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Donald Trump just called himself an environmentalist. Wait, what?

President Trump was in Las Vegas on Thursday evening headlining Nevada Senator Dean Heller’s reelection event. Heller is currently high on the list of endangered GOP members up for reelection this fall, so Trump flew down there to save him. Speaking of endangered species, the president just unveiled a proposal to severely weaken the Endangered Species Act, but I digress.

At the rally, Trump said something that will shock the pants off of anyone who has been even remotely attuned to the myriad ways in which this administration has undermined environmental regulations. He said, AND I QUOTE, “I’m an environmentalist.” Sir! This actually isn’t the first time Trump has tried to tell people that he’s a champion of the environment. In 2017, he said, “I’m a very big person when it comes to the environment.” Watch the Vegas clip:

No offense, my guy, but you’re an environmentalist if today is opposite day on the planet Mars. Trump went on to say that we have the cleanest air and water — as coal ash spills threaten rivers in North Carolina, students can’t use the drinking fountains in Detroit due to lead contamination, and the air quality in parts of the Western U.S. was the worst in the world this summer due to smoke from climate-worsened fires.

Want more proof that the Trump administration has launched targeted attacks on public lands, renewable energy, climate science, and more? Here’s the short list:

Remember when the president appointed Scott Pruitt, grifter-in-chief at the EPA and dedicated chore-boy for the fossil fuel industry? Yeah, Pruitt wasn’t great for the environment.
What about that time Trump decided to shrink two enormous national monuments, opening up sacred indigenous land and acres of important animal and plant habitat for resource extraction?
Or, hey! How about when he announced plans to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement? Or what about that year when mentions of climate change essentially disappeared from government websites (and they’re still MIA!)?
Wait! One more. How about that time he repealed Obama’s Clean Power Plan with a “coal-at-all-costs” plan?

I guess everyone can just say that they’re whoever they wanna be now. By Trump’s logic, I am now a Midwest ostrich farmer. You can be one, too! There are no rules.

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Donald Trump just called himself an environmentalist. Wait, what?

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Quietly, Surely, We’re Losing a Whole Pine Species En Masse and Nobody Gives a Damn

Mother Jones

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

U.S. Forest Service research ecologist Bob Keane has studied whitebark pine, a coniferous tree of the high country, for more than thirty years. Still, when asked to describe a whitebark to someone who’s never seen one, he takes a breath and pauses for a moment. “Gosh,” he says.

The shape of the tree is very distinctive, Keane says. Instead of growing cone-shaped like other conifers, whitebarks branch like hardwoods. “A lot of the undergrowth is very small, so you see these open park-like stands of beautiful spreading trees,” he says. This shape is an adaptation that shows Clark’s nutcrackers flying past that a tree below has many nutritious cones and might be worth a travel stop.

Clark’s nutcrackers cache thousands of whitebark seeds, dispersing the pine across the high country, where the tree is a keystone species. Whitebark pine is one of the first trees to break ground after a fire, thanks to those nutcrackers, and it stabilizes soil and snowpacks at timberline. Living a millennium or more, whitebarks shape the West’s high mountain ecology in countless ways.

But the whitebark is going extinct and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the agency) hasn’t given the species federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. In April 2017, two conservation organizations from Montana lost a lawsuit against the agency for its failure to list the pine. No one—not the plaintiffs, defendants, or panel of judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals—questioned the precariousness of the tree’s fate. At question was how the agency prioritized which species it protects. Species, the court ruled, could be passed over because the agency didn’t have the necessary funds. As the story of whitebarks demonstrates, extinction has as much to do with politics as it does with biology.

The whitebark pine is an iconic tree of the West’s high mountains, ranging from Wyoming’s southern Wind Rivers to northern Alberta and British Columbia. In the fall, in a whitebark pine forest, “there are tons of cones and it is alive with animals, just alive,” Keane says. “You don’t see that with subalpine firs.” Researchers have found that whitebark cones feed more than 100 animal species and, in Glacier National Park, 40 percent of the understory plants in whitebark pine communities grow only there. The tree’s fatty, protein-rich seeds are an important food for Greater Yellowstone grizzlies; when the seeds run short, the bears eat more meat.

The whitebark pine faces intertwined threats that have killed the trees across much of their historic range. In 1910, Gifford Pinchot imported white pine blister rust, a fast-moving European fungal disease that kills whitebarks, to the West in a tree shipment.

