uphillbothways

The following pages are returning "404 page not found" consistently, for me at least. (Also, breaks infinite scroll on homepage.)

https://kbin.social/?p=2
https://kbin.social/?p=6
https://kbin.social/newest

(Though, https://kbin.social/newest?p=1 does seem to to work.)

Also not working:
https://kbin.social/all
https://kbin.social/active

The first non-Hopoo Risk of Rain game is exactly what many series fans had feared

A year ago almost to the day, Gearbox Publishing officially acquired the Risk of Rain IP from original developer Hopoo Games after serving as the publisher on runaway hit Risk of Rain 2. At the recent 10-year Risk of Rain anniversary blowout, Gearbox announced Risk of Rain: Hostile Worlds, a new mobile title in the works at developer Frima Studio, best known for the reasonably well-liked action RPG Disciples: Liberation, mobile spinoff Forza Street, and contributions to Fortnite's mobile version.

Hostile Worlds will be the first Risk of Rain game without Hopoo attached. It's an isometric action game explicitly built for Android and iOS devices, currently in regional testing ahead of a proper global launch. The game's been billed as a four-player hero collector which streamlines Risk of Rain's core gameplay loop – shoot, collect items, kill a boss, repeat – and marries it to free-to-play monetization.

The ability to 'boost' your own comments/threads has been used by a very small number of users in a way that seriously degrades conversation on the platform. These users constantly move their own contributions to the top of the conversation without regard to their value. If allowed to continue it will likely become standard for everyone to do the same and the value of the 'boost' feature will be lessened.

I can't see a downside to removing the ability to do so, and it seems like it would be very easy to implement. Though, I am open to discussion on the topic.

Thank you. (And, once again, I apologize if there is a thread about this topic already. I searched, but didn't see one.)

Are there plans for a 'hide thread' feature, under 'more'? (next to comment and boost)

Just curious. It's not the highest priority by any means, but I've found myself looking for it sometimes. (think it was a reddit option, can't remember for sure)

There are occasions when a thread is bothersome or somewhat triggering for one reason or another (maybe the image is a little much) and it would be nice to just not see that individual thread again in my own feed.

Thanks in advance. (And, sorry if there's another thread on this. I tried searching and didn't see one.)

The Environmental Protection Agency is delaying plans to tighten air quality standards for smog despite a recommendation by a scientific advisory panel to lower air pollution limits to protect public health.

The decision by EPA Administrator Michael Regan means that one of the agency’s most important air quality regulations will not be updated until well after the 2024 presidential election.

“I have decided that the best path forward is to initiate a new statutory review of the ozone (standard) and the underlying air quality criteria,’' Regan wrote in a letter to the EPA advisory panel last month. The letter cites “several issues” raised by the panel in a recent report that “warrant additional evaluation and review.’'

The review, which will last at least two years, will “ensure that air quality standards reflect the latest science in order to best protect people from pollution,’' Regan said.

Regan’s decision avoids an election year battle with industry groups and Republicans who have complained about what they consider overly intrusive EPA rules on power plants, refineries, automobiles and other polluters.

The delay marks the second time in 12 years that a Democratic administration has put off a new ozone standard prior to an election year. President Barack Obama shut down plans to tighten ozone standards in 2011, leading to a four-year delay before the standards were updated in 2015.

Paul Billings, senior vice president of the American Lung Association, called the EPA’s decision “profoundly disappointing” and a missed opportunity to protect public health and promote environmental justice. A recent report by the lung association showed that minority communities bear a disproportionate burden from ground-level ozone, which occurs when air pollution from cars, power plants and other sources mixes with sunlight. The problem is particularly acute in urban areas.

Billings called the ozone rule “the public health cornerstone of the Clean Air Act,’' adding that “millions of people will breathe dirty air for many more years’’ as a result of the delay. An increased number of asthma attacks, sick days and even premature death are likely to occur, he and other public health advocates said.

Raul Garcia, vice president of policy and legislation for Earthjustice, called the delay “shameful” and unjustified. “The science tells us we are long overdue,” Garcia said.

Democratic lawmakers also were disappointed. “Inaction threatens public health and puts those with underlying conditions such as asthma or lung disease at an elevated risk,’' said Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. He and 51 other Democrats had urged swift action on a new rule.

