Daniel Salzler No. 1251
EnviroInsight.org Three Items April 26, 2024
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1. America’s Most Endangered Rivers® of 2024. A CALL TO ACTION FOR CLEAN WATER
Rivers make life possible, yet we are losing them.
Much of our drinking water comes from rivers, and natural river habitats support thousands of plant and animal species.
But America’s rivers and clean water supplies are in crisis. Forty-four percent of waterways in the U.S. are too polluted for swimming or fishing, according to the U.S. Environmental
Santa Cruz River # 4 on Most Endangered list (see below)
Protection Agency. Freshwater species are going extinct faster than ocean or land species, and rivers are among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. Mean-while, climate change is fueling more severe floods and droughts — and unjust policies put the burden of all these impacts disproportionately on Communities of Color and Tribal Nations.
In addition, a 2023 Supreme Court ruling slashed Clean Water Act safeguards, leaving many small streams and wetlands unprotected. Since all water is connected, leaving these areas without protection risks pollution flowing into the rivers that are our sources of drinking water.
America’s Most Endangered Rivers® of 2024 is a call to action for clean water. We must shoreup safeguards for streams and wetlands at the state level, and we must strengthen the Clean Water Act to ensure rivers everywhere are protected.
Freshwater species are going extinct fashion, faster than oceans or land, species and rivers are among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet.
1 Rivers of New Mexico, NM ………………………………………….pg 4 of the report – see link
2 Big Sunflower & Yazoo Rivers, MS ………………………………pg 6 of the report – see link
3 Duck River, TN …………………………………………………………..pg 8 of the report – see link
4 Santa Cruz River, AZ, SO (Mexico) . …………………………….pg 10 of the report – see link
5 Little Pee Dee River, SC, NC . ……………………………………..pg 12 of the report – see link
6 Farmington River, CT, MA . ………………………………………..pg 14 of the report – see link
7 Trinity River, CA . ……………………………………………………….pg 16 of the report – see link
8 Kobuk River, AK…………………………………………………………pg 18 of the report – see link
9 Tijuana River / Rio Tijuana, CA, BC (Mexico) ……………….pg 20 of the report -see link
10 Blackwater River, WV …………………………………………………pg 22 of the report – see link
American Rivers reviews nominations for the America’s Most Endangered Rivers®report from river groups and concerned individuals across the country. Rivers areselected based upon the following criteria:
A major decision that the public can help influence in the coming year on the proposed action.
The significance of the river to people and nature.
The magnitude of threat to the river and its communities, especially in light of climate change
and racial injustice.
Read the entire report (22+ pages) at https://mail.aol.com/d/folders/1/messages/AIugTixvsmVZZiBtkQLG8A5fvJ0
2. Test Yourself On What You Know About Electric Vehicles Versus What You Think You Know. The petroleum industry continues to spew untruths about electric vehicles and how bad they are.. Answer the following ten questions and see if opinion changes.
Despite efforts made by those who produce gasoline, Electric vehicles are increasingly popular, despite some bumps in the road. But how much do you really know about them—about their history, or their impact on the energy grid and mineral
supplies? It’s time to find out with this quiz printed i n there Wall Street Journal Answers at end of newsletter
1. Which country/region had the most fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road in 2022?
a. U.S. c. China
b. Europe d. India
2. A charged-up EV will have zero emissions on the road, but that’s not the whole story. What percentage of U.S. electricity on the grid is produced from renewable resources?
a. 1% c. 51% e. 91%
b. 21% d.71%
3. EVs are one of several green technologies whose growing popularity is putting a strain on global copper supplies. How much copper does an electric vehicle contain compared with a gasoline-powered one?
a. About the same c. More than 2 times as much e. More than 4 times as
b. About 1 1/2 times as much. d. About 3 1/2 times as much much
4. Electric vehicles are generally heavier than gasoline-powered cars and light trucks, largely because of the weight of their batteries. That means their tires wear out faster. How much faster?
a. 10% c. 30% e. 50%
b. 20% d. 40%
5. What percentage of the light vehicles (under 8,500 pounds) on the road in the U.S. in 2022 were wholly electric or plug-in hybrids?
a. 5% or more c. About 3% e. About 1%
b. About 4% d. About 3%
6. n the third quarter of 2023 there were about 160,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles in the U.S., according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. What percentage of visits to public charging stations end without the vehicle being charged?
a. 10% c. 20 % e. 30%
b. 15% d. 25%
7. Which company overtook Tesla to become the largest seller of fully electric vehicles for the last quarter of 2023?
a. Ford c. Volkswagon Group e. BYD
b. General Motors d. Toyota
8. What is the target date under Environmental Protection Agency rules for the U.S. to ban the sale of new gasoline/diesel light vehicles?
a. 2032 c. 2034 e. There is no such target date
b. 2033 d. 2035
9. In 2021 fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in the U.S. used less than 0.2% of the electricity consumed in the country, according to a study by the Argonne National Laboratory. What percentage of the country’s electricity does the Electric Power Research Institute estimate EVs will consume in 2030?
a. Up to 2% c. Up to 8% e. Up to 15%
b. Up to 5% d. Up to 11 %
10. When were the first small-scale electric vehicles developed?
a. 1770’s -1780’s c. 1810’s – 1890’s e. 1980’s – 1990’s
b. 1820’s – 1830’s d. 1930’s – 1940’s
3. Ancient Farmers Dug Canals That Shaped Phoenix’s Modern Water System Just south of the intersection of North Horne and East McKellips Road in Mesa sits the Park of the Canals. It’s one of just a few places where you can still see remnants of canals dug by the ancestral Sonoran Desert people who occupied the Salt River Valley before the time of Christ.
