All Things Environment

[Farfromgeneva]

Story about tech and agriculture in France. I do like this as an area where efficiency and optimization with processing power could have a profound impact on all people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/busi ... 58ebbc3361

[youthathletics]

Story about tech and agriculture in France. I do like this as an area where efficiency and optimization with processing power could have a profound impact on all people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/busi ... 58ebbc3361

Paywall....can you share text if not too long, or send via PM

[Farfromgeneva]

Story about tech and agriculture in France. I do like this as an area where efficiency and optimization with processing power could have a profound impact on all people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/busi ... 58ebbc3361

Paywall....can you share text if not too long, or send via PM

When have I ever worried about story length and pasting???

You know what's cool is that between chrome, edge and foxfire you can triple you're free reads without having to clear the cookie as frequently...
--

The Future Farmers of France Are Tech Savvy, and Want Weekends Off
An unconventional school wants to attract a new crowd to French agriculture, and help farms earn a profit.

At Hectar, a farm in France that serves as a training ground, a veterinarian, Julie Renoux, cares for the cows.Credit...Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

By Liz Alderman
Oct. 7, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
YVELINES, France — On a century-old farm that’s now a start-up campus in this verdant region west of Paris, computer coders are learning to program crop-harvesting robots. Young urbanites planning vineyards or farms that will be guided by big data are honing their pitches to investors.

And in a nearby field on a recent day, students monitored cows equipped with Fitbit-style collars that were tracking their health, before heading to a glassy, open work space in a converted barn (with cappuccino makers) to hunch over laptops, studying profitable techniques to reverse climate change through farming.

The group was part of an unorthodox new agricultural business venture called Hectar. Most of them had never spent time around cows, let alone near fields of organic arugula.

But a crisis is bearing down on France: a dire shortage of farmers. What mattered about the people gathered at the campus was that they were innovative, had diverse backgrounds and were eager to start working in an industry that desperately needs them to survive.

“We need to attract an entire generation of young people to change farming, to produce better, less expensively and more intelligently,” said Xavier Niel, a French technology billionaire who is Hectar’s main backer. Mr. Niel, who spent decades disrupting France’s staid corporate world, is now joining an expanding movement that aims to transform French agriculture — arguably the country’s most protected industry of all.

“To do that,” he said, “we have to make agriculture sexy.”

France is the European Union’s main breadbasket, accounting for a fifth of all agricultural output in the 27-country bloc. Yet half of its farmers are over 50 and set to retire in the coming decade, leaving nearly 160,000 farms up for grabs.

Despite a national youth unemployment rate above 18 percent, 70,000 farm jobs are going unfilled, and young people, including the children of farmers, aren’t lining up to take them.

Many are discouraged by the image of farming as labor-intensive work that ties struggling farmers to the land. Although France receives a staggering 9 billion euros ($10.4 billion) in European Union farm subsidies annually, nearly a quarter of French farmers live below the poverty line. France has faced a quiet epidemic of farmer suicides for years.

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And in contrast to the United States, where the digital evolution of agriculture is well underway, and huge high-tech hydroponic farms are multiplying across the land, the farm-tech revolution has been slower to take hold. The industry in France is highly regulated, and a decades-old system of subsidizing farms based on size rather than output has worked as a brake on innovation.

The French government has backed some changes to Europe’s mammoth farm subsidy program, although critics say they don’t go far enough. Still, President Emmanuel Macron has sought to rejuvenate agriculture’s image, and has called for a shift to “ag-tech” and a rapid transition toward environmentally sustainable agriculture as part of a European Union plan to eliminate planet-warming emissions by 2050.

But to capture an army of young people needed to carry farming into the future, advocates say, the lifestyle of the farmer will have to change.

“If you say you have to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that won’t work,” said Audrey Bourolleau, the founder of Hectar and a former agriculture adviser to Mr. Macron. “For there to be a new face of agriculture for tomorrow, there needs to be a social revolution.”

