Covering Ongoing Climate Actions And Ecocide

Don’t see enough calls to action and reminders the planet is dying. If you’re response I’d depression you’re part of the problem, make noise like your life depends on it.

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

Exxon - Inside Climate News

Exxon - Inside Climate News

An award-winning multi-part series on what Exxon knew, when they knew it, and how they buried the truth

[headspace-hotel]

as promised, the transplanting tutorial

most sources make transplanting sound incredibly difficult, but transplanting young seedlings from areas with sparse dirt, like a driveway or roadside, is actually incredibly easy and can get you some great stuff. Once I worked out the method, i've had a very high survival rate

it took me like a month of trial and error to figure this out so you don't have to.

Feel free to repost, no need for credit

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

[plum-soup]

r/hotpeppers is my favorite subreddit because all the posters are this unique subtle kind of deranged you can only achieve by spending your entire summer crouched over various 3 foot tall plants that produce fruit that would probably kill all your taste buds from eating one chili raw

[depsidase]

[garbage-empress]

Ah yes because when I think economical travel, I think of a car. The vehicle that I’d have to individually buy for more than my annual income, not to mention the thousands of dollars a year I’d have to pay for regular maintenance, insurance and fuel.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

passenger airlines, of course, never require expensive and dedicated infrastructure. airports are famously cheap to build and serve multiple functions, like waiting for the airplane, eating while you’re waiting for the airplane, going to the bathroom while waiting for the airplane, and buying stuff while waiting for the airplane

[tarvek-sturmvoraus]

highways are multi-purpose, everyone knows that. they also serve the critical functions of being extremely ugly and destroying large swathes of nature.

[praeca]

Not to mention how cheap it is to build 4 lanes of concrete and Asphalt than 1 lane of Metal!

[brunhiddensmusings]

which are also quick and easy to repair so need virtually no maitenence, you will never see a road take more then a week to be fixed even in the most dire of circumstances thus all roads stay smooth and safe

[the-real-skye]

This always leaves out that it is a sponsored search result from the Cato Institute, a lobbying firm with an unending focus on supporting the oil industry, through asphalt highways and cars.

As far as economics, the average person never realizes the actual costs of a trip in a car when comparing it to a train ticket, and sometimes parking at the train station. They usually only think about the gas for the trip and maybe the highway tolls, but not the rest of the costs. Actual driving costs are 3 to 5 times the cost of the gas. Depreciation of the vehicle from the added miles, the need for vehicle repairs, and a portion of the auto insurance, and the risk of a crash (if you spend an average of $1000 every 10,000 miles on repairs from crashes, a 250 mile trip is 1/40th of that or $25 of average crash risk. You might be fine or you might hit a deer along the way). There is also your work as the driver for several hours when you could have been talking to family and friends or using a phone or computer without needing to be free of distractions since you would be sitting in a train. The train ticket accounts for all of those costs.

You don’t realize it while driving so it only appears to be cheaper. Add up all of the costs of owning, insuring, and maintaining your car, calculate the costs per mile, and use that to compare to the number of miles of the train trip. It’s easier to say gas is $40 and tolls are $10 but OMG the train fare is $99! I’ll just drive and save $49, right? Right?

[simonalkenmayer]

Exactly.

Friendly reminder from history:

We once had roughly three times as much rail track as we do now. By the time the car became a thing, we had many railroad companies, several cross country routes that could get a man from Chicago to Reno, or Kansas City to LA inside of a week. Highways and interstates didn’t exist.

It wasn’t until the car industry began to grow that it lobbied for roads to be built, and if you ever want to understand early car culture or the automotive craze, please look up the history of the Lincoln Highway. Interwoven is the history of how the automotive companies drove rail out of business, and pressed congress to disassemble the track.

Miles of it lay fallow now, when once a thriving public transit infrastructure was in place.

It pains me every damn day.

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

The Rosewood Trade: An Illicit Trail from Forest to Furniture

The most widely traded illegal wild product in the world today is rosewood, an endangered hardwood prized for its use in traditional Chinese

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

One in five hectares of oil palm in Indonesia is illegal, report shows

JAKARTA — Indonesia, the world’s biggest producer of palm oil, owes a substantial slice of that output to criminal deforestation, according

Palm Oil in Indonesia: Environmental and Social Aspects

Palm oil is everywhere. Not only is it in the news, it is also an ingredient in roughly half of the products we buy. However, it is not some

Palm oil firms depriving tribes of millions of dollars

Companies supplying major manufacturers fail to meet promises to share land, joint BBC investigation finds.

