"Good Afternoon, Moon"

Waning Crescent

24.6 days old

25.2 percent lit


What?

The moon happens in the afternoon, too.

The picture above also contains Venus to the left of the moon. 

January 19, 2020
By Hanneke Weitering

The waning crescent moon (click here) will form a triangle with the Red Planet and the bright star Antares in the morning sky on Monday (Jan. 20), and you can catch the trio in the morning sky before dawn.

Mars will be in conjunction with the moon — meaning they share the same celestial longitude — at 2:12 p.m. EST (1912 GMT), but they will be invisible in daylight for skywatchers across the U.S. at that time. However, the pair will be observable for a few hours before sunrise....

People are embracing nature and the trend is vital to return Earth from it's climate crisis.

Cultures of the past where humans survived always included a reverence for nature. That needs to return to the priorities of the USA. Don't ask me how we were the people that developed and made into law "The Endangered Species Act," but, we did and Americans had esteem globally because of our moral character and love of nature. It is time to reclaim that heritage and make it part of the American culture with reverence for our natural spaces. There is plenty of profit in tourism and photo safaris. We have to leave behind the gluttony of the oil culture. It is a must not simply a dream.

January 3, 2020
By Mark Sommer

Water flows along Hunters Creek. 

A 222-acre forest with old-growth trees in Wales (click here) has been saved from potential logging and subdivisions.

Mossy Point will become a nature preserve.

The Western New York Land Conservancy (click here), working with Friends of Mossy Point, announced Thursday that it had raised the $1.6 million it needed to buy the land before a Dec. 31 deadline.

“This campaign was a tremendous effort by everyone involved,” said Nancy Smith, the conservancy's executive director. “[We] came together to make this dream a reality. Since the Great Lakes contain almost a quarter of the world’s surface fresh water, it is so inspiring to protect a forest that enhances the quality of the fresh water we all rely on.”

As a headwater forest, the land naturally filters water from the Niagara River and helps prevent flooding in communities downstream....

A New York story.

April 8, 2018
by Gwendolyn Craig

Tom Rauber, of Dansville, holds an immature bald eagle.

About 53 years ago (click here), Tom Rauber saw something he never expected to see.

It was 1965 and the lineman with the Rochester Telephone Corporation would sometimes escape the city to eat his lunch in his truck parked near Hemlock Lake in Livingston County. He always loved the outdoors and wildlife, said his daughter Shelly Rauber Mistretta, but perhaps no one knew how much until he discovered the last pair of bald eagles in New York state.

They were in a shagbark hickory tree, Mistretta said laughing, sitting in a coffee shop in Skaneateles Tuesday, pictures of her father holding juvenile bald eagles sprawled on the table top.

"He just watched them quietly for I think the first four or five years, and we knew he was watching a bird, but it was weird," she said, recalling her elementary school-age memories of that time. "It was like we were in a secret society. We couldn't talk about it."

Rauber would keep a canoe hidden in the cattails on the lake to check on his endangered birds. Between the 1940s and 1960s, New York's nesting bald eagle pairs went from about 70 to just one. The devastating trend was seen across the country, except for Alaska, as hunters, habitat loss and a pesticide called DDT threatened the very existence of the eagle. Rauber, ecstatic about coming across this special pair, contacted the Albany branch of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where he was asked to monitor the birds and keep the agency updated.


More than three decades later, Rauber was still keeping bird journals. The telephone lineman turned wildlife rehabilitator became one of the most instrumental players in bringing the nation's bird back from the brink of extinction, along with the state Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife technician Mike Allen.

Both men died within about two months of each other last year — Allen on Oct. 28 and Rauber on Dec. 27....

Fire suppression allows for mature Shagbark hickory forests.

FIRE ECOLOGY OR ADAPTATIONS : (click here)

Periodic fires tend to favor oak over over the less fire-resistant
hickory.  The slow-growing, thin-barked shagbark hickory is reduced by
short fire intervals.  Frequent burning at prairie margins reduces
or eliminates shagbark hickory seedlings.

Fire suppression in parts of the Northeast has reduced fire frequency
and converted oak-hickory forests to more mesophytic stands.
However, in an oak-hickory forest in Indiana, fire suppression since
1917 has contributed to the recruitment of shagbark hickory, sugar
maple, white ash (Fraxinus americana), and American elm (Ulmus
americana).  Increases in tree density in oak-hickory forests in
Michigan have also been attributed to fire suppression.  In the
Great Smoky Mountains, fire suppression since 1940 has allowed hickories
to reach fire-resistant size.

