 People
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Green Candidates on the Map
Tuesday night was a primary election in New York and Maryland and two candidates who have made the environment and environmental justice central campaign issues have advanced to the general election in November.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (running as a progressive Democrat) sent shockwaves through the Democratic party after she defeated 10-term Queens NY congressman Joe Crowley. Her stance on climate action, especially the Green New Deal, would be the most progressive of any member of Congress. She wants a full transition to renewable energy in America by 2035 and sees this as the most direct way to reduce GHG emissions. “We need more environmental hardliners in Congress,” she told In These Times magazine earlier this week. “We need a Marshall Plan for renewable energy in the United States. The idea that the Democratic Party needs to be moderate is what’s holding us back on this.”
Ben Jealous won the Democratic primary for Maryland's gubernatorial race Tuesday night and throughout his race has made the environment a central campaign issue. As the former head of the NAACP Jealous has focused not only on a transition to renewable energy and making Maryland a leader in green jobs but also on environmental justice and ensuring that Maryland's poorest communities aren't disproportionately impacted by pollution. During his time at the NAACP Jealous created its climate justice program while focusing on coalition building with environmental groups and unions. Jealous has been endorsed by Bill McKibben, 350.org, Phil Radford, and Friends of the Earth Action.
Why This Matters: Barring an unforeseen circumstance in her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez will likely win her seat in November but for Ben Jealous his will be an uphill battle to defeat Maryland's current Republican governor Larry Hogan whose approval rating hovers around 70%. The only way to get the environmental policies we need is to have them become litmus issues for voters and having two candidates win who've campaigned so hard on the environment is how we can begin to do this. Hopefully, other candidates can see that making the environment a central campaign issue is a winning formula. |
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 Air
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A Code Red Day for smog in Denver. Or is it? Photo: NOAA
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Bad Air Day???
The Trump Administration is considering rolling back the ozone standard of the Clean Air Act. One of the hidden problems with this proposal is that air quality will then seem better than it actually is. Right now, there are alerts created when air quality is bad -- and these alerts are on a color-coded scale. TV weather forecasters tell the public when it's a bad air day -- which are called code red days. But if the standard changes, so will the scale. The current standard is 70 parts per billion -- it was lowered in 2015 from 80 parts per billion based on scientific evidence that pointed to a need for a more protective standard. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Congressional Republicans have been considering elevating it back to 75 parts per billion. That does not seem like such a big deal -- but it turns out that it is.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) did a little calculating to see what this change from 70 to 75 would do to the air quality ratings in 19 major U.S. cities with smog problems. And what they found was that under the looser standard, the number of "bad" air days since 2015 went down by a lot - sometimes as much as a month or two worth of days. According to the UCS, "from high to low, the cities with the most number of days affected are: Los Angeles (91), Phoenix (63), Las Vegas (45), Dallas (39), New York (37), Atlanta (28), Chicago (28), Houston (28), Pittsburgh (24), Philadelphia (22), Cincinnati (21), St. Louis (21), Cleveland (19), Washington, DC (19), Detroit (15), Kansas City (11), Boston (10) and Miami (7)."
Why This Matters: Ozone is a serious pollutant that causes real harm, especially to children, the elderly and those with respiratory ailments like asthma. The Trump Administration is setting itself up to say the air is cleaner than ever, but it will be nothing more than fake news. This is like changing the grading scale so you can get an A in the class. Once they lower the standards, then they can say air quality is at an A+ even if under the old standards it would have been much worse. They don't seem to care how many people have a bad air day -- if they say it is a good air day, then it is. So Trumpy! So Wrong!
To Go Deeper Into the Ozone: Read UCS' full piece here. Be sure to click on the interactive map to see how your city would fare under the looser standard.
H/T to Andy Rosenberg for doing double duty this week -- exposing the proposal to take conservation and climate out of NOAA's mission and calling out the impact on red air alert days if Trump's EPA loosens the standards for ozone pollution.
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 Forests
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Protecting the Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve. Video: Save the Redwoods League
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Ancient Redwoods Get Protection in California
This week it was announced that the Save the Redwoods League will purchase a grove in Northern California with hundreds of ancient redwood trees, with some taller than the Statue of Liberty. Known as Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve, the lush 738-acre stretch of forest is a third larger than Muir Woods National Monument and has 47 percent more old-growth trees (one of the oldest trees, the so-called McApin tree, is as big as a two-lane road). Save the Redwoods League told CBS that transaction involves a land swap and $9.6 million in payments and that they hope to open the park to the public within three years.
