11/8/2023 0 Comments Horn timely record solitude![]() But am I counting on hipsters in Brooklyn to save the planet? No. So that’s great that some hipster in Brooklyn is keeping bees-I think that’s wonderful. But how many people keep fricking bees? Not that many. You know, The New York Times is filled with stories about beekeeping. Well, it’s possible people are more interested in DIY culture in general terms. Instead of encouraging individuals to plant wildflowers to save the bees or guilting people for their front-yard greenery, he said, we might be better off chipping away at some of the industry issues that make lawns so pervasive in the first place. His advice wasn’t what you typically hear in these conversations. To help me make sense of all of this, I called up Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who literally wrote the book on lawn culture. But No Mow May doesn’t solve the broader issues of water use, pesticides, and fertilizer runoff. Abstaining from lawn maintenance for a month to help bee populations is certainly easier than ripping up your lawn and planting native wildflowers-which can be pretty expensive and time-consuming. We’re now halfway through “ No Mow May ,” an interesting initiative that began in the U.K. What’s the best way to make your yard more environmentally friendly? Articles on the topic abound this time of year. Instead, it takes those enjoyments and dials up the temperature until the fruits of the season start to rot-until the former beach days, al fresco park gatherings, and mornings in the garden just aren’t very pleasant, or even carry the risk of heat stroke, and “scorchers” turn into multiday death traps. Climate change isn’t simply removing what’s enjoyable about these months (like snow in winter). But what rampant emissions are stealing from summer people-and all of us-is arguably worse. It’s to say nothing of the well-documented annual spike in violent crime, which researchers show is particularly likely on days above 85 degrees.Īs a fall and winter person myself, I spend a lot of time mourning what petro-hegemony is doing to those seasons. It’s to say nothing of the increasingly plausible link between heat and derechos, or the dangers of drought, fire, or flash floods-all of which climate change is making more likely in various regions in the summertime. ![]() At the same time, power plants are highly dependent on water, which they need to cool down their systems,” but which isn’t necessarily available in some areas during drought.Īnd that’s to say nothing of work-related heat deaths, for both outdoor workers in fields like agriculture, construction, and delivery and indoor workers in poorly ventilated warehouses. power grid is dangerously underprepared for these kinds of scenarios, and not just because of overall energy capacity: “If the weather gets hot enough, power lines start to sag-a result of the metal inside them expanding-and risk striking a tree and starting a fire. In the 2021 heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest, over 6,000 people lost power in Portland alone during a 112-degree-heat weekend. The second reason is that air conditioners, which are hardly evenly distributed across society to begin with, aren’t much help if the electrical grid fails. (Already, this decade, the city is expecting the number of heat emergency days to range from 18 to 20.) But by the 2050s, even under a “low emission scenario,” that number will more than double, to 25-and could be as high as 45. Here in D.C., for example, the “baseline” number of heat emergency days is supposed to be 11. For one, the number of dangerously hot days in many areas is growing. For a while, heat deaths were decreasing-probably due, the CDC has surmised, to “better forecasting, heat-health early warning systems, and increased access to air conditioning.” But there are a few reasons that trend might not hold. Epidemiologists estimate that the real figure may be closer to 12,000-20 times higher than the official count.” “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” Eric Margolis previously wrote for TNR, “only counts deaths where heat illness is explicitly noted, so the official CDC count of heat-triggered deaths sits at just around 600 per year. Then there are the deadly waves, whose toll is probably undercounted in this country. At the more prosaic end of the spectrum, 75-degree days turning into 85- or even 90-degree days is just an unpleasant hassle, making it harder to enjoy the outdoors and more costly to keep the indoors comfortable air conditioners are expensive and a pain to deal with, and heat screws up people’s sleep.
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