“Unfortunately we’ve seen the process for updating the ozone standards repeatedly swept up in political games that risk lives,’' the lawmakers said in an Aug. 7 letter to the EPA.

Conor Bernstein, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, applauded the EPA’s decision “not to race ahead with an unnecessary revision of the ozone standards,’' which have not been changed since 2015. The current standard was reaffirmed in December 2020 under then-President Donald Trump, a Republican.

Bernstein, whose members produce coal and other fossil fuels, urged officials to reconsider other regulations that he said target coal-fired power plants and endanger reliability of the electric grid. “It’s clear — and deeply alarming — that EPA (does not) understand the cumulative impact its rules will have on the grid and the nation’s severely stressed power supply,’' he said.

A spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying group for the oil and gas industry, said current ozone limits are among the most stringent in the world. “Any tightening of the standard could impact energy costs, threaten U.S. energy security and impact businesses and American consumers,’' spokeswoman Andrea Woods said in an email.

The EPA’s decision comes after two advisory panels — the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council — urged the agency to lower the current ozone standard of 70 parts per billion.

“Based on the scientific evidence currently available, it is concluded that the level of the current standard is not protective with an adequate margin of safety,’' the EPA panel said in a June report. A limit of 55 to 60 parts per billion “is more likely to be protective and to provide an adequate margin of safety,’' the panel said.

Lianne Sheppard, a University of Washington biostatistics professor who chairs the scientific advisory panel, said Regan’s decision was “his alone” to make.

“However, I am disappointed, given the robust scientific evidence that ozone is harmful to public health and welfare,” she told E&E News last month.

The White House environmental justice council, meanwhile, cited the “horrible toll of air pollution’’ and its disproportionate effect on minority communities. In a letter to the White House, co-chairs Richard Moore and Peggy Shepard said the problem is “compounded by the inadequate monitoring and enforcement in many of our communities.’'

Moore is co-director of Los Jardines Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while Sheppard is co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice in New York City.

Tomas Carbonell, a top official in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said the report by the scientific panel left the EPA with little choice but to launch a comprehensive review even though all but one panel member supported a stricter ozone standard.

“When we’re looking at our national air quality standards, there’s really no way to cut corners around that process,’' Carbonell said in an interview.

The agency will convene workshops next spring to gather information and will release a review plan for action in late 2024, he said. A final decision could be years away.

archive: https://archive.ph/wip/lSj05

In an excerpt from his book River Notes, leading anthropologist Wade Davis recalls how the taming of the Colorado River in the 1960s — ‘nature serves man’ went the thinking — helped shape the nation. But now facing a historic drought, all that could be lost in a generation.

I first visited the Grand Canyon in 1967 with two school friends and an elderly teacher who filled his summers by taking young students on long road trips, camping across the country. I mostly remember the color of the sky and the immensity of the chasm, with the Colorado River as seen from the canyon rim just a dirt thread lying across the bottom of the world. The nearest we got to the river was a mule ride down the Bright Angel Trail, three hours that left us sunburnt and swarming with ticks. Of the greater forces at play that summer, we were as oblivious as our teacher.

In retrospect, 1967 was an auspicious year for the army of engineers, planners, and developers whose confidence in their ability to tame the Colorado, transform the desert, and reimagine the hydrology of the American West had taken on a religious dimension, secured as if an article of faith.

The Glen Canyon Dam, built over a decade, had been formally dedicated by the president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, on September 22, 1966. In scale, it was an astonishing feat of construction, a concrete arch surpassed in height only by its elegant sibling downstream, the Hoover Dam, an art deco masterpiece of engineering completed in 1935. Lake Mead above the Hoover Dam would remain the largest reservoir in the United States, but as the waters of the Colorado began to spread across the catchment of the Glen Canyon Dam in the first months of 1963, a vision emerged of a body of blue water in volume only slightly smaller than Lake Mead, but in scale and aspect incomparably more beautiful and dramatic.

To Floyd Dominy, the man ultimately responsible for the building of the Glen Canyon Dam—and its greatest champion—the reservoir that became Lake Powell was a thing of pure beauty, a miracle in the desert. “There is a natural order in our universe,” Dominy famously wrote.