“This is one of the most extraordinary conservation opportunities that we’ve seen in generations,” said Sam Hodder, president of the Redwoods League. As the SF Chronicle reported, the league didn’t know much about the ancient trees east of Tin Barn Ridge until the organization bought nearby Stewart's Point in 2010 from the same family that has now agreed to make a long-awaited deal to sell their cherished private grove of coastal redwoods. Using laser light sensors from aircraft, Redwoods League surveyors counted 319 trees taller than 250 feet and climbed five of the biggest.
Why This Matters: The Richardson reserve is special because it is an undisturbed ancient forest ecosystem. When settlers moved West during the gold rush, hundreds of thousands of acres of ancient giant sequoia trees were felled to provide timber for San Francisco's growing population. Many of the tallest trees were lost and today only 5 percent of the original old-growth coast redwood forest remains. Giant sequoias are some of the tallest and oldest organisms on Earth and are truly remarkable to visit, definitely put visiting one of these groves on your bucket list!
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 Land
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Cities Provide a Safe Haven for Bumblebees
Bumblebees are important pollinators that help maintain ecosystems, agriculture and all the beautiful flowers we enjoy. Unfortunately, like many other pollinators, they're under threat from habitat loss, climate change, pesticide and fungicide use and parasites. But a new study suggests that bumblebees are thriving more in urban environments than in rural ones. As the Guardian explained, bumblebee colonies in urban areas not only produce more offspring than those on agricultural land, but have more food stores, fewer invasions from parasitic “cuckoo” bumblebees, and survive for longer. This isn't to say that cities are the ideal setting for the bees but their populations tend to be healthier there, likely because they're protected from parasites the abundant availability of flowering plants is greater than in rural areas.
Why This Matters: While scientists have known for a while that urban settings can provide a haven for bees, this research reveals that city bees are thriving and underscores the value of urban areas to keeping their populations healthy. This also means that people who live in urban areas can help pollinators by growing plants that help pollinators.
Go Deeper: The case for planting pollinator-friendly plants and grasses as the as the go-to bedding for solar farms.
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 Oceans
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A dead northern fulmar near Shishmaref on Aug. 13, 2017.
Photo: Ken Stenek, Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team
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Seabird Die-Off Observed Again This Year In Alaska
Dead seabirds have been washing up on the beaches in Western Alaska since late May, KTUU TV in Anchorage reports. The birds have been found on beaches from islands in the Bering Sea to villages north of the Bering Strait. Environmentalists and government wildlife managers believe this could be another bad year for seabirds in the ever warmer waters of the North Pacific -- the last several years have seen die-offs like this one. So far this year the birds that are washing ashore are common murres, a seabird that resembles a thin penguin and is found in subarctic waters along the North Pacific and North Atlantic. There was a massive murre mortality event in 2015 and into 2016. At least 30,000 were found dead that year, but scientists believed the actual number of birds that died then was in the range of hundreds of thousands.
Scientists are beginning to perform necropsies on the birds hoping to determine for certain what is causing the problem. Robb Kaler, a wildlife biologist at the USFWS Migratory Bird Management office who has been monitoring the situation statewide says in his view, "[t]hey're dying of starvation, but there might be other contributing factors." Last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that the dead birds were mostly northern fulmars and short-tailed shearwaters, species that migrate long distances to spend summers in waters off Alaska and other northern regions. But they also found some kittiwakes, murres, and auklets as well.
Why This Matters: This could be just the beginning of the negative impacts of ecosystem changes caused by the rapid warming of the Bering Sea that we have reported on this past spring. The warming reduces the numbers of the forage fish that murres depend upon and as a result, they are starving to death. The murre could be remembered as the canary in the coal mine for the Bering Sea.
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 Animals
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One Cool Thing: Da Bears on Camera!
If you need a wildlife fix this summer, look no further! You can watch the brown bears of Brooks Falls in Alaska's Katmai National Park and Preserve 24/7! Each summer, the brown bears flock to Brooks Falls to hunt the delicious sockeye salmon as they fight their way upstream to spawn. This area is teeming with wildlife -- watching the bear cam you might also see salmon leaping up the falls and bald eagles and gulls flying overhead... and if you're lucky, maybe you will even see a wolf or a moose! To watch the bear cam, click here!
To Go Deeper: Consider that the proposed Pebble Mine could spoil the watershed that these bears call home. Read all about it here. To speak out about the mine, click here.
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