A hunter from North Carolina was hospitalized Monday after authorities said he was accidentally shot while hunting near Admire.
According to a written release from Lyon County Sheriff’s Detective Sergeant Travis Mishler, Nathan Lindeman of Wake Forest, North Carolina, was hunting with a group in north Lyon County when deputies were dispatched to the 1800 block of U.S. Highway 56 at 2:45 p.m. for reports of a shooting.
Lindeman, 54, reportedly drove himself to the Admire toll plaza after calling 911 for help. Mishler said Lindeman had several minor wounds from being struck with 12-gauge birdshot while he was hunting.
Undersheriff John Koelsch confirmed to The Gazette that the unidentified man shot himself accidentally.
Lindeman was transported to Newman Regional Health by Emporia EMS with non-life-threatening.
According to information released by the International Hunter…
It took biologists decades to repopulate the state with enough river otters to support this winter’s inaugural trapping season.
But trappers in 23 counties triggered the close of the season in a lot less time.
The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission gave them four months, November through February, to trap a total of 75 otters, with a limit of one apiece. The 75th animal would start a three-day countdown to end the season.
That happened Jan. 7, and three more were trapped through Jan. 10, for a total of 78.
“I thought the limit would be reached before the end of the harvest,” said Sam Wilson, the commission’s furbearer program manager. “But with initial seasons, you never know.”
Wilson has studied the animals for years. Though once common to Nebraska, they were gone by the early 20th century — victims of unregulated trapping, hunting and habitat destruction.
In the mid-1980s, the state launched a five-year repopulation program, releasing 159 otters from around the country and Canada into Nebraska’s river systems.
The imported animals thrived. The commission removed them from the endangered species list in 2020 — after their numbers had increased to about 2,000 and they’d spread across the state — and announced Nebraska’s first regulated river otter trapping season late last year.
Wilson plans to dive into the first-year trapping data and write a report, but he had initial thoughts.
Based on surveys and sightings from the public, officials knew the areas that were home to the most otters. And that’s where trappers snared the most animals — along the Platte River, in Hall and Buffalo counties; along the Elkhorn River in Holt and Antelope counties; the Niobrara River in Cherry County; and in Southeast Nebraska, near the Nemaha and Missouri rivers.
“The harvest, to me, matches or aligns with what we already understood the distribution to be.”
Wilson will likely propose a second season, he said, which commissioners would have to approve.
Bird flu cases have been on the rise recently, with reports of outbreaks in the UK, China, mainland Europe and Israel. Outbreaks typically happen in commercial flocks, such as in large-scale poultry farming operations – which is why bird flu is often only a concern to people working in these professions. But with a growing number of people now keeping chickens and other birds in their backyards, the close contact they have with their birds could potentially be putting them at risk of contracting and spreading bird flu too.
This was never more evident than when it was reported that a 79-year-old English man had recently tested positive for the H5N1 strain of bird flu. H5N1 is a strain of bird flu which is mild in wild birds, but much more deadly in domestic birds. If it infects humans, it has a mortality rate of 53%. The man lived with around 20 ducks in his Devon home, with another 100 elsewhere on his property. While the man is still alive, the ducks were culled to prevent further spread.
Current bird flu biosecurity measures focus primarily on large-scale poultry farming. But with outbreaks becoming more common and more severe, the risks are increasing – and may actually be found much closer to home.
Domestic chicken-keeping
Backyard chicken-keeping has been on the rise in Britain for at least a decade. Numbers peaked during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 as people flocked to get backyard hens both as a hobby, and to have ready access to food.
In the UK, domestic flocks do not need to be registered with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on The Great Britain Poultry Register unless there are more than 50 birds. Voluntary registration is however encouraged for backyard keepers specifically so that they can be notified of disease outbreaks. The poultry register was introduced in 2006 and is used specifically to manage disease outbreaks in all commercial birds, including chickens, ducks, turkey, geese and quail.
