1 . If you’ve never had hot pot, you’re absolutely missing out. Not only is it delicious, but it’s also a fantastic meal to share with friends or family. But it also generates a lot of waste oil. In fact, hot pot is reportedly responsible for 12,000 tons of waste oil per month just in the Chinese city of Chengdu alone. Instead of just throwing away that oil, one company decided to turn it into jet fuel (航空燃料).

Bloomberg recently published a great article about Sichuan Jinshang Environmental Technology, a company that began exporting hot pot waste oil to be turned into biofuel that can power planes. It’s not exactly a perfect solution to the greenhouse gas emissions that the aviation (航空) industry is responsible for, but it’s a step in the right direction. “Our mission is to make waste oil fly to the sky,” Zhong Guojun, the company’s vice president, told Bloomberg.

Based in Chengdu, Sichuan Jinshang Environmental Technology takes waste oil from around the city and refines it into something called industrial mixed oil. The refined oil is then exported to be turned into jet fuel or biodiesel (生物柴) by companies such as BP or Neste Oyj, the biggest producer of sustainable jet fuel in the world. And with new requirements for airlines to use more biofuel in their planes, there’s a lot of demand despite the fact that it’s still more expensive than regular jet fuel.

“When there is a demand, the supply will catch up, and the demand is already here,” said Chong Cheng Tung, Associate Professor at the China-UK Low Carbon College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University told Bloomberg. “So either you switch your fuel to green fuel, like bio-jet fuel, or you have to meet additional payments for travelling.”

Last year, Neste announced plans to spend more than $2 billion expanding its capacity to produce sustainable jet fuel. By 2026, it hopes to be able to produce 1.2 million tons of the stuff. Other companies such as Chevron, BP. and Total Energies are producing it on a smaller scale (规模) but also plan to increase their output soon.

4 . Every spring, as the weather warms, trees up and down the East Coast explode in a display of bright green life as leaves fill their branches, and every fall, the same leaves provide one of nature’s great color displays of vivid yellow, orange and red.

Thanks to climate change, the timing of these events has shifted over the last two decades, Harvard scientists say.

Andrew Richardson, an associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, and research associate Trevor Keenan worked with colleagues from seven different institutions on a study which found that forests throughout the eastern United States are showing signs of spring growth dramatically earlier, and that the growing season in some areas extends further into the fall.

Richardson said, “Climate change isn’t just about warmer temperatures. It’s also about changes in precipitation (降水) patterns... so in the future, an earlier spring might not help forests take up more carbon dioxide if they end up running out of water in mid-summer.”

The research combined information from three sources. Using satellite data, Keenan tracked when forests across the region began to turn green in the spring, and when leaves began to turn yellow in the fall. Ground observations made every three to seven days at the Harvard Forest in Petersham and a long-term research site in New Hampshire provided information about the state of buds, leaves and branches. When combined with records from instrument towers, the data sets allowed the researchers to paint a richly detailed picture that shows spring starting earlier, and the growing season lasting longer than at any point in the past two decades.

Another important result, Richardson said, was the discovery of a significant source of error in existing computer models on how forest ecosystems work.

“This shows an opportunity to improve the models and how they simulate how forests will work under future climate scenarios forecast.” he said.

The real power of the findings, however, may be in helping to make the effects of climate change clearer to the public, the researchers said.

6 . We’re shopping online more than ever now, including various personal care and food items. Of U.S. Internet users, one-third do it at least once a week. Seeing your limited toilet paper (TP), you might pull up your smartphone and after a few taps have a fresh order of TP set to arrive in a day, maybe even less, and all done right from the toilet seat.

But this type of shopping — numerous small, quick-to-ship orders placed through e-tailing companies like Amazon — might be the worst for the environment, according to a recent study in Environmental Science & Technology. With their current business model of free shipping and fast delivery, greenhouse gas emissions linked with transporting “fast consumer goods” are high. “The online-only retailers are growing rapidly,” says lead author Sadegh, a scientist at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

Previous analyses haven’t agreed on whether online or in-store shopping is better. In fact, some studies have found that online shopping has a lower impact, because it saves the emissions associated with driving your car to the store (95 percent of Americans drive to go shopping). But this benefit can vary, or even disappear, depending on how fast we want that TP to arrive. And if you’re shopping in real life, factors like how you transport those items, how far you travel, and how much you buy at once all affect the carbon footprint of your purchase. “There have been some contradicting results, with some saying online shopping is better and some saying traditional shopping is better,” says Sadegh. So he tried to settle the debate with an approach that showed how likely one option was to be better than the other.

