This is admittedly from November, but it's the first deep-dive I've seen.

The story of the United States corn ethanol industry is a story about a sector that grew rapidly under a very specific set of policy, technology and market conditions. It filled a gap when gasoline demand was rising, when climate policy focused on incremental change, and when EVs were still a niche. It became a major part of the Midwestern political economy. It shaped land use patterns. It supported thousands of farmers and dozens of rural communities built around steady demand for transport fuel. That world is shifting and the signals point toward a twenty year horizon that looks very different from the previous twenty, with very significant implications for the Midwest’s economies and likely politics.

Corn ethanol grew from a small program focused on oxygenates into a national industry producing over 16 billion gallons annually, about 48 million metric tons. The Renewable Fuel Standard created guaranteed demand by requiring refiners to blend increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. Direct subsidies through the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit helped expand capacity. By the late 2000s the industry had become large enough to hold political weight in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska. Ethanol plants became anchor employers. Farmers gained a new buyer that consumed nearly 40% of the national corn crop. The system became predictable and self reinforcing. All gasoline sold in the country now has about 10% ethanol added, with some higher blends available in some places. Once direct subsidies expired, the mandate and a large fleet of internal combustion vehicles kept the industry stable. That stability is now being tested by structural changes in transportation and energy.

The first challenge appears in the gasoline market itself. EIA data from 2015 through 2019 shows finished motor gasoline stabilizing at roughly 140 billion gallons a year. The post pandemic rebound never reached that range again. By 2024 gasoline demand had slipped below pre pandemic levels even though the population was larger than in 2019. The shift is not a statistical quirk. Efficiency gains, hybrid penetration and improved powertrain design are pushing gasoline demand down. Even modest EV adoption affects fuel consumption more than most people expect because each EV replaces an entire household’s gasoline demand, not a small slice of it. Hybrid and work from home models that are common after COVID also inhibit demand. Gasoline peaks are rarely jagged events. They plateau and then begin slow but durable declines. Ethanol demand sits inside that shrinking pool. Rising blend rates cannot compensate if the base declines year after year.

Weather agencies and climate scientists have pointed to the possibility of an El Niño forming in the Pacific Ocean later this year – a phenomenon that could push global temperatures to all-time record highs in 2027.

Both the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology have said some climate models are forecasting an El Niño but both cautioned those results came with uncertainties.

Experts told the Guardian it was too early to be confident, but there were signals in the spread of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific that suggested an El Niño could form in 2026.

The cycle of ocean temperatures in the Pacific – known as the El Niño southern oscillation (ENSO) – is linked with extreme climate events around the world.

When warmer-than-average waters gather in the east of the equatorial Pacific and extend to the coast of the American continent, this is known as an El Niño and tends to give global temperatures a boost and, in Australia, can be linked to drier and hotter conditions.

Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group.

By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than in the first year of the Biden administration.

Trump’s first administration filed 86 such cases in its first year, which was in turn a drop from the Obama administration’s 127 four years earlier.

“Our nation’s landmark environmental laws are meaningless when EPA does not enforce the rules,” Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement.

The findings echo two recent analyses from the nonprofits Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Earthjustice, which both documented dwindling environmental enforcement under Trump.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33800866

“We have been occupying the U.S. company Cargill for 14 days, and now we have blocked access to Santarém’s airport, where many people come to take photos and swim in the river without knowing about the problems we are facing. The president signed a decree that privatizes three rivers – the Tapajós, Tocantins, and Madeira – and advanced a measure that opens the way for dredging the Tapajós. Our river is at risk. The government can no longer tell Europe and the United States that it preserves the environment while destroying it here,” said Goldman Prize winner Alessandra Korap Munduruku, a leader from the Middle Tapajós region.

During Wednesday’s meeting with government representatives, Chief Gilson Tupinambá announced the blockade of access to the airport in response to the lack of effective government steps to address the movement’s demands. “I want to tell all of you that no one is leaving Santarém, the airport has just been closed. No one is leaving Santarém. And you are going to stay here with us, eat what we eat, go through what we go through, until we get an answer,” he said.

