Author: Latest Results

Abstract

Plastics are integral to the modern economy. They are lightweight, strong, flexible and are used in all sorts of products in almost every industry. However, their widespread usage and poor degradability/disposability have also made them a threat to the ecosystem and human society. A promising solution is to use bioplastics, which are derived from renewable carbon sources and/or are degradable at their end-of-life stage. However, bioplastics currently account for only a small fraction of the total global market share of plastics (about 1%). Among the major barriers to their industrial translation are a lengthy and expensive testing and certification process, greenwashing and public misconceptions. In this Review, we address these obstacles and propose an accessible pre-screening framework for testing a large number of bioplastic products before they undergo standardized testing. We further describe the challenges associated with the life cycles of bioplastics and discuss how to address them, with reference to a case study from South Korea.

Abstract

In this article, I argue that post-truth politics is best understood and investigated as a distinct style of epistemological politics which embraces conspiracy to reject competing truth claims and evidence. I show the Flat Earth Movement to be a post-truth political formation with a unique geographic imagination forwarding specific ideas about the role of locales, landscapes, scale, and one’s embodied senses in knowledge production. I demonstrate how Flat Earthism’s geographic imagination prioritizes a person’s embodied senses, particularly vision, over other ways of knowing, codifying experiential interpretations of locales and landscapes into a generalized scalar knowledge applied to the planetary and cosmic scales. The contribution to the literature on post-truth politics in Geography I would like to make is three-fold. First, I would like to show that post-truth politics is not merely the intentional circulation of lies, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, or alternative facts. Such conceptualizations can miss that post-truth politics can be reflective of actual publics with unique epistemologies, geographic imaginations, and knowledges. Second, and related, I want to demonstrate that post-truth politics transcend the discourses of specific politicians. Third, and finally, I seek to demonstrate the need for greater empirical and analytic consideration of conspiracy theorizing in post-truth politics.

Abstract

The United States recently passed major federal laws supporting the energy transition. Analyses suggest that their successful implementation could reduce US emissions more than 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. However, achieving maximal emissions reductions would require frictionless supply and demand responses to the laws’ incentives and implementation that avoids polarization and efforts to repeal or undercut them. In this Perspective, we discuss some of these supply, demand and polarization challenges. We highlight insights from social science research, and identify open questions needing answers, regarding how to address these challenges. The stakes are high. The success of these new laws could catalyse virtuous cycles in the energy transition; their failure could breed cynicism about major government spending on climate change.

Abstract

The crustal motions throughout Germany have not yet been fully understood because the research scope of previous studies often focuses only on some active grabens. Thus, we investigate it in detail to identify the neotectonic motion characteristics and specific deformation-ongoing regions. High accuracy for monitoring and data analyses is required because the expected crustal deformation in Germany is small. For this reason, we use high-precision GNSS time series processing techniques and interdisciplinary data to reflect actual motions and determine the causes of deformation. Also, an advanced technique of discontinuity correction is introduced to unify the fragments of the GNSS coordinate time series for better velocity field reliability. Our findings show that the crustal motions in Germany tend to increase at a maximum speed of +1.0 mm/year. Meanwhile, local subsidence of around \(-\) 0.8 mm/year is concentrated in the river basins (e.g., the Rhine, Ems, Elbe, Northern Oder, and Danube) and extensive mining regions. The Earth’s crust here also behaves with noticeable compressions. The intra-plate motion in Germany is \(\sim \) 0.8 mm/year. A special region with an extension rate of +4.3 nstrain/year is observed along the North–South trending Regensburg-Leipzig-Rostock shear zone. Machine Learning clusters the 3D plate velocity field in Germany into three distinct regions with increasing speeds: Northwest, East, and Southwest. Significant surface deformations are detected mainly in the Upper Rhine graben, Eifel volcanic field, and Thuringian-Vogtland slate mountains. The harmonic motions of the Earth’s crust in Germany have an amplitude of \(\sim \) 4.7 mm, in which the surface loads contribute half to this type of motion. The findings will contribute to the overall picture of neotectonics here.

Abstract

This article discusses activist perceptions of the beneficial potentialities of new media for environmental campaigning as investigated in Australia, due to its high level of environmental activism and Internet usage. Drawing upon literature on communication theory, environmental politics, digital activism, and social movement theory, this study explores new media use for activism in two large Australia-wide environmental campaigns: contestation of old-growth forest logging and unconventional gas mining (fracking) development. From March to May 2017, 34 environmental activists involved in these campaigns were interviewed for this study. They shared their opinions on what it meant for them to use new media, the difficulties they encountered, but also the beneficial potentialities they identified in using these media for their activism. The study findings show that new media built significantly on more ‘traditional’ forms of activism, including stalls and non-violent street demonstrations, but also enabled extended activist outreach, enhanced engagement with supporters, and boosted campaign mobilisation. As such, despite an array of quite challenging limitations they also referred to, and to which they responded strategically, Australian environmental activists found new media highly beneficial to their activism.