Junk food

Moving from direct environmental issues to the one-step-removed topic of food, I'm fascinated by this article on junk food from Vox. Did you know that 75% of adolescents in the US get more than half of their calories from junk food?! Even though that taxing something bad like junk food seems like a good idea, David Just, who graduated from the same program I did, and Marc Bellemare, a co-author of Towson's Seth Gitter, have some interesting thoughts on problems with the junk food tax. They point to the political problems associated with getting a tax passed and the American addiction to convenience as obstacles. Also, our current food system would need to do better at producing more, cheaper food that isn't as bad for you.

Lots of complicated factors!

Dorchester County: Rising Chesapeake Tides

Gorgeous short 15 minute movie that also packs a wallop of a message. Times are really changing for the eastern shore: if we don't act, tens of billions of dollars of real estate will be under water this century. Take a look at the beautiful photography they use to tell the story....

Quiz time!

How much do you know about how land is used worldwide?

Put numbers in each of the following boxes. The total should add up to 100%.

Cropland:   %
Livestock, including pastures plus land used to grow feed crops:  %
Forests:  %
Shrub land (small woody vegetation):  %
Barren land (deserts):  %
Glaciers:   %
Freshwater:  %
Built area (cities):  %

Answers here.

No cars for you

The good news in American car manufacturing is that many manufacturers are jumping into the electric sector. Unfortunately, there's bad news too: they're basically abandoning the car sector for the SUV market. For a long time the latter have been more profitable, and with low gas prices likely to stick around for awhile, consumer trends are likely to stay with the more bulky vehicles. Sure, Honda and Toyota will continue to crank out their crowd-pleasing Accords and Camrys, but US producers seem likely to back out of the market soon.

Cape town: the city without water

Capetown, South Africa averages about 31 inches of rainfall per year, not that far from Baltimore's 42 inches per year, but a severe drought and recent city expansion is bringing a real crisis to the fore. The city is literally about to run out of water: their supply is currently set to expire on April 22nd. How will they respond? Well, by raising the price of water. Since charging people for an essential good can be seen as evil, the price will be paid in time: people will have to go stand in line with buckets or whatever to get their daily ration of water.

Fortunately it's not that bad yet, but this is looking like another low year for rainfall on the US West Coast as well. Many places are at very low percentiles for the amount of water that has fallen so far this "Water year" (October-September), including central California where percentiles are in the single digits. As I recall, last year wasn't bad, bringing to end a 5 year drought, but one good year doesn't solve every problem....

1/24 UPDATE: more information from Nature. The day they run out of water- Day Zero- has moved closer, to April 12th. Impacts range from a devastating loss of agriculture to an inability to host tourists to an inability to do medical studies because the staff needed to do the work will be forced to spend hours in line waiting to get their daily ration of water. As one scientist quoted in the article says, "This is very, very serious."

Solar is booming

Solar is expanding rapidly around the world....  (Never understood why that song didn't catch on more- juvenile lyrics, cultural appropriation, catchy beat- what else does a pop song need?)

This article, mostly about why a certain governmental report isn't done very well, tells about how fast solar is expanding. The end of coal is upon us!

China doesn't want your trash

While that sounds silly, it's actually a real problem. We used to ship large amounts of recyclables to China, but they recently decided they were done taking it, at least in part because much of it was contaminated with various wastes, some hazardous. Sounds reasonable, but that leaves us with a problem: what to do with all the things we can't recycle, such as thin plastic bags? Burn them? Bury them, hundreds of tons at a time? No good solutions....
h/t Global Health Now email alerts

Coal is now uneconomic

That means that it's too expensive compared to the alternatives to be worth using, even not taking into account the externalities. Take a look!
h/t @martinravallion