If you travel to one of the darkest places on Earth, you can see one of the last great things completely unaltered by humans: the entire night sky.
But increasingly, even in the darkest places on Earth (which are vanishingly rare themselves), humankind is beginning to interfere with this primordial view. The unimpeded view of the night sky is being lost, and quickly.
In their quest to provide global broadband internet access to remote places, satellite companies are launching small constellation satellites into orbit close to the Earth so that the internet connection doesn’t have too long of a delay.
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Environmental groups sued the Bureau of Land Management in federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the agency unlawfully authorized an Idaho phosphate mine project by a subsidiary of Bayer AG because it didn’t account for the increased selenium pollution it may cause in waterways.
The Center for Biological Diversity and others alleged in U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho that BLM violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to take a “hard look” at how dust of selenium, a mineral toxic in high concentrations, that would be released at the proposed Caldwell Canyon open-pit mine in southeast Idaho could contaminate the nearby Blackfoot River. The mining project by Bayer’s P4 Production LLC, would produce phosphate that the complaint says the German chemicals group would use to manufacture the active ingredient in its weedkiller Roundup.
A greater sage grouse. (Photo by Bob Wick / BLM)
(CN) The Biden administration faces a lawsuit over its predecessor’s hasty approval of a mining operation in rural Idaho without considering the environmental impact of extracting the raw materials for the herbicide Roundup.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved the project in August 2019, clearing the the way for P4 Production to mine over 1,500 acres of undeveloped land for German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The proposed Caldwell Canyon Mine is in prime territory for sage-grouse bird and other species, according to the complaint filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project and WildEarth Guardians in U.S. District Court of Idaho.
The costs to electrify freight rail in the U.S., albeit expensive, extend beyond strictly capital costs to questions about electric grid reliability and how best to address decarbonization.