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Trump State of the Union’s brief environmental interlude: more oil, more trees

The reality TV president delivered a reality TV State of the Union Tuesday night. Over the course of 80 sometimes raucous minutes, he awarded a school voucher to a Philadelphia 4th grader, had the first lady present conservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and reunited a military servicemember with his family.

Along the way, he ticked off a checklist of statistics, claims, and promises designed to galvanize his colleagues on the right side of the aisle. The most prominent parts of the speech touted the strong economy, celebrated the administration’s crackdown on immigration, and decried an alleged Democratic attempt to engineer a socialist takeover of healthcare.

One phrase that didn’t pass the president’s lips — to nobody’s surprise — was climate change.

Trump devoted just a few seconds of his address to energy and environmental issues: first by celebrating the massive oil and gas boom that has made the U.S. a net exporter of oil, and later by reiterating his commitment to joining an international initiative to plant one trillion trees worldwide.

The president took credit for the recent increase in domestic fossil fuel production, suggesting that it was his administration’s “bold regulatory reduction campaign” that made the U.S. the top producer of oil and natural gas in the world. But the U.S. actually reached that milestone under the Obama administration. Thanks to the explosion in fracking beginning in 2008, the U.S. became the top producer of natural gas in 2009 and of oil in 2013, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The president then went further, claiming that the boom has made the U.S. “energy independent” — ignoring the fact that the country is still subject to the global oil market, and that turbulence in the Middle East and elsewhere has the ability to affect gas prices in the U.S.

The dramatic increase in stateside oil and gas extraction has also generated environmental and public health consequences that went unacknowledged in Tuesday’s address. Though U.S. emissions likely fell by about two percent last year, those reductions are nowhere close to the cuts required to meet the targets set under the international Paris Agreement, which scientists say are essential to avoiding the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Research also suggests that increased pollution from the oil and gas boom could reverse that fragile progress.

Energy and environment have never been a point of emphasis in Trump’s State of the Union addresses. In 2018, the president devoted just two brief sentences to energy independence, focusing instead on immigration and tax cuts. Last year, too, energy and environmental policies were largely absent from his speech, save the passing mention of “an American energy revolution.”

The Trump administration’s decision to join the World Economic Forum’s initiative to plant one trillion trees worldwide is likely too little, too late. For one, if the U.S. is to compensate for all its 2019 emissions, it would need to plant trees on 371 million acres. That’s double the size of Texas.

Successful reforestation programs have also been hard to implement. Last year, Turkey planted 11 million trees, but according to reports from the country’s agriculture and forestry trade union, the vast majority of the saplings inspected died within just a few months. Trees also take decades to reach their full carbon-combating potential. Trees planted today may not reach full growth for 40 years or more — and that’s assuming they survive disease, wildfires, and droughts.

Then there’s the challenge of accurately monitoring and calculating the amount of carbon dioxide that the trees are pulling out of the air. Reporting by ProPublica and other research has found that many programs have grossly overestimated the emissions reductions from reforestation.

In fact, scientists have suggested that when it comes to climate change, conserving current trees is more helpful than planting new ones. Given that the Trump administration expanded logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest just a few months ago, one might be tempted to rip up Trump’s speech in frustration — if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had not already done precisely that at the end of the address.

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Trump State of the Union’s brief environmental interlude: more oil, more trees

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Bernie Sanders inspired the Sunrise Movement, now has its endorsement

Sunrise Movement, the group of young climate activists who helped catapult the Green New Deal onto the national stage last year, is feeling the Bern. The organization used its oodles of Gen Z social capital to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for president on Thursday.

In a statement, Varshini Prakash, the group’s executive director, said she believes a Sanders presidency “would provide the best political terrain” for Sunrise to accomplish its mission of enacting a Green New Deal. It’s no surprise that an organization founded by young adults inspired by Sanders’ presidential run in 2016 would throw its support behind the candidate. But the results of a survey of thousands of the group’s members, published Thursday, made it clear that the group is united behind the Vermont Senator.