Shagbark hickory usually sprouts from the root crown or stembase after
abovegrund foliage is killed by fire.  Seedling establishement may also
occur.

Burn, babe, burn is not the answer for healthy forests. Mature trees can be fire

resistant.

The reason these corals are healthy is due to water temperature and the lack of First World influence.

They aren't fished commercially. There is subsistence fishing. Up to now no one cared about these reefs in an international dialogue. They need to be protected and the people of the islands supported through any medical help they need to improve their quality of life. That comes as a mission and not a profit motive.

23 December 2019
By Shreya Dasgupta

Mass grouper spawning aggregation in French Polynesia. 

Over the course (click here) of seven months in 2012 and 2013, more than 70 scientists collaborated to study and map the coral reefs around the islands of French Polynesia in the South Pacific.

This was a huge undertaking. Researchers covered over 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles), including places never studied by scientists before. They conducted nearly 4,000 coral reef and fish surveys in 264 dive sites across 29 islands, and mapped over 9,300 square kilometers (3,590 square miles) using satellite imagery. No other coral reef survey in French Polynesia has been conducted at this scale, said Renée Carlton, a marine ecologist with the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation.

Findings from this massive expedition, published in a new report, offer hope. At the time of the surveys, French Polynesia had one of the world’s healthiest coral covers, and some of the highest diversity and density of reef fish on the planet.

The surveys were part of the Global Reef Expedition (GRE), a global mission supported by the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation that aimed to map coral reefs around the world.

“The goal of the Global Reef Expedition was to collect as much data as possible on the status of coral reefs, given the rapid changes we are seeing to reefs around the world,” Carlton told Mongabay. “Having a baseline understanding of the status of coral reefs is important for scientists and managers alike.”...

Staminate (male) flowers are borne on long stalked catkins at the tip of old wood or in the axils of the previous season's leaves.

A monoecious plant has separate male flowers and female flowers occurring on the same plant. Plants that are dioecious (die-EE-shus) have either staminate or pistillate flowers on separate plants.

Pistillate (female) flowers are in short terminal spikes.

Shagbark Hickory (click here) is monoecious, producing separate male (staminate) and female (pistillate) flowers on the same tree. The male flowers are produced in drooping yellowish green catkins near the tips of twigs; these catkins are arranged in groups of 3 (catkins in each group sharing the same basal stalk) and they are 3-6" long. Individual male flowers are less than 1/8" (3 mm.) across, consisting of several stamens and an insignificant calyx; each male flower is partially hidden by a 3-lobed bract. The female flowers are produced in short greenish spikes (about 1/3" or 8 mm. long) at the tips of young shoots; there is typically 2-3 female flowers per spike. Individual female flowers are about 1/8" (3 mm.) long and ovoid in shape, consisting of a calyx and a pistil with spreading stigmata at its apex. The blooming period occurs from mid- to late spring as the leaves develop. The flowers are cross-pollinated by the wind. Fertile female flowers are replaced by nearly sessile clusters of 1-3 fruits that develop during the summer and mature during autumn of the same year.

January 17, 2020
By Tom Venesky

Bernie Okuniewski explains the process to make hickory syrup to customers at the Pennsylvania Farm Show. Education is a key part of his business, as many people aren't familiar with syrup made from hickory bark.

Harrisburg -  After Bernie Okuniewski (click here) cooks up a batch of syrup, the main ingredient that he pours into the bottle isn’t from the sap that flows inside a maple tree.

Instead, the ingredient that makes Okuniewski’s syrup unique is found on the outside of a tree.

Hickory bark, actually.

There is a difference in twig size and formation in the different varieties of the Shaghickory.

C. ovata twigs and buds (middle) are intermediate in size. The same is true of the Hickory nut. C. ovata is in the middle as well.

They make meals for wildlife as well. The nuts are green before they dry.

Hickory nuts (click here) are the most calorie-dense wild plant food. One ounce of shelled out hickory nut meats packs a whopping 193 calories, with most of that coming from fat.

World Economic Form, Davos Switzerland held January 21 - 24, 2020

Davos (click here)

It is time to change the paradigm before Earth changes it forever. The reason there is truncation of the future to the underpinnings of government are crony industries that believe they must last forever. THEY DON'T. Every economy has it's day and then it is time to move on. The current generations have to let go of the financial performance of the past and realize the future is going to be very, very different.

