Nutrition & human height

A six minute video posted on Vox shows how important a good diet is. This will be useful in my stats class, but it's also relevant for Resources: note that while Borlaug's work didn't have a direct effect on infant mortality rates, the changes he contributed to made a big difference for a lot of people. While genetics are important, diet can also determine as much as 20% of a person's height, which is why South Korea saw such impressive gains in height in the late 20th century. I always appreciate a little good news!

Chinese renewables

They may be working hard on their giant pig farms, but they are also working hard on adding renewable energy. According to Hannah Ritchie, their new capacity grows at an astounding rate: the amount of NEW capacity each year is more than the total capacity of large countries such as the UK. Wow.

No other large country is even close to adding this much renewable capacity. Go China!

Chinese pig farms

 Article in today's NYT: high rise CAFOs have been built in China. I'm not sure about how much antibiotics they use, but at least in this picture it doesn't look as awful as some of the American CAFOs. (Some pictures show cages, which I think I have heard are important to keep breeding pigs from crushing piglets, though again I am no expert.)

They even reuse some of the feces: "Roughly one-quarter of the feed will come out as dry excrement that can be repurposed as methane to generate electricity." That's the same thing they are doing in North Carolina, where Modern Farmer reports that biogas collection has run into some problems as the waste collection disproportionately affected communities of color.

Oil: in decline?

Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data is one of my heroes, and her blog today considers a report by (oil company) BP that demand for oil is declining. No one can perfectly predict the future, and there are a few scenarios to consider, but overall patterns indicate decreased demand over time, which is great news from a climate perspective.

Boxing Day is over

A leading indicator for the health of the economy is the amount of cardboard used: when the economy is roaring along, demand for boxes is huge in this age of Amazon. If this leading indicator is to be believed, though, we may be in for some belt-tightening. This article shows that demand for boxes is way down.

Another indicator is the value of the US dollar. While that varies depending on what it's being compared to, in many cases the value of the grenback has been declining since September. Here's the US dollar vs. the Euro.

Long time no blog

Here it is the start of a new semester and I haven't posted anything for months: that's not good. Been a busy time: sorry!

First, a graphs caught my eye showing increased production of milk per cow 

 and increased US yogurt consumption.

Finally, the Washington Post posted this article today about the environmental impact of a variety of foods. There are many interesting graphics there including this one:

I knew that beef was up there, thanks to Our World in Data, but I didn't realize about groundfish. I need to learn more!