Sunrise, which is comprised of a national leadership team and a series of autonomous “hubs” located across the country, started the process of endorsing a candidate last November. The six-week-long undertaking allowed the group’s 10,000 members to cast votes on two questions: should Sunrise endorse a candidate, and who should that candidate be? Eighty-five percent of its members voted in favor of endorsing, and 76 percent voted in favor of Sanders — a decisive victory by any measure. Senator Elizabeth Warren got 17.4 percent of the vote, and the remainder was split primarily among Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, and “no preference.”

Sanders, who was the first candidate to unveil a climate change proposal actually called the Green New Deal, said on Thursday he was “honored” to receive Sunrise’s support. But he’s not the only candidate with a vision for a progressive climate action plan. Warren also has a plan called the Green New Deal and has been endorsed by one of the architects of Congress’s Green New Deal resolution, and all of the Democrats running for president have said they support the general idea of a Green New Deal. “I’m grateful for @SunriseMvmt’s leadership in this fight,” Warren, who clearly is not a sore loser, wrote on Twitter shortly after the group announced its endorsement of Sanders.

Regardless of how committed other candidates say they are to progressive proposals like the Green New Deal, Sanders’ seniority on these issues has made him a magnet for endorsements from progressive groups like Dream Defenders and People’s Action. Most importantly perhaps for the young members of Sunrise Movement, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, cosponsor of the Green New Deal resolution that was introduced in the House and rejected by the Senate last year, endorsed him in October.

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Bernie Sanders inspired the Sunrise Movement, now has its endorsement

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Unlikely Friendships – Jennifer S. Holland

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Unlikely Friendships

47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom

Jennifer S. Holland

Genre: Nature

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: June 15, 2011

Publisher: Workman Publishing

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


The “irresistible” New York Times bestseller that “features heartwarming stories of interspecies love and adorable photographs” ( The New York Times Book Review ). Written by National Geographic magazine writer Jennifer Holland, Unlikely Friendships documents one heartwarming tale after another of animals who, with nothing else in common, bond in the most unexpected ways. A cat and a bird. A mare and a fawn. An elephant and a sheep. A snake and a hamster. The well-documented stories of Koko the gorilla and All Ball the kitten; and the hippo Owen and the tortoise Mzee. And almost inexplicable stories of predators befriending prey—an Indian leopard slips into a village every night to sleep with a calf. A lionness mothers a baby oryx. Holland narrates the details and arc of each story, and offers insights into why—how the young leopard, probably motherless, sought maternal comfort with the calf, and how a baby oryx inspired the same mothering instinct in the lionness. Or, in the story of Cashew, the lab mix that was losing his eyesight, and Libby, the stray cat who began to guide the dog’s way through the house and yard. With Libby, Cashew lived out his last few years with loving support and a lasting friendship. These are the most amazing friendships between species, collected from around the world and documented in a selection of full-color candid photographs. “The feel-good book of the summer—maybe the year—may very well be Unlikely Friendships .” — USA Today “With aww-inducing photographs, the book highlights the most improbable animal connections.” — National Geographic

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Unlikely Friendships – Jennifer S. Holland

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What critics of Bernie Sanders’ climate plan are missing

Bernie Sander’s $16 trillion climate plan, which he calls the Green New Deal, would transition the electricity and transportation sectors to renewable energy by 2030, allegedly create 240,000 jobs a year, and essentially nationalize the nation’s power sector. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and legions of climate activists have thrown their support behind the proposal, arguing the Vermont Senator is the only candidate in the primary whose climate ambitions are commensurate with the scale of the crisis. What’s not to love?

A lot, according to a bunch of climate scientists and energy economists interviewed by New York Times reporter Lisa Friedman. In a nutshell, those experts say the plan is “technically impractical, politically unfeasible, and possibly ineffective.” Friedman’s sources argue that Sanders’ resolute stance against building new nuclear projects would kneecap his ability to make the leap from fossil fuels to wind and solar. Then there’s the fact that many of the exciting projects he has planned for the American people, like high-speed rail and mass transit, require CO2-intensive resources to build.