“God created both Nature and Man. Man serves God, but Nature serves Man. To have a deep blue lake, where no lake was before, seems to bring Man a little closer to God.”

Even his archrival, David Brower of the Sierra Club, haunted all his life by the loss of Glen Canyon, agreed that Dominy was a good man, even a great American, though very much a product of his times. Like so many of his generation, including my own father, Dominy believed that any natural resource not used was wealth wasted. He had been raised as a boy on a dying farm in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl. His first job as county agent in rural Wyoming was helping ranchers build earthen dams to secure water for their livestock. By his own account, he became a crusader for the development of water. As Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, singularly responsible for water policy in the American West, Dominy was not just an advocate of massive water projects, dams, and canals designed to tame every river and divert water to the cities, farms, and settlements of the desert southwest; he was, in his own words, “the messiah.”

As Lake Powell slowly came into being, with the flow of the Colorado shut down as if by a tap, there was little concern for the downstream consequences. In later years, conservation would sometimes trump engineering, but in 1963 ecological considerations hardly entered the conversation. The environmental movement was embryonic; as an organized political force it would only emerge in the wake of the dam’s construction, catalyzed by the outrage provoked as the reservoir above the dam deepened and spread, flooding Glen Canyon, famously eulogized by photographer Eliot Porter as “the place no one knew.”

The overwhelming national consensus in 1967 called for growth. Albuquerque’s population had doubled in a decade. Las Vegas that year had a population of 181,000; Tucson, 274,000; Phoenix, 763,000. Each of these cities would grow at least five-fold in a generation, with Las Vegas increasing to 2.8 million, and Phoenix by 2022 achieving a population of 4.6 million. If few in 1967 anticipated such figures, it was evident to all, as Dominy never ceased to say, that if there was to be any growth at all, it would be dependent on water, stored in Lake Powell.

Thus, over twenty years, as the reservoir expanded, reaching in 1983 a maximum depth of 583 feet, extending in length 186 miles, with a width of 25 miles and 1,900 miles of shoreline, Lake Powell—celebrated as a recreational wonderland — became a symbol of human triumph, capacity, and resolve. It stored 20 million acre-feet of water — enough to fill 10 million Olympic-sized swimming pools — a vital repository that made possible the transformation of desert lands that would, in time, be home to 40 million Americans.

In 1973, construction began on the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile diversion canal conceived to bring water from the Colorado — 456 billion gallons altogether — to Phoenix and Tucson, even while providing irrigation for more than a million acres, allowing farmers to grow cotton, hay, and alfalfa in the desert. To secure federal funds to cover construction costs, Arizona cut a deal with California that was certain to haunt the state should the flow of the Colorado ever be compromised or reduced. But with water in abundance, there was little concern. That the open canal lost over five billion gallons of water each year to evaporation, and another three billion to leakage, was considered tolerable wastage, given the scale and benefits of the project.

As Lake Powell reached its maximum capacity in 1980, water levels five times what they are today, the future seemed exceedingly bright. The only threat to the dam came in 1983 when a surge of snowmelt into the reservoir raised lake levels to a dangerous extent, forcing the engineers to open the spillways for the first time since the initial construction. Abundance of water, not a shortage, marked the 1980s, a decade now recognized as having been unusually wet.
...

archive: https://archive.ph/UOffT

A US B-2 Spirit bomber recently carried out a historic hot pit refueling at Orland Air Base, Norway, marking the first landing of the stealth bomber in the Scandinavian nation.

As per the US Air Force statement, the event occurred on August 29 and serves as a symbol of the joint commitment between the United States and Norway to deter potential threats and enhance the NATO Alliance.

Hot-pit refueling is an efficient technique employed to minimize aircraft downtime and enhance overall reliability. Instead of shutting down the aircraft’s engines after landing and parking, the aircrew keeps an engine operational while refueling takes place. This method ensures a continuous and streamlined refueling process.

The service said that the practice of hot pit refueling within NATO nations enables the B-2 to expand its fuel range while minimizing its downtime on the ground, ultimately enhancing the capacity to bolster combat airpower across the European theater for the United States and its allied partners.

According to Gen. James Hecker, who leads US Air Forces in Europe & Africa and NATO Allied Air Command, hot-pit refueling is evolving as a transformative tactic in bomber operations, offering increased adaptability.

