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Via FoamFacts – “Foam #6, commonly referred to as Styrofoam—a trademark of Dow Chemical Company, is also known as expanded polystyrene or EPS…Foam # 6 is a thermoplastic, which means that it can be completely recycled. From a technical standpoint, converting foam into recycled pellets is very easy. And by using widely available compactors specifically designed for …
Follow-up to previous posting – McClatchy – Trump team compiles infrastructure priority list – new via Stratfor – “…there are more than 80,000 dams in the United States, with an average age of 52 years. The suburban sprawl and growing populations have also put more people downstream of dams that once only served agricultural land, …
Levine, Adam Seth and Kline, Reuben, When Does Self-Interest Motivate Political Engagement? The Case of Climate Change (March 12, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2931842 “Past work finds that material self-interest often motivates increased issue engagement. In this paper we identify an important condition under which the opposite can occur. When people see an issue as …
COMPREHENSIVE PLAN FOR REORGANIZING THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH, March 13, 2017 – “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Purpose. This order is intended to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of the executive branch …
Follow up to previous postings – Why is federal government data disappearing? and Please support DataRescue and other open access archive efforts, the New York Times highlights efforts by proactive teams that include librarians, advocacy groups, grad students, coders, archivists and scientists – Activists Rush to Save Government Science Data — If They Can Find …
Via The Eco Experts: “Climate change is one of the greatest threats we face, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warning that continued emissions of greenhouse gases at their current level could cause a disastrous and irreversible impact on the planet. The effects of climate change are already clear: 2016 has officially been …
The Trump administration has pushed a flurry of deregulations, giving more freedoms to gun sellers, bankers and miners, and corporate lobbyists are clamoring for more. Automakers Near a Victory on Rollback of Fuel Standards
Washington Post: “The Trump administration is seeking to slash the budget of one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post. The proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would also …
Forest dynamics in the U.S. indicate disproportionate attrition in western forests, rural areas and public lands. Sheng Yang, Giorgos Mountrakis. PLOS. Published: February 22, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0171383 “Forests are experiencing significant changes; studying geographic patterns in forests is critical in understanding the impact of forest dynamics to biodiversity, soil erosion, water chemistry and climate. Few studies …
USGS: “Get your flip-flops and shorts out because spring is arriving very early this year . . . at least 2-3 weeks early across almost the entire Southeast, from San Antonio to Atlanta to Washington, D.C. This unusually early spring is likely to keep rolling north, already bringing surprising signs of spring to portions of the central Midwest …
FastCoExist: “Should sections of the Environmental Protection Agency‘s website go the way of the civil rights and climate-change pages of the White House website—in other words, disappear—the agency is prepared. Even if Donald Trump takes the whole EPA site offline, a mirror copy of the website exists online, and it reflects the way the site …
Less ice and more shipping traffic has left the seafloor looking like the side of a New Jersey highway. John Metcalf, Feb 16, 2017. This post is part of a CityLab series on wastelands, and what we squander, discard, and fritter away. “Humanity’s trash has near-universal dominion in the ocean. It swirls in the waves …