Those ancient farmers have been referred to as the “Hohokam” but it’s not the name of a tribe or a people, and their O’Odham, Hopi, and Zuni descendants do not call them that.
Early archaeologists believe the culture developed in Mexico and moved into what is now Arizona. In order to flourish, they built an extensive canal system to bring water to villages and irrigate thousands of acres of agricultural fields.
At the Park of the Canals in Mesa, you can still see remnants of the ancient canals dug by the ancestral Sonoran Desert people before the time of Christ.
Mark Tebeau is a public historian and professor at Arizona State University.
But those indents in the land once made it possible for about 60-100,000 people to survive in the early arid desert.
“They built canals in every place that it made sense to tap into the Salt River.”
Laurene Montero is the city archaeologist for Phoenix. She also works at the S’edav Va’aki Museum, another site dedicated to preserving some of those canals.
“The museum itself is on top of an archaeological site that is also a very important traditional, cultural place to the O’odham people because their ancestors were here and lived at this village site,” Montero said.
Montero says the ancestral Sonoran Desert people worked with the natural landform to get water to move without any kind of power.
“They built the canals much as we’ve built them today with kind of the “V” shape and progressive narrowing of the channel to help keep the water moving at a rate that wouldn’t knock out the side walls, but also wouldn’t allow too much sedimentation to build up,” Montero said.
The system allowed them to grow corn, cotton, squash and beans. Montero said it’s pretty remarkable considering they didn’t have draft animals or modern tools.
“They would’ve used sticks and stones for digging, and baskets for carting the dirt out, and yet some of these canals were — I mean, they were huge,” Montero said. “Some of them, from berm to berm, [were] like 80 feet across. And [they were] deep!”
If you added up the lengths of all the canals, it’s about 1,000 miles of prehistoric irrigation, but they weren’t all in use at the same time.
“Oftentimes they were built and they got flooded out and they cleaned them out, they reused them,” Montero said. “But sometimes they had to re-build.”
The civilization drastically declined and many of the canals are believed to have been abandoned around 1450. Tebeau said no one knows exactly why but there are several possibilities.
“Whether it is the population grew beyond the ability of the canals to support it, whether it’s the drought itself changes the way the river is working for the community,” Tebeau said. “We don’t know exactly why it fails, but we know the failure of that canal is at the heart of the Hohokam collapse.”
Chris Caseldine is an ASU professor who’s worked on several projects related to irrigation through time. He said in the late 1800s, pioneers like Jack Swilling found the ancient canals and restored them to once again deliver water.
“There’s the adage that Phoenix was built on the ashes of a previous civilization,” Caseldine said. “It is correct that the ancestral O’Odham canals really enticed people to be in Arizona because the issue is not really too little water. We had a lot of water. It was just- do you have enough people to maintain the canals?”
All these years later, some things haven’t changed. “They’re not that dramatically different in size than our modern canals.” SRP archaeologist Dan Garcia said.in fact, the water still flows using the grade of the landscape to guide its path.
“I like to estimate that a big chunk of the early canal system that SRP still operates on behalf of the federal government that that does follow the path and some of those are even the same canals as the ancient canals, just refurbished and modernized, Garcia said.
In many ways, the modern system that delivers water to more than 2.5 million people in the Valley is a monument to the state’s ancient ingenuity.
“We’d like people to know the history of these canals and how unique they are and how important they are, not only to us because without the canals, there’d be no life in the Phoenix metropolitan area,” Garcia said, “but also the importance to the Native American communities that still live here. You know, their ancestors built these things and they’re still conveying water to the same places, along the same pathways as they were in ancient times.” Source: Bridget Dowd – KJZZ
Answers To Electric Vehicle Quiz
- C. China had 13.8 million EVs and plug-in hybrids on the road, by far the most of a country and more than half of all such vehicles in the world, according to data from the International Energy Agency. Europe was second with 7.8 million, then the U.S. with three million. The rest of the world combined had 1.6 million.
2. B. According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, about 21% of
electricity in the country came from renewables last year. Sixty percent was produced by
fossil fuels, mainly natural gas and coal.
3. C. An average electric vehicle uses more than twice as much copper as the average gasoline
or diesel-fueled vehicle, according to the International Energy Agency. Some analysts have
warned of a copper supply shortage over the next decade.
4. B. Electric-car tires degrade 20% faster than those on cars with internal combustion engines, according to Kelley Blue Book, a California-based vehicle-valuation and automotive-research company. Tires are made specifically for EVs to deal with the extra weight, but there are fewer choices in the marketplace, and they tend to be more expensive. Failure to use the correct tiresm can impact an EV’s driving range.
5. E. A mere 1.2% of light vehicles registered in the U.S. that year were either EVs or plug-in
hybrids, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.
6. C. One in five visits to a public station ends without charging, mostly because the chargers
aren’t working, sometimes for other reasons including long lines, according to a J.D. Power
study released last August
7. E. China-based BYD sold more than 526,000 EVs in the quarter.
8. E. There is no EPA target date for a total emissions ban that would effectively require all new
cars to be fully electric. Last month the agency released its toughest tailpipe-emissions rules
ever but gave automakers more time to comply than under previous proposals.
9. D. The institute estimates EVs will consume 7% to 11% of the electricity generated in the U.S.
in 2030. The projected growth of EVs in the U.S. has sparked some concerns about the effect
on the power grid.
10. B. The first workable electric cars were built in the period 1828 to 1835, according to the
Energy Department.
Copyright: EnviroInsight.org