The future is more local, self-sufficient with global interactions for artists. The quality of life is dependent upon a change in values that will embrace more abstract thought such as the arts. Rather than every car in the driveway, let's think about a precious original work of art in every unit of every floor of a high rise in the city.

Focusing people to the city, with Japan as an example, will bring the need for cars to near obsolescence. Mass transit is necessary to go from city to city. I don't see the suburbs surviving the change. Rather than using every inch of American land for real estate development, there needs to be a consolidation of people and their activities to cities where transportation is as near as the next subway stop. The USA needs to build high speed rail with innovative ideas such as magnetic and pneumatic rail.

For those that see the world differently, I assure them their thinking is obsolete. Earth covered in concrete is one huge heat island where life no longer exists.

I must remind at this point one of the reasons for conservation in the first place. The Endangered Species Act was an understanding that if the minor species started to fail, it would lead to those along the food chain to fail. It is true and the first place to witness it are the oceans where major fisheries are failing due to over harvest and heating waters. The most common place for fish to live, breed and flourish often begins in the coral reefs and today it is prudent to ask, "How are the coral reefs doing? Are there many left?"

Start making an economy that is focused on the sins of the past and the promises of the future and MITIGATE the damage so far and RESTORE natural areas IN ABUNDANCE.

Currently, burnt forests are the legacy to children. That has to be completely reversed with more land dedicated to forests and more effort to end forest fragments and a demand for the return of the "Core Forest."

NOW!

The promise to generations to come is a strong apology for the destruction of Earth and reinvigorate land while targeting a ZERO GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSION.

January 19, 2020
By Sam Meredith

Burnt trees are seen in Mallacoota on January 15, 2020 , Australia. The Princes Highway between Mallacoota and Orbost remains closed to public due to the risk of falling trees following the devastating bushfires that have swept through East Gippsland in recent weeks.

Over half of the world’s GDP (gross domestic product) (click here) is exposed to risks from nature loss, according to a new report.

It comes following a 12-month period which reportedly saw the hottest year on record for the world’s oceans, the second-hottest year for global average temperatures and wildfires from the U.S., to the Amazon, to Australia.

The report, which was produced by WEF in collaboration with PwC U.K., found that $44 trillion of economic value generation — more than half of the world’s GDP — is “moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services and is therefore exposed to nature loss.”

Policymakers and business leaders from around the world are due to arrive in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Monday.

The annual January get-together is scheduled to focus on the intensifying climate crisis....

Northern Shagbark Hickory

There are five leaflets to the entire leaf.

Carya ovata var. ovata has its largest leaflets over 8 in long. That is each leaflet, not the entire leaf which is seen to the left.

The blades are ovate, most often obovate (narrow end at the base) or elliptic. The picture to the left is that of the ovata variety.

The overall length of the leaf can be 11 to 23 inches. The top of the leaf is glabrous (without hairs). 

The edges of the leaf are finely serrate with tufts of hair at the proximal end to the tree. There is a central vein with parallel veins off the central vein throughout the leaf.

There can be hairs underneath the leaf, but, usually confined to the major central vein.

January 19, 2020
By Adam Wagner

Raleigh - Global warming made Hurricane Florence wider and wetter, (click here) a study published this month in the journal Science Advances confirmed.

Days before Florence made landfall in September 2018, a team from Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences compared 10 forecast ensembles to a hypothetically cooler world to determine that the actual storm would produce as much as 50% more rainfall and be about 50 miles wider than it would have been without a warmer climate.

After the storm, the team refined its methodology and ran 96 different ensembles, comparing forecasts under the actual conditions in which Florence developed to those of a world where the sea surface temperature near the Carolina coast was about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. Those ensembles showed that Florence’s average rainfall increased about 4.9% in the warmer world, while the storm was about 5.6 miles — or 1.6% — wider than it would have been without warming, the researchers reported.

In a prepared statement, Kevin Reed, the Stony Brook professor who led the study, said, “We found predictions about increases in storm size and increased storm rainfall in certain areas to be accurate, even if the numbers and proportions are not exact. More importantly, this post-storm modeling around climate change illustrates that the impact of climate change on storms is here now and is not something only projected for our future.”

