WASHINGTON, April 19 (Reuters) – The Trump administration this week will begin the environmental review process for oil and gas drilling on a section of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a region in northern Alaska rich in crude but prized by conservationists.
In a notice from the U.S. Department of the Interior seen by Reuters, which the agency will post on Friday, it says it will hold meetings in five Alaskan towns where the public can speak about drilling in the refuge.
The tax bill passed by the Republican-led Congress late last year allowed the Interior Department to hold two lease sales in part of the 1.5-million-acre (600,000-hectare).
In 1980, when Congress created the refuge, it designated the “1002 area” as a part on the refuge’s coastal plain where drilling could occur in the future.
The first lease sale could occur next year if there are no delays.
Alaskan lawmakers have been fighting for decades to open the refuge.
And it is uncertain how much interest there is from oil companies to drill in the remote region.
In December, a lease sale received only seven bids, on less than 1 percent of the 10.3 million acres offered in the National Petroleum Reserve, which is less than 150 miles (240 km) from the refuge.
The Interior Department said in the notice more meetings could be held if there is strong community interest.
All comments are subject to editorial review.

Given that the average American consumes 23 pounds of ice cream each year, that’s a lot of packaging.
So, are ice cream cartons recyclable?
As you probably know, the base material for ice cream cartons is paper — specifically, paperboard.
But ice cream cartons are made of a special type of paper called wet-strength paperboard, which includes a plastic lining of polyethylene to ensure that it won’t break down in the freezer under extreme temperatures.
Other examples of wet-strength paperboard include frozen food boxes and beer/soda carriers.
That polyethylene coating poses a recycling challenge because the process for recycling paper involves adding water to turn it into pulp.
A City-by-City Solution Ice cream carton acceptance in curbside recycling programs is by no means standardized in the U.S., and you can’t even predict its acceptance by region.
If you don’t see either frozen food boxes or ice cream cartons specifically mentioned by name, don’t include them with your recyclables.
If your community doesn’t accept ice cream cartons, there’s not a viable alternative for you.
Carton Preparation If you are in a community that accepts ice cream cartons for recycling, be sure to empty out all remaining ice cream before you recycle, and give the carton a quick rinse.

Warmer oceans, overfishing, pollution, and gradually acidifying waters have destroyed more than a third of the world’s shallow tropical coral reefs.
More than 90 percent of the world’s near-surface coral habitat could be gone in the next 30 years.
And so tropical reef fish, among the most vulnerable organisms when it comes to climate change, are increasingly under threat.
The evidence suggests that tropical fish species can adapt to warmer waters just by moving a few feet down to cooler waters.
Carole Baldwin, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Institution and lead author of the new study, thinks that deeper waters are the future for coral reefs, and she makes a case for hope amidst uncertainty.
“We know that fishes in general, like a lot of marine organisms, can survive a lot deeper,” says Baldwin.
“The hopeful thing is that if species start moving deeper now or in the future in response to warming surface waters or deteriorating reefs, that there are these other zones that they can go to.” Rich Pyle, a fish scientist with the Hawaii Biological Survey, agrees that deep water corals hold immense promise for conservation efforts.
There isn’t even much data about temperature at these depths, though it is significantly cooler and more stable than surface waters.
To be sure, Pyle says there’s reason to believe that deep reefs may even be in greater danger than their shallower cousins.
If they migrated to the depths in the past, maybe they could do it again.

Yes, a great leap forward, but unfortunately it can create more emotional distress and not shift the behavior.
When the child is most out of control, scared, and emotionally vulnerable, we deprive our emotional support and banish them from the group?
In our home and because I teach this to clients, we incorporate biofeedback.
They can see that belly breathing lowers their heart rate and feels better.
When a child needs to be in a quiet space to self-regulate, here are some tips.
Some kids want to lie down and get cozy; other kids want to thrash.
The goal is to help them learn to notice their own change in states and learn that breathing quiets the system.
Ideally, you’ll do this before it is a five-alarm situation (warm cheeks, upset belly, tightness in the chest).
Sometimes just sitting there and “doing your own thing” is what a child needs—to know you are close if he/she needs you.
Want more parenting tips from Bobbi Wegner?

