Brazilian Amazon deforestation rate jumped an estimated 22% in the year ending July 31, 2021 compared to the previous 12 months, belying pledges by the government of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro that his country will halt illegal rainforest destruction. Under pressure from the United States, European nations and large corporations in Brazil and abroad to curb illegal land clearing, the Bolsonaro administration has vowed to stop illegal deforestation altogether by 2028 to help meet its Paris climate goals. But the preliminary deforestation figures, which will be finalized in mid-2022 following further analysis of satellite images by the government’s National Space Research Institute (INPE), suggest the country is moving at alarming speed in the opposite direction. If the 22% surge is confirmed, it will represent the third consecutive deforestation-rate rise under Bolsonaro, who took office in 2019. Since the land-clearing rate had risen the year before Bolsonaro...
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The vast, three-decade-old network of underground gasoline and natural gas pipelines operated by Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil giant, is drawing growing concern, as worries mount that the company is neglecting its maintenance. According to an investigative report published by Mexico’s El Universal newspaper, the concern came up in a July board meeting of Pemex Logística, a Pemex affiliate that oversees the company’s oil and gas pipelines. “Most of the pipelines have completed their useful lifecycle and need inspection,” Juan Francisco Rivera Cavazos, deputy director of transport at Pemex Logística, was quoted by El Universal as saying at the meeting. El Universal reported that Rivera went on to say that funds must be allocated for the inspection and the repair or replacement of aging lines, which in the meantime present a “major risk.” Buried Pemex pipelines underlie nearly 17,000 kilometers (over 10,000 miles) of varied terrain including urban...
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Some 300 to 500 La Plata dolphins die each year in the waters off Uruguay after becoming entangled while feeding on fish trapped in artisanal nets, according to the nonprofit International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The dolphin (Pontoporia blainvillei) is known in Spanish as the delfín franciscana. Scientists say it can quickly drown after getting stuck in a net because it is unable to remain continuously underwater longer than 13 minutes. But even when the dolphins manage to escape, they can die later of injuries sustained in the struggle to get free of net mesh or hooks. Uruguayan biologist Javier Sánchez Tellechea says the problem is not that the dolphins do not detect the nets. He says they do, but their instinct to evade obstacles is effectively overridden by their stronger instinct to go after the fish inside the nets. “In my doctoral thesis I had the theory...
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Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s executive decree describing recycling as a matter of strategic national interest would appear to be good news. After all, the vast amount of consumer waste that lies uncollected—largely because the crisis-torn country’s trash trucks sit idle—poses public health threats, experts say. But the decree, issued on March 22, mainly targets high-value materials such as metal, electronic waste and optic fiber. And the real purpose, critics say, is to dismantle factories and other facilities that have shut down as a result of failed economic policies, and to sell valuable recyclables abroad for funds needed to sustain the Maduro regime. “The sale of the recyclable materials to foreign countries will generate an income to support the state at this critical time,” says Luisa Villalba Márquez, a researcher at the Science Faculty of the Universidad Central de Venezuela who has spent nearly three decades studying...
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