Slow-moving Florence dropped record-setting rain across Eastern North Carolina in September 2018, with the National Weather Service reporting local highs of nearly 36 inches in Elizabethtown and 34 inches in Swansboro. Flooding from the storm damaged an estimated 75,000 structures in North Carolina, including in many areas that suffered flooding during 2016’s Hurricane Matthew....
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE (click here) IN NEWPORT/MOREHEAD CITY NC HAS
CONFIRMED A TORNADO NEAR HAVELOCK IN CRAVEN COUNTY NORTH CAROLINA ON
THE EVENING OF SEP 13TH 2018. THE TORNADO WAS ASSOCIATED WITH
HURRICANE FLORENCE. A LARGE SWATH OF SNAPPED PINE TREES WERE FOUND
IN THE CHERRY BRANCH NEIGHBORHOOD OF HAVELOCK. THE DAMAGE WAS MOST
EXTENSIVE FROM NEAR THE DEAD END OF SEATTLE SLEW DRIVE SOUTHWEST
TOWARD THE INTERSECTION OF ROUTE 306 AND PINE CLIFF ROAD. OVER 100
PINE TREES WERE SNAPPED IN THIS GENERAL AREA, WITH A FEW PINE AND
HARDWOOD TREES UPROOTED NEAR BOTH ENDS OF THE DAMAGE PATH. MAXIMUM
ESTIMATED WINDS WERE 105 MPH. 

There are three varieties of Shagbark Hickory. The variety in New York State is Carya ovata var. ovata. This is the appearance of the bark of these trees.

Mature shagbarks are easy to recognize because, as their name implies, they have shaggy bark. This is on mature trees only, the young have smooth bark.

To the right is the smooth bark of a young Shagbark Hickory.

January 19, 2020
By Anya Kamenetz

Xiye Bastida to left.

A teenage girl, Greta Thunberg, (click here) has become the world-famous face of the climate strike movement. But she's far from alone: Thunberg has helped rally and inspire others — especially girls.

NPR talked to four teenage climate activists, all girls, from the U.S. and Australia, alongside their mothers. These teenagers are juggling activism with schoolwork and personal time. And their families are working hard to support them as they grapple with the heavy emotions that come with fighting for the future.

In Castlemaine, Australia, Milou Albrecht, 15, co-founded School Strike for Climate Australia, which organizes student walkouts. As massive bush fires engulf parts of her home country, Albrecht's group has been pressuring the German corporation Siemens to withdraw from an Australian coal mining project.

In New York City, Xiye Bastida, 17, led her school in the city's first big student climate strike last March, and along with traveling and public speaking, she and some of her classmates have continued to strike on Fridays ever since. ("Gym is on Fridays, so I have a very low grade in gym," she notes.)...

In Louisiana, 16-year-old Jayden Foytlin was one of 21 young people who sued the federal government for violating their rights to a livable planet. The young plaintiffs hailed from communities around the country that have been directly affected by global warming — Foytlin, for example, is from south Louisiana, where her home has been flooded in storms....

November 12, 2019
By Angela Heathcote

Milou Albrecht, Harriet O’Shea Carre and Nimowei Johnson.

...The first strike (click here) by the group happened yesterday, when the temperatures in Bendigo hit a scorching 34°C. They sat outside their Federal Senator, Bridget McKenzie’s office for the entire day, playing cards and chess, and drawing with chalk. They’ll be doing the exact same thing today....

Carya ovata

Shagbark Hickory

Grows to 100 feet tall at maturity. It's longevity is 350 years.

The diameter, not radius, of the trunk at maturity is 48 inches or 4 feet.

It is a hardwood.

It's Sunday Afternoon

Matrix Forests are an effort to protect ecosystems.

Matrix sites (click here) are large contiguous areas whose size and natural condition allow for the maintenance of ecological processes, viable occurrences of matrix forest communities, embedded large and small patch communities, and embedded species populations. The goal of the matrix forest selection was to identify viable examples of the dominant forest types that, if protected and allowed to regain their natural condition, would serve as critical source areas for all species requiring interior forest conditions or associated with the dominant forest types....

Map of New York State Matrix Forests (click here)

Conservation, when minimized by society seeks to impress the importance of maintaining the integrity of native species and their ecosystems. Conservation biologists seek to bring an understanding to groups that uphold the dignity of nature so others can understand the importance a segment of society that values these beautiful natural areas while protecting wildlife as well. Priorities of greed often over ride the best decisions, but, nature is still hanging in there. If there was no other form of life on earth, there would be forests. Chlorophyll, the molecule, is that indomitable. Skyscrapers crumble over time, but, trees live hardily to 300 years or more.

