarctica’s ice mass have been published, and they are dramatic. Yearly ice loss has increased by a factor of six in the past 40 years, contributing more than half an inch to global sea level rise, a University of California, Irvine (UCI) press release reported. The researchers also observed consistent ice loss from East Antarctica, which boasts the world’s largest ice sheet and has traditionally been assumed to be more stable.

Photo: Pixabay

 “The places undergoing changes in Antarctica are not limited to just a couple places,” lead author and UCI chair of earth system science Eric Rignot told The Washington Post. “They seem to be more extensive than what we thought. That, to me, seems to be reason for concern.”

Scientists have estimated that sea levels could rise by three feet by 2100 if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and curb climate change, but faster melting from Antarctica could further accelerate the pace of sea level rise.

The research, undertaken by scientists at UCI, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Netherlands’ Utrecht University, was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To arrive at their conclusions, the glaciologists looked at 40 years of high-resolution aerial photographs and satellite images covering 18 Antarctic regions, according to the UCI press release.

They found that Antarctica lost 40 gigatons of ice a year from 1979 to 1990. This jumped to about 252 gigatons a year between 2009 and 2017. The pace of melting also accelerated. From 1979 to 2001, it averaged 48 gigatons a year every decade. From 2001 to 2017, that rate increased a full 280 percent to 134 gigatons per year per decade.

Net ice loss occurs when snowfall does not equal the outward flow of glaciers and ice shelves. When that happens, sea levels rise, The Washington Post explained. West Antarctica, which has enough ice to raise oceans 17.32 feet, is still the most unstable section. The entire region is now losing 159 billion tons of ice each year.

But East Antarctica, which could contribute almost 170 feet to sea level rise, is also losing ice. Its Dennan glacier, for example, has lost around 200 billion tons worth. Other vulnerable glaciers include Dibble, Frost, Holmes and the Cook and Ninnis glaciers, which frame the Wilkes Subglacial Basin.

“The Wilkes Land sector of East Antarctica has, overall, always been an important participant in the mass loss, even as far back as the 1980s, as our research has shown,” Rignot said in the press release. “This region is probably more sensitive to climate [change] than has traditionally been assumed, and that’s important to know, because it holds even more ice than West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula together.”

For every 360 billion tons of ice lost, sea levels rise by around one millimeter, The Washington Post reported. Overall, Antarctica has the potential to contribute 187.66 feet to sea level rise.

Source: Eco Watch

Wind and Solar Are the Final Nails in Coal’s Coffin

Foto-ilustracija: Pixabay

During the 2016 campaign and in various postelection rallies, President Trump promised to save America’s flagging coal industry and put the nation’s coal miners “back to work.” While Trump continues to labor under the delusion that easing emissions standards will somehow resuscitate the coal industry, his administration’s own numbers tell a different story. In fact, more U.S. coal plants have been deactivated in the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency than were taken offline during President Obama’s entire first term. Domestic coal use in 2018 was also the lowest it’s been since Jimmy Carter was in office.

Photo-illustration: Pixabay

Cheap natural gas is one reason for coal’s demise, but the more interesting—and much more important—part of the story is the role that renewables, specifically wind and solar, are playing in the protracted fade-out of our dirtiest fuel. As for job creation, the 2018 U.S. Energy and Employment Report found that there are three times as many Americans now working in clean energy jobs as there are in the fossil fuel industry. For quite some time, conventional wisdom has held that renewables pose a serious threat to the future of coal. Now it seems clear the future has arrived.

Just ask the people in my home state of Texas, of all places. In a just-published report, scientists at Rice University in Houston conclude that the state could quit coal cold-turkey today and still have energy to spare—all thanks to recent advances in renewables. As one of the coauthors told the Houston Chronicle, “There is nowhere else in the world better positioned to operate without coal than Texas is. Wind and solar are easily capable of picking up the slack.”

The authors acknowledge that Texas is uniquely equipped to be in this enviable position. Ample winds along its Gulf Coast and in its western plains have helped make Texas the country’s largest producer of wind energy. And its famed size and sunshine have made it one of the fastest-growing states in terms of solar capacity, which industry analysts predict will reach 3,000 megawatts next year—up from just 15 megawatts in 2010.

Where does all of this progress leave coal? Out in the cold. The state’s coal-fired power plants are shutting down or being seasonally mothballed at rates never witnessed before. And according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which provides electric power to more than 23 million Texans, future energy projects in the state are trending—mightily—in favor of wind and solar. One recent chart released by the consortium predicts that these two renewables will generate 86 percent of the megawattage of those future projects. How much coal is in that queue? Precisely 0 percent.

Texas isn’t jumping on the renewables bandwagon out of some official commitment to curb climate change, or because it’s suddenly turned its back on the fossil fuel industry that helped make it an international economic powerhouse. Texas is joining the club for the same reason that so many other states are joining: It makes sound economic sense. As Dan Cohan, one of the Rice study’s coauthors, puts it, “It’s the cheapest way to do things, whether or not you care about the environment.” The new year brought with it a Wall Street Journal story that pithily sums up where things are headed nationally. Under the headline Utilities Speed Up Closure of Coal-Fired Power Plants, the article traces the phenomenon in large part to the “more economic alternatives” now provided by wind and solar.