Bird flu spreads primarily to domestic flocks from water birds such as ducks and geese, who spend spring and summers mixing in Siberia. When they migrate to Britain in the autumn, they bring influenzas with them. These viruses spread through faeces and saliva, which is why separating domestic flocks from wild birds is essential during outbreaks.
This is why during outbreaks – as in November 2021 – Defra and the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) might impose an Avian Influenza Protection Zone (AIPZ). This means all captive birds are legally required to be kept indoors until the outbreak is over, usually in the spring. While Defra points out that backyard hens are subject to these restrictions, the AIPZ is written with commercial flocks in mind.
Since most backyard flocks are made up of just a handful of birds, keepers often believe that their risk of bird flu is low. When the AIPZ restrictions came into force in November, I was interviewing domestic chicken keepers. Most understood that the measures were put in place to ensure birds were kept safe and to stop the spread of the virus, but many also felt the AIPZ didn’t apply to them because they only have a handful of birds. Some even felt that their risk of contracting bird flu was low because of their small flock numbers.
But home flocks are still vulnerable to infection – especially from interactions with wild bird populations. And if owners don’t take precautions, they can catch it themselves.
Reducing risk
Infection of bird flu in humans is rare. Since 2003, there have been just 863 cases of human infection reported from 18 countries. But the growth of domestic flocks might be a potential new reservoir for disease. Another issue is that infections might go unreported – not just because birds die quickly, but due to owners fearing that beloved pets may be culled. This is why it will be important in the future for Defra and APHA to provide specific policy for backyard chicken keeping.
But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t still many things that backyard chicken keepers can do to protect themselves and their birds, including:
Keeping birds undercover and fenced away from wild birds;
Disinfecting their boots before and after interacting with birds and cleaning pens frequently;
Quarantining any new birds for 30 days before adding them to a flock;
Monitoring flocks for signs of illness;
Reporting suspected cases of bird flu to Defra and APHA.
Bird flu season usually lasts until the spring, when migratory birds leave Britain’s shores. Given the risks that backyard chicken keepers might also experience, it’s important to follow any rules set in place to curb the spread of this disease.
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The fast-moving pathogen, which has already invaded Europe, was found in East Coast ducks. The last outbreak that tore through the US killed 50 million birds.
IN THE FIRSTdays of the new year, on the marshy coastal edge of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, a hunter shot an American widgeon, a rusty-fronted duck with a pale beak and a brilliant green stripe. This was not a big deal; the state’s duck hunting season runs from Thanksgiving through the end of January. Neither was what happened next: Before taking it home, the hunter let a wildlife biologist affiliated with a government program swab the carcass for lab analysis.
But what happened after that was a big deal indeed. After the sample went through its routine check at Clemson University, it made an unusual second stop at a federal lab halfway across the country, in Iowa. The news of…
A sign at the edge of an exclusion zone warns of the closure of a footpath after an outbreak of bird flu in the village of Upham in southern England, February 3, 2015.(photo credit: REUTERS/PETER NICHOLLS)Advertisementhttps://trinitymedia.ai/player/trinity-player.php?pageURL=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jpost.com%2Fhealth-and-wellness%2Farticle-694366&unitId=2900003088&userId=43dabe08-2b1a-4c7c-bafe-85ac9a956566&isLegacyBrowser=false&version=20220124_f72f860bfd9c3551b2d6b109e6a4485f247ff3b3&useCFCDN=0&themeId=140
Two additional wild birds have been found to be infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) virus in South and North Carolina, the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announced on Tuesday.
The two birds were found to be infected just days after a wild American wigeon was found to be infected with the virus in Colleton County, South Carolina, thefirst case of Eurasian H5 avian influenzain the US since 2016. Other variants of the bird flu…
The late rocker Meat Loaf was outspokenly anti-vaccine mandate and anti-mask before his death — once telling a reporter, “If I die, I die, but I’m not going to be controlled,” according to reports Friday.
