Friday, August 16th, 2019
Joshua B Pribanic and Talia Wiener, - Public Herald
Stephan: Only under Trump where there is little or no regulation could a story this painfully greedy and incompetent take place.
Pennsylvania River
Joey Bacon, 13, stands ready under the Lance Corporal Abram Howard Memorial bridge in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, with his fishing pole cast into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. Joey spends a lot of time around the River swimming, fishing, and cannon-balling from the bridges that crisscross the water. He hasn’t caught anything in the hour he’s been out today, but one time he caught a catfish as long as his arm, and he’s hoping that will happen again.
Water that travels ninety-one miles downstream from Joey ends up at the Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence on the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg. On any given day, Governor Tom Wolf could look out from his window to wildlife on the River and people recreating in the waters rushing by.
But what Wolf can’t see, is that his own Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has allowed radioactive material from fracking waste to be discharged into that River through sewage facilities upstream.
A Public Herald investigation has uncovered that DEP is allowing 14 Sewage Waste Treatment Plants to discharge radioactive fracking […]
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Thursday, August 15th, 2019
Stephan: Here is the alternative to industrial chemical monoculture.
The recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. There’s hope — and a solution.
Credit: Loveleyday / Shutterstock
From where I stand inside the South Dakota cornfield I was visiting with entomologist and former USDA scientist Jonathan Lundgren, all the human-inflicted traumas to Earth seem far away. It isn’t just that the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye—are people singing that song again?—but that the field burgeons and buzzes and chirps with all sorts of other life, too.
Instead of the sunbaked, bare lanes between cornstalks that are typical of conventional agriculture, these lanes sprout an assortment of cover crops. These are plants that save soil from wind and water erosion, reduce the evaporation of soil moisture, and attract beneficial insects and birds. Like all plants, these cover crops convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into a liquid carbon food, some for themselves and some to support the fungi, bacteria, and other microscopic partners underground. A […]
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Thursday, August 15th, 2019
SIMON SHUSTER and VERA BERGENGRUEN, - Time
Stephan: Everybody looked away when Moscow Mitch and Oleg Deripaska worked out this deal in an impoverished sector of Kentucky. I think they thought beggars can't be choosers. But this is a story of corruption, and how Russia, a nation with an economy the size of New York state, can manipulate a nation ostensibly more powerful and dominant by orders of magnitude.
The idled blast furnace stands on the grounds of AK Steel’s Ashland Works mill on Wednesday, May 15, 2019 in Ashland, Ky.
Credit: Luke Sharrett/Time.
Last summer, it looked like things were finally about to change for Ashland, Ky. For two decades, the jobs that once supported this Appalachian outpost of 20,000 people on a bend in the Ohio River have been disappearing: 100 laid off from the freight-rail maintenance shop; dozens pink-slipped at the oil refinery; 1,100 axed at the steel mill that looms over the landscape. Then, on June 1, 2018, standing on a stage flanked by the state’s governor and business leaders, Craig Bouchard, the CEO of Braidy Industries, pointed across a vast green field and described a vision as though he could already see it.
In the little-used park just off I-64, Braidy would build the largest aluminum mill constructed in the U.S. in nearly four decades. The $1.7 billion plant would take aluminum slab and roll it into the […]
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Thursday, August 15th, 2019
Stephen Edelstein, - Digital Trends
Stephan: A few weeks ago I ran a story about a new Prius car with solar panels as part of its roof. A significant percentage of the power to run the car would come from those panels, which would have an enormous effect on the battery issue, and rapidly speed up the conversion out of the carbon era. Now Hyundai announces their solar car.
Hyundai following Prius is offering a solar powered car.
Solar panels can power your house, but what about your car? Hyundai is the latest automaker to experiment with solar charging systems for cars, unveiling a solar roof that helps recharge the Sonata Hybrid sedan’s battery pack. While the latest versionof the Sonata Hybrid will likely launch in the United States soon, Hyundai did not say whether the solar roof would be included.
Hyundai claims the solar roof can charge a car’s battery pack to 30-60% capacity, given six hours of charging per day. Hybrids like the Sonata have smaller battery packs than all-electric cars, so a solar roof can make a bigger difference in charging. The solar roof can charge both while the car is stationary and while driving, according to Hyundai.
Adding solar cells to a car is not a new idea. The Karma Revero luxury plug-in hybrid is available with a solar roof, and Toyota even covered the hood of a car with solar cells to make maximum use of the sun’s energy. The
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Thursday, August 15th, 2019
Stephan: Did you ever think this would be how an American president was discussed? This is not a political argument, it is objectively fact-based.
Donald Trump, an adamant climate change denier, is the most relentlessly anti-environmental president in modern U.S. history.
Credit: OLIVIER DOULIERY VIA GETTY
Donald Trump has lied an average of 13 times a day since becoming president, a new analysis finds.
Between the day of his inauguration (Jan. 20, 2017) and Aug. 5, 2019, Trump has made 12,019 statements that were either false or misleading, according to the Washington Post. While that averages out to 13 such statements a day since Trump assumed office, the number has increased recently. Since April 26, when Trump made his 10,000th false or misleading statement, he has averaged 20 such statements every day, or one every 72 minutes.
The Post went into detail about the specific categories of Trump’s misstatements:
About one-fifth of these claims are about immigration, his signature issue — a percentage that has grown since the government shut down over funding for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, his most repeated claim — 190 times — is that his border wall is being built. […]
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