If the High Allegheny Plateau (click here) along the New York-Pennsylvania line were thought of as a giant chocolate chip cookie, then Appalachian oak-hickory forests would be the cookie dough and the chips would be the other embedded communities such as lakes, bogs, and swamps.

Iron & Wine - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Iron & Wine Hickory (click here for official website - thank you)

"Hickory" by Iron and Wine (click here for album - thank you)

Spanish version found here - page down (click here)

He kissed her once as she leaned on the windowsill
She'll never love him but knows that her father will
Her fallen fruit is all rotten in the middle but her
Breast never dries when he's hungry

The money came and she died in her rocking chair
The window wide and the rain in her braided hair
A letter locked in the pattern of her knuckle
Like a hymn to the house she was making

Blind and whistling just around the corner and there's a
Wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted

She kissed him once cause he gave her a cigarette
And turned around but he waits like a turned down bed
And summer left like her walking with another and another and a
And the sound of the church bell ringin'

The money came and he died like a butterfly
A buried star in the haze of the city lights
A gun went off and her mother dropped her baby on a
Blue-feathered wing, we were lucky

Blind and whistlin' just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whisperin' somethin'
Strong as hell but not hickory-rooted
      

The impeachment would have taken place anyway with Trump blaming his underlings.

January 17, 2020
By Ramesh Ponnuru

The Government Accountability Office (click here) issued a short report yesterday concluding that the administration had broken the law in freezing aid to Ukraine last summer. A common response from the president’s defenders has been that the GAO has found such violations of the law on many occasions, and the press did not play it up when it was the Obama administration at fault. That’s true....

Firtash should be grateful for his extradition. It is safer for him in the USA.

Firtash was paying Parnas for undefined services. Basically, Russia was paying Guiliani for his plot against the Bidens.

January 18, 2020

By Franklin Foer

For five years (click here) Chuck Goudie and the ABC7 I-Team have been investigating Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, who says he has never been in Chicago and shouldn't be charged with crimes here.

Somewhere near the heart of the Ukraine scandal (click here) is the oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Evidence has long suggested this fact. But over the past week, in a televised interview and in documents he supplied to Congress, Rudy Giuliani’s former business partner Lev Parnas pointed his finger at the Ukrainian oligarch. According to Parnas, Giuliani’s team had a deal with Firtash. Giuliani would get the Justice Department to drop its attempt to extradite the oligarch on bribery charges. In return, according to Parnas, the oligarch promised to pass along evidence that would supposedly discredit both Joe Biden and Robert Mueller....

One of the reasons it has been difficult extracting corruption from Ukraine is because of a gangster named Semion Mogilevich. It has nothing to do with the Bidens.

Added to the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List: 2009 (click here)

The circumstances: In 2011 the FBI apprehended fugitive James “Whitey” Bulger, the alleged Boston mob leader who had been on the bureau’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List for 12 years. At the time an FBI press release touted the capture of “a man notorious in Boston and around the world for the very serious crimes he is alleged to have committed.” But as Bulger was being removed from the list, another gangster remained, a fellow whose alleged crimes made Whitey Bulger look like Ray Bolger. Meet Semion Mogilevich, an obese Ukrainian known as the “Brainy Don” who has been called “the most powerful mobster in the world.”...

January 29, 2018
By Jay McKenzie

...Because Menatep Bank (click here) was involved in a scheme by which the Russian mob’s boss of bosses, Semion Mogilevich laundered tens of billions of dollars through the Bank of New York.

According to a report from The Guardian at the time, “$500m of the assets of Menatep bank passed through Bank of New York accounts belonging to offshore companies connected to Russia’s mafia godfather, Semion Mogilevich.”...

...What’s interesting about Milner’s connection with the natural gas giant Gazprom is the company’s close associations with pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash and Semion Mogilevich. According to a Reuters investigation, Dmitry Firtash “said he had needed and received permission from a man named Semion Mogilevich to establish various businesses” in Ukraine. His primary partner in the country was Gazprom....

