Paris to ban all gas-powered cars by 2030

Paris City Hall wants gasoline-powered cars off the roads by 2030, which would be the latest move in a string of aggressive pro-environmental policies by the mayor. (Philippe Wojazer/Reuters)

 

The noise of car engines revving around the streets of Paris might become just a memory.
In its latest initiative to reduce air pollution, Paris City Hall wants gasoline-powered cars off the roads by 2030. The controversial move announced Thursday follows Mayor Anne Hidalgo's plan to ban all diesel cars from the city by 2024, when Paris will host the Summer Olympics.
Speaking on France Info radio, the Paris deputy mayor in charge of transport, Christophe Nadjovski, said "we have planned the end of thermic vehicle use, and therefore of fossil energies, by 2030."
Many Parisians don't own a car, but Hidalgo still has angered many of them with her efforts to make Paris a greener city, notably by adding cycling paths that have slowed vehicle traffic along the Seine River. Her detractors have accused her of waging a war against cars.

Wary of those critics, Paris City Hall issued a statement Thursday insisting the 2030 deadline isn't a proper ban, but "a feasible and realistic" goal. The statement added that Paris officials would keep discussing the issue with residents and car makers in the coming months.
Paris has faced rising air pollution in the last few years. Some pollution spikes have been so bad they forced City Hall to bar half of all cars from travelling and to make public transportation free for several days.
Hidalgo has been seeking to reduce pollution with a series of measures. She has launched a program banning traffic from the famed Champs-Elysees Avenue once a month, introduced rental bicycles in the streets as well as a fleet of electric cars to encourage residents to leave their polluting vehicles at home.

In September 2016, Paris authorities decided to close a 3.5-kilometre downtown road and transform it into a promenade. A year later, the body measuring air pollution said the move had no significant impact on residents' exposure to carbon emissions across the whole city.
With her ambition of taking gasoline-powered cars off the Paris roads by 2030, Hidalgo wants to go faster than the French government. Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot has said he wants to banish from France all fossil fuel cars by 2040.
"This government goal affects the whole French territory, rural zones included," the Paris City Hall statement said. "If we want to achieve this, it implies that the end of diesel and gasoline should take place several years in advance in urban areas, and particularly in big cities."

Paris will be a pioneer in this endeavor. The rest of the western world, and in particular, North America will reluctantly trail behind.  And if More Trump-like presidents continue to be in power,
the USA may set the process back a hundred years.

Orange is the new green: How orange peels revived a Costa Rican forest

A thousand truckloads of orange peels were unloaded onto a barren pasture in a Costa Rican national park in the mid 1990s. Today, that area is covered in lush, vine-laden forest.

 

 

  The land of orange peels

 

  Forgotten for years after lawsuit.

 

 What used to be the barren area (on the right) is now a flourishing forest, thicker, lusher and more healthy than the natural forest on the left

 

Proof that agricultural waste can restore decimated and barren forest land

 

A thousand truckloads of orange peels were unloaded onto a barren pasture in a Costa Rican national park in the mid 1990s. Today, that area is covered in lush, vine-laden forest.

Credit: Photos courtesy of Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs

In the mid-1990s, 1,000 truckloads of orange peels and orange pulp were purposefully unloaded onto a barren pasture in a Costa Rican national park. Today, that area is covered in lush, vine-laden forest.

A team led by Princeton University researchers surveyed the land 16 years after the orange peels were deposited. They found a 176 percent increase in aboveground biomass -- or the wood in the trees -- within the 3-hectare area (7 acres) studied. Their results are published in the journal Restoration Ecology.
This story, which involves a contentious lawsuit, showcases the unique power of agricultural waste to not only regenerate a forest but also to sequester a significant amount of carbon at no cost.
"This is one of the only instances I've ever heard of where you can have cost-negative carbon sequestration," said Timothy Treuer, co-lead author of the study and a graduate student in Princeton's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. "It's not just a win-win between the company and the local park -- it's a win for everyone."
The original idea was sparked by husband-wife team Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, both ecologists at the University of Pennsylvania, who worked as researchers and technical advisers for many years at Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG, Guanacaste Conservation Area) in Costa Rica. Janzen and Hallwachs have focused the latter half of their careers on ensuring a future for endangered tropical forest ecosystems.
In 1997, Janzen and Hallwachs presented an attractive deal to Del Oro, an orange juice manufacturer that had just begun production along the northern border of Área de Conservación Guanacaste. If Del Oro would donate part of their forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, the company could deposit its orange peel waste for biodegradation, at no cost, on degraded land within the park.

But a year after the contract was signed -- during which time 12,000 metric tons of orange peels were unloaded onto the degraded land -- TicoFruit, a rival company, sued, arguing the company had "defiled a national park." The rival company won the case in front of Costa Rica's Supreme Court, and the orange-peel-covered land was largely overlooked for the next 15 years.
In the summer of 2013, Treuer was discussing potential research avenues with Janzen when they discussed the site in Costa Rica. Janzen said that, while taxonomists (biologists who classify organisms) had visited the area, no one had really done a thorough evaluation. So, while on another research trip to Costa Rica, Treuer decided to stop by the site to see what had changed over the past decade.
"It was so completely overgrown with trees and vines that I couldn't even see the 7-foot-long sign with bright yellow lettering marking the site that was only a few feet from the road," Treuer said. "I knew we needed to come up with some really robust metrics to quantify exactly what was happening and to back up this eye-test, which was showing up at this place and realizing visually how stunning the difference was between fertilized and unfertilized areas."