Hectar’s vision revolves around attracting 2,000 young people from urban, rural or disadvantaged backgrounds each year, and equipping them with the business acumen to be farmer-entrepreneurs capable of producing sustainable agriculture ventures and attracting investors — all while generating a profit, and having their weekends free.

Modeled on an unconventional coding school called 42, which Mr. Niel founded a decade ago, it operates outside France’s education system by offering free tuition and intensive training, but no state-sanctioned diploma. Backed mainly by private investors and corporate sponsors, Mr. Niel is betting that Hectar’s graduates will be more entrepreneurial, more innovative and ultimately more transformative for the French economy than students attending traditional agricultural universities. (Hectar can shake things up only so much: Students would still need a diploma from an ag school in order to qualify to be a farmer in France.)

Some of those principles are already starting to appear in French agriculture. At NeoFarm, an agro-ecological vegetable farm on a compact two-acre plot half an hour east of the Hectar campus, four young employees spent a recent afternoon monitoring laptops and programming a robot to plant seeds along neat rows.

NeoFarm, started by two French tech entrepreneurs, is on the edge of a trend in France of investors setting up small farms near population centers, and growing healthy food using less fossil fuel and fertilizer. While big French farms use technology to raise yields and cut costs, boutique farms can use tech to take advantage of much smaller lots, curbing costs and reducing tedious labor tasks to create an attractive lifestyle, said Olivier Le Blainvaux, a co-founder who has 11 other start-up ventures in the defense and health industries.

“Working with robotics makes this an interesting job,” said Nelson Singui, 25, one of the workers recently hired at NeoFarm to care for the crops and monitor systems that automatically sow seeds, water plants and harvest carrots.

Unlike other farms where Mr. Singui had worked, NeoFarm offered regular work hours, an opportunity to work with the latest technology and a chance to advance, he said. It plans to open four new farms in the coming months.

Such expansion comes as so-called neo-peasants have begun migrating from French cities to rural areas to try their hand at sustainable farming, attracted to a career where they can help fight climate change in a country where 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture.

But some of these rookie farmers don’t know how to make their ventures financially viable, said Mr. Le Blainvaux. New operations like NeoFarm, and schools like Hectar, aim to retain newcomers by helping them nurture profitable enterprises and make a break from government subsidies, which critics say discourage innovation and risk-taking.


“It’s very easy when you’re not in this industry to say, ‘I’ll make it sexy with tech,’” said Amandine Muret Béguin, 33, head of the Union of Young Farmers for the Ile-de-France region, which is home to Hectar’s 1,500-acre campus. “You can have the best schools and the best robots, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have a better life.”

Ms. Muret Béguin, who proudly hails from a farming family and cultivates about 500 acres of cereal grains, said that French farming had already evolved toward greater ecological sustainability, but that the general public wasn’t aware.

Members of her group question the need for a campus like Hectar when, they say, state-certified agricultural schools that already teach farm management and technology are severely underfunded. The way to draw more people into agriculture, Ms. Muret Béguin added, is for consumers “to recognize and value the hard work farmers are already doing.”

Yet for people like Esther Hermouet, 31, who hails from a winegrowing family near Bordeaux, Hectar is answering a need that other agricultural institutions aren’t offering.

That afternoon, Ms. Hermouet mingled with a diverse group of young students, including an unemployed audiovisual producer, a Muslim entrepreneur and an artisanal cider maker.

Ms. Hermouet and her two siblings were on the verge of abandoning the vineyard run by their retiring parents, fearing that taking over would be more trouble than it was worth. Some of their neighbors had already seen their children leave the vineyards for easier jobs that didn’t require waking at the crack of dawn.

But she said her experience at Hectar had made her more optimistic that the vineyard could be made viable, both commercially and from a lifestyle perspective. She learned about business pitches, carbon capture credits to help maximize profit and soil management techniques to reduce climate change. There were suggestions about working smarter in fewer hours, for instance by using technology to identify only isolated vines that need treatment.

“If my brother, sister and I are going to work the earth, we want to have a proper life,” she said. “We want to find a new economic model and make the vineyard profitable — and also make it sustainable for the environment for decades to come.”

