Stephan: Here is some good news about plastics. Trader Joe's has taken a very important step to eliminate single-use plastics, and I encourage you to shop there. Vote with your pocketbook to support a corporation that can look beyond immediate profit. That's what Ronlyn and I do.
A Trader Joe’s in Chicago, Illinois.
Credit: M. R. / Flickr
As the world suffocates from its plastic addiction, a growing number of businesses are stepping up to the plate to reduce their plastic waste. Most recently, Trader Joe’s announced that it will be taking steps to cut back on plastic and other packaging waste after a petition launched by Greenpeace harnessed nearly 100,000 signatures.
At the end of last year, the company announced several improvements geared towards making packaging more sustainable in an effort to eliminate more than 1 million pounds of plastic from stores. Already, the retailer has stopped offering single-use plastic carryout bags nationwide and is replacing plastic produce bags and Styrofoam meat trays with biodegradable and compostable options.
“As a neighborhood grocery store, we feel it is important for us to be the great neighbor our customers deserve. Part of that means better managing our environmental impact,” Kenya Friend-Daniel, public relations director for Trader Joe’s, told EcoWatch in an email. “As we recently shared with our […]
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Thursday, March 7th, 2019
Phillip Inman, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: It is my opinion that BREXIT is one of the stupidest economic and geopolitical moves made by any developed nation in the last half century. With the clock ticking down the last few days and still no agreement, I think by the end of the year Britain is going to be in real trouble. Not just economically, but possibly in the very structure of the nation. By 2020, when the U.S. hopefully will see the disappearance of most of the Republican cretins in the Senate, as well as Trump, Britain could be facing the loss of Scotland, the unification of Ireland, and the loss of Northern Ireland, leaving just little England and tiny Wales. That would be the end of the United Kingdom and would then leave England facing a major historic reduction in power, economy and national status.
Here is the latest assessment of where BREXIT stands and what it may mean.
UK car plant
A no-deal Brexit would plunge the UK economy into recession and annual growth will slip below 1% this year for this first time since the financial crisis even if a deal is secured, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has warned.
The thinktank, which advises 34 of the world’s richest countries, said that even with a smooth Brexit, the UK economy would slump to 0.8% growth in 2019 from 1.4% in 2018 as Brexit uncertainty and Donald Trump’s trade war with China harmed the UK’s economic prospects. In November it was forecasting 1.4% growth for the UK this year.
The last time annual growth in the UK was below 1% was in the depths of the financial crisis, when the economy contracted by 4.2%.
The OECD said a steep fall in investment over the past year by UK-based firms had left the economy in a weak position to boost its poor productivity rates and increase wages growth.
The economic health check comes as
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Thursday, March 7th, 2019
Antonia Blumberg, - Huffington Post
Stephan: I regularly read the most amazing assertions linking vaccines and autism, but there is never any real data. Now there is, and here it is. To read the full Annals of Internal Medicine research paper:
Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccination and Autism: A Nationwide Cohort Study
A major new study offers yet more evidence that the vaccine that protects against measles does not increase children’s risk of autism.
The study, conducted by researchers in Denmark and published this week in Annals of Internal Medicine, examined all children born in Denmark to Danish-born mothers from 1999 to 2010 ― 657,461 children.
“The study strongly supports that MMR vaccination does not increase the risk for autism, does not trigger autism in susceptible children, and is not associated with clustering of autism cases after vaccination,” the researchers wrote. “It adds to previous studies through significant additional statistical power.”
Among the research participants, 6,517 children were diagnosed with autism in the next decade during the study. But researchers found no increased risk for autism among those who received the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella, when compared with the children who did not receive immunization.
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Thursday, March 7th, 2019
Eva Botkin-Kowacki, Staff Writer - Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: Exactly as I predicted five years ago. By 2050 Key West will probably be gone -- 31 years -- and largely uninhabitable in 15.
Key West
On a map, Key West is just a speck of land surrounded by water. Tourists from the mainland drive for hours over the aptly-named Overseas Highway to reach this vacation paradise at the tip of the Florida Keys. The island’s remoteness and sparkling waters entice more than 3 million visitors a year, and buoy residents’ fierce love for the place.
But being out in the middle of the ocean is as much a danger as it is a draw. With an average elevation of 4.7 feet above sea level, Key West is particularly vulnerable to threats from the ocean. That isn’t lost on homeowners, as many know the flood risk of their homes down to the inch.
Key West is on the front line of climate change. The island serves as a sort of measuring stick for resilience. Islands and low-lying coastal areas around the world face looming displacement as seas rise and storms intensify. If the community there can weather the storm of climate change, perhaps there’s a path for […]
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Thursday, March 7th, 2019
Erik Stokstad, Reporter - Science
Stephan: Human stupidity and greed plus the climate change produced by them have combined, and we are now seeing the collapse of our food systems. Here is the latest on seafood and again, as always with SR, we are dealing with data not polemics.
Cod in the North Sea have suffered from rising temperatures, as well as overfishing.
Credit: PA images/Alamy
Marine fish around the world are already feeling the effects of climate change—and some are reeling, according to the first large analysis of recent trends. Rising sea temperatures have reduced the productivity of some fisheries by 15% to 35% over 8 decades, although in other places fish are thriving because warming waters are becoming more suitable. The net effect is that the world’s oceans can’t yield as much sustainable seafood as before, a situation that is likely to worsen as global warming accelerates in the oceans.
A silver lining is that the research suggests well-managed fisheries are more resilient in the face of rising temperature, says Rainer Froese, a marine ecologist with the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, who was not involved in the work. “We have to stop overfishing to let the gene pool survive, so that [the fish] can adapt to climate change,” he says. “We have to give them a […]
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