Treuer studied the area with Jonathan Choi, who, at the time, was a senior studying ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. Choi turned the project into his senior thesis.
"The site was more impressive in person than I could've imagined," Choi said. "While I would walk over exposed rock and dead grass in the nearby fields, I'd have to climb through undergrowth and cut paths through walls of vines in the orange peel site itself."
The research team evaluated two sets of soil samples to determine whether the orange peels enriched the soil's nutrients. The first set of samples was collected and analyzed in 2000 by co-author Laura Shanks of Beloit College, and the second set was collected in 2014 by Choi. Shanks' data were never published, so her analysis was combined with Choi's for the purposes of this study. The samples were analyzed using different but comparable methods.
To quantify changes in vegetation structure, the researchers established several transects within the orange waste treatment area. These transects were 100-meter-long parallel lines throughout the forest, where all trees within 3 meters were measured and tagged. This was done to see how much growth was brought on by the orange peels. For a comparison, the researchers constructed a similar set of routes on the pasture on the other side of the road, which hadn't been covered in orange peels. They measured tree diameter and identified all species within both areas.
They found dramatic differences between the areas covered in orange peels and those that were not. The area fertilized by orange waste had richer soil, more tree biomass, greater tree-species richness and greater forest canopy closure.

"Plenty of environmental problems are produced by companies, which, to be fair, are simply producing the things people need or want," said study co-author David Wilcove, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and public affairs and the Princeton Environmental Institute. "But an awful lot of those problems can be alleviated if the private sector and the environmental community work together. I'm confident we'll find many more opportunities to use the 'leftovers' from industrial food production to bring back tropical forests. That's recycling at its best."

Conversation With Koko, the talking, feeling, thinking gorilla

 

 

This program doesn’t just talk with an ape, it carries on an intimate, decades-long dialogue with her. The story documents the incredible development of a gorilla named Koko, whose learning of American Sign Language (and understanding of spoken English) gives new meaning to the ideas of animal intelligence and inter-species communication.

Ahamo 2015 Winner: Excellence in Documentary Film:

 Gorillas in the wild are an endangered species. They are close relatives of ours. They think and feel and communicate. And yet we rob them of their habitat and food sources, hunt them and kill them.



'War on the EPA': How Fossil Fuel Industry Executed 'Hostile Takeover' of Key Agency

Must-see Frontline details how Trump administration handed over environmental protection to oil and gas interests 

As Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt formally announced this week that he plans to pull the plug on the Clean Power Plan, Frontline released a documentary titled War on the EPA, which details the Trump administration's concerted effort to cater to the fossil fuel industry's demands and roll back environmental regulations.

Among those interviewed for the film are Elizabeth "Betsy" Southerland, a 30-year EPA veteran who publicly resigned this summer and, so far, is the highest-ranking former staffer to speak out against the agency's operations under Pruitt, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and has been a key player in the administration's war on science.

 

 

"The atmosphere of EPA is really tense," Southerland said in the film. "What everyone is trying desperately to do is to hope against hope that their facts will change Scott Pruitt's mind—that they'll be special and they'll be able to convince the administrator not to go with whatever the industry people have asked him to do, and to give some deference to the science and engineering behind previous regulations."

Mere weeks after Southerland resigned from the agency, Pruitt announced the EPA had finalized plans to postpone a regulation she had worked on, which sought to prevent coal plants from dumping toxic chemicals in waterways. Pruitt's plans were immediately denounced by experts and conservationists, with the Center for Biological Diversity calling it "mind-bogglingly dangerous."

Rolling back that rule was just one of many moves by the Trump administration to implement an agenda that serves the coal, oil, and natural gas companies. Trump first visited EPA headquarters in late March, to sign an executive order directing the agency to rewrite the Clean Power Plan. During his speech at the agency, the president declared: "My administration is putting an end to the war on coal."

The film also features an interview with Bob Murray, CEO of Murray Energy Corporation, the largest coal company in the United States. Murray mentioned in the film that not only was he in the audience during Trump's March speech at EPA headquarters, but that the president acknowledged the coal baron when he vowed to "put our miners back to work."

"I would say that people were really devastated by that," Southerland said of Murray's attendance. "That it was considered to be, really, an open slap in our face."

"What it conveyed is, 'this is a hostile takeover.' You, the scientists and lawyers and engineers at the agency are no longer valued," added Eric Schaeffer, who led the EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement for five years, and resigned from the agency in 2002, to protest attempts by then-President George W. Bush's administration to weaken federal clean air policy. 