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

Vegetable Ivory: A Humane Alternative to Elephant Poaching

The tagua nut, known as "vegetable ivory" has resurfaced as one of the most sustainable products in the world. Hopefully, its comeback will

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/brazil-amazon-deforestation-enforcement/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Bayer-Monsanto is in deep trouble

There’s a a plague on, so it’s easy to miss the non-plague-related news, but boy, the story of how Bayer-Monsanto is imploding in an inferno of corruption, litigation and negligence is SOMETHING ELSE.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/08/devastating-lawsuit-targets-bank-of-america-credit-suisse-and-bayer-board-members-and-executives-over-disastrous-monsanto-acquisition.html

You’ll recall that Bayer merged with Monsanto in 2018, paying $66b in an all-cash deal and erasing the Monsanto name (apparently, they judged Bayer’s association with Auschwitz to be preferable to Monsanto’s association with Roundup).

In the short time since, the Bayer-Monsanto merger has become “One of the worst corporate deals of all time” (per the WSJ). Now it is embroiled in litigation that has sucked in Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse and Volkswagen.

The lawsuit, Haussmann v Baumann, uses Germany’s extraordinary corporate law to target the company’s board members, financiers, and advisors.

The lawsuit claims that the board acted negligently by going forward with the acquisition despite the massive liability stemming from pending judgments against Monsanto for covering up the cancer risk from its glyphosate (“Roundup”) weed-killer.

In the years since, the company has paid $13b in judgements over the product, with no end in sight - and it still sells and aggressively markets Roundup without any warnings, teeing up future litigation.

The lawsuit claims that Bayer’s top management sought the Monsanto merger because they feared that Bayer was a hostile acquisition target, and believed that after such an acquisition they would lose their massive paychecks.

In order to streamline the acquisition, Bayer structured it as an all-cash deal that would not need shareholder approval, taking out high-interest bridge-loans from massive banks that stood to profit handsomely and so skimped on their own due diligence.

Bayer, too, failed to conduct the customary due diligence one would expect prior to a deal of this magnitude - a fact that bolsters the plaintiffs’ claims in their suit.

The plaintiffs are Bayer shareholders, and under German law, they are entitled to sue Bayer’s board, and need only prove “negligence” to hold those board members PERSONALLY LIABLE.

What’s more, German Directors and Officers insurance - which normally buffers corporate boards from this liability regime - does not apply here, because these policies have “insured vs insured” exclusions that kick in when the board is sued by its shareholders.

Also named in the suit are the banks that made the loans, and the suit seeks to claw back millions in fees that the banks trousered in the deal.

Meanwhile, Bayer is still being sued over glyphosate, and has more pending litigation over Dicamba, another carcinogenic product it sells like candy.

As Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith writes: “So pass the popcorn. If this case gets past the jousting over using New York courts to get at German companies, it will expose even more ugly, self-serving behavior.”

[plantyhamchuk]

This article is from 2020, but, this is the kind of thing that pisses me off.

Dicamba is carcinogenic af. Numerous studies involving many thousands of people show a strong relationship between applicators using it and increased risk for many different types of cancer (bile duct cancer, liver cancer… there’s even a a small amount of evidence showing a relationship with tonsil cancer, and leukemia). Dicamba is nasty, and one of the old school herbicides (it’s from 1967), most of which have been phased out due to how toxic they are. Dicamba will fuck you up even if you haven’t used it in 20 years. Dicamba is very mobile, spreading through soils and water so easily that they keep trying to reformulate so it doesn’t spread so much. Famously, there was a case where the largest peach producer in Missouri won a huge $$$$$ jury case, stating that his peach fields were nearly obliterated thanks to his neighbors spraying so much Dicamba around (this is currently being appealed, but this case is being closely watched). There is a strong body of evidence that man, if you’ve got options, don’t use this stuff use something else.

Guess what replaced these old school chemicals? Glyphosate. Glyphosate, in the court of public opinion, might be a horribly toxic mess but it’s, according to currently understood science, one of the safest chemical herbicides out there. That’s WHY farmers have used and even overused it. That’s why they created round-up ready commodity crops. For awhile, it was effective, cheap, and the safest thing on the market. Glyphosate does not require a special pesticide applicator’s license. It was a farmer’s (and homeowner and college campus and golf course) dream come true.  

Is Glyphosate harmless? Probably not, but neither is your coffee habit and staying up all night.