This clever technique expands USAF’s operational reach, establishing temporary hubs at strategically selected and sometimes unexpected locations. These flexible capabilities form the cornerstone of modern airpower projection.

The B-2, one of three Spirit bombers stationed at Whiteman Air Base in Missouri, has been deployed to Iceland’s Keflavik Air Base. Simultaneously, a contingent of roughly 150 skilled airmen from the 509th Bomb Wing was dispatched on August 13 to lend invaluable support to this vital overseas mission.

This mission holds special significance as it marks the first return of the aircraft to the European theater following their last deployment to the continent in 2021.

These aircraft were temporarily grounded for five months starting in December due to safety concerns triggered by a fire incident involving one of the bombers.

In their current European assignment, the B-2 bombers are engaging in extensive training exercises alongside NATO and US Air Force units, although the precise duration of their stay remains unknown.

US Bomber Missions In Europe
In recent years, the strategic importance of operations in the High North has surged, exemplified by the deployment of B-2 stealth bombers to this region.

This heightened significance is linked to the evolving landscape of climate change, which potentially foresees the opening of an Arctic passage during the summer months in the not-so-distant future.

Simultaneously, uncertainties have arisen concerning the security of Northern Europe due to the profound impact of events in the Ukraine conflict and the incorporation of Finland and Sweden into NATO.

Considering this perspective, the US Air Force highlighted the paramount importance of US forces and equipment seamlessly operating alongside its Allies and Partners, recognizing that this synergy is essential for strengthening an expansive network of alliances and partnerships capable of effectively addressing both current and future challenges.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Andrew Kousgaard, 393rd Expeditionary Bomb Squadron commander, said, “The long-range, penetrating strike the B-2 provides is a truly unique capability in the world, but long-range requires a lot of gas.”

“Honing our ability to interoperate with our allies and utilize partner-nation equipment and infrastructure to refuel can significantly reduce what we often call our ‘tanker bill;’ in some cases, it could be the difference between mission success and failure,” Kousgaard said.

The brief mission to Norway also aligns with the US Air Force’s ongoing commitment to exercise its agile combat employment concept, which aims to strategically reposition aircraft and airmen across various airfields to prevent them from becoming static targets in the event of a large-scale conflict.

In June, a pair of B-1B Lancer bombers from Texas made history by landing at Sweden’s Lulea Kallax Air Base during their deployment at RAF Fairford in England.

Since 2018, the United States has been conducting strategic bomber missions in Europe with the primary objective of acquainting their crews with the region, as well as nurturing relationships with NATO allies and partners.

Overall, the service believes that the greater their ability to seamlessly integrate forces and equipment for strategic maneuvering across Europe, the better prepared they become to effectively confront security challenges, both in the present and in the years ahead.

archive link: https://archive.ph/vzNsY

Secretariat on biodiversity says fungi should be recognised and protected on equal footing with plants and animals

The word “funga” should be used alongside flora and fauna when discussing conservation issues to reflect the importance of fungi to ecosystem health, a UN body has said.

The secretariat of the UN convention on biological diversity (UNCBD) said it was time that fungi were “recognised and protected on an equal footing with animals and plants in legal conservation frameworks”.

“Whenever referring to the macroscopic diversity of life on Earth, we should use ‘flora, fauna and funga’, and ‘animal, plants and fungi’,” it said in an Instagram post.

Mycologists, mostly from Latin America, established the term “funga” five years ago. It refers to the levels of diversity of fungi in any given place, and is analogous to “flora and fauna”, which refer to plants and animals. Unlike flora and fauna, it is not a Latin term but was chosen because it is morphologically similar.

“Just like mycelium, mycologically inclusive language will spread unseen but profound [sic], permeating public consciousness (and policy) to acknowledge fungi’s vital role in the grand web of life on and in Earth,” it said.

Government agencies in Australia, Brazil, Iceland and elsewhere have picked up on the word. Its creation and use reflects an increasing appreciation of the fungal kingdom and how it connects the plant world through an underground mycelial network.

“Through language, we can trigger change,” the chief executive of the Fungi Foundation, Giuliana Furci, said. “It gives us an opportunity to look at nature as an interdependent set of ecosystems: If we concentrate on fungal conservation, we can protect whole habitats.”