The 74-year-old “Bat Out of Hell” singer — who was reportedly critically ill with COVID-19 before he passed away Thursday — was opposed to pandemic restrictions, slamming lockdowns and mask mandates during an interview last summer.
The Grammy Award-winning musician, whose real name was Marvin Lee Aday, also railed against vaccine mandates in Australia, sources told TMZ.
Meat Loaf, who struggled with asthma and other health conditions, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in August he considered lockdowns “political” and masks “useless” before offering reporter Scott Mervins an embrace.
“I’m happy to give you a hug. I hug people in the middle of COVID,” Meat Loaf said, adding that he refused to live life in fear.
Meat Loaf was reportedly anti-vaccine mandate and anti-mask before his death.The singer said he did not want to be “controlled” before his COVID-related death.
“I’m sorry, I understood stopping life for a little while, but they cannot continue to stop life because of politics. And right now they’re stopping because of politics,” he said.
“And on CNN last night, it finally came out that the masks we’re all wearing are useless. But I’ve known that for six months. They don’t do anything. They don’t stop you from getting COVID. They’re just a nuisance and make your nose itch and make it so you can’t breathe.”
He added, “If I die, I die, but I’m not going to be controlled.”
The rocker’s official cause of death wasn’t immediately known Friday. He had not said publicly whether he had been vaccinated for COVID-19.
The “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” singer also suffered from a back injury in November, which played a role in his declining health.
Meat Loaf won a Grammy for the 1993 hit “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That),” which soared to number one on the charts in more than two dozen countries.
Len LisenbeeOutdoors ColumnistView Comments0:501:32https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.496.0_en.html#goog_275514962
I just cannot get over just how dumb some people are. It’s almost as if they took college courses on how to be really dumb.
But based on the number of notes I receive asking for more of them or saying how much they enjoyed a Dumb Outdoor Crooks column that I wrote, many of you folks really enjoy them. And since I am a firm believer in job security, here is another installment of really dumb outdoor crooks.
The king of all dummies
If your significant other calls police for a domestic dispute, you might think twice about maintaining evidence of an outdoor crime, right. But that is exactly what happened recently in Decatur, Michigan.
And shortly after the police arrived and secured the situation, they called the Michigan Department of Environmental Conservation officers and asked them to respond to that location…
There are a few counties in the central plains of North Carolina that can easily be mistaken for the hog capital of the world. Housing over 40 percent of the state’s hog population of 9 million, hogs outnumber people 29 to one. These counties are home to numerous concentrated animal feeding operations—called CAFOs or factory farms—that make North Carolina the second-biggest pork producer in the United States.
Not coincidentally, this distinction comes at the cost of the residents who live in the vicinity of factory farms within these counties, who are predominantly African American, Native American, and Latino. With per capita incomes and education levels well below the national average, the proliferation of factory farms within low-income minority communities has raised valid concerns of environmental injustice. In a 2017 review of North Carolina’s meat industry, the Environmental Protection Agency cited a “linear relationship between race/ethnicity and density of hogs” in these counties and their disproportionate impact on communities of color.
The health impacts that accompany factory farms are life-altering to the communities that live within a 3-mile radius of these intensive operations. In addition to being plagued by the sounds of shrieking, miserable animals, the smell of feces and urine, and poor air quality, residents often complain of stomach aches, headaches, higher rates of nausea, watery eyes, along with feelings of anxiety and depression from the constant assault on their senses. A recent investigative study by the World Animal Protection (WAP) group emphasizes that the physical and mental ailments of area residents are only the tip of the iceberg: there are more significant and far-reaching impacts on the global community as a direct result of practices on factory farms. The report is referring to the widespread use of antibiotics on factory farms that have led to the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria which is a cause for grave global concern.
