
Donald Trump has been having a tough time in the UK lately. First, he lost his appeal with the UK Supreme Court to halt a Scottish wind farm project near his resort in Aberdeenshire. Next, a parliamentary petition, backed by more than 500,000 people, was launched to bar Trump from entering the UK. And now, a UK agency is slapping him with a fine for carbon pollution from one of his private jets.
Donald Trump fined for pollution from one of his private jets https://t.co/LBX02bcIRh— The Guardian (@The Guardian)1452264627.0
Trump faces fines of €2,152 ($2,339) for a flight to the UK in a plane owned by a firm called DJT Operations I LLC, part of the Trump Organization.
The UK's Environment Agency, which is charged with enforcing the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), published an updated list of those facing fines on Tuesday. The agency issued the fines to 25 operators, totaling more than £750,000 (about $1.1 million), because they failed to purchase carbon permits to cover their emissions, The Guardian said.
Those fined along with Trump are various private and commercial jet operators, including the Bahrain Royal family, insurance giant AIG and 21st Century Fox America, the company chaired by Rupert Murdoch.
“The EU Emissions Trading System is an important means of regulating emissions from aviation operators,” Liz Parkes, Environment Agency deputy director of climate change and business services, told The Guardian. “The Environment Agency’s enforcement activity is part of coordinated action across Europe.”
The trading system is designed to limit carbon pollution and mitigate climate change.
"Under ETS rules, polluters must hand over a carbon permit for every ton of carbon pollution emitted, or pay a €100 [$109] per ton fine," Politico explained. "The permits are often given to airlines for free and can also be purchased. The current price is about €8 [$8.72] per permit."
Trump failed to hand over the carbon permits by the end of April 2013, as required by law, said Politico.
Trump, whose mother was Scottish, opened his luxury golf resort in Aberdeenshire in 2012, the period covered by the fines. He has been embroiled in controversy since he bought the Menie estate there in 2006. He has not publicly responded to the fines, but The Guardian said, news of the fines is "unlikely to impress Trump," who has called global warming “bullshit” and a concept “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
On Wednesday, Trump threatened to withdraw $1 billion in investments from Scotland if the UK follows through on the petition to ban him from the country. The petition, which Parliament will debate on Jan. 18, was launched after Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims coming to the U.S.
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
By Jewel Fraser
Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.