For Mr. Niel, who made his fortune disrupting the French telecom market, joining a movement to modernize the way France is fed is the equivalent of taking a moonshot.

“It’s a vision that can sound too beautiful to be true,” Mr. Niel said. “But often, we find that it’s possible to turn such visions into a reality.”

[Farfromgeneva]

A Crisis of Confidence in America’s Tap Water
Aging infrastructure and chemical pollution have led to high-profile cases of contamination from Michigan to West Virginia and beyond.

Residents of Mingo County, W.Va., sued a coal company for water contamination. Above, in 2010, Jimmy Murphy of Sprigg holds a jar of well water from his home.
PHOTO: JEFF GENTNER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Kris Maher
Oct. 8, 2021 9:24 am ET
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Distrust of tap water is on the rise in the U.S. In 2018, roughly 60 million Americans didn’t drink their tap water, according to a study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University—a 40% increase compared with four years earlier.

The rise, which was sharpest in Black and Hispanic communities, followed the drinking-water crisis that broke out in Flint, Mich., in 2014, when a change in the city’s water source led to complaints of brown, foul-smelling water. Despite early assurances by state and federal officials that the water was safe, scientists found that it contained extraordinarily high levels of lead, a potent neurotoxin. The public health emergency hit a city already struggling with crime, job loss and a shrinking population that could barely support its infrastructure.

Flint’s water crisis was widely publicized, but it is hardly unique: Washington, D.C., Chicago and Newark have also grappled with lead in their water systems. In the past decade, drinking water emergencies struck Toledo, Ohio, and Charleston, W.Va., where residents were told not to drink or bathe in the water in their homes. State governments had to ship bottled water by the tractor-trailer load to hundreds of thousands of people.

“The fundamental problem with drinking water is that we are continuing to live off the investments of our great-grandparents,” said Erik Olson, a senior director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “Most drinking water to this day is still being delivered through pipes that are many decades old and being treated using World War I-era technology.”

Found in everything from fast-food wrappers to firefighting foam, PFAs are called ‘forever chemicals’ because they don’t break down readily and can accumulate in people and animals.
That technology often isn’t up to the task of efficiently delivering safe water. Sand filters can fail to trap pollutants, and pipes made of concrete and cast iron can be more than 125 years old. Each year, there are more than 250,000 water main breaks in the U.S., which can allow pathogens to taint water before it reaches homes. In Toledo, the toxic threat came from an algal bloom on Lake Erie, and in Charleston, from a coal-processing chemical that leaked from a storage tank. Even after the cities installed more advanced filtration systems or other costly fixes to prevent similar failures, many residents remain wary of drinking from their taps.

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Books and movies portraying legal battles over drinking water contamination, such as “A Civil Action” and “Erin Brockovich,” have also raised awareness. These stories typically feature residents who have discovered toxic water in their homes. A crusading lawyer arrives to fight a polluting corporation after regulators failed to address the problem. “Could it happen here?” the viewer wonders.

More and more, it seems, the answer is yes. Take “Dark Waters,” the 2019 film about attorney Robert Bilott’s 20-year legal fight against DuPont over its discharge of chemicals known as PFAS in Parkersburg, W.Va. Found in everything from fast-food wrappers to firefighting foam, PFAS have been linked to cancer and immune system problems and are considered dangerous at levels a thousand times smaller than lead and arsenic. They are called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down readily in the environment and can accumulate in people and animals.

The chemical industry has said that the more than 600 PFAS in use today are essential for manufacturing products like cellphones and medical devices and that the chemicals have different qualities and shouldn’t be regulated together. “What we should be focused on is, where are materials getting into the environment and are they at levels that might be unsafe,” said Robert Simon, a vice president with the American Chemistry Council.


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In 2016, Harvard University researchers analyzed an EPA survey of water systems and found that two PFAS chemicals exceeded federal health advisory levels in water systems for more than six million people, with the highest levels near industrial sites, military bases and wastewater treatment plants. PFAS have been found in nearly 2,800 communities and 328 military sites, according to the Environmental Working Group, an environmental nonprofit.

