Increasing pressure on India to agree to demands of the Paris Climate Agreement looks like “carbon imperialism” to the Indian government, reports Vijay Jayaraj for the Global Warming Policy Forum. “India is an important player in the global discussion on renewable tech transition as they are one of the largest consumer of fossil fuels and…
Category: Jane Shaw Stroup
Thursday’s Links
A ‘blacklist’ aims at preventing climate skeptics from getting academic jobs, says Roger Pielke. Watch out. Los Angeles just issued a “Green New Deal.” Federal rules make it almost impossible for “Good Samaritans” to clean up abandoned mines, says PERC.
Friday’s Links
Is too much e-commerce overrunning our cities? Yes, says the World Economic Forum. The term ‘global warming’ may be coming back, because it’s scarier than ‘climate change.’ Puddles, ditches, and watering ponds no longer regulated as federal waters.
Curbside Recycling: A Costly Mistake
Recycling companies are facing hard times. Partly that’s because in 2017 China started closing its doors to waste. It doesn’t accept mixed paper or most plastic or electronic waste.
Although some recycling (such as electronic waste) has been relocated to South Asia, the dwindling market for recycled material has sent prices downward, making it difficult for the entire industry.
But the biggest problems face companies—and communities—that pick up and sort household. Approximately 60 curbside programs were canceled in 2017, “with even more drop-off site closures and material limitations,” says Waste Dive, a newsletter about the waste industry. (The newsletter does note some programs that had been dropped have come back.)
Material that is supposed to be recycled is ending up in landfills, an Atlantic article said earlier this year. Companies are debating how to cope with the shrinking market. A debate over the “single-stream” versus dual-stream (requiring homeowners to separate recyclables) continues.
Rescuing the Wild Horses on Public Lands
Wild horses and burros range throughout the public grasslands of the United States. With few predators, they face starvation or dehydration, as 90,000 animals attempt to live on dry lands that can sustain fewer than a third of that number.
PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center, has developed a possible solution, one that has now been adopted by the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees those lands. It is an incentive-based plan that pays individuals to adopt horses.
Let Environmentalists Bid
In this guest post by Shawn Regan, a research fellow and the director of publications at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Montana, looks at the fact that to acquire rights to natural resources in the West, you must use the resource. This is an obvious barrier to many would-be environmentalist bidders.