by Jane Shaw Stroup | Dec 7, 2019 | The Environmental Blog
A new video by PERC (the Property and Environment Research Center) describes how trophy hunting in Coutada 11, an area in Mozambique that extends almost 500,000 acres, has brought back its wildlife. Devastated by a civil war that ended in 1992, Mozambique lost most of its wildlife, especially large animals such as lions and elephants. As part of the recovery from the war, the Mozambique government began leasing its game reserves to private businesses.
In 1994 Mark Haldane, who runs an African safari business in South Africa and Botswana visited Coutada 11, which is in the Zambesi River delta. “It was absolutely beautiful,” he says in the video. “The problem was they had hardly any animals.”
Using funds from his existing business, Haldane began building up wildlife again. The key was to involve the local community. The company built a clinic and a school and regularly provides meat from hunting. It also hired former poachers as salaried anti-poachers.
The biggest threat to protecting the animals, says Haldane, is proposed laws that would ban the importation of trophy animals such as elephants and lions into the U.S. and other countries.
by John C. Goodman | Dec 3, 2019 | The Environmental Blog
As noted in a recent Washington Times article, nearly four years after the Paris agreement was enacted with full force, only two of the 32 top emitting countries — Morocco and Gambia — have actually “enacted policies consistent with holding global temperature rise from pre-industrial levels below 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, according to the Climate Action Tracker.”
Faced with public backlash (on the streets and at the ballot box) against costly climate policies that have raised energy prices, the European Union and Japan — the two main driving forces behind the demand for stringent emissions reductions — have enacted policies that have increased their greenhouse gas emissions since the Paris agreement was signed.
And there’s more from H. Sterling Burnettt in the American Spectator.
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by Jane Shaw Stroup | Nov 29, 2019 | The Environmental Blog
In three recent articles by Waste Dive, an online newspaper that covers the waste-and-recovery industry, this picture emerges:
Recycling is in trouble, thanks in part to China’s decision in 2017 to stop accepting waste from other countries. Residential recycling, which has never made money, is cash-strapped.
What to do? Look for federal funds.
by Holly Fretwell | Nov 26, 2019 | The Environmental Blog
Wildfire is causing needless loss of life and resources. Last year, the Camp Fire that burned in northern California took 85 lives, destroyed nearly 19,000 structures, and burned 153,000 acres. Efforts to prevent a similar tragedy this year led to intentional blackouts that left millions without electricity. Yet the fires rage again, consuming 75,000 acres this year. Wildfires across the west burn on average 7 million acres annually.
Fire-fighting now takes up more than half of the Forest Service’s annual budget, leaving few dollars for restoring forests and preventing future fires. A century of fire suppression and decades of reduced commercial harvest have increased forest density and left an accumulation of fuels on the forest floor. Add that to a drier climate and residential development expanding on the forest edge, and the mix is a design for disaster.
by Jane Shaw Stroup | Nov 21, 2019 | The Environmental Blog
Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite. In a recent post on his blog he wrote:
One would think that the practice of science would be objective. I once believed this, too. As a fresh post-doc at the University of Wisconsin, when I discovered something new in satellite data, I was surprised to encounter NASA employees who tried to keep my work from being published because they feared it would interfere with a new satellite mission they were working toward. I eventually got it published as a cover article in the prestigious journal, Nature.
But the subject I was dealing with did not have the profound financial, political, policy, and even religious import that climate change would end up having. Furthermore, 35 years ago things were different than today. People were less tribal. There is an old saying that one should not discuss politics or religion in polite company, but it turns out that social media is far from polite company.
From a practical standpoint, what we do (or don’t do) about human-caused climate change supports either (1) a statist, top-down governmental control over human affairs that involves a more socialist political framework, or (2) an unconstrained individual-freedom framework where capitalism reigns supreme. So, one could easily be a believer (or non-believer) in the ‘climate emergency’ based upon their political leanings.
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