Last month, the EPA released a plan to set the first-ever limits on the discharge of PFAS from certain industrial polluters. It is also working to develop a national drinking water standard that would require enforceable limits on two PFAS chemicals in drinking water. Currently about 16 states have set their own limits for a handful of PFAS chemicals.

Some help for the nation’s water systems could soon be on the way. The $1 trillion infrastructure bill that Congress passed in August designates about $50 billion for improving water infrastructure, including replacing an estimated 6 million to 10 million lead pipes. The Biden administration has called it the largest investment in clean drinking water in American history.


A water plant tower in Flint, Mich., where lead contamination in the water supply earned national attention and spurred an exodus of residents.
PHOTO: EMILY ELCONIN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Still, many experts say that the outlay won’t be nearly enough. In 2018, the EPA put the cost of maintaining the nation’s drinking water systems over the next 20 years at $472 billion. The water industry has estimated the cost of lead-pipe removal nationwide at $60 billion. In Flint alone, the city has spent nearly $100 million to dig up close to 28,000 service lines and replace more than 10,000 that were made of lead or galvanized steel.

The EPA has prioritized improving water systems in rural and low-income communities, where problems can include pesticides in agricultural runoff; pharmaceuticals that pass through water treatment plants; discharges from factories, power plants and coal mines; and underground injection of industrial waste.

A lesser-known water contamination story in West Virginia’s Mingo County, 2½ hours south of Parkersburg, illustrates the dangers. In 2004, a handful of people in four coal-mining communities filed suit against Massey Energy, claiming that waste from a coal preparation plant had tainted the aquifer and their wells, causing residents to develop rashes, gastrointestinal problems and cancer.


Kevin Thompson, an environmental lawyer, discovered that the company had injected a billion gallons of coal waste near the communities in the 1980s. By the time the gray and rusty water coming from people’s taps was investigated in the early 2000s, the extent of the slurry injection had been all but lost in state records. Massey and its CEO Don Blankenship denied that the company had contaminated any wells, and the company fought the lawsuit up to a settlement in 2011.

More than 700 people joined the lawsuit, and many have since complained of lasting health problems. Yet people’s lives improved once they got clean water through a $4.3 million municipal water-line project. After more than a decade, they could do their laundry without adding bleach to try to mask the water’s chemical odor. They could bathe their children and take showers in water that didn’t make them dizzy or their eyes water. They could drink a glass of water from their tap without worrying.

—Mr. Maher is a reporter in The Journal’s Midwest bureau and the author of “Desperate: An Epic Battle for Clean Water and Justice in Appalachia,” which will be published Oct. 12 by Scribner.

Write to Kris Maher at [email protected]

[youthathletics]

It's all over the place: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog ... -longer-to

[Farfromgeneva]

My mother and I would take vacations to topsail when I was a kid. Probably took 4yrs of trips before we stopped making the wrong turn onto that base. Reality is that beachfront will be gone before Florida’s is and shouldn’t be inhabited in by humans now.

[youthathletics]

Beach ain't going anywhere anytime soon. If its hotter, that means more water will evaporate.

[Farfromgeneva]

Beach ain't going anywhere anytime soon. If its hotter, that means more water will evaporate.

Well then invest in the coast of NH & Maine then I guess.

[DMac]

Doc, your lawn crew is going to have to get new equipment just like I used to use.
The old man would have no part of a power mower...had a pretty sizable yard too.
https://news.yahoo.com/california-law-b ... 00432.html

[youthathletics]

I just had flashbacks of punishment from childhood. Thanks Dmac.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Doc, your lawn crew is going to have to get new equipment just like I used to use.
The old man would have no part of a power mower...had a pretty sizable yard too.
https://news.yahoo.com/california-law-b ... 00432.html

Raking was worse than cutting.

[Farfromgeneva]

Weeding blows

[DocBarrister]

Even the lying prostitutes* of the fossil fuel industry must get real about human-caused climate change. That’s because human-caused climate change is threatening much of the fossil fuel industry’s key infrastructure.

