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In 'remarkable shift,' 4 out of 5 Texans say climate change is real. Now what?
During his time representing Fort Worth in the Texas House, Lon Burnam recalls a member of the governor's staff issuing a stern warning: Keep the words "climate change" in a piece of legislation, and the bill will be "dead on arrival." A lot has changed since Burnam, a Democrat, left office in 2015 and became the chair of the Tarrant Coalition on Environmental Awareness. In a "remarkable shift from the past," a University of Houston study published in December found that 81% of Texans agree that climate change is happening. That result, from a survey of 500 Texans conducted in October, now mat...
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
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Landmark book from 1995 by pioneering Minnesota conservationist gets update
MINNEAPOLIS — The voice of a Minnesotan who knew as much as anyone about the state’s ecology and spent a lifetime researching it and telling its story will echo again later next month.John Tester died last November, two days shy of his 90th birthday. Most of those years filtered through the lens of the state’s outdoors. As a boy in a hunting family in Gibbon, Minn. As a wildlife scientist on the front edge, for example, of wildlife radio telemetry still used to this day. As a University of Minnesota professor trying to teach what was known about the state’s environment and how the pieces conne...
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
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Bezos Earth Fund gives nearly $800 million to climate groups in first round of grants
SEATTLE — In its first round of grants, the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund will award $791 million to 16 environmental organizations largely focused on researching and implementing ways to reduce carbon emissions, build green jobs and restore wildlife.The funding round announced Monday was remarkably large for an organization that does not have a website and has not published a list of staff, named a director or released instructions on how to apply for grants.Five big-name environmental nonprofits — the Nature Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, World Res...
The Seattle Times
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Minnesota regulators approve permits for Enbridge pipeline
Two Minnesota regulators Thursday granted environmental permits for Enbridge’s Line 3 oil pipeline across northern Minnesota, critical approvals needed for construction to begin soon on the controversial $2.6 billion project.The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) approved permits dealing with water quality and wetland issues arising from construction of the 340-mile pipeline. Also, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) granted several Line 3 permits.The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers still must approve its own environmental permit — one Enbridge has said that it expects to get s...
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
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The Sorghum Solution?: The Salk Institute's plant-based research to battle climate change gets a boost
When energy nerds talk about carbon capture and sequestration, CCS for short, the discussion normally centers on finding ways to take carbon dioxide from fossil fuel power plants, transporting it to a storage site and depositing it so the CO2 does not enter the atmosphere.But researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., take a different approach to CCS — by working to remove carbon from the atmosphere by developing better varieties of plants, such as sorghum.The institute’s plant-based solution to help fight climate change — called the Harnessing Plants Initiative — received a $2 mil...
The San Diego Union-Tribune
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They're not in the mood. Toxins are turning off great egrets mating in the Everglades
MIAMI — Great egrets in the Everglades are losing their sexual motivation because they are exposed to mercury through the fish they eat, a University of Florida study using more than 20 years of data has found.Researchers observed that mercury contamination led to a 50% reduction in attempts by the birds to breed, showing that the heavy metal is affecting their reproduction process much earlier than previously thought. As most studies have focused on offspring-related metrics such as hatchling success, the recent findings indicate that the full effects of mercury exposure among wading birds ma...
Miami Herald