Animals are the main unit of production on factory farms. To protect their product, farmers enlist the help of antibiotic drugs, which are used to prevent the onset and spread of disease among stressed animals. This is more commonly known as the prophylactic or subtherapeutic use of antibiotics. While the use of antibiotics on animals with no preexisting illness may appear to be for the welfare of farmed animals, the liberal use of antibiotics is aimed at maximizing profits by fattening the animals within short periods and maintaining them with some resemblance of health while being kept in overcrowded, unhygienic, and ill-maintained facilities.
This practice has been so successful that 75 percent of antimicrobials in the U.S. are marketed to animal farms. However, this indiscriminate use of antibiotics has resulted in many bacteria that have grown resistant to life-saving antibiotic drugs, which are often the last line of defense for humans fighting bacterial infections. The alarming growth of resistant bacteria—called superbugs—has compelled several global organizations to act, with the World Health Organization (WHO) listing superbugs and drug-resistant microbes as one among the top ten global threats to human health, along with climate change and global pandemics.
How antibiotic resistance works
The WHO acknowledges that the indiscriminate use of antibiotics to promote growth and prevent disease in factory farms has contributed significantly to the emergence and propagation of superbugs to human and non-human animal populations. As a matter of global urgency, they have listed a series of drugs that are critically and highly important to human health. With their highly adept survival mechanisms, bacteria that developed resistant genes to specific antibiotics—called antibiotic-resistant genes or ARG—are not only able to outsmart the antibiotic drugs but are also able to pass on the resistance genes from one species to another. The presence of ARG in bacteria is an indication of the growing antibiotic resistance in the organism.
The WAP group has been closely following and reporting on the link between factory farms and the alarming growth of superbugs and ARG over the past few years. In December 2018, as part of a global investigation, the group tested pork samples from stores in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States for the presence of bacteria resistant to specific antibiotics. E. coli, Salmonella, Enterococcus, and Listeria were found in 94 percent of the 160 pork samples tested. While 41 of the 51 bacteria isolated from the pork samples were resistant to at least one class of medically important antibiotics, 21 bacteria were resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics.
In their most recent report published in April 2021, the group has detailed disturbing findings from a study in October 2020, in which 45 water samples and 45 soil samples were taken across eight sites, both upstream and downstream from factory farms in North Carolina, and tested for the presence of ARG. The communities that live near these sites have complained for over three decades of both, the detrimental impact that the factory farms have had on their health and the associated lack of justice and action that have accompanied their complaints.
When thousands of gallons of manure are sprayed onto fields eight feet from your kitchen window, the strong smell and taste of manure and ammonia contaminate your drinking water and lingers in the air for days afterward, ensuring that no children are playing outside and there are no barbeques with family and friends. Within a short time, the aerosolized manure builds up on the exterior of your house and across your property, attracting clouds of insects, especially flies. However, testing for ARG in water and soil samples in the vicinity of factory farms has not been prioritized to date. Alarmingly, the WAP report found that all 90 samples tested returned a positive result for at least one ARG, with resistance to tetracyclines identified in 89 out of 90 samples, and 23 out of 90 samples had one or more ARG to antibiotics identified by WHO as critically and highly important, such as cephalosporins and penicillin.
“The implications of antibiotic resistance throughout the environment near large factory farms are extremely concerning,” says Cameron Harsh, Farming Campaign Manager, World Animal Protection U.S. “The contamination of waterways and air puts nearby communities at high risk. Drug residues and resistant bacteria do not obey the boundaries of the farm operation. They are carried away via the waste stored in lagoons or sprayed on fields, on insects, rodents, and other wildlife, on farmworkers headed home to their families, and on the animals processed for our food, potentially spreading resistance to other bacteria as they persist and travel.”
The link between factory farms and superbugs
Because the same antibiotics used to mask poor animal welfare practices—such as the lack of hygiene and overcrowding on farms—can also be used as growth enhancers on factory farms, there is an ever-greater incentive to use antibiotics to speed up operations while enhancing the quality of meat. For example, the use of antibiotics can facilitate the growth of a pig to his slaughter weight of 250-280 pounds in less than 6 months, which is a mere fraction of his natural 15 to 20-year lifespan.