The paper of record isn’t the first to question Sanders’ climate plan. “I find it very difficult to imagine that we can reach a completely decarbonized electricity and transport system by 2030, especially if we’re limiting our options exclusively to wind and solar, as well as geothermal,” Nader Sobhani, a climate policy associate at the think tank Niskanen Center, told InsideClimate News. In the Washington Post, columnist David Drehle wrote, “The wall is child’s play compared with the risible fantasy that Sanders has rolled out in lieu of an actual climate change strategy.”

Obviously, experts and pundits can and should criticize a policy proposal on its merits. But what Sanders’ critics miss is that even if it’s impractical or unfeasible, his Green New Deal still serves a political purpose. The plan moves the Overton window, the range of political ideas that the public considers acceptable or mainstream, several notches to the left.

In fact, Sanders has already moved the Overton window on climate. In 2016, Sander’s climate strategy centered around a carbon tax, an idea that his rival, Hilary Clinton, couldn’t even get behind. In 2019, a carbon tax is barely on the menu, not because it’s too ambitious, but because it’s not ambitious enough. The extraordinary evolution of our climate discourse over the past couple of years is, in part, thanks to the groundwork Sanders laid in 2016. (It’s also thanks to Green New Deal champion Ocasio-Cortez, who credits Sanders for inspiring her to run for Congress.)

Sanders has long been adept at shifting the Overton Window. In 2016, Clinton called talk of a single-payer system “a theoretical debate about some better idea that will never, ever come to pass.” Now, more than half of the crowded Democratic field supports some version of it. That’s in large part because Sanders started beating the Medicare-for-All drum on a national stage during his 2016 presidential run. Sanders has also influenced the national conversation around immigration, publicly funded higher education, and, yes, capitalism itself.

His $16 trillion climate plan may not be entirely feasible, but pulling his most serious competitors further left has always been well within Sanders’ grasp. At the end of the day, that may be the most indelible mark Sanders leaves on the 2020 race.

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What critics of Bernie Sanders’ climate plan are missing

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Here’s why Twitter’s political ad ban gives Big Oil a free pass

If you’re fortunate enough not to have a Twitter account, then you might have missed the news that the website’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, took the unprecedented step of banning political ads last week. In a Twitter thread (what else?), Dorsey explained the logic behind the move, which sets the social network apart from major competitors like Facebook, which has not banned much of anything, including neo-Nazis, in the name of “free speech.” “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” he wrote.

Twitter’s decision, which will take effect on November 22, was hailed as a win for democracy and civic discourse. In a tweet, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called the move a “good call,” adding, “if a company cannot or does not wish to run basic fact-checking on paid political advertising, then they should not run paid political ads at all.”

But there’s a significant downside to Twitter’s decision. Ads that “advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance,” like immigration, health care, and, yes, climate change, are on the chopping block. And when it comes to the issue of climate change, Twitter’s new policy gives oil and gas companies a leg up, and the folks who want to regulate those companies a kneecapping.

In recent years, Big Oil has finally wiped the smog off its glasses and read the writing on the wall: the public knows that a shortlist of multinational corporations are responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s planet-heating emissions. So those corporations shifted tactics lickity-split. Instead of denying that climate change exists, fossil fuel companies want you, and government regulators, to think that they’ve changed their oily ways. ExxonMobil says it’s investing heavily in developing a clean biofuel from algae. Shell produced several climate change manifestos with hopeful titles like “the Sky scenario” that it says have the potential to stop climate change. Chevron is saving turtles in the Philippines.

The problem is that these great initiatives are just a tiny sliver of what Big Oil actually does, which is — you guessed it! — dig up and sell oil. Algae biofuel is Exxon’s hobby (read: marketing ploy), oil is its day job. But it wants you, the consumer, to think that its top scientists are in the lab day and night working tirelessly to save the planet. Meanwhile, in Congress, these same companies are spending hundreds of millions every year to lobby against any kind of climate regulation that will hurt their bottom lines.

Twitter’s new policy allows ExxonMobil to keep filling up your newsfeed with ads about a biofuel that isn’t going to be commercially viable for at least another decade. But it bans a politician from buying ad space to tell you that, if elected, they plan to go after Big Oil.