And a century of fire suppression has imperiled whitebarks, too. The shade-intolerant trees rely on fire to open areas; without fires, trees such as subalpine firs shade out whitebarks. Often, Keane says, permanently stunted pines linger in the shadows of those new neighbors. “You’ll see an overstory of subalpine fir, but an understory of tiny whitebark pine saplings that are probably older than the canopy,” he says.

Meanwhile, native mountain pine beetles have taken out swaths of whitebark pines weakened by overcrowding and drought; a 2009 beetle outbreak killed whitebarks across more than 3,000 square miles. Exacerbating blister rust’s spread, wildfire suppression, and pine beetle outbreaks is an ever more pervasive threat: “The fourth big one is climate change and how climate change is interacting with all of these things, ” says Amy Nicholas, endangered species listing coordinator for the agency’s Wyoming field office.

Conservationists have requested federal protection for whitebark pines under the ESA for more than 25 years, beginning in 1991. In 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service found that the pine was likely to go extinct across much of its U.S. range in as little as 100 years, or less than two generations. Yet instead of listing whitebark pine as endangered, the agency listed the tree as a “candidate” species, essentially waitlisting the species for help.

The reason came down to a funding shortage: listing whitebark pine as endangered would have required the agency to devote resources to saving it. Without enough money to care for all disappearing species, the agency focuses on listing species that are part of legal settlements, for example.

As a candidate species, whitebark pine got a listing priority number, based on how likely it is to go extinct. In 2011, whitebark pine received one of the highest priority rankings, yet other species were being federally protected and whitebark pine was not.

Two Montana-based conservation organizations—WildWest Institute and Alliance for the Wild Rockies—sued the agency, arguing that by prioritizing candidate species ranked lower than whitebark pine, the Fish and Wildlife Service wasn’t following its own guidelines for deciding which species to protect. The conservation groups felt species should be given help in order of biological need.

The court ruled in favor of the agency. While pointing out that current policies on listing seemed inadequate when “dealing with the potential life or death of an entire species,” the court concluded that the agency was not required to make decisions based on its candidate species ranking system. “Scarce funds and limited staff resources may prevent FWS from taking immediate final action to list or delist a species,” the presiding judge wrote.

According to Patrick Parenteau, a Vermont Law School professor, the agency often makes listing decisions based on finances. “This is a systematic problem that the Fish and Wildlife Service has had for decades,” Parenteau says. He points to persistent resistance from Congress and some Republican administrations to fully fund the service’s endangered species listing program.

Financial considerations do not factor into whether a species gets listed, but rather in what order and when, agency biologist Craig Hansen says. “The listing budget is given to us by Congress and has an annual cap,” Hansen says. “We can’t pull funds from other programs to list.” The service’s funding woes have led to a backlog of organisms waiting to be listed, such as northern California’s Sierra Nevada red fox, which in 2016 included just 29 remaining adults.

These rust-resistant baby whitebarks are part of the U.S. Forest Service’s collaboration with NGOs trying to save the species. Bob Keane

In 2016, to stop the constant backlog of candidate species waiting to be listed as threatened or endangered, the Obama administration drafted a streamlined process that prioritized the most imperiled species backed by the best available science. It wasn’t adopted by the Trump administration.

Matthew Koehler, executive director of plaintiff WildWest Institute, grows frustrated talking about the whitebark case. Koehler believes the funding shortage that stalled the whitebark’s listing is part of a strategy by Congressional members in both parties to tie the service’s hands. “Then, the same members of Congress complain that the ESA doesn’t work or that it moves too slow,” he says.

Indeed, this past February, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., led a Senate hearing to “modernize the Endangered Species Act,” arguing in a statement that the ESA has not been successful enough and causes economic harm.

Funding is only one of the ESA’s difficulties, though. Court battles also stymie species’ recoveries. For each species, a listing decision takes years, followed by litigation from whoever opposes the outcome. “It isn’t just a bunch of scientists sitting around a table saying ‘let’s list this species,” says Parenteau. And still, species such as the whitebark disappear.

And then there’s climate change. Congress wrote the ESA in the 1970s, long before scientists understood the profound ways in which greenhouse gases affect species and their homes. The ESA is designed to address discrete problems: overgrazing, point-source pollution, exurban development. In its revision of ESA listing guidelines, the Obama administration acknowledged as much: the agency could have put off working on species endangered by climate change, including whitebark pine, since it has less power to help them.