An inconvenient by-product of treating animals as meat production units with artificially short lifespans is the sheer amount of animal waste generated on factory farms. More than 2 billion tons of animal waste, which consists of both solid and liquid waste, is generated on animal farms each year, and storing and maintaining animal waste until it can be more easily displaced is challenging. Animal waste in factory farms is often stored in poorly engineered tanks and massive, open-air cesspools (misleadingly called lagoons) while awaiting treatment and disposal. These ill-maintained, gigantic tanks—some as large as seven acres and totaling anywhere between 20 to 45 million gallons of waste—often leak and spill into the adjacent water bodies and the groundwater.
When the fecal mixture is sprayed as manure on food crops, they enter the soil, the groundwater, adjacent waterways, and the air. As farmed animals discharge up to 70 percent of the antibiotics they are fed via urine and feces, factory farms’ biological waste is heavily concentrated with active antibiotic drugs that enter the environment in multiple ways. It is the antibiotics that have inadvertently entered the environment—be it the air, soil, water, or food streams—that pose a grave risk of producing antibiotic-resistant bacteria or superbugs.
The superbugs know no boundaries and invariably end up infecting humans and other non-human animals, setting off a cascade of detrimental events. Each year, 700,000 human deaths worldwide are attributed to antibiotic-resistant infections and more than 10 million people are projected to die annually from treatment-resistant bacteria by 2050. In the U.S., antibiotic-resistant bacteria claim a life every 15 minutes, with 35,000 deaths and more than 2.8 million infections reported annually.
What happens on factory farms doesn’t always stay on factory farms
The World Animal Protection report summarizes their findings by pointing out that both enhancing the standards for animal welfare practices and the dependence on antibiotics in factory farming operations must be addressed in tandem to see any meaningful reduction in antibiotic use in our food systems. It is only by eliminating the worst animal abuse practices in factory farming such as cage confinement, painful physical alterations, weaning animals from their mothers too young, and using high growth breeds that tangible reductions in total antibiotics used in farmed animals can be achieved.
Developing stronger antibiotics and novel waste treatment technologies cannot be the long-term solution towards eradicating superbugs while the factory farms continue to rely relentlessly on antibiotics without addressing cruel practices currently employed to maximize profits and meet the demand for animal protein. Both governmental and intergovernmental organizations, along with financial investors in the food industry can be more proactive in setting the standards for animal welfare, establishing checks and balances for implementing the animal welfare policies in farms while simultaneously monitoring, enforcing, and reporting accurately on the use and consumption of antibiotics in factory farms. The report also suggests that financial stakeholders in the food industry consider increasing the proportion of plant-based protein in their investment portfolio to support an average global reduction in meat production and consumption of 50 percent by 2040.
Given the vast consortium of stakeholders in the food industry, their profit margins, and the inevitable resistance that will be encountered in implementing any reforms that reduce profits within the current paradigms, it is easy to overlook the principal stakeholder—sentient beings—whose short life and welfare are at the center of this paradigm. What cannot be as easily ignored are the clear and far-reaching impacts of the ill-conceived, profit-driven practice of overusing antibiotics on farmed animals. The antibiotic use that enables the mistreatment of pigs has now crossed the ill-kept barriers of factory farms and seeped into communities via leaky lagoons, contaminated groundwater, and polluted air and soil ecosystems, resulting in the alarming rise of ARG in bacteria. The greed-driven practices on factory farms can no longer be dismissed as geographically isolated, “one-off” instances of environmental racism or poor animal welfare. If unchecked, ARG will continue to spread globally with devastating consequences to both human and non-human animals.Read More
Provincial ministry says the animals, tested in November, were located in the London area
CBC News · Posted: Jan 23, 2022 7:00 AM ET | Last Updated: January 23
Five white-tailed deer in southwestern Ontario tested positive for COVID-19 and researchers are now trying to learn more about what this could mean for other species and humans as well. (Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press)
21 comments
A Guelph expert says crucial research is underway after the discovery of five white-tailed deer in southwestern Ontario that tested positive for COVID-19.