A fascinating website, ImpactAlpha, has a story up this week about the UBS Wealth position on sustainable investing. Jessica Pothering

Guest essay by Eric Worrall A self identified Libertarian who believes in “aggressive” carbon taxes thinks ordinary Republicans can be persuaded to embrace his ideas if the party leadership tell them what to do.
Taylor spent years as a professional climate denier at the Cato Institute, arguing against climate science, regulations, and treaties in op-eds, speeches, and media appearances.
But his perspective slowly began to change around the turn of the century, driven by the arguments of several economists and legal scholars laying out the long-tail risks of global warming.
He and his colleagues there are trying to build support for the passage of an aggressive federal carbon tax, through discussions with Washington insiders, with a particular focus on Republican legislators and their staff.
… Lesson 1: Pick the right targets Political scientists consistently find that mass opinion doesn’t drive the policy debate so much as the other way around.
Partisan divides emerge first among “elites,” including influential advocacy groups, high-profile commentators, and politicians, says Megan Mullin, an associate professor of environmental politics at Duke University.
For the most part, people first align themselves with groups, often political parties, that appeal to them on the basis of their own experiences, demographics, and social networks.
They then entrust the recognized leaders of their self-selected tribe to sort out the details of dense policy and science for them, while vigorously rejecting arguments that seem to oppose their ideologies—in part because such arguments also effectively attack their identity.
… Read more: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610719/how-the-science-of-persuasion-could-change-the-politics-of-climate-change/ I suspect Jerry is over-estimating the influence of “elites” on their followers.
I doubt the Republican establishment was keen on President Trump winning the Republican nomination, but somehow he went and did it anyway.

The world needs to speed up its transition to renewable energy by a factor of six if it wants to meet the goals set out in the Paris agreement to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, a new study by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) concluded.
The report found that the Paris goal of keeping global temperatures well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels was “technically feasible” but that current energy plans by world governments would not do the job.
Indeed, an unaltered approach would spend the global carbon dioxide emissions budget in 20 years.
For this to happen, renewable energy would have to account for two-thirds of global energy consumption by 2050; in 2015, it accounted for 18 percent.
Further, renewable energy’s share in the power sector would have to rise from one-quarter to 85 percent in the same time period, and global energy demand would have to fall by two-thirds by 2050 as well.
IRENA called its plan for increasing renewable energy and energy efficiency by 2050 REmap and specified country-by-country targets.
It found that renewable energy could make up 67 percent of China’s energy consumption by that date, 70 percent of the EU’s, and two-thirds or more of India’s and the U.S’s.
IRENA said the REmap plan is possible with available and affordable technologies, but it would still require an investment.
The total dollar amount put in to the energy system would have to increase by 30 percent by 2050.
IRENA’s plan is a win-win, but it requires swift action.

BP plc and Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) announced Thursday the sanctioning of the ‘Satellite cluster’ project in Block KG D6, located offshore India.
The ‘Satellite cluster’ is the second of three projects in the Block KG D6 integrated development, BP confirmed.
The first of the projects, the development of the ‘R-Series’ deep-water gas fields, was sanctioned in June 2017.
Together the three projects will develop a total of around 3 trillion cubic feet of discovered gas resources with a total investment of around $6 billion, BP stated.
Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of RIL, said the company was delighted to announce the on-schedule progress of the Satellite cluster in the east coast of India.
“This development supports the country’s imminent need of increasing domestic gas supply and is a firm step towards making India a gas-based economy,” Ambani said in a company statement.
RIL is the operator of Block KG D6 with a 60 percent participating interest.
Generated by readers, the comments included herein do not reflect the views and opinions of Rigzone.
All comments are subject to editorial review.
Off-topic, inappropriate or insulting comments will be removed.

