November 2020 Environmental News: Right Whales, Plastic Recycling, and More
Photo by Nick Fewings
Here’s the best of what we’ve read over the last month.
“As the effects of climate change become more devastating, prominent research institutions and government agencies are focusing new money and attention on an idea once dismissed as science fiction: Artificially cooling the planet, in the hopes of buying humanity more time to cut greenhouse gas emissions.”
— As Climate Disasters Pile Up, a Radical Proposal Gains Traction (The New York Times)
“But [plastic is] not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite. NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.”
— How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled (NPR)
“As numbers of North Atlantic right whales keep declining because of entanglements with fishing gear and fatal ship strikes, conservationists are using acoustic technology and waging an escalating legal battle to push for more aggressive action to protect the world’s rarest cetacean.”
— At Sea and in Court, the Fight to Save Right Whales Intensifies (Yale Environment 360)
“The deregulatory era of the past four years amounts to an unprecedented stress test of the nation’s environmental rules and regulations and, in some cases, exposed how vulnerabilities in the way those rules were crafted or finalized can be used to weaken or rewrite them. Climate-minded policymakers can now study those vulnerabilities, and the often sloppy way Trump officials tried to take advantage of them, to restore and strengthen the nation’s environmental protections in order to make them more ambitious, more durable, and more partisan-proof.”
— Biden Faces Moral Imperative to Advance Climate Regulations (Sierra)