The Ontario Ministry of Northern Development, Mine, Natural Resources and Forestry confirmed these are the first cases reported in free-ranging wildlife in Ontario.
Cases in wildlife have been detected in deer in Quebec and Saskatchewan, as well as northeastern U.S.
Scott Weese, chief of infection control at the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, said it’s still not known how the deer contracted COVID-19 and more research is needed to determine the possibility of transmission from deer to other species.
“This is a human driven pandemic and we spill it over into animals probably not uncommonly, but we don’t really know how it got into deer,” Weese told CBC K-W.
“The other potential is the animal bridge: cats are quite susceptible to this virus. If you have a person that has a cat and the cat goes outside, could the cat be a bridge?” he added.
Transmission path
He said if deer can transmit the virus to other animals or among themselves, then it can be challenging to control the spread and could potentially create a reservoir of the virus.
He said the bigger concern is that transmission could lead to high replication and mutation rates that could cause issues if they spread back into people.
“If were starting to find old strains in deer or different strains [of COVID-19] in deer, then we’d be more concerned that this virus is hanging out for a while and changing,” he said.
“If we’re finding the same stuff we’re finding in people then it would support the fact that this is just [a case of:] ‘humans infect deer and it burns out’. But we need more time to sort that out.”
The ministry said the samples were collected in November from the London area. To date, 213 samples were collected in 2021 and have been tested, with testing initiatives ongoing.
Dr. Scott Weese is the Ontario Veterinary College’s chief of infection control. (Dave MacIntosh/CBC)
Rate of infection
Based on current information, the risk of wildlife — including deer — spreading the virus to people is low. There has been no known transmission of COVID-19 from deer to humans at this time, the ministry said.
More research needs to be done to better understand the range of species that are susceptible and how species may be infected, carry and transmit the virus.
There is currently limited information on animals and COVID-19 and whether they can spread the virus. Usually it’s spread from human to animal, or exposure from the environment.
So far, there has been reported transmission from animal to humans from farmed mink in Europe, according to research though the World Organization for Animal Health.
Studies in the U.S. have found evidence of widespread transmission in some areas where white-tailed deer are infected, which could suggest transmission from human-to-deer and deer-to-deer.
Hunting, using game meat
The Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative suggests there have been no reports of people contracting COVID by preparing or eating meat from an animal infected with the virus.
Weese said he’s not worried about venison being a source of infection as long as people continue to handle and cook the meat properly.
Until more research can be done, people who hunt are urged to wear masks when exposed to animals’ respiratory tissues and fluids, which should not be splashed or sprayed.
Proper hand and eye protection should be worn when handling and dressing the carcass.
These precautions are especially important for people who aren’t fully vaccinated or are at higher risk of COVID-19 illness. Whenever possible, people who are fully vaccinated should handle and dress carcasses.
“There is currently no evidence that humans can get COVID-19 from skinning, processing, or eating meat from wildlife, however hunters and trappers should always follow food safety recommendations, such as practicing good hygiene and properly cooking meat to an internal temperature of 74°C (165°F) to kill any parasites, viruses or bacteria that may be present,” the ministry said in an email.
People who are symptomatic are advised to avoid close contact with animals.
“What I’ve found is people, when they start talking about things like global warming, they usually use it to mean a bunch of left-wing things,” Mr. DeSantis said at the event. “We’re not doing any left-wing stuff.”
Governors and lawmakers in several Republican-led states, including Idaho, South Carolina and Texas, are taking a similar approach to concerns about climate change. Research shows that after natural disasters are becoming more frequent and intensifying, they are taking measures such as infrastructure upgrades to reduce floods, wildfires and severe storms. They say such steps are important for the economic livelihood of their states.
