nuclear-news

Opinion:

¶ “Donald Trump, Bird Killer” • He campaigned as a guardian of birds against windpower. His secretary of the Department of Interior, Ryan Zinke, recently noted renewable energy’s risks to birds in arguing against using public lands for solar power. Now, his administration is pushing policies that could send billions of birds to their deaths. [New Republic]

Victim of obsolete technology (Historical Picture Archive | Getty)

¶ “Game 1 of the World Series breaks heat record” • In a year of catastrophic hurricanes and devastating wildfires, the heat wave in Southern California this week is another urgent reminder that climate change is already here. Evening temperatures at Dodger Stadium reached 103° F. The average October high in Los Angeles is 75° F.  [ThinkProgress]

Science and Technology:

¶ New research suggests that the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago were much cooler than we thought. If this…

Opinion:

¶ “‘Can You Say Corruption?’ Puerto Rico Contract for Trump-Connected Raises Concerns” • Two-year-old Whitefish Energy won $300 million no-bid contract to restore Puerto Rico’s electrical grid. Its financiers have important connections to the Trump administration. It had two employees when the hurricane struck. [Common Dreams]

Downtown Whitefish, Montana, home of Whitefish Energy,
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and a major donor to Trump campaign (Photo: WikiCapa, Wikimedia Commons)

How can I help the people of Puerto Rico? One way is
to donate at [Sunnyside Solar’s crowdfunding website].

World:

¶ Nicaragua has signed on to the Paris Agreement, so now the United States and Syria are now the only two nations in the world that have refused to be members of the climate pact. The Central American country held out on signing the deal for two years, based on its government’s criticisms that the pact was “insufficient”…

So far, in the past three months, we’ve had four major U.S. disasters whose impacts we can certainly say were made worse by human caused climate change.

The costs from these disasters to U.S. society and, in the end, to citizens and taxpayers is tremendous. Thousands of people have lost their homes. Irreplaceable lives were forever stripped from us. Many have lost access to work and livelihoods. And in the case of Puerto Rico, hundreds of thousands of people have been thrust back into what amounts to a modern rendition of the dark ages.

(A satellite image of the burn scar left following the North Bay fires. Human-caused climate change is a primary enabler for these kinds of disasters. Image source: NASA.)

As a measure of money alone and leaving aside the untold human misery, hurricane Harvey may ultimately cost the U.S. $180 billion, Irma may cost the U.S…