As environmentalists, we’d love for governments, utilities and energy companies to put climate and air quality at the very top of their priority lists. Happily, more and more are doing just that. But as pragmatists, we should acknowledge that money, in the form of savings and/or profits, is going to be the determining factor in the growth of renewables. The good news is that climate advocacy and renewable technology have combined in such a way as to take the still-young clean energy sector to the next level. As it gets bigger, its products and its infrastructure will get cheaper. And as they get cheaper, dirty coal will look more and more like a loser—even to those who were perfectly fine with it before.

Here’s the thing: As disingenuous as President Trump has shown himself to be, I do believe he’s sincere in his desire to save the coal industry, even if it’s just to shore up votes in Appalachian swing states and appease the corporate fat cats to whom he’s indebted.

The only problem? He can’t do it. It’s too late.

Source: Eco Watch

Lush Bath Bombs Make a Fizz About Going Plastic Free

Photo: Pixabay

The brand is opening an entirely plastic free shop in Manchester this Friday.

This Robot Is Delivering Coral Babies to the Great Barrier Reef

The climate is changing faster than many species can adapt, so scientists are trying to speed up evolution by fostering the spread of creatures who can take the heat. Think of it as natural selection with a little boost from humans—or, in some cases, robots.

To that end, Australian scientists Peter Harrison and Matthew Dunbabin recently teamed up for a world-first field experiment. A robot Dunbabin designed carried coral larvae that Harrison had gathered and dispersed them on part of the Great Barrier Reef. What makes these larvae unique and the groundbreaking experiment especially promising is that the they are heat-tolerant, meaning they not only can survive, but flourish, in warmer waters.

Harrison had collected the larvae from corals that had survived deadly marine heat waves in 2016, 2017 and 2018. “These surviving larvae are likely to have greater ability to withstand heat stress as they survive and grow,” Harrison said, meaning they could thrive in a warmer world.

Pollution from fossil fuels is heating up the planet, rendering ocean waters inhospitable for coral. Even in the more optimistic scenarios, virtually all of the world’s reefs could be eradicated by mid-century. Ensuring the survival of these natural treasures will depend on cultivating more heat-tolerant corals. That’s where the robot, called “LarvalBot,” comes in.

“I first thought about the larval restoration concept some decades ago when I was part of the team that discovered the mass coral spawning phenomenon on the Great Barrier Reef in the early 1980s,” said Harrison, director of the Marine Ecology Research Centre at Southern Cross University. “Literally billions of coral larvae are produced during mass spawning events from healthy corals, but as coral cover and health have declined to the point where too few larvae are produced from remaining remnant coral populations, we now need to intervene to give nature a helping hand.”

Harrison had already developed techniques for mass spawn capture and larval rearing, but “one aspect that I still wanted to develop further was a more efficient larval delivery process onto the damaged reef areas, and so the LarvalBot concept developed from discussions with Matt.”

The robot has the capacity to carry around 100,000 microscopic coral larvae per mission, and Dunbabin expects to scale up to millions. The robot gently releases the larvae onto damaged reef areas allowing them to settle and, over time, develop into full-grown corals.

“We call this the ‘Swiss-army-knife’ of underwater robots, as it was designed to do multiple tasks with customizable payloads, such as photo surveys, water quality monitoring, marine pest surveillance and control, and now coral larvae dispersal,” said Dunbabin, a robotics professor at the Queensland University of Technology.

“Using an iPad to program the mission, a signal is sent to deliver the larvae and it is gently pushed out by LarvalBot,” said Dunbabin. ” It’s like spreading fertilizer on your lawn. The robot is very smart, and as it glides along, we target where the larvae need to be distributed so new colonies can form and new coral communities can develop.” The robot has an onboard vision system that allows it to “see” its way through reef environments, he explained.

“We will be monitoring the survival and growth of juvenile corals as they appear on the reef,” Harrison said. “We should start to see juvenile corals after about 9 months when they grow large enough to become visible on the reef.”

Later this spring, the researchers plan to send the robot with more larvae to degraded reefs in the Philippines, then will aim for an even larger project on the Great Barrier Reef in late 2019.

One of the advantages of the robot is that it can also monitor the growth of coral reefs, which will help scientists understand how they respond to the larval delivery. This will be critical to scaling up the process. “We need to learn how to restore corals and reefs at larger scales very quickly,” Harrison said. “During my lifetime I’ve witnessed continual degradation of reefs around the world, including parts of the Great Barrier Reef. This is incredibly sad and frustrating.”

Dunbabin agreed. “Coral reefs are spectacular! Even now when I jump in the water and see all the fish and colors, I still am in awe of these eco-cities of connected life,” he said. “I can’t help but feel I need to do something to help restore them to what they were.”

