The Heatpump Petting Zoo
A Fair Greening Our Homes
-The Washingtom Post
April 13, 2024
A loose line of people snaked from a doorway in the side of a cargo truck. One young boy wandered over to examine several bales of hay stacked nearby while others waiting craned their necks to get a peek inside. A small sign in the shape of a barn stuck over the open door read, “Petting Zoo.”But the queuing visitors weren’t there to meet pigs, goats or sheep. What they wanted was hands-on experience with a different kind of beast: heat pumps.“We have heat pump everything,” said Vanessa Bertelli, head of the nonprofit Electrify DC, as she walked through the D.C. Armory, an indoor arena, on a recent Saturday.To her right, a showcase of two brands of heat pump water heaters. In another exhibit, a heat pump dryer. Inside the “petting zoo,” a converted truck designed to look like the interior of a home, heat pumps protruded from the walls.At this fair, instead of pony rides, games of chance and fried food, visitors took electric bicycles and scooters for a spin, watched cooking demonstrations on induction stoves, and learned about other ways to make their homes and lives more climate-friendly.
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Canada Braces for
Another Season of Flames
-New York Times
March 4, 2024 Canada’s emergency preparedness minister is warning that this year’s wildfire season will be worse than the record-breaking season of 2023, when thousands of fires burned tens of millions of acres and set off massive plumes of smoke that enveloped major U.S. cities, including New York and Washington.This year’s fires could be especially bad in two of the country’s most fire-prone provinces, where nearly 150 of the blazes that started during last year’s season are still burning this winter, under snow-covered ground.
While so-called “zombie fires,” a term recently popularized in the Canadian media, are an annual phenomenon in parts of the country, never have so many fires been reported in a single winter, raising fears that many of them may flare up again above ground.
The “zombie fires” persist during winter because porous peat and moss ground cover in northern areas act as underground fuel for them.
The risk of wildfire in Canada has grown because of climate change, which increases the hot, dry and gusty conditions that have caused drought, according to research published last summer by World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists who model how climate change impacts extreme weather.
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Greenland's Melting Ice Sheet is
Being Replaced by Vegetation
-Phys.org
February 14, 2024
An estimated 11,000 sq miles or 28,707 sq kilometers of Greenland's ice sheet and glaciers have melted over the last three decades, according to a major analysis of historic satellite records.The total area of ice loss is equivalent to the size of Albania, and represents about 1.6% of Greenland's total ice and glacier cover. Where there was once ice and snow, there is now barren rock, wetlands and areas of shrub.A team of scientists from the University of Leeds, who have tracked the changes across Greenland from the 1980s through to the 2010s, say warmer air temperatures are causing the ice to retreat, which in turn is having an impact on the temperature of the land surface, greenhouse gas emissions and the stability of the landscape.Permafrost—a permanently frozen layer below the Earth's surface—is being "degraded" by the warming and in some areas, scientists warn that it could have an impact on the infrastructure, buildings and communities that exist above it.Their findings are published in an article titled "Land cover changes across Greenland dominated by a doubling of vegetation in three decades" in the journal Scientific Reports.
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Turning Tons of Tires
into Synthetic Gas
--the Inside Climate News
January 3, 2024
The mayor and city council have enacted a one-year moratorium after the EPA raised multiple environmental justice concerns, from toxic air to hazardous waste.
Officials in Youngstown, Ohio, have dealt a setback to a company’s plan to build and operate a recycled tire waste-to-energy plant near the center of the city and adjacent to a neighborhood of predominantly Black residents, enacting a one-year moratorium on such industrial processes. Mayor Jamael Tito Brown signed the ordinance Dec. 26.The developer, SOBE Thermal Energy Systems, has proposed turning discarded tires, plastic waste and used electronics into energy at 30 locations, starting with the Youngstown plant situated next to a jail, a Youngstown State University dormitory and a neighborhood where there’s already environmental justice concerns. The plant would turn the tires into a synthetic gas to be burned to produce steam for heating and cooling buildings. But those plans in Youngstown have stirred a robust opposition from local and state environmental and citizens groups, and pushback from some national groups, including Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit activist organization based at Bennington College in Vermont.
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