Once Just An Alluring Pet, The Ravenous Lionfish Is Now A Predatory Threat To Reefs In The Atlantic.

Demand for ivory in Asian markets is driving illegal elephant poaching, with China posing the greatest threat.

In the U.S., clean energy and carbon pollution regulation are very popular. What is the disconnect between public opinion on these issues, and Federal actions?

Brad Plumer in the Washington Post explains a new study on the dramatic drop in carbon emissions in the U.S. over the past five years. This graph shows a hypothetical level of emissions that were projected based on trends from 1990-2005, compared to the actual level of emissions in 2012. It then breaks down the causes.

Plumer explains:

The recession and financial crisis, obviously, made a big difference. A weaker economy has meant less demand for energy — that was responsible for more than half the drop compared with business as usual.

Meanwhile, Houser and Mohan find the U.S. economy actually hasn’t become vastly less energy-intensive over time (the blue bar). Yes, overall efficiency has gone up — Americans are buying more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, etc. But the country is also no longer shedding manufacturing jobs as quickly as it was during the 1990s. So the amount of energy we use per unit of GDP has generally followed historical trends, improving only gradually.

The real change has come in the type of energy that the United States is using. The country is now relying more heavily cleaner forms of energy than it used to, and that explains about half of the fall in emissions

Preparedness for climate change (top) and coastal flooding (bottom), from States at Risk

Wetlands losses and gains for different land use categories. While, historically, agriculture was responsible for the vast majority of wetlands losses, government incentive programs like the Wetlands Reserve Program have encouraged farmers to restore former wetlands on their lands, contributing to a net gain of wetlands from the agriculture sector 2004-2009. In contrast, silviculture (forestry) is contributing heavily to wetlands losses, with urban and rural development also destroying wetlands. Urban and rural development combined accounted for 23 percent of the wetland losses 2004-2009, while silviculture accounted for 56% (a decrease from 1998-2004 for urban and rural development and an increase for silviculture).

*"Other" included areas such as native prairie, un-managed forests, scrub lands, barren and abandoned land, lands enrolled in conservation easements or other lands designated as wildlife management areas. Conservation programs are largely responsible for high wetlands gains from these areas.

“About 3 billion people around the world  — mostly in Africa and Asia, and mostly very poor — don't have access to modern energy and still cook and heat their homes by burning coal, charcoal, dung, wood, or plant residue indoors. These homes often have poor ventilation, and the smoke can cause a horrible array of respiratory diseases, including lung cancer... Indoor air pollution gets surprisingly little attention for such a lethal public health problem. It kills more people each year than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, but few countries treat it as a crisis on the same level.” - Vox

From the Washington Post:

"There are two ways to think about the cost of energy. There’s the dollar amount that shows up on our utility bills or at the pump. And then there’s the “social cost” — all the adverse consequences that various energy sources... end up foisting on the public."

"The blue bars represent the current market cost of various energy sources. On top of that, Greenstone and Looney have added estimated health damages from air pollution (the purple bar), as well as the cost of climate-changing carbon emissions that come with burning fossil fuels (the gray bar)."

"At the end of the paper, Greenstone and Looney argue that the government should put a price on the social costs of fossil fuels — either through a cap on emissions or a tax. “If firms and consumers faced the full cost of their energy use,” they write, “they would have a greater incentive to make more-informed and socially efficient decisions about energy consumption.”"

The annual energy potential of renewable versus nonrenewable energy sources