Germany and Russia have been at loggerheads over Gasprom for some time now. The motto between the two is, "Energy Unites People" (click here) among other ideas. The problem is that each party sees the idea of "uniting" in very different ways. DAMN NATO gets in the way of uniting Europe as a Russian territory all the time. Removing the USA from NATO was a lynchpin Putin valued.

1 December 2010
By Luke Harding

The Ambassador to Kyiv in 2010 was John F. Tefft. He went on to become a Russian Ambassador for the USA.

Moscow, November 19, 2014

It was a privilege (click here) to present my credentials today to President Putin as the new U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation.... 

...Gas supplies to Ukraine and EU (click here) states are linked to the Russian mafia, according to the US ambassador in Kiev.

His cable, released by WikiLeaks, followed statements by the then prime minister of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko, to the BBC that she had "documented proof that some powerful criminal structures are behind the RosUkrEnergo (RUE) company".

Allegations have long swirled that the Russian crime don Semyon Mogilevich had covert interests in Swiss-registered RUE, which distributes gas from central Asia....

From "The Atlantic" article:

...When Putin ascended to power in 2000, he gained control of his country’s natural-gas business. He placed his allies at the helm of the country’s gas monopoly, Gazprom, and he has routinely wielded that company as an instrument of Russian foreign policy. In 2002, Firtash became Gazprom’s most important middleman: He was responsible for selling Russian gas to Ukraine. Thanks to an extraordinary Reuters investigation, which burrowed into Customs documents, contracts, and Cyprus bank accounts, the details of this arrangement are now well known. Gazprom sold Firtash gas at four times below the market price. When Firtash resold the gas to the Ukrainian state, he pocketed a profit of $3 billion. Even as he amassed this fortune, bankers close to Putin extended Firtash an $11 billion line of credit....

Putin wanted global dependence on Russian assets.

Anxiety over the climate is a direct result of Republican cronies.

August 26, 2018

The senator from Arizona (click here) brought climate science into Capitol Hill hearings and cap-and-trade legislation to a vote, but then moderate Republican politics changed.

Among the many battles Sen. John McCain waged in his storied career, it is easy to overlook his fight for U.S. action on climate change.

He wrote legislation that failed. He built a bipartisan coalition that crumbled. And when Congress came closest to passing a bill that embraced his central idea—a market-based cap-and-trade system—McCain turned his back.

And yet, McCain's nearly decade-long drive on global warming had an impact that reverberates in today's efforts to revive the U.S. role in the climate fight. In the Senate chamber and on the campaign trail, the Arizona Republican did more than any other U.S. politician has done before or since to advance the conservative argument for climate action.

Today's efforts to recruit GOP members into the climate movement—appeals to conservative and religious values, the framing of climate change as a national security threat, efforts to stress market-based solutions and the role business leaders can play—all owe a debt to McCain....

October 8, 2018
By Isobel Thompson

I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris (click here) ,” Donald Trump crowed during his announcement, more than a year ago, that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord—a deal that, to his mind, did not “serve America’s interests.” Of course, according to a new report compiled by nearly 100 leading scientists, the Northeastern United States and north-central France will soon face the same fate regardless. According to the report, issued by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), the widely shared goal of keeping a global rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius is firmly off-track, with current levels of emissions set to hike temperatures up to 3 degrees Celsius by 2040. Even if temperatures rose by 2 degrees Celsius—a figure previously deemed acceptable—the results would be dystopian, exacerbating the risk of drought, floods, poverty, and extreme heat. “It’s a line in the sand, and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” said Debra Roberts, co-chair of the working group on impacts. “This is the largest clarion bell from the science community, and I hope it mobilizes people and dents the mood of complacency.”...

Those are real jobs in a real factory that produces cars that do not pollute. 

December 20, 2019
By Johnna Crider

We haven’t seen (click here) a new picture of the Tesla Gigafactory 1 in Nevada in about two months and during that time, they have been busy preparing for the production of Model 3 battery packs and drive units.

The entire world gives $400 billion in subsidies to oil companies. (click here) An article by The Atlantic asks this question: Is that bad? The answer, to me, is obvious — yes.

The article, noting that we spend $400 billion on oil subsidies globally, indicates that taxpayers want their governments to stop subsidizing this rich, over-mature industry, yet politicians keep the money funneling toward them. It is estimated that Tesla Gigafactory 4 in Germany will cost approximately $4.4 billion. That means you could build ~91 gigafactories for the cost of one year of global oil subsidies....