Source: Eco Watch

The Smoke Clears from Household Fuels with New Clean Air Strategy

Photo: Pixabay

The government has announced only the cleanest wood-burning stoves will be available for sale from 2022.

Photo: Pixabay

Source: Energy News

‘Millions of People Could Miss out on Benefits of EVs’

Foto-ilustracija: Unsplash

A new report suggests a poorly handled deployment risks exacerbating social divides across the UK

Undercover Investigations Will Be Legal Again at Iowa Animal Farms

Foto ilustracija: Pixabay

On Thursday the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa struck down the Iowa Ag-Gag law, holding that the ban on undercover investigations at factory farms and slaughterhouses violates the First Amendment. In 2017, a coalition of animal, environmental and community advocacy groups, including Center for Food Safety, challenged the law’s constitutionality. Federal courts have similarly struck down Ag-Gag laws in Idaho and Utah as unconstitutional.

Photo: Pixabay

Iowa’s Ag-Gag law criminalizes undercover investigations at a broad range of animal facilities including factory farms, puppy mills and slaughterhouses; preventing advocates from exposing animal cruelty, environmental harm, workers’ rights infractions and food safety violations. The law achieved its goal of suppressing undercover investigations—no investigations have taken place since the law’s passage in 2012.

“Ag-Gag laws unconstitutionally allow Industrial Ag to hide in the darkness, and today’s decision is another important pulling back of that curtain,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of Center for Food Safety. “This decision is a victory for all those who support humane treatment of farm animals and safe food.”

For more than a century, the public has relied on undercover investigations to expose illegal and cruel practices on factory farms and slaughterhouses. No federal laws govern the conditions in which farmed animals are raised, and laws addressing slaughter and transport are laxly enforced. Undercover investigations are the primary avenue through which the public receives information about animal agriculture operations. Iowa is the biggest producer of pigs raised for meat and hens raised for eggs in the U.S., making it critically important that investigations there are not suppressed.

“Ag-Gag laws are a pernicious attempt by animal exploitation industries to hide some of the worst forms of animal abuse in the United States,” said Animal Legal Defense Fund Executive Director Stephen Wells. “Today’s victory makes it clear that the government cannot protect these industries at the expense of our constitutional rights.”

Center for Food Safety is also co-counsel and co-plaintiff in another case successfully striking down Idaho’s Ag-Gag law in 2017, and part of ongoing cases in North Carolina and Kansas.

A copy of the decision is available upon request (please email us at pr@centerforfoodsafety.org).

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Bailing Out Benji, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Center for Food Safety. They are represented by the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Iowa, Public Justice, the Law Office of Matthew Strugar and Center for Food Safety.

Source: Eco Watch

Joshua Tree National Park Announces Closure After Trees Destroyed Amid Shutdown

Photo-illustration: Pixabay

Maintenance and sanitation problems also reported 18 days after government shutdown furloughed the vast majority of park staff.

Volunteers helping tourists at the Joshua Tree National Park in California.
A day after this story was published, National Park Service announced that it had averted the closure by tapping revenues from recreation fees, and that campgrounds and entrance stations would be reopened on Thursday. In a press release, the NPS thanked volunteers “who provided basic sanitation in campgrounds and other closed areas during the lapse in appropriations”.

For 17 days, a host of volunteers and a skeleton staff kept the trash cans and toilets from overflowing at Joshua Tree national park.

But on Tuesday, 18 days after the federal government shutdown furloughed the vast majority of national park staff, officials announced that vandalism of the park’s distinctive namesake plants and other maintenance and sanitation problems will require closure starting Thursday.

“While the vast majority of those who visit Joshua Tree do so in a responsible manner, there have been incidents of new roads being created by motorists and the destruction of Joshua trees in recent days that have precipitated the closure,” spokesman George Land said in a news release.

Land told the Los Angeles Times that, with only eight rangers currently overseeing the nearly 800,000 acre park, the gates would likely remain closed until the shutdown ends.

But a different spokesman for the National Parks Service, Mike Litterst, subsequently told the Times that the park may not close after all if staff are able to complete cleanup work before Thursday.

National Park Service officials did not immediately respond to requests for clarification.

The potential closure of Joshua Tree was met with mixed emotions by those whose livelihoods depend on the more than 2.8 million visitors the park attracts annually.

“I have 11 employees who are effectively going to be laid off as of Thursday,” said Seth Zaharias, co-owner of a company that leads rock climbing trips in the park. “They are not going to work for the remainder of the shutdown.”

Still, Zaharias said that reports of vandalism to the park made him support the closure. “Economically, that’s disastrous for our community,” he said of the prospect of serious environmental damage to the park. “It’s really bad.”

His company was beginning to send out cancellation notices for customers who had booked trips after Thursday, he said.

David Lamfrom, director of the California desert and national wildlife programs for the National Parks Conservation Association, warned that the damage to Joshua Tree’s desert landscape could be catastrophic.

Source: The Guardian

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