Environment News – Headlines
Some bite-sized pieces of news from the environment this week.
29 May, 2019
News snippets
New royal baby Archie got plenty of news coverage when he was born. But you have to wonder how skewed our priorities are. In the US, ABC’s World News Tonight spent more than 7 minutes reporting on the birth – more time than the program spent covering climate change during the entire year of 2018.
On the same day, the United Nations released a summary of a major new report warning that human destruction of the natural world threatens our water supplies, food security, and health.
ABC and NBC’s nightly news programs didn’t even mention the report. But they did air 2 segments each on Archie. CBS was the only national broadcast network that ran a segment on the report that night, and of course it ran one on the baby, too. And over the following days, Archie stayed in the news. Climate change stayed out of it. Yes, the climate crisis is grim news, and many people people want lighter fare. OK. But we shouldn’t shut out real news. We have a problem.
Climate denial is still getting loads of money, much of it from pro-Trump billionaires. After backing Trump’s 2016 election bid with millions of dollars, the secretive GOP mega-donor Mercer family funds think tanks that peddle misinformation about the climate crisis. Fossil-fuel billionaire Koch brothers continue to support climate deniers. And in 2017, dozens of climate denial groups called on Trump to fully withdraw from the historic 2015 Paris climate accord. Which he did.
“Look after your own waste!” That’s what south-east Asian countries are telling the West. Waste from the United States, the UK, Australia and Germany pours into the area – often illegally, falsely declared as other imports.
Countries like Malaysia are so angry about it, that they are shipping it back to the country which sent it. They say it’s the only way western countries will be forced to confront their own waste problems, rather than burdening developing countries.
Only 9% of the world’s plastics are recycled, with the rest mostly ending up rotting in landfills across south-east Asia or illegally incinerated, releasing highly poisonous fumes. A research officer says the waste is often “contaminated, mixed and low grade” which meant it could not be processed and has ended up in vast toxic waste dumps.
more snippets
Leaving work early could help the planet! Productivity sounds like a good thing, but making lots of stuff and keeping offices humming results in a load of climate-warming pollution. Not to mention the fossil fuels used in the daily commute. A new report suggests that overworked Americans are making the country’s gigantic carbon footprint even bigger. It’s thought that if U.S. companies had working hours more like Europe’s, energy consumption would drop by 20 percent. Wow!
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