Bear hunt in New Jersey nets 241 kills by Saturday night

Michael Izzo and Matt Kadosh report for NorthJersey.com

Hunters had killed 52 bears by 9 p.m. Saturday night, bringing the number of bears harvested on the sixth day of New Jersey’s bear hunt to 241, a Fish and Wildlife spokesman said.

With the potential for hunters to drag more kills from the forest overnight, final figures would be posted on the state Department of Environmental Protection’s website by 8 a.m., said a spokesman, Robert Geist.

While the figures marked a significant decrease from the 562 killed during last year’s hunt, an animal rights activist told a reporter the numbers don’t matter.

“The senseless slaughter of young cubs and yearlings and moms for trophies, mounts and rugs,” said Angi Metler, director of the Bear Education and Resource Group. “That’s what this hunt is about. Don’t kid yourself. It’s not about numbers.”

Bill Crain, another activist, knew he would be arrested Saturday morning when he left the designated protest zone at the Whittingham Wildlife Management Area. It wasn’t the first time he left a bear hunt protest in handcuffs.

An animal rights activist and professor at the City College of New York, Crain spent a week in jail this January after protesting last December’s bear hunt in the state.

“I was in jail eight days the last time I did this,” Crain said. “This would be the eighth time so it will probably be more.”

With a sign that read “Mother Nature is Crying” hanging from his neck, Carin crossed the street and walked toward the bear check-in station, where he was stopped by New Jersey State Police and Conservation Police, handcuffed, and placed in a trooper’s car.

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China automakers cranking out E-vehicles; Big Oil effect?

                                                                                                 Credit: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images   
Rob Dieterich reports for Inside Climate News:
China is the world’s biggest car market, and its government has become the world’s biggest booster of electric vehicles. Those two facts go a long way toward explaining the urgency with which global automakers are rolling out electrification plans, The New York Times reports.
Beijing policymakers have a range of motivations for their electric auto embrace, from smog-choked cities to a dependence on imported oil. They also see the possibility of an expanded role for Chinese firms in a reimagined auto industry. Global automakers see a role for themselves in China’s huge auto market, which is all the motivation they need. The Times story is here.
 
India, meanwhile, has committed to a 2030 deadline to end the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines, but the country lags far behind China. In its biggest move to date, the government last month agreed to purchase 10,000 electric vehicles from Tata Motors.
Bloomberg points out, as evidence of the scale of the challenge India faces, that Tata doesn’t yet have a commercially available electric car. There were just 350 charging stations in India versus 215,000 in China at the end of last year, according to the Bloomberg story, here.
 
With the spread of electric vehicles, a related question arises: How soon might global demand for oil begin to decline? Barclays research says an EV boom and increases in fuel efficiency could cut global oil needs in 2025 by an amount nearly equal to the output of Iran.
And if electric vehicles capture a third of the global market by 2040, the lost demand would nearly equal all of Saudi Arabia’s production. InsideClimate News has the whole story, here.
 

KEY STAT: An estimated 814,000 electric vehicles will be sold in China in 2019, and 602,000 in the rest of the world, according to a forecast from LMC Automotive.


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First ‘negative emissions’ carbon-capture plant is running

SUCK IT UP

Arctic-Images / Getty Images

Emilia Urry reports in Grist:


On Wednesday, Iceland flipped the switch on the first project that will remove more CO2 than it produces. The plant is operated by Climeworks, which also opened the first commercial carbon-capture plant in Switzerland earlier this year.
Here’s how direct-air carbon capture works: Giant turbines pull in huge quantities of air, hoovering up molecules of carbon dioxide so we can store it somewhere that’s NOT the atmosphere.
The Icelandic pilot program can remove an estimated 50 metric tons of CO2 from the air in a year. It pumps the collected gas deep into the island’s volcanic bedrock, where it reacts with basalt and essentially turns into limestone. Voilà! No massive reservoirs to manage for millennia — just a lot of rock.
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If all this sounds too good to be true, there’s a reason. Ambitious “clean coal” plants have been engaged in a very public struggle with the economic reality of carbon capture in recent years, and direct-air capture is an even tougher sell.

But it’s getting more affordable. Today, companies estimate it would cost between $50 and $100 to capture a single metric ton of carbon. Iceland’s plant has already achieved $30 per metric ton. It will never work as a substitute for action to reduce emissions, but carbon capture could be a crucial part of keeping global temperatures in check this century.

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Is Facebook squashing bugs or quashing Russian data?

Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin report for Washington Post:


Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research last week showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that — and maybe much more — if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well.
Albright welcomed the chat with three company officials. But he was not pleased to discover that they had done more than talk about their concerns regarding his research. They also had scrubbed from the Internet nearly everything — thousands of Facebook posts and the related data — that had made the work possible.
Never again would he or any other researcher be able to run the kind of analysis he had done just days earlier.
Facebook does not dispute it removed the posts, but it offers a different explanation of what happened. The company says it has merely corrected a “bug” that allowed Albright, who is research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, to access information he never should have been able to find in the first place. That bug, Facebook says, has now been squashed on a social media analytics tool called CrowdTangle, which Facebook bought last year.
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Amazon’s HQ2 offers big benefits, but it won’t come cheap

Jeff Jeffrey writes in Philadelphia Business Journal:

The prospect of landing Amazon.com’s second North America headquarters has public officials and economic development experts salivating at the chance to land what is being billed as a $5 billion, 50,000-job investment to their hometown. But as the Oct. 19 bidding deadline fast approaches, cities also are grappling with a sobering reality: HQ2 is going to be an expensive proposition.

More than 50 cities throughout North America have announced plans to submit bids to Amazon for its new HQ2 facility. As such, Amazon is in a powerful position to potentially secure billions in taxpayer subsidies and related incentives. It’s a position the company is well acquainted with.

The Business Journals has identified at least $1.24 billion in taxpayer incentives and abatements awarded to Amazon over the past decade. More often than not, those subsidies have come in return for pledges by Amazon to locate facilities and bring jobs — sometimes thousands of jobs — to nearby communities. It’s a process that has frequently pitted cities and states against one another as they compete to lure Amazon their way.

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NJ appellate court blocks mining operation in Pinelands


Court finds Pinelands Commission’s rejection of project was justified because it did not conform to region’s Comprehensive Management Plan

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:
pinelands

A state appeals court yesterday upheld a decision by the Pinelands Commission to block approval of a mining operation in Jackson Township by a local planning board.
In a 12-page ruling, the court found the commission’s rejection of the project was justified because it failed to conform with the agency’s Comprehensive Management Plan, which does not permit mining operations in parts of the Pinelands designated as “forest areas.’’


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