On the invention of the phrase “fauna, flora and funga”, she said: “We wanted something catchy that could incorporate fungi into the conversation.”

In a joint piece for Time this year, Furci and the biologist and author Merlin Sheldrake wrote: “Accounts of the living world that do not include fungi are accounts of a world that doesn’t exist.

“Fungi have long sustained and enriched life on Earth. We are unthinkable without them, and yet we are only just beginning to understand the intricacies of fungal lives. It’s time we give them the attention they deserve.”

archive link: https://archive.is/wip/VBGGJ

The scraps in your bin marked ‘compost’ may end up as methane. Here’s what that means

When orange bins marked for “compost” drop-off first started proliferating on the streets of New York in February as part of a department of sanitation pilot, many residents celebrated. I was one of them: even as an environmental reporter who has visited the landfill where my trash ends up and is well aware of the problems with food waste, the lack of convenient composting options near me was often prohibitive. Having a bin within walking distance I could access at any time meant all my food waste would finally be converted back into soil.

Or at least that’s what I thought it meant, until the news broke in April that the contents of those “compost” bins mostly don’t go to compost sites, but to an anaerobic digester at a wastewater treatment plant called Newtown Creek. There, the food waste is mixed into sewage before being converted partially into methane.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this, and neither were my neighbors, given that methane is a potent greenhouse gas playing a role in the climate crisis.

Questions about anaerobic digestion – touted as a green solution to food waste – are becoming relevant in more and more places as this method is increasingly a part of organic waste management plans across the US, with plants operating or being built everywhere from Ohio to California and embraced by brands such as Ben & Jerry’s. It’s also fairly common in parts of Europe. But how do its environmental credentials stack up against composting?

The pros and cons of anaerobic digestion
Both composting and anaerobic digestion, or AD, use microorganisms to break down food waste. Composting does so in the presence of oxygen, and creates (you guessed it) compost; AD does so without oxygen and produces solid and liquid organic leftover matter called digestate – and methane.

When anaerobic digestion is at its most climate-friendly, that methane is captured and used for what Dr Stephanie Lansing, a professor of environmental science and technology at the University of Maryland, calls renewable energy, while the solids left over after the AD process are cured and turned into compost. From Lansing’s perspective, these options make AD the clear winner over composting.

“Why would you not want to get the renewable energy first, and then get the compost later, because you still get both resources when you do digestion?” she asked.

But whether or not AD actually comes with those promised environmental benefits depends on how an anaerobic digestion facility is run, which can vary greatly. Though the methane can be turned into energy to power houses or waste facilities themselves, many still flare (burn and release into the atmosphere) some of the methane they generate. (The plant nearest me, Newtown Creek, was flaring half of its methane up until this April.)

And even when all the gas from a digester is being captured and used for energy, not everyone is comfortable describing it as “renewable energy”. According to Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), “‘renewable’ implies a resource that can be replenished. And for me, it implies that it can be replenished with little ecological cost. But generating garbage is not something we want to be doing at all, so that’s not something that we should be thinking of as renewable.”

The NRDC isn’t anti-anaerobic digestion, and it “sometimes supports the inclusion of anaerobic digestion biogas in renewable energy portfolios”, but in a “limited” way, Hoover added. A recent report published by the non-profit instead recommended prioritizing surplus food rescue, food waste prevention and compost over sending food waste directly to anaerobic digesters.

Another recommendation the NRDC makes – that the solids left over at the end of anaerobic digestion be turned into compost and added to soil – is a good practice, and one that AD proponents often highlight. But in reality, the practice is underutilized: more than half of all biosolids in the US are landfilled or incinerated rather than composted. When anaerobic digesters process food waste and sewage sludge at the same time, rather than processing food waste on its own, the end result can contain toxins that render the digestate unfit for adding to dirt that people are in close contact with, ie garden or public park soils.

“The takeaway is not ‘you should never do anaerobic digestion,’” said Hoover. “But it is ‘you should really think through a lot of different components before you launch into using anaerobic digestion for food waste in particular.’”

The case for composting
Many people are familiar with the basic argument for composting: it reduces food waste and the associated greenhouse gases, and leaves behind an end product that supports healthy soils.