Warmer oceans, overfishing, pollution, and gradually acidifying waters have destroyed more than a third of the world’s shallow tropical coral reefs.
More than 90 percent of the world’s near-surface coral habitat could be gone in the next 30 years.
And so tropical reef fish, among the most vulnerable organisms when it comes to climate change, are increasingly under threat.
The evidence suggests that tropical fish species can adapt to warmer waters just by moving a few feet down to cooler waters.
Carole Baldwin, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Institution and lead author of the new study, thinks that deeper waters are the future for coral reefs, and she makes a case for hope amidst uncertainty.
“We know that fishes in general, like a lot of marine organisms, can survive a lot deeper,” says Baldwin.
“The hopeful thing is that if species start moving deeper now or in the future in response to warming surface waters or deteriorating reefs, that there are these other zones that they can go to.” Rich Pyle, a fish scientist with the Hawaii Biological Survey, agrees that deep water corals hold immense promise for conservation efforts.
There isn’t even much data about temperature at these depths, though it is significantly cooler and more stable than surface waters.
To be sure, Pyle says there’s reason to believe that deep reefs may even be in greater danger than their shallower cousins.
If they migrated to the depths in the past, maybe they could do it again.

Rhonda Anderson and her daughter, Siwatu-Salama Ra, have spent much of their lives working to protect their Detroit community from polluters.
She faces the prospect of giving birth in prison — away from her family, as well as the community she works to lift up.
As a black woman, Ra is more likely to be incarcerated than a white woman — four times more likely, in fact.
“Siwatu has spent her life fighting environmental injustice and pushing back against the big polluters who are violating the law to poison her community,” the Sierra Club’s executive director, Michael Brune, said in a statement.
“The prosecutor convinced the jury and judge that I lacked fear, and that’s not true,” Ra said during her sentencing.
“I was so afraid, especially for my toddler and mother.
I don’t believe they could imagine a black woman being scared — only mad.” Ra’s advocates have called into question the fact that the jury was not informed that finding Ra guilty would result in a mandatory sentence.
“In environmental-justice organizing, you’re dealing with a lot of small emergencies all the time, especially in an underdeveloped, under-resourced city like Detroit,” says William Copeland who worked alongside Ra at the East Michigan Environmental Coalition.
“Get her back out here so she can continue the work that she’s been doing all these years,” Anderson says.
As part of her campaign to free her daughter, Anderson is calling for the larger environmental community to realize that pollution is just one of many inequities people in fence-line communities face.

After last weekend’s rains, a significant number of homes “were severely damaged and there were several homes that were completely ripped from their foundation,” Blane said, adding that the county does not have an official tally on how many homes were damaged.
At least 350 people have had to evacuate the island’s north shore, while flooding in other parts of the island has displaced families from about 20 homes.
A river that runs through the north shore town of Hanalei flooded over the weekend and caused widespread damage.
Kauai County does not have an official number of people displaced, and recovery and relief efforts are ongoing.
Landslides triggered by the heavy rains have completely blocked off Kuhio Highway, the island’s main two-way road, cutting off traffic to the more remote coastal towns on the north shore, including Waihina and Haena.
She told HuffPost that she has been able to text with her family, who say they are safe.
An estimated 28.1 inches of rain fell in 24 hours in the town of Hanalei over the weekend, according to the National Weather Service in Honolulu.
Ian Nelson, a resident of Princeville, Kauai, shared with HuffPost photos of one of the escaped animals roaming the beach of Hanalei Bay.
“The focus has been on the north shore because they are completely isolated from the rest of the island while the highway is closed, but there are communities throughout the island that were impacted with the same severe damage,” Blane told HuffPost.
“Community-driven support has [residents] coming in on their own by boats, Zodiac [inflatable boats] and Jet Skis to try and bring in supplies that they are collecting on their own.” Kauai County officials and Red Cross have not fully assessed the damage but are working with the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency to begin relief efforts.