Sadegh and his team compared three shopping styles: traditional in-store shopping, online ordering from a physical store (which they called “bricks and clicks”), and ordering through an online-only retailer. Nearly two-thirds of the time, bricks and clicks shopping resulted in fewer emissions per item than in-store shopping — and was better than online shopping 97 percent of the time. In-store shopping had fewer emissions than online — only 81percent of the time.

7 . Trees are symbols of hope, life and transformation. They are also increasingly labeled as a straightforward, relatively inexpensive, and best solution to climate change. Lately, society has been putting a lot of pressure on trees to get the whole world out of the climate change emergency. Accordingly, enthusiasm is worldwide popular among governments, businesses and individuals for ambitious projects to plant billions, even a trillion more, so as to help cut current emission (排放).

“Trees are having a bit of a moment right now,” says Joe Fargione, an ecologist with The Nature Conservancy based in Minneapolis. “There’s no anti-tree lobby. Trees have lots of benefits for people. Not only do they store carbon, they help provide clean air, prevent soil erosion, shade and shelter homes to reduce energy costs and give people a sense of well-being.”

Yet, as global eagerness for adding more trees grows, some scientists are urging caution. Before moving forward, they say, such massive tree projects must address a range of scientific, social and economic concerns. Poorly designed projects that don’t address these issues could do more harm than good, the researchers say, wasting money as well as public goodwill. “There’s a real feeling that forests and trees are just the idea we can use to get some unspeakable support for many, perhaps more complicated, types of landscape restoration initiatives”, says ecologist Joseph Veldmanan.

The concerns are myriad: There’s too much focus on numbers of seedlings planted, and too little time spent on how to keep the trees alive in the long term, or in working with local communities. And there’s not enough emphasis on how different types of forests store very different amounts of carbon. There’s too much talk about trees, and not enough about other carbon-storing ecosystems. And over the last decade, a diverse garden of tree-centric proposal has spread across the globe. That can lead to all kinds of problems, Joseph adds. “For me, the devil is in the details.”

8 . Songs of Disappearance is a 24-minute album of endangered birdcalls recorded by Australia’s best wildlife sound recordist, David Stewart. It sold over 2,000 copies and shows the love of Australians who want to help their native species — with all proceeds (收益) going to conservation of our feathered friends.

Its genesis came when Stephen Garnett, a conservation professor at Charles Darwin University, finished the2020 Action Plan for Australian Birds, a set of recommendations that found 1 in 6 native species are threatened with extinction. He had a conversation with his Ph.D. student Anthony Albrecht, a classical cellist (大提琴手) and one-half of a two-person multimedia company called the Bowerbird Collective.

Albrecht asked his advisor if there was anything Bowerbird Collective could do to make people aware of the action plan. That was when they discussed the idea of an album. “I knew it was an ambitious thing to suggest and — I don’t know — Stephen’s a little bit crazy like me, and he said, let's do this,” Albrecht tells NPR. The other half of Bowerbird, the violinist Simone Slattery, arranged a musical collage (拼贴) of all 53 birds on the record, while the remaining tracks are each bird’s individual songs recorded by Stewart.

“We did it! Thanks to your incredible support we reached Number 3 in the ARIA charts, ahead of Taylor Swift, ABBA, Mariah Carey and Michael Buble,” the organizers wrote on their website, noting the Christmas-time bump given to the latter.

All proceeds of the album were donated to BirdLife Australia, which helped in production.

Some of the singing comes from birds that are Critically-Endangered, and one bird, the Night Parrot, wasn’t even known to science until 2013. “The golden bowerbird sounds like a death ray from some cheesy 70s sci-fi series,” says Sean Dooley, the national public affairs manager at BirdLife Australia.

Caring for the Environment Starts from Ourselves

10 . Don't worry about why the chicken crossed the road—the bigger question is whether it'll make it at all.     1     But that road risk has dropped because of the COVID pandemic.

When officials began issuing stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of COVID-19, Shilling and his colleagues quickly realized they were witnessing a novel experiment:     2    

The answer is a lot of things, including fewer accidents and lower greenhouse gas emissions from cars. In their latest report, the researchers found that driving less has also led to a dramatic decrease in roadkills.

"    3     As far as I'm aware, no other action has been taken since creation of the national parks."

The team documented about a third fewer kills in the four weeks following shutdowns. If such a slowdown persisted for a year, 27.000 large animals would be saved in just those three states.

    4     Some populations in urban areas are at risk of local extinction, and vehicles are one of the top killers. However, in recent months, traffic deaths of mountain lions have dropped by 58 percent, revealing an important clue about how to save them.

People are now returning to the roads as stay-at-home orders are lifted.     5     "Yeah, I just say—everybody loves wildlife, you know—and if we can find a way to not kill them, it seems like everybody can line up behind that."