“We went to COP30 and it was a staged circus. There, they promised Free, Prior, and Informed Consultation, but now we don’t want consultation, we want this decree revoked. Revoke it now. I’m 50 years old and my concern is for our children and grandchildren. What will be left because of greed?” said Chief Gilson Tupinambá.

Who would have guessed?

Flawed economic models mean the accelerating impact of the climate crisis could lead to a global financial crash, experts warn.

Recovery would be far harder than after the 2008 financial crash, they said, as “we can’t bail out the Earth like we did the banks”.

As the world speeds towards 2C of global heating, the risks of extreme weather disasters and climate tipping points are increasing fast. But current economic models used by governments and financial institutions entirely miss such shocks, the researchers said, instead forecasting that steady economic growth will be slowed only by gradually rising average temperatures. This is because the models assume the future will behave like the past, despite the burning of fossil fuels pushing the climate system into uncharted territory.

Tipping points, such as the collapse of critical Atlantic currents or the Greenland ice sheet, would have global consequences for society. Some are thought to be at, or very close to, their tipping points but the timing is difficult to predict. Combined extreme weather disasters could wipe out national economies, the researchers, from the University of Exeter and financial thinktank Carbon Tracker Initiative, said.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33800925

“What is happening on the Tapajós is not an isolated episode: it is the direct consequence of decisions that treat rivers as export corridors and push projects forward without real listening and without rights safeguards. During COP30, more than 500 Indigenous people warned the world about the risks of projects tied to the Ferrogrão export corridor and the dredging of the Tapajós – and still, their demands remain without an effective response. The international community, buyers, and financiers cannot keep normalizing a ‘progress’ that fuels conflict and threatens living territories,” said Vivi Borari, an Indigenous leader and activist in the Tapajós Vivo Movement, a member organization of the Enough Soy Alliance.

“While Cargill tells the press that they have no control over the reckless expansion of export-oriented infrastructure across the Amazon, the opposite is true,” said Christian Poirier, Amazon Watch Program Director. “It is the demands of powerful commodity traders like Cargill that drive the destructive privatization of Amazonian rivers and construction of mega-projects like Ferrogrão. The Indigenous mobilization chose Cargill’s grain terminal for this reason, to hold them accountable alongside sectors of the Brazilian government.”

In the dim flicker of a kerosene lantern on a fog-wreathed houseboat, I watched Nazia Qasim’s reed-scarred hands pierce threadbare fabric with her needle, weaving colored abayas as her eyes fixed on Dal Lake’s silt-choked horizon, diesel haze mingling with the sour tang of rotting lotus stems, where vibrant beds once bloomed.

I’ve heard endless tales from Nazia—and Qudisa, and Bano, and their sisters—about how the lake’s relentless shrinkage has mirrored their own lives’ contracting. Yet the women have overcome: As the lake withers, under absent snows and dying streams, the water now polluted and undrinkable, they have found new work and purpose through their weaving. For hours last January, I watched their hands move in the lantern’s glow, transforming loss into livelihood. This sisterhood, which once thrived on an endless, ancestral bounty of lotus, water chestnuts, and fish, now scraps stitched tight, the women’s quiet knots a fierce stand against the fade.

As a climate reporter based largely out of India, I am often tasked with telling stories on the frontlines of disaster. I have crouched in Pampore’s parched Karewas at dawn, watching farmers Farida Jan and Snobar Ahad recount the decline of saffron, a visceral dirge for disappearing traditions I could feel in the cracked earth underfoot. I’ve seen women shoulder jerry cans under a merciless sun, irrigating wilted bulbs past cobwebbed government drip lines, turning the world’s most prized spices into frantic wagers against the sky, where one failed season means debt for entire villages. And in countless moments, I’ve watched with growing frustration how easily the world abandons the Global South, which disproportionately bears the brunt of climate change, and how rarely the countries most responsible seem to face the same consequences.

This work necessitates exhaustive fieldwork in fragile ecosystems, sifting through scarce data amid conflict, and confronting the grief of vanishing landscapes and livelihoods. But in my writing on the realities of climate change, I’ve also made a conscious effort to find stories of resilience, rather than just stories of despair. Stories that not only show there are still people who haven’t given up on the fight, but who have made a meaningful difference in changing the tides.

These changemakers are often women.