Chemical “medicines” used to kill lice, along with fish excrement, can negatively impact ecosystems in the waters surrounding farms.
“The Highland council is not listening to its communities nor the Scottish parliamentary committee’s advice.
However, the Highland council’s report recommending approval of the sites allows for these new methods to be abandoned if the farm operators sell on to another company, or find they have to switch from organic to conventional methods.
“And you [then] continue to produce the product in an inorganic manner.” Harvey said the council had therefore considered the plans as conventional, not organic, farms.
He said there is not yet enough evidence of the negative ecological impacts of salmon aquaculture to deny permission for new sites.
Some locals fear the two farms proposed by Organic Sea Harvest Ltd will be sold to large Norwegian multinationals – something that often happens with smaller operations.
The UK chief operating officer of Norwegian fish farming company Villa Seafood is among the Organic Sea Harvest’s five directors, as is Highland councillor Alister Mackinnon.
But Alex MacInnes, a director of Organic Sea Harvest, said: “I and my colleagues have absolutely no intention of farming other than organically or have any intentions of selling the business.
The fact that some objectors feel SCT does not represent them, because it is an unelected body and a limited company, has played a large part in the dispute.
They can also be nominated to serve as board directors at the annual general meeting.” Several councillors supported SCT’s position when approving the farms because they should bring jobs to the area.

There are plenty of reasons to feel optimistic.
I am sharing some of those optimistic stories here.
A common thread in many of these stories is that people kept working even when it looked like hope was lost.
It’s what will shape a better future for people and nature.
Hurricane Sandy is hardly a happy story, but the fact is it would have been worse if not for natural habitat.
Here’s how this river restoration success came to be.
Make it count for conservation; Cool Green Science has covered a variety of citizen science projects around the globe for you to choose from.
Conservationists are using a variety of techniques to give native plants a head start, including putting seeds in a soil mix that is combined in a pasta maker.
Years later, he had a second chance to address the issue.
This time, he knew what he had to do, and that included involving the commercial fishing community.

At the outset of Our Place, Mark Cocker sets out his vision of the kind of book he’s trying to write.
Springing out of his attempts to steward five acres of sodden fenland in the floodplain of the river Yare in Norfolk, he says he wants to compose a work that interweaves “an autobiographical narrative of place and a historical exploration of how and why the British countryside has come to look as it does”.
Cocker steps rather carefully around the subject of Brexit and his rallying cries are directed more to the people of Britain than to its politicians, but that shouldn’t mask the fact that this is a radical and polemical work in the tradition of those figures from the past and present that Cocker calls on throughout the book: Cobbett, Hazlitt, Wendell Berry, Marion Shoard.
The book is full of examples of the sops and pablums by which we fool ourselves that we’re making a difference to the environmental catastrophe currently taking place in Britain (not least among them the membership fees we pay to our charitable organisations).
As soon as I finished Our Place, I packaged up my copy and sent it off to Michael Gove – certainly another meaningless gesture, but this is the kind of book that demands action, which requires a response to the questions Cocker asks in an early chapter: “The British love wildlife, and they appear to love it more than others.
We lost 44m birds from our avifauna between 1966 and 2008.
By adopting the language and attitudes of capitalism, environmentalists are defeated at source The great paradox that lies at the centre of Our Place is that the British purport to care so much for wildlife, that our landscape is such a fundamental element of our national identity, that we belong to associations and organisations that claim to defend nature and the countryside in a way that is globally unique: 5m of us in the National Trust, 1.2m in the RSPB, 800,000 in the various wildlife trusts and yet we are worse at looking after our countryside than almost any other nation on Earth.
Our Place is the opposite of that kind of writing.
Cocker ends his book with 10 “truths” about the situation of nature in Britain right now, none of them easy reading, and with a pointed question: “If we cannot sustain a country equal to the love we bear it, then who on Earth can?” As a nation, we need to act urgently to answer this question and we could start by asking those organisations whose membership fees we pay exactly how they intend to reverse the near-terminal destruction of Britain’s beautiful, vulnerable natural world.
To order a copy for £13.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