Exxon’s efforts may not appear overtly political, but they absolutely are. Trying to hoodwink voters and regulators so that the government doesn’t hold polluters accountable is fundamentally at odds with Dorsey’s vision of earning reach instead of buying it. Has Big Oil earned the right to clog our newsfeeds with pictures of green gunk that’s ostensibly going to save the earth? Certainly not.

Twitter has put us in a tough spot. Yes, it’s good that, pretty soon, politicians and dark-money-fueled super-PACs won’t be able to force whatever nonsense they want onto the public. But the new ban will also tilt the online playing field in favor of companies that want to keep burning fossil fuels and against the politicians and groups that want to legislate them out of existence. Which is all to say that regulating civic discourse on social media is a gargantuan task and one that’s nearly impossible to do right. If you came here looking for an answer to this ethical dilemma, I’m sorry to disappoint. Go tweet @jack.

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Here’s why Twitter’s political ad ban gives Big Oil a free pass

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Nature Guide to Shenandoah National Park – Ann Simpson & Rob Simpson

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Nature Guide to Shenandoah National Park

Ann Simpson & Rob Simpson

Genre: Nature

Price: $23.99

Publish Date: August 6, 2013

Publisher: Falcon Guides

Seller: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group


This field guide dedicated to wildlife of Shenandoah National Park is an information-packed, pocket-sized book that introduces park visitors to animals, plants, insects and more that reside in the Shenandoah Valley in a colorful and portable package. Including full-color photos and easy-to-understand descriptions and with full cooperation from the park association, this book will appeal to the 1.1 million visitors who travel to Shenandoah every year.

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Nature Guide to Shenandoah National Park – Ann Simpson & Rob Simpson

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5 ways Puerto Rico is still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tropical Storm Dorian skirted Puerto Rico’s western corner on Wednesday, before heading north towards Florida, where it is expected to develop into a Category 3 hurricane. While the storm spared Puerto Rico of much damage, it raised attention to how the island is still in recovery mode — and ill-equipped for another natural disaster.

Hurricane Irma struck Puerto Rico in early September 2017. Two weeks later, on September 20, Hurricane Maria made landfall in the municipality of Yabucoa. When the debris settled, almost 3,000 people were dead, thousands more were displaced, and the island’s already aging infrastructure was severely weakened. The island’s antiquated power grid, which had been neglected for years, took an especially hard blow. Immediately after the storm, at least 1.5 million people were left without electricity, some for almost a year, casting the island into the longest blackout in U.S. history.

Efforts to rebuild the island have been slow, stymied by a mixture of colonial exploitation, government bureaucracy, partisan politics, civil unrest, and a president who’d rather blame Puerto Rico for inconveniencing him with another hurricane rather than providing actual leadership.

Making things even more volatile, just last month, former Governor Ricardo Rosselló stepped down following massive protests that called for his resignation. An unelected fiscal control board continues to run the island’s finances, implementing severe austerity measures in an effort to pay back the island’s roughly $70 billion debt.

As Puerto Ricans prepare themselves for another hurricane season, under shifting local leadership and in a world with increasingly unstable weather, here are five numbers that highlight just how vulnerable Hurricane Maria left the island:

$139 billion in damages

That’s how much former Governor Ricardo Rosselló estimated it would cost, in a report he filed to congress last August, for the island to fully recover from Hurricane Maria and Irma’s destruction. The former governor sought money from the federal government as well as foundations, other nonprofits, and Puerto Rico’s general budget to help cover this hefty cost. The federal government allocated not even half of that, only $42.6 billion, for rebuilding efforts, according to federal data. And Puerto Rico has received only $13.8 billion so far.

30,000 blue tarps

According to Rosselló’s report, approximately 90 percent of the island’s nearly 1.23 million households asked for relief and housing assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency immediately after Hurricane Maria. Seventy-eight percent of those households experienced damage to their home’s structure. FEMA provided blue tarps to residents whose roofs had been torn off by the storm, and today, the tarps are still widely visible on the island. Around 30,000 households still take shelter under these tarps instead of permanent roofs, AP reporter Danica Coto told PBS Newshour this week.