Come to Churchill ( Polar Bear Town) Manitoba in Canada

Come on this virtual journey through the realm of the polar bear (http://www.nathab.com/polar-bear-tours), as we follow the life-changing experiences of Nat Hab guests, Expedition Leaders and a WWF scientist during a trip to Churchill—the Polar Bear Capital of the World. Learn how the power of conservation travel can help protect a threatened species like polar bears for generations to come.

Learn more about Churchill Polar Bear Tours and conservation travel with Nat Hab and WWF: http://www.nathab.com/polar-bear-tours/



Study underway to help reduce China's air pollution and prolong life expectancy

Deadly air pollution in China has long been out of control

Chinese people suffer from a multitude  of respiratory diseases

Although the government has long been aware of negative effects of air and water pollution, they have been slow to act upon the problems

Toxic water pollution from industrial and human wastes fill every waterway

Solid waste like plastics cover every shore

 Children play on piles of garbage releasing toxic gases

There are currently an estimated 4.5 billion people around the world exposed to levels of particulate air pollution that are at least twice what the World Health Organization (WHO) considers safe. Yet, the impact of sustained exposure to pollution on a person's life expectancy has largely remained a vexingly unanswered question -- until now.

A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that a Chinese policy is unintentionally causing people in northern China to live 3.1 years less than people in the south due to air pollution concentrations that are 46 percent higher. These findings imply that every additional 10 micrograms per cubic meter of particulate matter pollution (PM10) reduces life expectancy by 0.6 years. The elevated mortality is entirely due to an increase in cardiorespiratory deaths, indicating that air pollution is the cause of reduced life expectancies to the north.

"These results greatly strengthen the case that long-term exposure to particulates air pollution causes substantial reductions in life expectancy. They indicate that particulates are the greatest current environmental risk to human health, with the impact on life expectancy in many parts of the world similar to the effects of every man, woman and child smoking cigarettes for several decades," says study co-author Michael Greenstone, the director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) and the Milton Friedman Professor in Economics, the College and the Harris School. "The histories of the United States, parts of Europe, Japan and a handful of other countries teach us that air pollution can be reduced, but it requires robust policy and enforcement."
The study exploits China's Huai River policy, which provided free coal to power boilers for winter heating to people living north of the river and provided almost no resources towards heating south of the river. The policy's partial provision of heating was implemented because China did not have enough resources to provide free coal nationwide. Additionally, since migration was greatly restricted, people exposed to pollution were generally not able to migrate to less polluted areas. Together, the discrete change in policy at the river's edge and the migration restrictions provide the basis for a powerful natural experiment that offers an opportunity to isolate the impact of sustained exposure to particulates air pollution from other factors that affect health.

"Unveiling this important information helps build the case for policies that ultimately serve to improve the lives of the Chinese people and the lives of those globally who suffer from high levels of air pollution," says study co-author Maigeng Zhou, deputy director of the National Center for Chronic and Non-communicable Disease Control and Prevention of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Overall, the study provides solutions to several challenges that have plagued previous research. In particular, prior studies: 1) rely on research designs that may be unlikely to isolate the causal effects of air pollution; 2) measure the effect of pollution exposure for a relatively short period of time (e.g., weekly or annually), failing to shed light on the effect of sustained exposure; 3) examine settings with much lower pollution concentrations than those currently faced by billions of people in countries, including China and India, leaving questions about their applicability unanswered; 4) measure effects on mortality rates but leave the full loss of life expectancy unanswered.

"The study's unique design provides solutions to several challenges that have been difficult to solve," says co-author Maoyong Fan, an associate professor at Ball State University. "The Huai River policy also provides a research design that can be used to explore a variety of other questions about the long-run consequences of exposure to high levels of pollution."
China has increased its efforts to confront its air pollution challenge. China is switching its primary source of heating from coal-fired boilers to gas-fired or electric units, and has shut down many polluting plants. The consequence is that particulate air pollution in some of China's most polluted cities, such as Beijing, has improved significantly.
"Our findings show that these changes will bring about significant health benefits for the Chinese people in the long run," says co-author Guojun He, an assistant professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. "If all of China were brought into compliance with its Class I standards, more than 3.7 billion life-years will be saved."

Broader Implications -- Introducing the Air Quality-Life Index (AQLI)
Importantly, the results from this paper can be generalized to quantify the number of years that air pollution reduces lifespans around the globe -- not just in China. Specifically, Greenstone and his colleagues at EPIC used the finding that an additional 10 micrograms per cubic meter of PM10 reduces life expectancy by 0.6 years to develop a new pollution index, the Air Quality-Life Index (AQLI). The index allows users to better understand the impact of air pollution on their lives by calculating how much longer they would live if the pollution in the air they breathe were brought into compliance with national or WHO standards.
"The AQLI uses the critical data and information gathered from our China research and applies it to every country, allowing the billions of people around the world who are exposed to high air pollution levels to estimate how much longer they would live if they breathed cleaner air," says Greenstone.
Do we want our kids to live longer?? All the scientific evidence and the scientific answers are right in front of us. This requires a global effort. Air and water pollution from other countries affects us just as much as our own. Winds and ocean currents carry it to us and seriously affect our quality of life, our wildlife and aquatic life. Only by cooperation, not isolation, can we mend our damaged planet.