With our existing environmental laws, whitebarks may yet survive in the northernmost parts of their range in Canada, Parenteau says. “But in the southern part of its range, unless we get serious about climate mitigation, it’s probably doomed anyway,” he says.

In any case, listing isn’t necessary for the feds to take action: Almost all whitebarks occur on federal public land, where the government can take steps to protect the species without listing, Parenteau says.

Indeed, having given up on the ESA for now, the WildWest Institute is seeking other pathways to whitebark protection. The organization is supporting a bill introduced to Congress to designate public lands in the northern Rockies where whitebarks live as wilderness. “We see wilderness designation as a way to protect that entire ecosystem,” Koehler says.

When pressed to make predictions for the longterm, Keane says areas where whitebarks used to flourish will probably eventually burn. By then, though, there will be no source trees left for birds to find seeds to spread to freshly burned areas. Instead, he imagines, shrub herblands will grow.

Still, unlike Parenteau, Keane is optimistic about the climate extremes that whitebarks can survive, if the trees get help. He’s part of a new collaboration between the U.S. Forest Service and two NGOs – American Forests and the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation—that’s working to restore whitebarks in the West. The group’s even developing rust-resistant seedlings. “Whitebark pine doesn’t even start optimum cone production until it’s 200 years old,” he says. “What we want to make sure is what we’re doing now, 100 years from now we will see the fruits of our labors.”

“If we do nothing,” Keane says, “we are making sure that it will be so low on the landscape, we will probably name the ones we see, there will be so few of them.”

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Quietly, Surely, We’re Losing a Whole Pine Species En Masse and Nobody Gives a Damn

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5 Surprising Animals You Didn’t Realize Were Pollinators

You’ve probablyheard a lot about the important role honey bees play in pollinating flowers, fruits and vegetables. But did you know that bees aren’t the only animals that are busy transferring the pollen that makes it possible for plants to reproduce? Here are five other important creatures that make it possible for our gardens to grow, farms to thrive and Mother Nature to stay happy and healthy.

Longhorn Beetle -Beetles, the largest order of insects in the world, pollinate as they move from flower to flower, where they consume nectar, pollen and flower parts. Though not as important as flies, butterflies, and bees, they still play an important role in pollination, especially in the tropics. With that said, it’s estimated that there are 52 native plant species pollinated by beetles in North America north of Mexico. There are no crops in the U.S. known to be pollinated by beetles except for the nativepaw paw. The long-horned beetle, Cerambycidae, is one of many beetles that help flowers reproduce.

Mexican Long-nosed Bat – A bat is actually a mammal, not an insect or a rodent, and bats generally play an important role pollinating fruit trees and flowers. At sometimes almost four inches long, the Mexican Long-nosed Bat is relatively large compared with most bats found in the U.S. It can be dark gray to “sooty” brown, and itslong muzzle featuresan obvious nose “leaf” at the tip. It has a very long tongue so it can dip three inches deep into a flower to slurp up the nectar. Found in Mexico and Texas, these bats help agave or century plants stay alive.

“They are very strong, highly maneuverable fliers,” reports, Texas Parks and Wildlife, “and like hummingbirds, are able to hover in flight while they feed. A mutual relationship exists, with the bats depending on the plants for food, and the plants benefiting from the bats as pollinators.”

Crested Honeycreeper – This bird,(Palmeria dolei), lives onthe Hawaiian Island of Maui. It is different from other pollinators in that it only pollinates one plant: the one it eats to survive. It’s the `ōhi`a plant, and until recently the plant itself was threatened because it was being overrun by wild pigs. The Fish and Wildlife Service has now protected the crested honeykeeper under the Endangered Species Act, setting aside a 7,500 -acre natural reserve and fencing two thousand acres to keep the pigs out. That’s been important because while the bird once lived on 485 square miles of terrain spread out over both Mauri and Noloka’i, it now lives on only 5 percent of its former Maui territory, and no birds at all remain on Molokai. If you ever get to Maui, you could identify this bird by its series of large white feathers running down its head, just above its bill and its bright orange plumage. Orange and silver accents on the wings and legs make this a beautiful bird.

Miami Blue Butterfly – As you might imagine, this little butterfly lives in south Florida, specifically on a few of the Florida Keys. Though it pollinates flowers, its ability to continue to perform that service is threatened by its very survival. The insects habitat and range are being destroyed by development and population growth, agriculture, and climate change.