470,000 fewer people

While Puerto Rico’s population was declining long before Hurricane Maria made landfall, the storm accelerated an exodus of people moving off the island, many to the United States mainland. According to a report by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, between the time right before the storms to the end of this year, Puerto Rico may lose more than 470,000 residents, or 14 percent of its total population. This depopulation has severe impacts on the island’s economy, causing a shortage of school-aged children, an aging population, as well as a loss of the island’s most educated people in a phenomenon known as “brain drain.” According to Roselló’s report, this continuing loss has “added to the stress on [Puerto Rico’s] economy and created a shortage of professional workers in many sectors.”

2.4 million trees needed

It is estimated that Hurricane Maria and Irma damaged anywhere between 20-40 million trees, causing serious environmental harm. In his recovery plan, Rosselló said at least 2.4 million trees needed to be replanted throughout the island to undo many of these negative impacts, including landslides which he said had increased by the “tens of thousands,” as well as serious threats to ecosystems. According to a 2018 report by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the damage to Puerto Rico’s forests had far-reaching effects:

Trees stabilize soil on slopes with their roots. The loss of trees, plus the accumulation of downed branches, can contribute to landslides, debris flows, and increased erosion. Those problems can, in turn, lead to poor water quality in streams and rivers where excess sediments build up.

24% of communities with poor communication

During Hurricane Maria, many people couldn’t call 911 because both cell and landline services weren’t working, and they couldn’t be reached by family members on the mainland who were trying to help. As of last June, 24 percent of municipalities on the island reported that half or less of their community still did not have cell phone or landline coverage. As of this week, according to the New York Times, “the government has not purchased the technology that would allow a 911 dispatcher to pinpoint a caller’s location, and has not replaced the dozens of dispatchers who have quit and left the island since 2017, according to Aramis Cruz, president of the local union.”

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5 ways Puerto Rico is still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria

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Donald ‘I’m an environmentalist’ Trump skips G7 climate meeting

World leaders met in France on Monday to discuss some of the most pressing issues of our time: climate change, biodiversity, and warming oceans. The members of the G-7 — the world’s richest nations — walked away from that meeting with a plan to release $20 million in aid to the countries battling historic blazes in the Amazon. But one leader was notably absent: Donald Trump.

The president’s team said Trump had to skip the meeting because of scheduled talks with Germany and India. Except the leaders of those two countries, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, were unable to meet with Trump. They were busy … attending the climate meeting he skipped. But wait! There’s more. When reporters asked Trump about the climate session later in the day, he said, and I quote, “We’re having it in a little while.” (Note: The session had already taken place.)

Trump’s decision to skip the climate meeting didn’t stop the president from calling himself “an environmentalist” at a press conference mere hours later. Remember, Trump has called climate change a Chinese “hoax,” falsely claimed that the noise from wind power causes cancer, and bemoaned the absence of “so-called global warming” in the dead of winter. Nevertheless, he proclaimed, “I think I know more about the environment than most people.” And this isn’t even the first time he’s called himself an environmentalist.

Granted, Trump isn’t your typical eco-warrior. Over the weekend, Axios reported that the leader of the free world has on two separate occasions asked senior officials whether the government could use nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States. (Trump later denied the report.) The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Hurricane Research Division has a whole factsheet on why nuking hurricanes is a bad idea. Turns out, a nuclear bomb can’t even put a dent in a tropical cyclone — but a tropical cyclone can carry nuclear radiation all over the damn place.

But there’s no need to worry. The scientists over at NOAA can relax. Trump clearly knows what he’s doing. The man is an environmentalist.

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Donald ‘I’m an environmentalist’ Trump skips G7 climate meeting

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Julián Castro’s Trump-defying plan to save endangered species

Hold your horses, because presidential candidate Julián Castro just came out with an animal welfare plan on Tuesday. The former housing secretary’s proposal may be the first policy proposed by a presidential candidate to highlight the connection between animals, climate change, and extinction (if only because we just learned how bad the extinction situation is about to get). And it arrived on the heels of the Trump administration’s attempt to weaken the Endangered Species Act.