A fascinating website, ImpactAlpha, has a story up this week about the UBS Wealth position on sustainable investing. Jessica Pothering

Guest essay by Eric Worrall A self identified Libertarian who believes in “aggressive” carbon taxes thinks ordinary Republicans can be persuaded to embrace his ideas if the party leadership tell them what to do.
Taylor spent years as a professional climate denier at the Cato Institute, arguing against climate science, regulations, and treaties in op-eds, speeches, and media appearances.
But his perspective slowly began to change around the turn of the century, driven by the arguments of several economists and legal scholars laying out the long-tail risks of global warming.
He and his colleagues there are trying to build support for the passage of an aggressive federal carbon tax, through discussions with Washington insiders, with a particular focus on Republican legislators and their staff.
… Lesson 1: Pick the right targets Political scientists consistently find that mass opinion doesn’t drive the policy debate so much as the other way around.
Partisan divides emerge first among “elites,” including influential advocacy groups, high-profile commentators, and politicians, says Megan Mullin, an associate professor of environmental politics at Duke University.
For the most part, people first align themselves with groups, often political parties, that appeal to them on the basis of their own experiences, demographics, and social networks.
They then entrust the recognized leaders of their self-selected tribe to sort out the details of dense policy and science for them, while vigorously rejecting arguments that seem to oppose their ideologies—in part because such arguments also effectively attack their identity.
… Read more: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610719/how-the-science-of-persuasion-could-change-the-politics-of-climate-change/ I suspect Jerry is over-estimating the influence of “elites” on their followers.
I doubt the Republican establishment was keen on President Trump winning the Republican nomination, but somehow he went and did it anyway.

Regardless of political affiliation, people are more likely to believe facts about climate change when they come from Republicans speaking against what has become a partisan interest in this country, says a new University of Connecticut study.
In fact, Republicans are even more persuasive than scientists when it comes to correcting misinformation about climate change, researchers found.
“For science issues such as climate change, we might expect scientists to be a credible and neutral authority,” says Benegal.
Participants included those who self-identified as Republicans, Democrats, or Independents.
As expected, study authors found a partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans in their stated opinions on climate change, with Democrats expressing the highest level of concern and scientific agreement.
In the study, misinformation was corrected by factual information from different sources stating the presence of broad scientific consensus that climate change is happening and attributable to human activity.
Overall, participants found the most effective corrections came from Republicans rather than non-partisan scientists or Democrats.
“Citing Republican elites who endorse the scientific consensus on climate change may be the most effective way to persuade citizens that climate change is a real and important problem,” says Scruggs.
“That may be a step forward in reducing the partisan gap in public opinion on the subject.” ### The study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-018-2192-4 Correcting misinformation about climate change: the impact of partisanship in an experimental setting Abstract Misperceptions of the scientific consensus on climate change are an important problem in environmental policy.
We find that corrections from Republicans speaking against their partisan interest are most likely to persuade respondents to acknowledge and agree with the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.