“Collection of the butterfly is also a significant threat,” reports the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. ”Impacts from increasing threats are likely to result in extinction.”

Delhi Sands Flower-Loving Fly – You may never have thought of flies as pollinators, but this one is. It’s found in the Delhi Sands area of the “Inland Empire” region of California, from north of Sacramento to Los Angeles. It’s the first and only fly to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. Like butterflies, honeybees and other pollinators, the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly feeds on nectar from flowers. Thisfly is important, in part, because it will protect many other species also living in the dunes, notes the Xerces Society, including not only the flowers it pollinates, butthe western meadowlark and the burrowing owl, mammals like the Los Angeles pocket mouse, butterflies and other insects, and numerous reptiles.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has pulled together this list of other pollinators if you want to appreciate how many there are!

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Surprising Animals You Didn’t Realize Were Pollinators

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Here’s the real story behind Trump’s drought denial

A little fishy

Here’s the real story behind Trump’s drought denial

By on Jun 1, 2016 10:09 amShare

Over the weekend, Donald Trump told voters in California, a state that is now suffering through its fifth year of drought, that “there is no drought.” Instead, Trump says, the state is suffering from harmful policies crafted by environmentalists. Or, in Trump-speak, “they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea.”

A lot of outlets pilloried the remarks.  The Atlantic said they were “beneath contempt.” Slate called them “oblivious.”

But Trump has gotten far too much credit. He’s not being his usual creative self. He’s just repeating an argument that’s been popular among conservatives for years. Ex-Republican-darling Carly Fiorina made this same argument repeatedly during her brief presidential run, calling the California drought nothing more than a “man-made disaster.” Conservative media, including Fox News, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal, have long taken aim at environmentalists for exacerbating the drought.

Think of it as off-brand climate denialism. Drought deniers believe overzealous environmentalists got California into this mess. State and federal conservation laws call for a certain minimum level of freshwater to flow through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta in Northern California, where two of the state’s largest rivers meet. Drought deniers say there’s an easy fix to the state’s water problems – take away those laws and divert more of that water to the agriculture industry.

The longstanding symbol at the center of this fight is the delta smelt, a three-inch-long fish protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Roughly half of the water that flows through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta is supposed to be left to sustain the delta smelt and the broader environment, and the rest is to be divided for human uses like agriculture and household consumption. But that’s in a normal year; in recent drought years, California has already been making exceptions to regulatory safeguards. The U.S. House of Representatives is now considering a bill to amend the Endangered Species Act and allow even more water to be redirected to the dry Central Valley and Southern California. Even Senate Democrats are  considering a bill that would give the federal government more leeway to divert water for human use.

But as water from the delta makes its way out to the ocean, it doesn’t just nurture the delta smelt.  By supporting the whole ecosystem, it supports fishing industries as well. The health of the delta smelt population is a rough approximation of the health of the ecosystem and other species in it, including salmon, and right now that health is poor. Ironically, even the quality of human drinking water would be negatively affected by diverting more water from the delta for human use.

Letting farmers and other interests use as much water as they want wouldn’t begin to solve the larger problems posed by drought and climate change. It wouldn’t suddenly mean there is more snowpack and rain. It wouldn’t make California any less hot. In fact, this Band-Aid approach might only make California worse off in the decades to come, as megadroughts become a reality; if the state doesn’t figure out how to conserve water now, it will only have more problems down the road.

So it isn’t as simple as Trump promises: “If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive.”

Trump and other drought deniers have another thing in common: They tend to ignore the role of climate change in making California’s drought more extreme, and reject climate science altogether. They are certain that the drought is man-made, but they’re still unconvinced that humans have caused climate change.

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Here’s the real story behind Trump’s drought denial

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We’re eating chocolate faster than we can grow it

bar none

We’re eating chocolate faster than we can grow it

18 Nov 2014 7:04 AM

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We’re eating chocolate faster than we can grow it

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A confession: I want chocolate. I want to eat unreasonable amounts of the stuff — which is a problem for more than just my blood sugar. It turns out I’m not alone: We are eating more chocolate, faster than we ever have before. And now we’re running out.

We already knew that increasingly hot, dry weather and a disease called”frosty pod rot” are both taking their cut from cocoa crops, especially in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where more than half of the world’s cocoa is grown. Now, new statements from Mars, Inc. and Barry Callebaut, two of the largest chocolate makers, point to another problem facing cocoa addicts: Me. And — be honest — you, too.

