Saturday (tomorrow), May 14, 2022, is World Migratory Bird Day 2022. The environmental group behind the campaign states:
Light pollution can adversely affect migratory birds on:
🔴 Behavior
🔴 Activity levels
🔴 Energy expenditure
🔴 Orientation when flying at night
🔴 Migration timing & routes
The theme this year is Dim the Lights:
… Continue ReadingArtificial light is increasing globally by at least 2 per cent per year and it is known to adversely affect many bird species. Light pollution is a significant threat to migratory birds, causing disorientation when they fly at night, leading to collisions with buildings, perturbing their internal clocks, or interfering with their ability to undertake long-distance migrations.
Solutions to light pollution are readily available. For instance, more and more cities in the world are taking measures to dim building lights during migration phases in spring and autumn.
“What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.” (V. Smil, below)
In an article filed under “climate crimes,” The Guardian claims that environmental nirvana is reachable if only politicians stop listening to Big Oil and start listening to social scientists. Author Amy Westervelt argues that the technology needed to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions is at hand; we just lack the will and the laws to implement it. She quotes from a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
… Continue ReadingFactors limiting ambitious transformation [to address climate change] include structural barriers, an incremental rather than systemic approach, lack of coordination, inertia, lock-in to infrastructure and assets, and lock-in as a consequence of vested interests, regulatory inertia, and lack of technological capabilities and human resources.
“Maybe instead of investigating the relatively high price [in early 2002] of gasoline, the government should check into its own regulatory and tax policies that artificially reduce supply and raise prices.”
This piece was written in first-quarter 2002 when environmental requirements were pushing reformulated gasoline prices higher, and the wellhead oil boom associated with hydraulic fractionation and horizontal drilling was a decade away.
Today, the war against oil from the Net Zero movement–now joined by the Russia/Ukraine conflict–has sent prices to historically high levels. Still, a mostly free market has wondrously overcome impediments to make a “depletable” mineral plentiful and affordable for hundreds of millions of Americans each day.
Let’s go back to the debate 20 years ago, when gasoline was sold for $1.50 per gallon (about $2.50 today)….
Crude oil prices are at a 6-month high. …
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