Just one example is the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

The increasing urgency to fortify sections of pipeline against thrashing floodwaters foreshadows what scientists, pipeline consultants and environmental advocates say is a future in which infrastructure like the Trans-Alaska Pipeline will face increasing assaults driven by the warming climate, including floods, wildfires, thawing permafrost and rising sea levels. Mitigation measures need to be charted into the future, they say, rather than applied like Band-Aids as the damage materializes.

Flooding along the 800 miles of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline has intensified as rising temperatures hasten snowmelt and amplify rainfall surges. Rivers paralleling the pipeline are reaching higher levels for longer periods, increasing their potential to wash out the pipeline and touching off frantic fights to prevent their churning waters from reaching it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tr ... i-rcna2867

As we all know, deniers of human-caused climate change are either (1) ignorant, (2) moronic, (3) liars, or (4) some combination of the three.

That doesn’t change the reality of human-caused climate change. Even the fossil fuel prostitutes must acknowledge reality if they want to protect the fossil fuel industry from ruin.

DocBarrister

*My apologies to actual prostitutes, who don’t deserve to be smeared like the fossil-fuel-advocate trash who deny the reality of human-caused climate change.

[DocBarrister]

Doc, your lawn crew is going to have to get new equipment just like I used to use.
The old man would have no part of a power mower...had a pretty sizable yard too.
https://news.yahoo.com/california-law-b ... 00432.html

Raking was worse than cutting.

Living in the past.

First, in California, we have gardeners who take care of all that.

Second, electric mowers are the future.

https://www.bestproducts.com/appliances ... gIg2fD_BwE

https://www.cubcadet.com/en_US/riding-l ... gJvYfD_BwE

DocBarrister

[Typical Lax Dad]

Doc, your lawn crew is going to have to get new equipment just like I used to use.
The old man would have no part of a power mower...had a pretty sizable yard too.
https://news.yahoo.com/california-law-b ... 00432.html

Raking was worse than cutting.

Living in the past.

First, in California, we have gardeners who take care of all that.

Second, electric mowers are the future.

https://www.bestproducts.com/appliances ... gIg2fD_BwE

https://www.cubcadet.com/en_US/riding-l ... gJvYfD_BwE

DocBarrister

Yep

[runrussellrun]

So[*]

[Farfromgeneva]

I got an electric mower-screw California I do my own yardwork. Sometimes at great risk to my health despite some fine folks here trying to convince me that something called a “professional” should be doing it.

California needs to clean up its own house, and let PG&E fail properly.

Alisal Fire Prompts Evacuations, Freeway Closure in Santa Barbara County
Southern California blaze has scorched thousands of acres since sparking Monday

Firefighters battle flames along the western flank of the Alisal Fire near Tajiguas Beach in Santa Barbara County.
PHOTO: MIKE ELIASON/SANTA BARBARA COUNTY FIRE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Jennifer Calfas
Updated Oct. 12, 2021 4:57 pm ET

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A wind-driven wildfire has scorched thousands of acres near Santa Barbara, Calif., and prompted officials to issue evacuation orders and close part of the 101 Freeway.

The Alisal Fire sparked Monday afternoon near the Alisal Reservoir just south of the tourist town of Solvang, and spread to about 6,000 acres with no containment Tuesday, according to the Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management. Between 100 and 120 structures were threatened by the fire Tuesday, according to Mike Eliason, public information information officer for the Santa Barbara County Fire Department.

Officials closed part of Highway 101, which runs along California’s coastline, Monday as the fire spread and crossed over the freeway to Tajiguas Beach. The origin of the fire is unknown.


Northwestern winds between 30 and 35 miles an hour, with some gusts reaching 70 mph, fueled the fire’s growth through shrubs, bushes and grass Monday into Tuesday, officials managing the fire said. The winds have prevented firefighters from using aircraft to help control the blaze, officials said, as crews worked to protect structures from the ground.


The Alisal Fire sparked Monday and has spread to about 6,000 acres with no containment Tuesday morning, according to officials.
PHOTO: ERICK MADRID/ZUMA PRESS
A wind advisory from the National Weather Service is in effect in parts of Santa Barbara County until later Tuesday night. But conditions were expected to improve compared with Monday, officials said, as firefighters hoped to use aircraft to spray fire retardant in the area.

