#Environmental Service

[robbincenijn]

Stena / Future Vision / w. GiantAnt / 2019

[reasonsforhope]

"The vision

“Every lawyer has skills that can help the climate. We’ve just gotta make the connections.” — Environmental lawyer and advocate Matthew Karmel

The spotlight

“How many lawyers does it take to break a Guinness World Record?”

Matthew Karmel posed this question on LinkedIn in February, adding, “No, this isn’t a bad lawyer joke; it’s a reason for climate optimism.”

Karmel, a principal at the law firm Offit Kurman and the chair of its environmental and sustainability law practice group, is one of the organizers of the Climate Pro Bono Bootcamp, a two-day virtual conference dedicated to helping more lawyers and legal professionals figure out how to donate their time and skills to advance climate work.

When people — including lawyers themselves — think of the intersection between climate and law, their minds may go straight to high-profile climate lawsuits or other legal action aimed at holding big polluters and inactive governments accountable. But there are many other forms of legal support that climate causes might need, from simple contracts to forming a new business or nonprofit to legal defense. “There are so many attorneys working at large law firms, small law firms — attorneys everywhere who just don’t do litigation, but are still very passionate about climate change and want to apply their skills in that way,” said Stephanie Demetry, the executive director of Green Pro Bono, an organization that matches attorneys with companies, nonprofits, grassroots leaders, and others who need legal assistance to advance climate solutions.

Karmel had the idea for the conference in late 2023, after he had been working with Green Pro Bono for a few years. “I was sitting there thinking, Why isn’t everyone doing this?” he recalled. “The things I’m doing aren’t unique. It doesn’t require specialized legal skills. It requires passion, and the general legal knowledge that every lawyer has.” He approached Demetry with the idea of hosting a training to help demystify what climate-related pro bono work can entail and build up the network of attorneys interested in offering it.

They held the first bootcamp in January of 2024 and had around 700 attendees — far exceeding their expectations. After the event, Demetry said, Green Pro Bono more than doubled the number of attorneys in its network and also saw a 53 percent increase in the number of projects that got picked up.

But for this year’s bootcamp, planned for late April, they’re aiming to increase that attendance — and setting the ambitious goal of growing it a hundredfold. That’s the number that would break a Guinness World Record for the largest attendance at a virtual law conference in one week (yes, this entry truly does exist). It might be a longer-term goal, but it’s one they’re serious about. Breaking the record, Karmel said, would be a powerful way to demonstrate the growing interest in climate action among the legal community, and also an opportunity to reach thousands more attorneys, students, and others with the event’s key message: that you don’t have to choose between your day job and working for the causes you care about."

You can find out more about the climate pro bono bootcamp, which is FREE, right here. It's April 22 & 23, 2025 at 12:00pm – 5:00pm EDT

-via Grist, April 2, 2025

[byler-alarmist]

Do people know most paper receipts are harmful to their health?

I'm going to get up on my soapbox for a minute, but do people realize how pretty much everyone is being overloaded with endocrine disruptors like BPA/BPS on a near-daily basis??

I don't think many people understand that ever since most of the world transitioned to thermal paper receipts (cheaper than ink), almost every receipt you handle from the gas station to the grocery store to the Square terminal printer at the local co-op is coated with Bisphenol-A (BPA) or its chemical cousin Bisphenol-S (BPS).

These chemicals have not only been proven to cause reproductive harm to human and animals, they've also been linked to obesity and attention disorders.

Not sure if your receipt is a thermal receipt? If you scratch it with a coin and it turns dark, it's thermal.

BPA/BPS can enter the skin to a depth such that it is no longer removable by washing hands. When taking hold of a receipt consisting of thermal printing paper for five seconds, roughly 1 μg BPA is transferred to the forefinger and the middle finger. If the skin is dry or greasy, it is about ten times more. 

Think of how many receipts you handle every day. It's even worse for cashiers and tellers, who may handle hundreds in a single shift. It is also a class issue, since many people who work retail and food service are lower-income and will suffer worse health consequences over time from the near-constant exposure.

Not only that, receipts printed with thermal ink are NOT recyclable, as they pollute the rest of the paper products with the chemicals.

People don't know this and recycle them anyway, so when you buy that "green" toilet paper that says "100% recycled"? Yup, you are probably wiping your most sensitive areas with those same chemicals (for this reason, I buy bamboo or sugarcane toilet paper as a sustainable alternative to recycled paper).

This page from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has some good links if you want to learn more.

As consumers, we need to demand better from our businesses and from our governments. We need regulation of these chemicals yesterday.

If you are a buyer or decision-maker for a business, the link above also contains a shortlist of receipt paper manufacturers that are phenol-free.

If you work at a register, ask customers if they want a receipt. If they don't and you can end the transaction without printing one, don't print one!

As a consumer, fold receipts with the ink on the inside, since that's where the coating is. Some more good tips here.