But according to Dior St Hillaire, co-director of composting non-profit BK Rot and chair of the Bronx Solid Waste Advisory Board, the benefits go much deeper.

Composting can create local green jobs, build community and generate crucial buy-in, so people are more motivated to separate out their food and yard waste rather than throwing it in the trash.

“That connection is lost when you’re thinking about anaerobic digestion,” she said. “You already see low numbers of recycling because people are not connected to it; they don’t believe it’s happening or believe in the viability of it. So imagine what [organics separation] is going to look like when you have people who are not connected to that end result. I think you’ll find really low participation rates.”

Keeping nutrients cycling locally through compost rather than trucking waste off to a digester also promotes climate resilience. According to Clare Miflin, executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design, adding compost to soil boosts the health of the trees and greenery that help cities combat dangerous heat. Plus, healthy soils amended with compost absorb up to “six times more rainwater”, protecting the city against floods.

A side-by-side comparison
When weighing the benefits of composting and anaerobic digestion, not everyone agrees on which should come out on top. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prioritizes anaerobic digestion above composting in its food recovery hierarchy; meanwhile, the NRDC places the two options on the same tier and says the best option depends on the scenario.

In New York City, anaerobic digestion looks likely to continue expanding, and financial incentives are almost certainly playing a role. Wastewater treatment plants with digesters receive a “tipping fee” from garbage collectors for accepting food waste, according to the EPA, and facilities that scrub their methane to pipeline quality can sell it as “renewable fuel”, at which point they’re “guaranteed a nice rate by federal law”, said Lansing.

Hoover, of the NRDC, doesn’t think that AD being part of a city’s mix of waste management strategies is necessarily a bad thing. It just means cities and their citizens need to weigh the specifics of any proposed composting or anaerobic digestion system, and demand that it’s held to the highest standards.

Along the way, city agencies need to be transparent if they want citizens to actively participate in the waste sorting necessary to make any of these solutions work. Slapping “compost” on the side of a street corner bin might convince citizens to dump their banana peels there, but if people find out later that those bins don’t actually go to compost, it could break trust and lead to composting being regarded with the suspicion currently reserved for recycling.

“We don’t want to keep sending more messages that it’s OK to say we’re doing one thing, and we’re actually doing another,” said St Hillaire.

Luckily, there are a few things everyone seems to agree on. First, certain kinds of waste are better handled by one system or the other: anaerobic digestion can accept dairy, meat and grease that compost sites can’t, while compost is better able to break down paper goods. And even more important, both options offer significant climate benefits. According to a report from the National Renewable Energy Lab, anaerobic digestion and composting have comparable emissions footprints when the AD digestate is applied to soil rather than landfilled.

From the perspective of many environmental advocates, the best solution will involve some mix of the two solutions, blending the efficiency and financial incentives of AD with the community and ecosystem benefits of composting.

“It’s not that AD trumps all or compost trumps all,” said St Hillaire. “New York City is a big city with a very dense population, we need as many [solutions] as possible.”

In other words, both anaerobic digestion and composting are far better options than landfilling, so keep separating out your organics rather than throwing them in the trash. I know I will.

archive link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/30/composting-anaerobic-digestion-food-waste-effective

Warmer winters, late freezes and wildly variable rainfall have formed a perfect storm to wreck the one of the region’s favorite fruits

Farming is inherently risky, a profession that always involves an expectation of loss and damage. But among many farmers, peaches are considered an unpredictable crop, with high risks and high rewards.

“Farming peaches is like gambling in a casino,” said 44-year-old Robert Jackson II, of Lyman, South Carolina. The fruit bruises easily and is vulnerable to weather changes, but can earn handsome profits.

He and his 70-year-old father, also named Robert Jackson, live and work on a 33-acre farm where peaches are their main revenue stream. “One day, everything could be fine, and then the next day, you could have nothing.”

That’s been the case for many South Carolina growers, who produce more of the fruit than the neighboring “Peach State”, Georgia. This year, a late freeze destroyed about 70% of the state’s harvest. This year’s disaster followed the previous year’s disruption, another freeze that put a major dent in peach growers’ pockets and prospects.

