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Category Archives: Environmental Law

Best Buy’s new recycling program will let you mail in your old electronics

Engadget: “Best Buy announced today that it’s extending its gadget recycling program to include a new mail-in option. The retailer will now sell you a box for your used electronics that you can ship back for recycling, saving a trip to the store. Best Buy says it’s recycled 2.7 billion pounds of electronics and appliances… Continue Reading

Americans feel favorably about many federal agencies, especially the Park Service, Postal Service and NASA

Pew: “As President Joe Biden and the new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives face off over the debt ceiling and government spending, more Americans say they have favorable than unfavorable opinions of many agencies and departments of the federal government. Americans view 14 of 16 federal agencies more favorably than unfavorably, according… Continue Reading

A gobal approach for natural history museum collections

Popular Science – Is there a way to keep track of all the items held in natural history museums? By Charlotte Hu: “Natural history museums offer amazing portals into worlds miles away from our own, and into eras from the distant past. Comprised of fossils, minerals, preserved specimens, and much more, some collections are of… Continue Reading

Geographic information systems: a use case for journalists

DataJournalism.com: “…Speak with a few GIS professionals and a common theme will emerge: they struggle to explain to their loved ones exactly what it is they do. Many of us understand superficially that GIS has something to do with ‘mapping’ and ‘geography’, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Similar to how tools… Continue Reading

Report Identifies PFAS Injected into at least 1,600 Oil and Gas Wells

Industry-Friendly State Disclosure Rules May Shield Far Broader Use. “Previously unpublicized information unearthed by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) shows that since at least 2013, oil and gas companies have used more than 21 tons (43,000 pounds) of a class of extremely toxic and persistent chemicals known as PFAS in hydraulic fracturing of oil and… Continue Reading

Alexander Skarsgård Explains the Answer to Everything

The New York Times – (It Involves Doing Some Math – Opinion / Video) “Partha Dasgupta is a Cambridge University economist who in 2021 prepared a more than 600-page report for the British government about the financial value of nature. Not your average bedtime reading. But believe us when we say his report, the culmination… Continue Reading

2022 Fossil Fuel Finance Report

Banking on Climate Chaos – Any bank supporting any company that is expanding fossil fuels is driving climate chaos: “Fossil fuel financing from the world’s 60 largest banks has reached USD $4.6 trillion in the six years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, with $742 billion in fossil fuel financing in 2021 alone. This… Continue Reading

Live stream of IPCC press conference to launch the Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will hold a hybrid press conference to present the Summary for Policymakers of Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report, subject to approval by the Panel. The press conference is scheduled to start at 14.00 CET (13.00 GMT) on Monday, 20 March 2023. It will follow the closure of the… Continue Reading

Artifical Intelligence and Climate Change

Quoted from: Couillet, Romain, Denis Trystram, and Thierry Ménissier. “The submerged part of the AI-ceberg.” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, September 2022. Via No Tech Magazine – “The energy consumption of a single training run of the latest (by 2020) deep neural networks dedicated to natural language processing exceeds 1,000 megawatt-hours (more than a month of… Continue Reading

These Interactive Tools Reveal Your Home’s Future Flood, Heat, and Wind Risk

Lifehacker: “Floods are the most expensive natural disaster in the United States, costing over $1 trillion since 1980 (when you take inflation into account), according to Flood Defenders. And while many people use FEMA flood maps to check whether their home has a high flood risk, they are outdated by a decade, according to Scientific… Continue Reading