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Would filling a new reservoir give off lots of greenhouse gases?

When you think about sources of planet-heating greenhouse gases, dams and reservoirs probably aren’t some of the first things that come to mind.

But scientific research has shown that reservoirs emit significant amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. It’s produced by decomposing plants and other organic matter collecting near the bottom of reservoirs. Methane bubbles up to the surface of reservoirs, and also passes through dams and bubbles up downstream.

Scientists call these processes ebullition and degassing.

And there is a growing debate about how much of these gases would be emitted by California’s planned Sites Reservoir, which is slated to be built in a valley north of Sacramento to store water for agriculture and cities.

In a 2021 study, scientists estimated that the world’s reservoirs are annually giving off greenhouse gases equivalent to 1.07 gigatons of CO2 — a relatively smaller piece of the picture if compared the more than 36 gigatons of emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial sources, but still significant.

John Harrison.
Harrison

John Harrison, the study’s lead author and a professor at Washington State University, read the findings by the environmental groups and said the per-area methane emissions rates they used in their analysis are within the rate reported for reservoirs in temperate regions, “albeit toward the high end of the distribution and quite a bit higher than emissions from temperate zone reservoirs of comparable size.”

Harrison said in an email that he thinks it’s important to work toward the kind of estimates the groups have attempted, but “due to a lack of supporting data and relevant studies, many of the flux estimates put forth in this report are necessarily quite uncertain.”

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Los Angeles Times

Where Donald Trump Meets Bernie Sanders

A Democratic Senator Defends ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’

A hit country artist offended progressives who couldn’t recognize his song as a primal cry of pain.

The future of progressive politics in America just might revolve around whether someone like Chris Murphy, a U.S. senator from a prosperous New England state, can find common ground culturally and politically with a man like Oliver Anthony. Earlier this month, Anthony, a young country singer, dropped his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” into the nation’s political-cultural stew pot. A red-bearded high-school dropout, former factory hand, and virtual unknown, he strummed a guitar in the Virginia woods and sang with an urgent twang about the despair of working-class life:

Murphy, who is the clean-cut son of a corporate lawyer and has what appear to be national ambitions, makes an unlikely populist. But he seems intent on listening. Earlier this month, he headed to the Blue Ridge Mountains city of Boone, North Carolina, where 37 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. “It’s one of the poorest regions in America and offers a different conversation than in suburban America,” he said. “That trip reinforced to me that we should not obsess on what divides us.”

Jennifer Sherman.
Sherman

Deaths of despair—that is, from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholism—are rising at a frightful pace. Overdose deaths in the United States topped 106,000 in 2021. By comparison, the European Union, which has 100 million more people, recorded about 6,200 overdose deaths that year. Such deaths tend to break along economic and educational lines.

Jennifer Sherman, a Washington State University professor who is president of the Rural Sociological Society, has spent decades among working-class and poor people in the mountains and plains of the West. She has observed a pervasive sense of loss. Workers drop out or end up in service jobs, she told me, and fight losing struggles with the wealthy over zoning and for control of land, forests, and water. “If the Democrats want to figure out how to be relevant, they have to move beyond ‘Trust us, we care,’” Sherman said.

The Republicans are aware of these shifting class tectonics. “I have a very smart conservative friend who describes the next five years as a race,” Murphy said, “to see whether the right can become more economically progressive before the left becomes a bigger tent.”

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The Atlantic

Bradley Cooper’s fake nose disaster didn’t have to happen

Though [Leonard Bernstein’s] life and image have been captured in the documentary film form, the TV streaming company, Netflix, is due to release the dramatized Maestro this fall, first in theaters and then on the platform. Producers could have chosen from a significant array of talented world-class Jewish actors. Since Bradley Cooper with Steven Spielberg bought the music rights to the film in 2018, however, and Cooper wrote and directed the film, he cast himself as its star.

While Cooper has certainly shown that he is a competent (verging on brilliant) actor, the fact that he is not Jewish limits the potential for true “representation.” To add further insult, pre-screening publicity pictures and the film’s trailer show Cooper wearing a prosthetic nose.

Notwithstanding the fact that members of Leonard Bernstein’s family supported the film’s casting, the plastic schnoz makes him look like nothing more than Bradley Cooper with a silly-looking nose approaching that of a circus clown.

Cooper’s image resembles the antisemitic caricatures from the 18th century onward, the ones depicting the evil, bulbous-nosed Jewish bankers often representing members of the Rothchild family, with their hands grabbing into and covering the globe.

Jews, however, are certainly not the only members of marginalized communities who have been misrepresented in the classroom and in the media.

Blackface — when people darken their skin with shoe polish, grease paint, or burnt cork or wood and exaggerate their lips and other facial features — has been the mainstay of U.S. popular culture since soon after the Civil War. It dates back centuries to European theatrical productions, most notably to Shakespeare’s “Othello.” It is founded in racism.

“It’s an assertion of power and control,” says David Leonard , a professor of comparative ethnic studies and American studies at Washington State University. “It allows a society to routinely and historically imagine African Americans as not fully human. It serves to rationalize violence and Jim Crow segregation.”

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LGBTQNation

 

One way to help coho salmon survive NW pollution

There is an air filter for your car, a filter for your tap water, and air filters for our smoky Northwest air. Now, there could be a filter to help the region’s struggling salmon.

According to a new study from Washington State University, using simple biofilters on stormwater runoff can dramatically increase the survival rate of newly hatched coho salmon.

Jen Mcintyre.
Mcintyre

“This study highlights how vulnerable the fish are as soon as they hatch to the toxic impacts of stormwater runoff,” said lead author and associate WSU professor Jen McIntyre. “Biofiltration appears to be very effective at preventing that acute lethal toxicity. We also found that it prevented some of the sub-lethal effects, but not all of them.”

The effects of chemical-carrying stormwater runoff from roads, and other places, into streams and rivers has recently received a lot of attention. After years of searching for the cause of so many salmon deaths, researchers discovered in 2020 that a tire stabilizer (6PPD) breaks down into a toxic substance. As tires wear down on the road, their rubber, and all the chemicals they carry, wash into local bodies of water where fish and wildlife encounter them.

Find out more:

KUOW.org
Phys.org
ScienceDaily
BigCountryNews
WSU Insider

 

 

‘Another tough election’

As one of two Republican members of Congress from Washington to have voted to impeach former President Donald Trump, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler faces one of her toughest primaries since she was first elected to represent the southwest region of the state in 2010.

The number of Republicans in the race — including a former Green Beret endorsed by Trump — and the anger that the six-term congresswoman sparked among some in her party with her impeachment vote means Herrera Beutler could face a scenario that seemed unfathomable in her previous re-election bids: not making it through the primary.

Due to the nature of the top-two primary, the vote in the 3rd Congressional District could cut in a variety of ways, including the incumbent advancing to the general election against a fellow Republican or against a Democratic challenger — in previous elections Democrats have always captured enough of the primary vote to advance to November. But Herrera Beutler could also be edged out.

It all comes down who turns out to vote and how much power the Trump endorsement holds, said Mark Stephan, an associate professor of political science at Washington State University-Vancouver.

“The 3rd District taps into that national story of, where is the Republican Party headed,” he said. “How much continued influence does President Trump have over the party?”

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KREM2 News