News blues
India. A disaster’s unfolding in India with 6 million Covid infections - second only to the United States in a country of nearly 1.4 billion people. The country recorded 332,730 new cases on Friday, marking the highest daily case count globally. The United States is second, having recorded a high of 300,310 cases on January 2.Additionally, more than a dozen people died when an oxygen-fed fire ripped through a coronavirus ward fire in a hospital intensive care unit and killed 13 COVID-19 patients in the Virar area on the outskirts of Mumbai.
Read the article >>
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Tracking Covid-19:- Tracking Covid-19 vaccinations worldwide
- South African experts to follow for up-to-date and accurate Covid information…
Healthy planet, anyone?
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| © Kal - The Economist |
Joe Biden pledges a drastic reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030… but no specific targets for agriculture – accounting for 10 percent of all U.S. emissions with discharges mostly stem from fertilizers, livestock and manure.
A Fact Sheet focusing on Biden’s climate pledge…
…notes that agriculture is both a source of greenhouse gases and potentially a key piece of the solution by capturing and storing heat-trapping carbon dioxide in forests and farmland. Environmental advocates … say the White House needs to address both sides of that equation to make a dent in global warming.Read “White House dances around a big contributor to climate change: Agriculture” >>
“It’s difficult to make concrete pledges in terms of using ag as a carbon sink… you can be more concrete around reducing fertilizer use [and] trying to address emissions around these large-scale hog and dairy operations.”
[Yet the] Biden administration is leaning heavily toward awarding financial bonuses for farmers, ranchers and foresters who retool their operations to suck carbon from the atmosphere. The White House blueprint specifically calls for “incentives” to reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions through new farm practices and technologies.
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President Cyril Ramaphosa told the delegates of US President Joe Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate that emissions in South Africa would begin to fall by 2025, rather than peak and plateau that same year, adding that South Africa had introduced new target ranges that were more ambitious than before. “Firstly the top of the 2030 range has been reduced by 28% or 174 million metric tonnes, which is a very significant reduction. Second, according to our previous nationally determined contribution, South Africa’s emissions will peak and plateau in 2025 and decline only from 2035. … South Africa’s emissions will begin to decline from 2025, effectively shifting our emissions decline 10 years earlier.”
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Like me, my daughter eschews tourist-rich spots and heads to shopping malls only under duress.A dream daughter, she accompanied me to the local scrap metal recycling yard yesterday and, after taking the Covid test required for air travel on Monday, we plan to visit the local landfill site. She’s a chip off ye olde blocke!
Today, we head to the local farmers market …then back home to display on the lawn near the public road items such as planks. Passers by stop and glean what they want from the collection. Such recycling – home grown and localized – is a perfect way of recycling goods too useful for the landfill yet no quite good enough to sell.
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Getting darker here…Feb 26: sunrise 5:47am; sunset 6:33pm.
March 18: sunrise 5:00am; sunset 6:11pm.
April 1: sunrise 6:09am; sunset 5:54pm.
April 24: sunrise 6:23am; sunset 5:30pm.