via Wikimedia Commons Guest essay by Eric Worrall h/t Breitbart / James Delingpole – Greens have discovered to their horror that producing renewable wood pellet biomass requires a large supply of dead trees.
Hardwood forests cut down to feed Drax Power plant, Channel 4 Dispatches claims Brendan Montague | 16th April 2018 A Dispatches investigation has uncovered evidence of hardwood forests being chopped down to provide ‘green energy’ for the UK.
Experts say unique habitats rich in wildlife are under threat as Britain’s power stations switch from burning coal to wood, writes BRENDAN MONTAGUE Huge areas of hardwood forest in the state of Virginia are being chainsawed to create ‘biomass’ energy in Britain as the government attempts to reach targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in efforts to tackle climate change, an investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches has found.
A key part of government efforts to hit its green energy targets is to switch from generating electricity from burning coal to burning wood – or so-called biomass.
It’s a policy that is costing taxpayers more than £700 million per year through a levy on their electricity bills.
The biomass industry and government argue that because wood is a renewable source of energy and trees can be replanted to reabsorb carbon dioxide this policy is good for the environment.
… The power station giant claims that burning pellets instead of coal reduces carbon emissions by more than 80 percent.
However, Dispatches conducted a simple experiment at a laboratory at the University of Nottingham to compare the carbon dioxide emitted when burning wood pellets, similar to those used by Drax, instead of coal.
Dozens of scientists It found that to burn an amount of wood pellets that would generate the same amount of electricity as coal it would actually produce roughly eight percent more carbon.
… Read more: https://theecologist.org/2018/apr/16/hardwood-forests-cut-down-feed-drax-power-plant-channel-4-dispatches-claims Lets hope the next Dispatches investigation is a wind turbine special titled “where have all our birds gone?“.

At some 10,800 sq ft, the model is more than twice the size of a regulation basketball court.
Housed at Louisiana State University’s center for river studies, the “Lower Mississippi River Physical Model” will help experts work out how best to enact a state plan to fight coastal erosion.
Researchers hope that such infusions will reverse some of the devastation the salt water has caused as it has killed off animal and plant life.
Clint Willson, the LSU professor who heads the Center for River Studies, said researchers would be able to study “the flows and the water stages of the water levels in the Mississippi river”.
“We can also model or simulate the transport or the movement of the Mississippi river sand down the river, and we can do all that in roughly one hour to replicate one year on the river.” Seawater encroachment has not just damaged wetlands – in many places it has erased them completely.
That is an area roughly the size of Delaware.
Among questions that researchers hope it will help to answer are: how will opening one diversion affect the river’s flow?
How will diversions affect dredging done by the US army corps of engineers?
How will multiple diversions along the river affect each other?
“What you do in one place has an impact on another,” said Willson, “and so the idea of looking at larger-scale impacts or larger-scale processes is critical to looking at what the potential impacts are or the unintended consequences of projects, and so a model of this scale allows you to do that.” The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Britain will consider tightening its emissions targets in line with the Paris Agreement, minister Claire Perry announced at a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in London (Flickr/Toshiyuki IMAI) The UK will consider tightening its emissions targets in line with the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious temperature limits, climate minister Claire Perry announced on Tuesday.
Speaking at a side event of a British Commonwealth leaders summit in London, Perry said the independent Committee on Climate Change (CCC) would be instructed to advise on how the UK’s long-term climate goals could meet the aspirational 1.5C limit agreed in Paris.
“After the IPCC report later this year, we will be seeking the advice of the UK’s independent advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, on the implications of the Paris Agreement for the UK’s long-term emissions reduction targets,” said Perry.
The country is on track to meet its near-term milestones, but the CCC has warned of “significant gaps” in government policy for maintaining momentum through the 2020s and 30s.
“So although the UK Climate Change Act was ground-breaking in its day, its existing 80% target now looks somewhat inadequate; other nations have already set net-zero targets in line with the Paris Accord, and the UK should logically adopt one too,” said Haigh.
Climate advocates welcomed the announcement, including Laurence Tubiana, a key architect of the Paris Agreement, and David Paul, environment minister of the Marshall Islands.
Today’s request for @theCCCuk to review the UK’s 2050 CO2 target in light of new science sends a strong message to the EU and the world that London is committed to the Paris Agreement.
26 countries have signed up to produce similar strategies, including Brazil, Japan and Canada.
UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa last week showed her support for an initiative to inform the development of long-term strategies.
“As we take action before 2020, we have to keep an eye on the future,” she wrote.