As southern peach season draws to a close, farmers worry that climate change threatens the long-term survival of an industry that is an economic powerhouse and deeply tied to regional identity. What apple pie is to America, the peach has arguably become to many people in the south. From Charleston to Greenville, South Carolina, roadside stands advertise peach ice cream, and small Gaffney, South Carolina, has a 135ft peach-shaped water tower.

But this year, peaches have been scarce. At an Asheville, North Carolina, farmers’ market where most of the peaches come from South Carolina, fewer peaches were on offer. When they were available, they were more expensive: a half-bushel could cost as much as $60. “Still, every peach sold in a blink of an eye,” said Ellerslie McCue, marketing coordinator for the WNC Farmers Market.

In 2022, Jackson Farms picked 2,200 half bushels of peaches. This year, it only yielded 110 half bushels. Typically, the farm would have enough peaches to sell wholesale, as many peach farmers do with excess crop. This year it only produced enough to sell at the family’s roadside stand and local farmers’ markets.

“We didn’t think the temperature was going to drop as cold as it did,” he said. “But 2 or 3 degrees is the difference between success and failure with peaches.”

Peaches are notoriously difficult to farm, both labor-intensive and sensitive to minor fluctuations in weather. During the fall and winter, peach trees enter a dormant period. Depending on the variety, the tree needs a specific number of “chilling” hours during this time – basically, hours spent at temperatures between 32 and 45F. During this season, peach trees are pretty hardy and resilient to freezes. Once the weather warms, the trees begin flowering and eventually producing fruit. But, at that point, the tree and its fruits are a lot more vulnerable to cold and destructive weather, such as hail.

“This year is probably the worst year in my 38 years of working,” said Dr Gregory Rieghard, professor of horticulture and member of the Peach Breeding Lab at Clemson University. He estimated that Georgia lost even more of its crop than South Carolina, keeping only 5% of its peaches.

Rieghard said climate change is jeopardizing peach growing.

“What people don’t realize is that when you have warmer temperatures in the Pacific, that warmth moves towards the Arctic and displaces the cold air that is there and pushes it down into North America. So we have an increased risk of these late freezes due to polar vortexes.”

Frequent late spring freezes combine with warmer winters and irregular rainfall to make a perfect storm for crop destruction. As global temperatures rise, peach trees are not always getting those necessary “chilling” hours. Warmer air also holds more moisture. It might rain less frequently, but when it does rain, there often is a lot more of it. Both drought and torrential downpours can wreck a season.

Rachel McCormick’s family has owned McLeod Farms in McBee, South Carolina, for five generations and currently plants 1,000 acres of peaches. Her father, Kemp McLeod, “calls the National Weather [Service] phone number all the time. I think they have him on caller ID,” she said.

The period of regular freezes this year was a “long three weeks” for the family. But they fared better than many farmers, retaining most of their crop. Some of it was the luck of geography. McBee, situated in the state’s Sandhills region, didn’t get as intense of a freeze as more southern and western parts of the state.

McLeod Farms also invested heavily in protecting its peaches. Workers burned bales of straw around the periphery of the farm at night and ran dozens of wind machines, circulating warm air around the trees.

Wind machines are among a handful of tools that can protect peaches in the face of a freeze. Rieghard’s lab at Clemson is also working on breeding new varieties of peaches that bloom later in the spring at higher temperatures. For the farmers themselves, there is crop insurance, which can provide some financial protection. Jackson didn’t get crop insurance until after the 2017 freeze when the US Department of Agriculture provided disaster relief to peach farmers. That vital cash subsidized the cost of crop insurance, which can be prohibitively expensive.

Despite this, many peach farmers remain steadfast in their commitment to growing peaches. Risk sometimes comes with gain. Rieghard noted peaches often return higher investment than row crops; in South Carolina, 15,500 acres of peaches generate over $98m, to the tune of more than $6,000 an acre.

“Honestly, if 100% of our crop came, we wouldn’t know what to do,” joked McCormick. Her family farm expects to lose at least 20% of its crop per season. As it stands, she’s currently filling out the paperwork to bring the usual cohort of migrant workers over through H-2A visas to work 2024’s crop. She doesn’t expect the more frequent freezes will change her family’s commitment to peaches.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the peach industry this year because we were hit so hard, but I hope it has brought awareness to how this supply chain works and how environmental and economic elements can affect an industry,” she said.