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The fire is burning in a sparsely populated part of Santa Barbara County that includes some ranches with livestock. Flames spread rapidly Monday, burning south through dry vegetation down to the coastline, said Andrew Madsen, a public information officer with the Los Padres National Forest.


Officials have issued evacuation orders and warnings for some local areas. About 230 people have evacuated, according to estimates from the California Office of Emergency Services.

Firefighters plan to try to box in the fire, with the Pacific Ocean halting it on one side, in part by re-establishing old firelines to cut off the blaze from more populated areas, Mr. Madsen said. To the east, the fire may eventually hit the burn scar left from the 2016 Sherpa Fire, where little vegetation has grown since, he added.

“Our hope and our approach is that it’s not going to increase in size and that we’ll be able to box it in and put it out,” Mr. Madsen said. “But as long as there’s fuel out there and there’s active fire and flames, it’s going to continue to go through some of these really deep, thick, old fuel beds.”


The fire is currently burning in a sparsely populated part of Santa Barbara County that includes some ranches with livestock.
PHOTO: ERICK MADRID/ZUMA PRESS
The Los Padres National Forest shared an image on social media Tuesday showing the view of the fire from Reagan Ranch, or “Rancho del Cielo,” former President Ronald Reagan’s 688-acre vacation home in the Santa Ynez Mountains in Santa Barbara County.

The Young America’s Foundation, a conservative group that preserves the ranch and hosts events there, said firefighters were working to protect it. The foundation also said it was working with firefighters to get them access to two nearby lakes.


The Alisal Fire is one of several large fires burning more than 300,000 acres across the country, with the majority in California, Idaho and Montana, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Firefighters in the West have so far experienced an above-average fire season, with resources deployed this summer at levels normally not seen until later in the year. Drought across the West has exacerbated conditions this year, creating a significant amount of heavy and dry vegetation for fires to quickly burn through.

Mr. Madsen, of the Los Padres National Forest, said the changing climate and prolonged drought have created more challenging conditions for firefighters to adapt to. “It’s explosive growth that now is kind of the new norm,” he said.

September, October and November are often busy months for fires in California, particularly the southern part of the state, because of drier conditions and high winds. As of Oct. 6, 7,883 fires have burned through more than 2.4 million acres in California, according to data from Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service. The five-year average for the same period is 7,312 fires and more than 1.2 million acres.

As Wildfires Worsen, California Firefighting Resources May Come Up Dry
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0:00 / 6:34
As Wildfires Worsen, California Firefighting Resources May Come Up Dry
As Wildfires Worsen, California Firefighting Resources May Come Up Dry
A year after one of the worst wildfire seasons in California’s history, the state is taking more preventive measures to reduce wildfire risks. But experts worry it still doesn’t have the firefighting and land management resources to adequately fight worsening blazes. Photo: Noah Berger/AP
Write to Jennifer Calfas at [email protected]

[runrussellrun]

Why have a lawn , at all ?

[NattyBohChamps04]

I got an electric mower-screw California I do my own yardwork. Sometimes at great risk to my health despite some fine folks here trying to convince me that something called a “professional” should be doing it.

The 40v-80v battery electric mowers and trimmers are better than gas powered for 99% of yards out there, even before you take the environmental benefits into account.

A lot less noise. A lot less maintenance. A much simpler engine. Cheaper to operate.

[Farfromgeneva]

I got an electric mower-screw California I do my own yardwork. Sometimes at great risk to my health despite some fine folks here trying to convince me that something called a “professional” should be doing it.

The 40v-80v battery electric mowers and trimmers are better than gas powered for 99% of yards out there, even before you take the environmental benefits into account.

A lot less noise. A lot less maintenance. A much simpler engine. Cheaper to operate.

I have 40v wish I had an 80v but it works fine on a 0.22 acre lot with about 1/4-1/3 in back. Plus I don't like the grass catcher on my mower. Miss the old manual one.