For someone aiming to end the global livestock industry, Bruce Friedrich begins his new book – called Meat – in disarming fashion: “I’m not here to tell anyone what to eat. You won’t find vegetarian or vegan recipes in this book, and you won’t find a single sentence attempting to convince you to eat differently. This book isn’t about policing your plate.”

There’s more. Friedrich, a vegan for almost four decades, says meat is “humanity’s favourite food”.

“It appears to be biological,” he says. “Meat has dense calories, which come from a lot of fat, and it has an umami flavour that humans have evolved to crave. Plus, meat is deeply rooted in most cultures and is the centrepiece at many social gatherings.”

The global damage wreaked by industrial livestock, from climate-heating methane burps to water pollution to the destruction of forests, is well established. For at least 50 years, says Friedrich, environmentalists, health experts and animal advocates – including him – have been trying to convince people to eat less meat and some have done so.

New investigation reveals vast global overlap between drilling permits and cherished sites crucial for nature

In brief

• Governments have allowed oil and gas companies to operate in more than 7,000 “protected” areas around the world

• Protected sites are recognised by international agreements but left at risk by weak enforcement

• Total global area encroached on is bigger than the size of France and includes sites that are vital buffers against climate change

In 2022, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) committed to developing strategies to reduce emissions from aviation. That process is now well underway.

In March of last year, I attended and reported on a CARB forum focused on technology solutions that could curb climate pollution from the aviation sector. Since that meeting, staff have prepared draft concepts for potential programs and policies that could be brought to the agency’s board for action next year.

Earlier this month, the agency hosted a public workshop to share more details about the four concepts under consideration, which focus on airport operations on the ground and at the gate: controlling emissions from aircraft auxiliary power units; reducing emissions from airport ground support equipment; reducing emissions from aircraft taxiing at the airport; and reducing emissions from aircraft takeoffs and landings.

Nearly half a century ago, the US Department of Energy launched a clean energy experiment beneath the University of Minnesota with a simple goal: storing hot water for months at a time in an aquifer more than 100 metres below ground.

The idea of the seasonal thermal energy storage was to tuck away excess heat produced in summer, then use it in the winter to warm buildings.

Now, 45 years after the first test wells were drilled under the university’s St Paul campus, one of the first large-scale aquifer thermal energy systems in the country is being built less than 10 miles from the original test site.

The Heights, a mixed-use development rising from a former golf course on the city’s Greater East Side, will tap thermal energy from an aquifer 100 to 150 metres below ground.

Groundwater from wells spread across the northern half of the 45-hectare development will be drawn by high-efficiency electric heat pumps, powered in part by solar panels, to provide low-cost heating and cooling with little greenhouse gas emissions for 850 homes and several light-industrial buildings.

Europe’s supermarket shelves are packed with brands billing their plastic packaging as sustainable, but often only a fraction of the materials are truly recovered from waste, with the rest made from petroleum.

Brands using plastic packaging – from Kraft’s Heinz Beanz to Mondelēz’s Philadelphia – use materials made by the plastic manufacturing arm of the oil company Saudi Aramco.

The Saudi state-owned holding opposes production cuts under the UN plastic treaty and is the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter (more than 70m tonnes up to 2023).

Aramco’s petrochemical subsidiary, Sabic, along with other big players, devised a successful way to rebrand their harmful business as “planet saver”. They label plastic as “circular” and climate-friendly, although in practice it remains almost entirely fossil-based, exacerbating global warming and the plastic crisis.

Under industry pressure, Europe is on track to legalise this practice, which independent experts have described as greenwashing, with lax EU rules set to take effect in 2026 and similar UK regulations to be enforced as of 2027.

We need naturally evolved bacterias that will eat all plastics (as link illustrates we discovered first one), but it extremely bad effects & risks (as the other link goes into) to creating the bacterias that will eat all the plastics, that take forever to biodegrade.

I been to clean-up beaches-parks events, but there is just too much it, for even the best possible machines to clean it all up.

Of course we cannot let Rich-Super Rich Economic Classes/Owners to just produce even a single new piece of plastic, which doing it now is hugely profitable industry.

Of course instead we need to putting as much resources as possible as quickly as possible to make plastics, that completely with a reasonable amount of time biodegrade, completely take over for then banned plastics, that take forever to biodegrade, markets.