For Jackson, the peach failure is a loss, but his family balances that part of their business with off-farm jobs and other crops.

“We still have the vegetables and watermelon and blackberries to save us. My dad says if you ever lose a blackberry crop, then there’s not gonna be anything because blackberries are the most resilient.” For now, the blackberries are fine.

But as they look ahead to the next year, Jackson said the family will plant more peach trees, as well as looking at investing in a wind machine. They also will prepare to burn frost-preventing “smudge pots” if another freeze occurs. “If you save one crop of peaches, it pays for itself,” Jackson said.

Besides, the work is also a payoff. “I love what I am doing, and I like the lifestyle of farming,” said Jackson.

His father originally owned a farm in South Carolina in the 1980s. After three freezes in a row, the elder Jackson declared bankruptcy and moved to Connecticut to work on an apple orchard, then a vegetable operation. But working for others dissatisfied him, and he returned to South Carolina and bought land to begin farming again.

Today, the younger Jackson’s kids roam the farm and pick fruits at will, just like he did as a youngster. So even if the peach industry is risky, it feels worthwhile to him.

“Everyone needs to taste the fruits grown right next to where they live, then they’ll understand.”

Still, he said, most people would do better putting their money into the stock market instead of a peach farm.

archive link: https://archive.is/7inpA

Bill Gates discussed the importance of plant-based meat alternatives with Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson on the latest episode of his podcast, "Unconfuse Me."

Bill Gates has spent years, and billions of dollars, working to combat climate change.

The billionaire’s foundation has invested vast sums in various climate tech solutions while regularly raising the alarm about the leading contributors to climate change, like the greenhouse gas emissions stemming from major energy and manufacturing companies burning fossil fuels at prodigious rates.

But, according to Gates, most people are still unaware of the role played by one of the biggest contributors to climate change: agriculture, specifically methane emissions from livestock and fertilizers.

“Of all the climate areas, the one that people are probably least aware of is all the fertilizer and cows, and that’s a challenge,” Gates recently said on the latest episode of his podcast, “Unconfuse Me.”

The topic came up because Gates was in conversation with musician and director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who, like Gates, also happens to be an early investor in several plant-based food startups, such as Impossible, NotCo and Neutral Foods.

Thompson, who is from Philadelphia, even recently partnered with Impossible to create a plant-based cheesesteak that counts former president Barack Obama as a fan, he told Gates.

Thompson told Gates he was won over by plant-based foods’ ability to mimic the taste of real meat, among other products: “Something told me plant-based is going to be the future … and I want to be the person that plants the seed,” he said.

While plant-based foods have won support from those looking for alternatives to products made from animals, Gates said that he started backing plant-based food ventures because of their potential to combat climate change.

“I came to it more from that climate angle,” he said.

Gates has pointed out in the past that the agricultural industry contributes roughly 24% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, with much of that stemming from methane emissions from livestock and fertilizer used to cultivate crops, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In fact, if cattle “were a country,” Gates wrote in 2018, “they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases [in the world].”

In his 2021 book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” Gates wrote that effectively combating climate change will take people being willing to commit to new ideas, like switching to electric cars and synthetic meats.

That same year, Gates argued that wealthy countries that have the resources to do so “should move to 100% synthetic beef” in order to meaningfully reduce global emissions from livestock, he told the MIT Technology Review.

“You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time,” he said at the time. “Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the demand.”

Plant-based meat sales still represent just a small percentage of the total meat market, and even Gates admits it will be difficult to convince enough people to stop eating real meat to make a significant difference.

One issue is that the still relatively new products are currently more expensive than real meats. Still, Gates has a positive outlook that plant-based meat companies will continue to improve their products, and reduce their costs, helping them to eventually become more popular.

That’s why Gates and his foundation have financially backed plant-based and lab-grown meat startups such as Impossible, Beyond Meat, Neutral Foods and Upside Foods. Speaking to Thompson about the plant-based meat startups, like Impossible, Gates said that “they’re doing well, but a lot of people want him to make [the product] even slightly better.”

“They have a good roadmap, so I’m optimistic,” he said.

archive link: https://archive.is/wip/F9QpM