And whatever you do, DO NOT RECYCLE THERMAL RECEIPTS

[karl-marxs-ghost]

How long before they dissolve the national parks system and cut down the redwoods and start fracking in yellowstone and mining in the grand canyon and building condos in the everglades

[mercurialkitty]

@uh-ohspaghettio and several other folks wanted to see GOOD NEWS in the destiel meme. So here you go.

[er-cryptid]

Sphenopsida

-- often called "horsetails"

-- tracheophytes

-- only 25 living species

-- true land plants

-- vascular

-- true roots, stems, and leaves

-- small leaves

-- scale-like pattern on leaves

-- grow in tropical and temperate climates

-- use alteration of generations

-- cell walls in leaves and stems contain silica

.

Patreon

[chronicsymptomsyndrome]

Does anyone know a reliable resource to find certain laws in specific areas? I am autistically at my wit’s end.

I have been looking for years and cannot find a single law addressing idling vehicles specifically in my area. I’ve found tons that say no more than five minutes out of every sixty, but none of them are specific to my area, and I have such a hard time believing this is a law in most of the country but not in my specific city/neighborhood.

I want to put up a sign but also cannot find any helpful information on whether or not I could get in a lot of legal trouble or fined for that in my area.

Any help insight advice etc is soo appreciated as I feel completely stuck/trapped and absolutely desperate. The meltdowns are getting to the point where I am afraid of snapping and becoming violent (which is doubly terrifying because I live in magaville so I just know everyone has at least like three guns on their person at any given moment)

[nyxelestia]

Environmental Storytelling

[robbincenijn]

Stena / Future Vision / w. GiantAnt / 2019

[poppy5991]

Publicly available datasets are being removed from federal websites so if you rely on fed data for your job, thesis, dissertation, etc, go pull it now for safekeeping. CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index Data just got pulled from ATSDR. That’s the most widely used zip code data for public health analysis of how factors like poverty, health insurance access, education level, race/ethnicity, English proficiency, etc affect health outcomes.

Environmental databases and health databases have already been pulled.

For the record, these databases are part of how places like “cancer corridors” have been identified in the past. Where companies target low income minority communities for placement of poorly regulated chemical plants and cancer rates skyrocket. They know these communities don’t have the legal resources or media connections to fight the plant development and often academics are the only ones who can assist by proving the correlation years later.

[cleangreen0]

How Are Solar Panels Recycled? A Step-by-Step Breakdown

As the solar industry grows, so does the challenge of managing old and damaged panels. But what happens to solar modules at the end of their lifespan? This guide breaks down the solar panel recycling process step by step, from collection and material separation to reclaiming valuable components like silicon, glass, and metals. Learn how innovative recycling technologies are making solar energy even more sustainable and what the future holds for end-of-life solar panels.

[bitstitchbitch]

So, I live in a mountainous area with a lot of outdoor recreation (importantly, in the US). Including a lot of hiking trails and reservoirs that largely lie within national forests or other federally managed land. And like many outdoor recreation areas, these areas have public restrooms, namely vault toilets.

the thing with vault toilets is that they fill up and need pumped out on a regular basis. Especially when they are on popular sites in a region that really loves outdoor recreation. And because these recreation sites are on federal land, the federal government is who pumps out the vault toilets.

Except thanks to the wonderful policies of our genius president (/s), these federal sites just had their funding significantly cut. Cue the very predictable outcome we are now experience - the vault toilets are full and no one is emptying them, meaning several very busy recreation sites now have no functioning restrooms! And the county officials are crying that Of Course they support Donald Trump and more efficient government, but this is really too far, there must be some mistake because Trump was only supposed to hurt Other People, not (white, Christian) families who just want to go hiking.

so yeah, when I said that Trump’s policies were a shitshow, I didn’t mean it literally. But if the shoe fits…

(okay, I’m laughing now but I’m going to be seriously annoyed if I get to my hike tomorrow and the restroom’s closed because my president is an idiotic fascist)

[hardlightvivisection]

So, voluntary extinction/being childfree is terrible and will lead to the death of everything in the universe (because human culture is so important it must be preserved forever), but you're fine with ongoing genocides and ethnic cleansings.

[lucelute]

The stock market has crashed, the tariff will make everything expensive, and Trump will sign to expand logging

The market and the tariff have already been spoken of, awful decisions; last time we had such high tariff was right before the great depression. I rest my case,

Also, to try and keep up with the demand for timber and other goods that come from nature, the administration will sign an executive order to expand logging across 280 million acres of national forests and public lands. Do you like nature? sorry, now we are going to destroy a lot of it because the imported ones are too expensive.

Elon wants both Amtrak and the U.S postal service to be private instead of government run.

And Al Green will be censured for disrupting President Trump's address to Congress.

Also, the administration said this morning that they were going to start dismantling the Department of Education, and immediately backpaddle.

[pizzleyanked]

i know that generative ai is today's boogeyman but i really wish that people were more precise when discussing it. ai is a huge field that isn't just "create thing based on stolen assets", there's many legitimate uses in medicine, research, etc. your beef is with generative ai, not ai in general.