The History of Earth Day, treehugger.com, Jenn Savedege. The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970. The event and which some consider to be the birth of the environmental movement. Founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson. Nelson chose the April date to coincide with spring while avoiding most spring break and final exams. Politics Iowa Senate Pulls All-Nighter to Roll Back Child Labor Protections, vice.com, Julia Roscoe. The Senate voted on a bill allowing 14-year-olds to work six-hour night shifts, and passed it at 4:52 a.m. Republicans Are Pushing to Make Child Labor Easier, vice.com, Paul Blest. Several Republican-controlled states are currently considering weakening child labor laws, including a bill in Arkansas that
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The History of Earth Day, treehugger.com, Jenn Savedege. The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970. The event and which some consider to be the birth of the environmental movement. Founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson. Nelson chose the April date to coincide with spring while avoiding most spring break and final exams.
Politics
Iowa Senate Pulls All-Nighter to Roll Back Child Labor Protections, vice.com, Julia Roscoe. The Senate voted on a bill allowing 14-year-olds to work six-hour night shifts, and passed it at 4:52 a.m.
Republicans Are Pushing to Make Child Labor Easier, vice.com, Paul Blest. Several Republican-controlled states are currently considering weakening child labor laws, including a bill in Arkansas that would allow children as young as 14 to work without first obtaining permission.
Electric Vehicles
Heavy Electric Pickups Are a Safety Concern, Says NTSB Head, treehugger.com, Llyod Alter. “I’m concerned about the increased risk of severe injury and death for all road users from heavier curb weights and increasing size, power, and performance of vehicles on our roads, including electric vehicles.”
US Postal Service Is Going All-Electric After All, treehugger.com, Llyod Alter. In a major reversal of its previous plans, the U.S. Postal Service has cranked up the number of electric versions of its next generation delivery vehicles (NGDVs) to 45,000 out of the 60,000 NGDVs on order.
Only six EVs still qualify for the $7,500 federal tax credit after new rules go into effect, The Verge, Andrew J. Hawking. The Internal Revenue Service released its list of electric vehicles that will still qualify for the $7,500 federal EV tax credit after strict new supply chain rules go into effect on April 18th.
Food
A More Fly-Free Way to Deal With Food Waste, The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu. Collecting food scraps in your kitchen can invite insect invaders. But there are plenty of ways to outsmart them.
How Does Mercury Get in Fish? treehugger.com, Gia Mora. Mercury finds its way out of the Earth and into living creatures in several ways.
The Egg Shortage Reflects a Cruel, Unsustainable System, treehugger.com, Hayley Bruning. There are two culprits for the soaring costs: inflation and an egg shortage.
Debt
Overspending on homes and cars lands many people in financial hot water, consumeraffairs.com, Mark Huffman. “Determine if you can genuinely afford the purchase without jeopardizing your financial goals,” Brown suggests. “Consider the purchase price and associated expenses such as maintenance, insurance, taxes, and interest payments.”
Would you go into debt for your pet’s health care? 78% probably would, consumeraffairs.com, Mark Huffman. They would take on debt to pay for needed pet medical treatment, 78% said they would.
Business
Southwest Airlines runs into another major technical glitch, affecting more than 2,000 flights, consumeraffairs.com, Gary Guthrie. The company suspended all flights on Tuesday morning to work through data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure, according to the airline.
Taylor Swift avoided the FTX mess by asking one simple question, consumeraffairs.com, Mark Huffman. Taylor turned to the lawyers and asked if the FTX securities were registered. She was told they were not. At that point Swift backed out of the deal. AB: I forgot about this little factoid.
There are more new cars for sale but affordability continues to decline, consumeraffairs.com, Mark Huffman. There are two reasons for that: supply chains have improved but consumers aren’t rushing out to buy a new car. The average annual percentage rate (APR) on new financed vehicles in the first quarter climbed to 7%, compared to 4.4% in the first quarter of 2022.
The USPS plans to raise prices for mailing services again, consumeraffairs.com, Kristen Dali. The United States Postal Services (USPS) has announced that it filed a request with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) to raise prices on First-Class Mail Forever stamps, postcards, and international letters and postcards.
How to deal with an aggressive debt collector, consumeraffairs.com, Gary Guthrie. And as we recently found out, there are debt collection agencies that are more than happy to make sure consumers pay and sometimes even if the debt has been discharged. AB: If you have an aggressive attorney haunting you and you have paid a debt or never owed? We had one such firm calling. I finally got to the head guy telling him to stop calling. He threatened us with calling the state police. I told him to go ahead as I was going to send a letter to the attorney grievance commission of New York. “It” stopped calling. Unethical attorney actions are not tolerated.
Environment
World’s First Rewilding Center Opens in Scotland, treehugger.com, Elizabeth Waddington. This is something that could change as more and more people visit the new rewilding center at Dundreggan, which seeks to bring rewilding to a wider audience and encourage people to think about broader landscapes in a way they may not have done before.
On Earth Day, Make One Change, treehugger.com, Katherine Martinko. It’s a once-annual chance to make a lifestyle change, to do things differently, and set yourself on track to achieve something you’ve wanted to do for a while. And if that desired change has the environment at its core, there’s no better day to start than Earth Day.
Animals Are Migrating to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, The Atlantic, Sarah Zang. Looking more closely at this plastic garbage, as scientists did recently, and you’ll find plenty of life: sea anemones as small as a pinky nail or as large as the palm of your hand; white, lacelike bryozoa; hydroids sprouting like orange feathers; shrimplike amphipods; Japanese oysters; mussels.
The Texas Mega-Dairy Fire is an Urgent Call to Address the Costly Clean-Up of Big Ag’s Cruelty, treehugger.com, Daisy Freund. Americans are paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes to compensate corporations that raise animals in terrible living conditions and kill them in brutal ways.
How to Understand the Scale of Embodied Carbon, treehugger.com, Lloyd Alter. Whenever we talk about fixing old buildings instead of tearing them down and replacing them, you can see eyes glazing over. They say the new building will be sustainable and energy efficient!
8 Dreamlike Abandoned Places Being Reclaimed by Nature, treehugger.com, Melissa Breyer. When humans flee, nature moves in on the deserted territory, turning shipwrecks into water-locked forests and old Italian flour mills into verdant oases.
What Are the Three Pillars of Sustainability? treehugger.com, Liz Allen. Sustainability is often broken into three intertwined categories: social sustainability, economic sustainability, and environmental sustainability..