As the effects of the climate crisis — more severe wildfires, floods, and hurricanes — have become clearer, politicians on the left have generally stopped talking about animals under threat and started talking about people at risk. Research indicates that that’s a good thing: Earlier this year, the author of a Yale University study on effective climate change imagery told Grist that the picture of a starving polar bear is pretty much tapped out. After all, most Americans have never even seen a polar bear up close.

But it’s not just charismatic megafauna under threat. A United Nations assessment this spring found that climate change could wipe out 1 million species if left unchecked. Evolution, you see, is hardly a fair match for our fast-warming planet. A new study out on Tuesday from Cornell University shows the climate is changing more speedily than animals can adapt to it. By studying 10,000 climate change papers, a team of international scientists found that normal functions like hibernation, reproduction, and migration are under threat due to shifting seasons and warming temperatures.

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“The climate crisis is accelerating an unprecedented decline in biodiversity, threatening not only the future of animals but human life,” Castro writes in a Medium post detailing his new proposal. “Public policy must also confront the consequences of the climate crisis, including the threat of animal extinctions.”

He notes that much progress has been made on the animal welfare front in recent years: California recently established new standards for farming chickens, pigs, and cows. Delaware became the first “no-kill” state this month, meaning that its shelters save at least 90 percent of the cats and dogs that enter their doors (San Antonio, Castro’s hometown, achieved no-kill status a few years ago). But climate change, he posits, threatens to undermine that progress.

In order to make public policy match the scale of the crisis, Castro suggests establishing a $2 billion National Wildlife Recovery Fund aimed at protecting animals from imminent extinction. He also wants to preserve 30 percent of America’s lands and oceans, a first step toward an ambitious 50 percent goal by 2050. How does he aim to accomplish this? The proposal doesn’t say. But Castro does write that he’d appoint a conservation scientist to head up the Department of the Interior to clean up “Trump’s environmental disaster.” He would also double the Multinational Species Conservation Fund — an act approved by Congress that gives grants to projects that benefit elephants, great apes, rhinos, and sea turtles around the world.

One of the Cornell study’s coauthors, André Dhondt at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said Castro’s plan seemed like a good idea. Creating a fund to address the crisis, as Castro proposed, “would help everybody,” he said — people and animals included.

Castro’s plan could be interpreted as a return to old school conservation — using wildlife to hook mainstream audiences, or in this case, voters. But it could also be understood as a foray into new territory. By marrying the climate crisis to the extinction crisis, Castro is paving the way for a more enlightened conversation about conservation among the 2020 Democratic hopefuls, two of whom happen to already be vegan (Senator Cory Booker and Representative Tulsi Gabbard). And not a moment too soon.

“Animals have been going extinct forever,” Dhondt said. “The problem is now its happening faster, or will happen faster, than ever before.”

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Julián Castro’s Trump-defying plan to save endangered species

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Pleased to Meet Me – Bill Sullivan

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Pleased to Meet Me

Genes, Germs, and the Curious Forces That Make Us Who We Are

Bill Sullivan

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: August 6, 2019

Publisher: National Geographic Society

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Why are you attracted to a certain "type?" Why are you a morning person? Why do you vote the way you do? From a witty new voice in popular science comes a clever, life-changing look at what makes you you . "I can't believe I just said that." "What possessed me to do that?" "What's wrong with me?" We're constantly seeking answers to these fundamental human questions, and now, science has the answers. The foods we enjoy, the people we love, the emotions we feel, and the beliefs we hold can all be traced back to our DNA, germs, and environment. This witty, colloquial book is popular science at its best, describing in everyday language how genetics, epigenetics, microbiology, and psychology work together to influence our personality and actions. Mixing cutting-edge research and relatable humor, Pleased to Meet Me is filled with fascinating insights that shine a light on who we really are–and how we might become our best selves.

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Pleased to Meet Me – Bill Sullivan

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