Our collective chocolate lust is  so out of control, we are in the middle of a “chocolate deficit” — wherein farmers produce less raw cocoa than the rest of us eat in the course of a year. Like other deficits, this one carries over from year to year, and (let’s be real) usually gets bigger. Unlike other deficits, it has me actually scared. From the Washington Post:

Last year, the world ate roughly 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than it produced. By 2020, the two chocolate-makers warn that that number could swell to 1 million metric tons, a more than 14-fold increase; by 2030, they think the deficit could reach 2 million metric tons.

I’d just like to point out that that’s A LOT of cocoa. Some of that is just because we are eating more chocolate, period. But we’re also eating way more dark chocolate, which contains way more cocoa than the average chocolate bar. Still, don’t panic! Chocolate is not going extinct anytime soon — it’s just going to get a lot more expensive.

Gulp. If you need me, I’ll be stocking my chocolate bunker.

Source:
The world’s biggest chocolate-maker says we’re running out of chocolate

, Washington Post.

Chocolate: Can Science Save the World’s Most Endangered Treat?

, Bloomberg.

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We’re eating chocolate faster than we can grow it

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It’s Now Illegal to Kill Wolves in Wyoming

Mother Jones

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For the past two years, killing a wolf in Wyoming was pretty simple. In a trophy game area near the border of Yellowstone, licensed hunters were allowed to take a certain number of gray wolves. In the rest of the state, or about 80 percent of Wyoming’s land, anyone could kill a limitless number of them on sight.

Read “10 Reasons We Need Wolves”

But that’s about to change. A judge ruled Tuesday that the animals’ delisting in 2012, which handed management of the species over to the Wyoming government, was “arbitrary and capricious,” and that the state isn’t ready to manage wolf populations on its own. The move has wolf activists breathing a sigh of relief; Wyoming’s management plan, as Sierra Club’s Bonnie Rice put it, could have potentially taken wolves “back to the brink of extinction.” Judge Amy Berman Jackson did not challenge the previous finding that wolves had recovered and that the species “is not endangered or threatened within a significant portion of its range.” But even so, her ruling means that Wyoming’s wolves will again enjoy protections under the Endangered Species Act and can no longer be hunted—at least in the short term.

While as many as 2 million gray wolves once roamed North America, the carnivores were nearly wiped out by humans by the early 1900s. Roughly 5,500 remain today, though an uptick in laws permitting wolf hunting in states like Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, and Idaho all threaten to keep the animals scarce. Wyoming’s hunting and “kill-on-sight” policies, for instance, meant 219 wolves were gunned down since 2012, according to Earthjustice.

In part because wolves were reintroduced in Wyoming, whether to kill or protect this predator remains a very polarizing issue in the state. Wolves kill farm animals and pets, pissing off ranchers and rural landowners alike and feeding into the attitude that the canids are just a deadly nuisance. A Facebook photo posted last year by hunting outfitters, for instance, shows a group of hunters posing with a dead wolf with blood covering its paws and mouth. The caption reads “Wyoming if FED up.” Commenters responded with notes like “the only good Canadian gray wolf to me is a dead Canadian gray wolf” and “Keep on killing guys!”

But scientists and conservationists have fought hard to restore this species into the North American ecosystem. Studies have shown that wolves maintain balance in the environment: they prey on other large mammals like moose and elk, whose populations (and eating habits) can get out of control without a predator to keep them in check; their hunting helps feed scavengers like wolverines, bald eagles, and mountain lions; their predation can force elk to hang out in smaller groups, thereby reducing the spread of diseases; and they’ve even been found to be good for the soil.

By restoring protections to gray wolves, states Rice in a press release, “the court has rightly recognized the deep flaws in Wyoming’s wolf management plan.” She argues that the state needs to reevaluate how it treats the animal and develop “a science-based management plan that recognizes the many benefits wolves bring to the region.”

The conservation groups that sued after the wolves were delisted in 2012 include Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity. Though yesterday’s news comes as a victory to these groups, a bigger hurdle lies ahead: The US Fish and Wildlife has proposed to remove the gray wolf from the federal Endangered Species list altogether based on the animals’ perceived recovery. A final decision is expected later this year.

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It’s Now Illegal to Kill Wolves in Wyoming

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These 5 Animals Are About To Become Extinct

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These 5 Animals Are About To Become Extinct

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