
Thanks to Ronnie Citron-Fink and the great work of Moms Clean Air Force for encouraging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to adopt strong carbon pollution standards for new power plants.
Here's a slideshow of photos from the press event and Citron-Fink's testimony that she presented to the U.S. EPA last week:
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I’ve traveled from New York to speak as a mom, a teacher and a representative of Moms Clean Air Force.
I was inspired to testify today because a special family friend passed away last week, Pete Seeger. As I joined his family and friends at memorials to celebrate his life and legacy, I heard over and over again about Pete’s unwavering love of protecting the air, water and land.
Pete was known for his passionate concern for ordinary people. From fighting for social justice to cleaning up the river that’s just a stone’s throw away from my Hudson Valley home, Pete believed change would come when ordinary people sang out and spoke out. So I’m here to do that. But I promise not to sing.
When asked recently about the most important issue of our time, Pete said:
“The oceans rising may be the wake-up call to the whole human race.” He hoped in the future, “…the people from the oil industry were still living so that they can see what a mistake they made.”
We have the opportunity to avoid this mistake right now.
We know human activities are causing the climate crisis.
We know carbon pollution is warming our planet, contributing to extreme weather events.
We know dirty energy, the pollution from fossil fuels, is the single biggest contributing factor to climate change.
And we know the biggest, dirtiest energy source is coal. Not only does carbon-intensive coal fuel the climate crisis, but pollution from dirty coal-fired power plants gets into the air our families breathe. Our youngest children are most vulnerable because their respiratory systems are so tiny, and they are still developing.
Coal is no longer the answer to power our children’s future. To further its use is a big mistake. This is why we need to assure that no new coal-fired power plants are built, and support the EPA’s strong carbon pollution standards.
I remember Pete singing to the children of my son’s kindergarten class 20 years ago. When he was packing up his banjo, my son asked how he could learn to play and sing like him. Pete told him to “Help others, take care of the planet, and when you sing for what is right, others will join.” It’s time for us to sing out against anything that pollutes our family’s health and contributes to climate change. Our children and grandchildren cannot afford this mistake. Thank you.
Visit EcoWatch’s COAL and ENERGY pages for more related news on this topic.
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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.
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