As in Florida, in most cases the focus is on adaptation. A spokesman for Mr DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment.
In the past two years, the US has experienced the highest annual highs Billion Dollar Weather Disasters Since 1980—when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began compiling such records—with 22 in 2020 and 20 in 2021. The government agency has said that the warming climate is a significant contributor.
a December analysis of five surveys Researchers at Florida Atlantic University concluded that the share of self-identified Florida Republicans who say they believe in climate change rose 5 percentage points to 88% in the nearly two years beginning October 2019, while increased by 1 percentage point to 96% for the state’s self-identified Democrats.
Nearly half of Republicans said climate change was caused by human activity, compared to three-quarters of Democrats.
Prominent Democratic governors often talk about climate change and back policies aimed at limiting or eliminating emissions. In his budget blueprint presented earlier this month, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, pledged $9.1 billion to advance clean-transit initiatives to reduce emissions and help transition to zero-emissions vehicles. proposed for $6.1 billion. In a budget presentation last week, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York promoted a $4 billion bond measure that would partially fund climate-change mitigation projects.
At the Oldsmar event, Mr. DeSantis outlined a proposal to dedicate more than $270 million to 76 projects aimed at strengthening protection against rising sea levels and flooding. “We are a low-lying state, we are a hurricane-prone state, and we are a flood-prone state,” he said.
In South Carolina, a series of devastating storms, including Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Florence, prompted Republican Governor Henry McMaster to form a flood water commission to develop recommendations for mitigating the effects of floods in 2018. Last year he named Ben Duncan to head a new Office of Resilience, which is managing funds to provide disaster relief and buy flooded properties and creating a statewide resilience plan.
The office aims to strengthen protection in coastal and low-lying areas, not to address factors that contribute to severe flooding, such as greenhouse-gas emissions. “We are focusing on the effects rather than the causes,” said resilience planning director Alex Butler.
Jason Crowley, a senior program director for the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, said an informal understanding between environmental groups and Republican elected officials has led to a focus on addressing the climate crisis rather than debating its causes to work on policy gains. paved the way for.
“We’ve been able to cut that noise,” he said. “In South Carolina, we have a problem, and we have to do something about it.”
At the federal level, Rep. John Curtis (R., Utah) led the creation of the Conservative Climate Caucus, which now has more than 70 GOP members of Congress and emphasizes private sector innovation to reduce emissions.
Some environmental advocates say elected officials who do not link the effects of climate change to the underlying causes are failing to fully address the problem. “We have to not only build resilience, but slow the pace of those impacts in the future,” said Nat Keohen, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, an environmental-policy think tank.
In Louisiana, a state hit by rising sea levels with significant oil and gas production, Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards convened a task force that earlier this month called for a plan to reach net zero greenhouse-gas emissions. submitted its final draft of the Climate Action Plan. 2050. It sought to address both the causes and effects of climate change through proposals such as generating electricity from renewable resources.
“The more we do against climate change, the more effective our restoration and protection projects are,” said task force chairman Harry Vorhoff.
Some of its recommendations would require action by the Republican-led state legislature. Eddie Lambert, the GOP chairman of the Environmental-Quality Committee, said he is open to considering its recommendations, but is wary of cutting oil and gas production altogether. Still, he said, the effects of global warming demand a response.
He said, “Climate change is caused by us or is a natural phenomenon, it is happening.”–
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People under 40 will experience ‘unprecedented life’ of climate change disasters, study says.
Sep 28, 2021 — People under 40 will experience ‘unprecedented life’ of climate change disasters, study says.
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Majority of US Population Now Under Age 40 – VOA Learning …
https://learningenglish.voanews.com › study-majority-o…Aug 13, 2020 — A new study shows that Americans under the age of 40 now make up a majority of the U.S. population.
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Exposing the Big Game 
