Protecting Global Biodiversity Hotspots

Stanford scholar Mark Z. Jacobson lays out how the US could get to 100% renewable energy by 2050. David Roberts describes his ambitious blueprint and the challenges it would face here.

A recent report from the Energy Information Administration found that U.S. plant owners and operators are getting ready to retire 27 gigawatts’ worth of coal generation, or about 8.5 percent of the coal fleet, between now and 2016. Considering the substantial contribution of burning coal to climate change, coal plant retirements are one of the greatest ways to reduce carbon emissions.

“[Electric vehicle] sales have been soaring worldwide. By 2025, more than 37 million fully electric vehicles are expected to be on the road globally, according to Navigant Research, and those EVs will be ‘cost competitive’ without subsidies.” - ThinkProgress

From the Washington Post:

Map from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showing how much electricity each state gets from wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal. Maine was the clear winner in 2011, getting 27 percent of its electricity coming from renewable sources — a lot of it wind power and biomass. But Maine had a lot of renewable energy back in 2001, too. South Dakota and Iowa, at 21 percent and 17 percent, have seen far more impressive growth. Both of those states got almost none of their electricity from renewable sources a decade ago.

Accessibility remoteness index of Australia

“Over the past year, seven of the estimated 80 remaining Texas ocelots were killed by vehicles. Six of these mortalities were adult males. Among ocelots, it is not easy to be a maturing male. In order to prevent competition for access to breeding females, older males often force the younger males to leave the area where they grew up, sending them out to find females and territory of their own. Once out of protected, dense brush habitat areas, these younger males encounter the human-developed world and all of its dangers, in particular roads and vehicles. In reaction to the large proportion of road mortalities being males, Dr. Hilary Swarts, a wildlife biologist who monitors ocelots in south Texas with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) said, ‘I can’t say it’s surprising that six of the seven deaths were males, since they have such a rough time of it once the older males start to see the younger males as competition for mates and territory.’” - See more at: http://blog.cincinnatizoo.org/#sthash.YjGoogOC.dpuf

I'm back...

I apologize for my 5 months hiatus. I intend to divert my attention back to Envirographs, to continue using graphs and maps to explore environmental problems, trends and solutions.

The American Lung Association released its 2012 "State of the Air" report. Among their findings, they report that the air quality in many places has improved, but that over 127 million people—41 percent of the U.S.—still suffer pollution levels that are too often dangerous to breathe. The report includes this graph from EPA, showing that emissions of the six common air pollutants have fallen 59% since 1990 as a result of Clean Air Act regulations. These reductions have occurred even as population, energy consumption, vehicle miles traveled and GDP have increased, debunking the myth that environmental regulations hurt economic growth.

*The "six common pollutants" are fine particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide (CO), and lead.

The sex of a sea turtle hatching is determined by temperature. Nests incubated at cooler temperatures produce more males, while nests incubated at warmer temperatures produce more females.

This could be a problem with climate change. As global temperatures rise, nests will be incubated at higher temperatures, producing fewer males. As this study found, climate change could lead to turtle nests with few to no males, skewing sex ratios and endangering the persistence of sea turtle populations. As the authors note:

“[O]nce incubation temperatures are 35°C, there are almost no more males produced (1 per 50 000 eggs laid)... As turtles return to the rough neighbourhood of their natal breeding grounds, it seems likely that for populations already producing more than 80% females, there will be a real extinction risk if they continue to nest at the same time of year and conditions warm by a few degrees.” 

But the bigger issue may be the increasing number of unviable eggs with rising temperatures. As the authors claim:

“[T]he primary concern in scenarios of climate change and rising incubation temperatures [is]... the high hatchling mortality in excessively warm nests...While climate warming still poses a threat to sea turtles, it is not the skewed sex ratios per se that will threaten population survival but rather higher mortality within clutches.”