Eco-news in brief 5-22
By CG News Editor April Jaynes
City of Athens considers frack tax
Last week during a planning and development committee meeting, Fourth Ward member Christine Fahl proposed a severance tax for oil and gas companies. The tax will hopefully provide a “clean-up” fund for the city. Because it is still uncertain whether the county or city of Athens has the carbon resources that the horizontal hydraulic fracturing drilling technique requires, concerns about this controversial method remain. The body also discussed the possibility of forming a permit system for unmetered water usage, and this idea is currently under review.
New imported fish study reveals less quantity, more diversity
A recent study published in PLoS ONE found that only 11 million coral reef fish were imported to the U.S. for saltwater aquariums, as opposed to the 15 million recorded on declaration forms of the previous report. The previous year’s diversity estimates for the aquarium trade were also 22 percent lower than what the current study found. Specifically, this year’s study found that the imports were comprised of 1,802 species from 125 families.
Climate change confirmed by 1,000 years of data
A large-scale temperature reconstruction was recently created by researchers at the University of Melbourne, verifying the warming of Australia. Scientists used 27 natural climate records to reconstruct the last 1,000 years of Australia’s temperature data, leading them to believe that human-caused climate change is occurring. The study was recently published in the Journal of Climate.