Here is the 2-questions (2-challenges) I have are:

1st. How do we have these naturally evolved bacterias, that will eat all plastics, that will not eat the plastics, that completely with a reasonable amount of time biodegrade, before their purposes was achieved?

&

2nd. How do we get the plastics, that take forever to biodegrade, out of all living beings, including ourselves?

Half the world’s 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 39 of these sitting in regions of “extremely high water stress”, new analysis and mapping has shown.

Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown.

Watershed Investigations and the Guardian mapped cities on to stressed catchments revealing that Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are among those facing extreme stress, while London, Bangkok and Jakarta are classed as being highly stressed.

Separate analysis of Nasa satellite data, compiled by scientists at University College London, shows which of the largest 100 cities have been drying or getting wetter over two decades with places such as Chennai, Tehran and Zhengzhou showing strong drying trends and Tokyo, Lagos and Kampala showing strong wetting trends. All 100 cities and their trends can be viewed on a new interactive water security atlas.

An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it’s time we took it seriously as a building material, too.

This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for architects to be “bamboo-ready” as they published a manual for designing permanent buildings made of the material, in an effort to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a proper alternative to steel and concrete.

Bamboo has already been used for a number of boundary-pushing projects around the world. At Terminal 2 of Kempegowda international airport in Bengaluru, India, bamboo tubes make up the ceiling and pillars. The Ninghai bamboo tower in north-east China, which is more than 20 metres tall, is claimed to be the world’s first high-rise building made using engineered bamboo.

The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.

A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.

The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”

But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.

The global cost of greenhouse gas emissions are nearly double what scientists previously thought, according to a study published Thursday by researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

It is the first time a social cost of carbon (SCC) assessment—a key measure of economic harm caused by climate change—has included damages to the ocean. Global coral loss, fisheries disruption and coastal infrastructure destruction are estimated to cost nearly $2 trillion annually, fundamentally changing how we measure climate finance.

“For decades, we’ve been estimating the economic cost of climate change while effectively assigning a value of zero to the ocean,” said Bernardo Bastien-Olvera, who led the study during his postdoctoral fellowship at Scripps. “Ocean loss is not just an environmental issue, but a central part of the economic story of climate change.”

Of note, the fisheries reporter behind this piece is Johnny Sturgeon.

For Antarctic scientists, getting a handle on what’s happening under the ice shelves is urgent because the fate of the planet’s coastlines will depend on how fast they melt.

Antarctica has more than 70 ice shelves that extend the continent’s vast ice sheet out over the ocean.

Covering about 1.5m sq km, ice shelves float on the water and don’t by themselves push up global sea levels if they melt.

But if global heating of the ocean melts them from underneath they could become unstable, allowing the ice sheet to slide faster into the ocean, pushing up global sea levels by several metres.

The continent’s most vulnerable regions alone have enough ice to push up sea levels by about 15 metres if they all melt.

#FuelingEcocide, our latest investigation coordinated by EIF in partnership with European Investigative Collaborations (EIC), reveals that oil and gas licences overlap with 7,000 protected areas worldwide. A total overlap of 690,000 km², an area bigger than the size of France – despite existing regulations and ongoing efforts to safeguard key biodiversity zones.

David E. Hogan, UA, Environmental Scientist invented a way to treat any form of waste water, to get copper out of it, so it can recycled & making the waste water better in the process. As he says in the segment, soon we will never need to make new copper, because it is so everywhere.

This is AWESOME!

Global temperatures in 2025 did not quite reach the heights of 2024, thanks to the cooling influence of the natural La Niña weather pattern in the Pacific, new data from the European Copernicus climate service and the Met Office shows.

But the last three years were the world's warmest ever recorded, bringing the planet closer to breaching international climate targets.

Despite natural cooling from La Niña, 2025 was still much warmer than temperatures even a decade ago, as humanity's carbon emissions continue to heat the planet.

That will inevitably lead to further temperature records – and worsening weather extremes – unless emissions are sharply reduced, scientists warn.

"If we go twenty years into the future and we look back at this period of the mid-2020s, we will see these years as relatively cool," said Dr Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus.