... for testing the integrity of the housing & infrastructure ...

I seriously doubt anything will be done until it damages the governor's home
and, even then, his paymasters will just ensure he can move into a better
place, further from the risk zone.

That, my friend, is the smell of corruption rising from the ruins of democracy.

You've managed to shut up the corporate mouthpieces.

Not one single dissent or excuse for the fact that Bayer have admitted that
their previous responses - so dutifully parroted by the local astroturfers - was
bollocks and that, rather than being "anti-science" or "Luddite" or "tin-foil",
the criticism was “quite good and scientifically sound”.

The Truth is a powerful disinfectant.

As in, showing the same breakdown categories for a direct comparison?

I'd be quite interested to see how (/if) the different segments have changed
in five years as the total amount has definitely increased.

Ideally, I'd also like to see "biomass" treated correctly too and not combined
(albeit conveniently) with solar & geothermal (for heating) or with wind & solar
& geothermal (for power generation) as well as the "biofuels" category.

As it is, it is painfully obvious that over 90% of the global energy is derived
from "burning stuff": fossil fuels + traditional biomass + biofuels + biomass
contribution to two other categories + (stretching a point slightly) nuclear.

It's only the 3.3% from hydro + the unstate wind/solar/geothermal (less than
4.2%) that *doesn't* involve burning shit - with all of the polluting end-products
that result ... call it 7.3% to be generous ... that is dismally low (even for 2010).

Is there a more hopeful recent update to this diagram please?

No, as others have noted up-thread, the hysteresis (and sheer scale) precludes
even rapid re-planting from being a "silver bullet" but there are still three good
reasons to push for this:

1) Clearance is primarily for meat production. Conservation & re-planting will
assist/encourage the (globally beneficial) move to reducing meat consumption.

2) Conservation & regrowth will preserve (and expand) the habitat of those
rain-forest species that we haven't yet pushed into extinction.

3) It is a visible & tangible cause that provides an entry for people's consciousness
to be awakened, a "first case" that gets the attention of folks who are neither
malicious nor embedded in the problematic industries first-hand but who need a
"something" to give them that nudge to move to the path of environmental
awareness. Some people mock the "photogenic causes" but they overlook the
fact that many people start off by helping to save whales, the cute dolphins,
the panda (one animal that is quite capable of ambling into extinction without
a single human being involved!) but that leads them to become aware of the
network of life, the connections, the importance of creatures to the biosphere,
krill, tuna, mosquito, bat, shark, turtle, elephant, everything enormous or tiny,
beautiful or plain, all of it. It takes that first step to move onto the path.


JMO.

I can see how this is a good, valid and honourable action by the veterans of
Vietnam, Cold War duty, Bosnia et al but it is pure two-faced American exceptionalism
when the people saying it have been - or are still - in active service in Afghanistan,
Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, ...



It's terrible that the poor girl was/is so terrified of the threat of Trump & his brownshirts
but the response of the rest of the world at the thought of the US military "protecting"
anyone but themselves & their paymasters is black humour indeed.

It's bad enough that there is a whole field of "entertainment" built up around
the concept of taking a completely incompetent moron and throwing them
into an environment that their every action makes an intelligent adult cringe
(and the target audience erupt in laughter) but this?

This is just cruelty to the mentally retarded - a vicious "Truman Show" for
the 21st Century.

> also found tiny particles of plastic in salt sourced from briny lakes, briny wells,
> and salt mines, although at lower levels

The first two of the above depends on the source of the "brine" in the first place
(i.e., is it a seawater replenished liquid or produced through groundwater rise?
If the former then yes, the marine liquid will carry in the same microparticles
that are found throughout the sea).

The last one is proof that it is in the *fresh* water being used to extract the salt
as there was absolutely no plastic around when those salt beds were being laid down.

The microplastic pollution is being introduced to a pristine environment by the
extraction process. This means that it is also being consumed by people & animals
in the belief that the fresh water is, well, fresh and unpolluted.


(ETA: Alternatively, given that this is China, it might be evidence that the supermarkets
and/or producers are mis-labelling marine salt as mined salt ... anything is possible in
that environmental wonderland ...)

The people who are closing the doors - because they are *full* - are not going to
care about niceties as "back to where?". Those are the luxuries expressed by the
vocal (but unhelpful) armchair "activists" from thousands of miles away.

The thing about triggering a "door shutting event" is that it cascades to the next
nation, the one who can no longer stand aside in order to let people pass through
to "somewhere else". That, in turn, triggers the door to be shut in each poor,
increasingly nationalistic nation: the doors that were only remaining open as long
as the exit doors were equally open. Once the exit door closes, the danger from
the combination of frustrated migrants and frustrated nationalists hits ignition
temperature very quickly. All that government can hope to do - in order to maintain
any form of public order - is close the "IN" door.

This will inevitably lead to two things: the first is that the accumulation of migrants
causes border issues; the second is that the strain on the country's structure exceeds
the ability to meet demands. The first issue allows the nationalists to have a free
target of "others" to blame for problems - law breakers from "out there".
The second issue gives the support for the growth of the nationalist response - the
increasing number of innocent citizens who are being impacted by the migrants.

Those people simply will not care about the "where" to send them "back" to.

If there is not a voluntary "retreat" by the people perceived as an "invading army"
then the "where" will be a bloody mess to be talked about by future historians.
(cf. Balkans, Rwanda, etc.)

"Where" at this point resolves to "away", not to a useful destination.

The people who were blaming Assad for this (who were, "coincidentally", the people who pounced on Saddam
for running his country too) are now stuck in a very nasty cleft stick: They have been actively destroying a
sovereign country (= "regime change" and have - in that very process - been supporting the most savage and
radical Islamic terrorists that the world have known (so far). Now, after all that time and despite all of the
warnings, they are starting to realise that maybe Pandora's Box should have remained closed after all.

Too late.

The situation is currently out of control.

The radical fanatics have been given not only arms & funds (standard CIA behaviour) but also the opportunity
to recruit at a scale that they couldn't have dreamed about a few years ago.

No matter *who* delivers the counterstrikes - US, Europe, Russia - the recruiting machine will be reinforced and
fed with grieving relatives of the "collateral damage". No-one will strike at the source of the problem - Saudi
Arabia & cohorts - but everyone will strike at the people who are dropping the bombs, firing the missiles,
providing the weapons that are killing, maiming & orphaning so many in the Middle East.

September 2001 should have been a wake up call.
It wasn't.

It turned out to be a rallying call for the war-pigs to continue to spread death & destruction across the globe
for the sake of profit.

Welcome to blowback world.

> Ractopamine is banned in the European Union, China, and more than 100 other countries,
> and it faces mounting criticism here in the United States.

Banned in the EU? Yeah, they're sensible about that sort of stuff.

Banned in more than 100 other countres? Fair, some will be tinies but probably includes the
usual Norway, Sweden and other European-but-not-EU ones as well as a number of their
ex-dependencies who have inherited sense from their previous colonial rulers.

Banned in China? Wow ... that shit *must* be bad.

Still in use and only getting "mounting criticism" in the US?