Thursday, January 18th, 2018
ELIZABETH PREZA, - Raw Story
Stephan: Trump zombie Ryan Zinke is arguably the worst Secretary of the Interior in history, even worse than the Reagan buffoon James Watts, remember him. Nobody pays much attention to good Secretaries of the Interior, but bad ones really stand out because they have the power to do real harm to the precious legacy each generation leaves to the generation that comes after them -- the national parks, and forests.
Ryan Zinke is so awful and so corrupt that he is the mated bookend to Scott Pruitt at the EPA So awful his advisory panel just quit en mass, a story that has mostly gotten lost in the shitstorm -- a word I never thought I would hear on cable news -- that is the White House under Trump.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
Credit: Gage Skidmore/flickr
Nine out of 12 members of the National Park System Advisory Board on Tuesday quit out of “frustration” after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke refused to meet with them, the Washington Post reports.
In a letter to Zinke, former Alaska governor Tony Knowles said the board members “have stood by waiting for the chance to meet and continue the partnership,” slamming the interior secretary for ignoring their “requests to engage.”
“We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new Department team are clearly not part of its agenda,” Knowles wrote. “I wish the National Park System and Service well and will always be dedicated to their success.”
Knowles told the Washington Post the board members “were frozen out” of recent Interior Department decisions to raise entrance fees and reverse a decision to ban plastic water bottles from the national park system.
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Thursday, January 18th, 2018
Akshat Rathi, Reporter - Quartz
Stephan: Here is the future and it is non-carbon except perhaps in the United States. What I am watching for now is emerging economic models to deal with non-carbon energy, because the old monopolistic central grid model isn't going to work.
A new dawn.
Credit: Reuters/Marcelo del Poz
ABU DHABI — “Turning to renewables for new power generation is not simply an environmentally conscious decision, it is now overwhelmingly a smart economic one,” said Adnan Amin, who has the numbers to back it up. Amin heads the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), and the numbers can be found in a new report the agency released at its annual summit on Jan. 13 in Abu Dhabi.
In most of the world, renewable electricity is already competitive with fossil-fuel power. Better still, the report makes the extraordinary prediction: By 2020, all forms of renewable electricity will be consistently cheaper than power produced by burning fossil fuels.
Today, fossil-fuel power typically costs between $0.05 to $0.17 per kWh. By comparison, consider the global-weighted average cost of electricity generated by various forms of renewables in 2017, as calculated by Irena: hydropower ($0.05 per kWh), onshore wind ($0.06 per kWh), bioenergy and geothermal ($0.07 per kWh), and solar photovoltaics ($0.10 per kWh).
Offshore wind and solar thermal power aren’t yet competitive with […]
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Wednesday, January 17th, 2018
SEAN POULTER , - Daily Mail (U.K.)
Stephan: Plastics are creating a planetary crisis, most people who know anything about the subject agree with this. Here, then, is some excellent news from the U.K.. As you read this ask yourself why can't we do this in the United States? Oh, right, because profit is the only social priority America has. Yeah.
Iceland Managing director Richard Walker holds the current plastic tray (left) and the new wood pulp tray (right)
Credit: dailymail.co.uk
A UK supermarket will be the first in the world to remove plastic packaging from all of its own-label products.
Iceland’s landmark move puts pressure on its rivals to follow suit amid public demands to turn back the tide of plastic pollution.
The company, which has more than 900 stores, has a five-year plan to ditch plastic from all of its own-brand products.
Packaging on 1,400 product lines will be replaced, and the changes involve more than 250 suppliers. First to go will be plastic ready meal trays in favour of wood-pulp alternatives made in Britain. Plastic bags used for frozen vegetables and other food will then be dropped in favour of paper alternatives.
Iceland, which has already removed plastic disposable straws from its own range, is also working on alternatives for plastic bottles and milk cartons.
Last week Theresa May set a 25-year deadline to banish ‘avoidable’ plastic and called on supermarkets to […]
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Wednesday, January 17th, 2018
Crawford Kilian, Contributing Editor - The Tyee (Canada)
Stephan: This is how the United States is now being discussed in Canada. Doesn't this just make you proud to be an American?
Me neither; I find it humiliating.
Immigrants deported from the United States arrive on an ICE deportation flight.
Credit: CNN
The announcement from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Monday was clear.
“Today, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced her determination that termination of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for El Salvador was required pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act. To allow for an orderly transition, she has determined to delay the termination for 18 months. The designation will terminate on Sept. 9, 2019.”
This means, according to the New York Times, that almost 200,000 Salvadorans have a year and a half to get out of the U.S., or wangle resident status, before they’re deported. They have 192,000 American-born children who by definition are U.S. citizens. The Center for Migration Studies estimates that 88 per cent of the affected Salvadorans have jobs, and many have mortgages.
Their remittances to families in El Salvador are an important part of that country’s economy. About 17 per cent of El Salvador’s economy in 2016 was based on $4.6 billion in
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Wednesday, January 17th, 2018
Stephan: American auto makers -- Tesla excepted of course -- are finally and belatedly getting the message, probably driven by the fact that China and Europe are committed to non-carbon vehicles by 2040, and the U.S. is about to be pushed out of those markets if it doesn't get with the program. It's kind of pathetic but, in the end, I think, should be seen as good news.
Tesla Model – X
DETROIT — Ford Motor Co’s plan to double its electrified vehicle spending is part of an investment tsunami in batteries and electric cars by global automakers that now totals $90 billion and is still growing, a Reuters analysis shows.
That money is pouring in to a tiny sector that amounts to less than 1 percent of the 90 million vehicles sold each year and where Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc, with sales of only three models totaling just over 100,000 vehicles in 2017, was a dominant player.
With the world’s top automakers poised to introduce dozens of new battery electric and hybrid gasoline-electric models over the next five years – many of them in China – executives continue to ask: Who will buy all those vehicles?
“We’re all in,” Ford Motor Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr said of the company’s $11 billion investment, announced on Sunday at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. “The only question is, will the customers be there with us?”
“Tesla faces real competition,” said […]
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