As ever, if you want to avoid GMO crops in the US:

1) Grow your own food, especially your own dent corn. Alternatively, purchase your food from small local farmers

2) Definitely do not buy meat in the store, unless you can find out if the animals were fed feed, AND the feed was fertilized/maintained ONLY by OMRI-approved products. Because the vast majority of animal feed is from GMO crops. Animals may be grass fed early on in life, but CAFO lots are all about that GMO feed because it is cheaper.

2a) It is surprisingly difficult to find what percentage of US meat is raised at CAFOs. Only source I could find, who state they are pulling from USDA numbers. Not even the wikipedia article covers it, although it is a worthy read too.  

3) Don’t drive a car that uses standard gasoline. We’re using (and using up) some of the best soils on the planet to grow fuel additives. 98% of US gas contains ethanol, 94% of it comes from GMO corn.

Charts from the US Energy Information Administration

4) Don’t eat processed anything without reading the labels first. If it contains any sort of corn or soy, put it back on the shelf at the store. Don’t eat out at restaurants either, from fast food to high end - unless they can provide full transparency along their entire logistics chain.

Dicamba is so problematic that even the Trump-run EPA decided, after numerous events of people accidentally fucking up their neighbors fields when spraying (in 2017 and 2018), that farmers had to have special Dicamba training. They also said that if states wanted to, they could force farmers to have to get their special pesticide applicators license. Farmers HATE this sort of thing, but the administration did this even knowing that the majority of farmers voted for Trump. 

Anyway, thanks to a combination of Glyphosphate overuse, misuse, and general demonization… there’s now GMO Dicamba soybeans and cotton. That said, US cotton is still better than Uighur slave grown Chinese cotton, which is where the majority of cotton comes now (China #1 producer, India very close #2 producer, USA distant #3 producer, Brazil  #4 producer - Source).

FUN FACT: There are many other awful chemicals still used in US agriculture, including Chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate. This one is FINALLY being removed from use in 2022, and the only reason why is that Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sued the EPA in 2007, & after a lengthy battle, the courts decided that the EPA was full of shit, denying how bad it was for neurodevelopment in children, how it gets into the groundwater, how widely it spreads into nature, how it impacts the health of agricultural workers. This article from the NYT explains it way better, and how it was part of the Trump admins overall rollback of environmental and human health protections. 

Organophosphates are pesticides, not herbicides, but they are bad bad news, and part of the nasty generation of agricultural chemicals that came before Glyphosphate that the general public is not aware of but are eating every single day.

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

Not all pesticide usage is created equal.

Knowing how misinformation travels online and the penchant for amplifying ideological purity, extremely conservative glyphosphate usage is very common for dealing with aggressive invasives. We’re talking a paintbrush to apply it to cut stems.

It’s a systemic killer. So once applied it kills the plant, and if that plant is outcompeting native wetland species AND has 12 foot root stalks, or is a climber and is intertangled with native flora, yes, applying a systemic pesticide is the least destructive to the ecosystem as a whole.

Argumentatum ad naturam is a fallacy for a reason, it might sound nice and dandy to take the most natural option, but we caused this. And we have limited resources, lots of ground to cover, and can’t be everywhere at once.

Conservation isn’t always kind or gentle. But remember it’s everything in moderation and thinking responsibly for long term goals.

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

In Your Facebook Feed: Oil Industry Pushback Against Biden Climate Plans

The messages take aim at Democrats by name as part of a broad effort to undermine landmark climate legislation that now hangs in the balance

I rub your back you rub mine, Facebook is a hotbed of every crime possible ecocide was already on the list. This is just receipts. And a reminder.

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

Tech Companies Block More than 11.6 Million Transactions for Endangered Wildlife Online - Wildlife Trade News from TRAFFIC

Online technology companies in the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online reported removing or blocking over 11.6 million listings for

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

Australia has lost one-third of its koalas in the past three years

Australia has lost about 30% of its koalas over the past three years, hit by drought, bushfires and developers cutting down trees, the Austr

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

Great Wall of Lights: China’s sea power on Darwin’s doorstep

ABOARD THE OCEAN WARRIOR in the eastern Pacific Ocean (AP) — It’s 3 a.m., and after five days plying through the high seas, the Ocean Warrio

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

Rupert Murdoch Has Known We’ve Been in a Climate Emergency Since 2006, Documents Show

Murdoch’s News Corp has spent the past 15 years mitigating its own climate risk while giving media outlets like Fox News carte blanche to de

[putyourbodyuponthewheels]

Global Coal Finance Tracker