American white water lily and its reflection

Nymphaea odorata at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on September 8th.

 

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An unspoken truth of the climate-change crusade is this: Anything the U.S. does to reduce emissions won’t matter much to global temperatures. U.S. cuts will be swamped by the increases in India, Africa and especially China. Look no further than China’s boom in new coal-fired electricity.

Under the nonbinding 2015 Paris climate agreement, China can increase its emissions until 2030. And is it ever. Between 2015 and 2021 China’s emissions increased by some 11%, according to the Climate Action Tracker, which evaluates nationally determined contributions under the Paris agreement. The U.S. has reduced its emissions by some 6% between 2015 and 2021. Beijing made minimal new commitments at last year’s Glasgow confab on climate, despite world pressure.

That’s the beginning of a September 12th Wall Street Journal editorial whose subhead is “Beijing is building more coal-fired capacity than the rest of the world combined, U.S. climate lectures notwithstanding.” Did you catch the third word in the second quoted paragraph? “Nonbinding” means that no matter what the leaders of a country say they will do, they don’t actually have to do it. And I have news for you: many people promise to do things they have no intention of doing. Later in the editorial we find this:

The reason for China’s coal boom is obvious: The Communist Party’s priority is economic growth, higher living standards, and becoming the world’s leading power. Carbon emissions are an afterthought, and promises of future reductions are the compliment Chinese vice pays to Western virtue signalers.

And here’s the last paragraph:

While the Biden Administration does all it can to restrict U.S. fossil fuels, no matter the economic harm, Beijing is charging ahead with coal imports, coal mining and coal power to become the world’s leading economy. They must marvel at their good fortune in having rivals who are so self-destructive.

 You’re welcome to read the full Wall Street Journal editorial.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Driving up to the Kolob Reservoir

Five years ago today we drove north on Kolob Terrace Road to the Kolob Reservoir just outside Utah’s Zion National Park. The placid scene shown above of pallid aspen trunks (Populus tremuloides) awaited us at the top. On the way up to the reservoir we’d stopped at the grove of trees shown below, where fire-darkened trunks and branches contrasted with colorful fall foliage.

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You may find it hard to believe that now, so many decades after the Civil Rights Movement led to the end of segregation in the United States, some public schools in this country have gone back to segregating students by race. Concerned Americans have justifiably been fighting back against this neoracism in our schools. As one example, you can read about illegal racial segregation in the public schools of Wellesley, Massachusetts, and the lawsuit that Parents Defending Education has brought against the offending school district. Notice in the article that this public school district has also been guilty of suppressing the free speech guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

 

Green, green, and more green

 

Wandering along Bull Creek on June 25, 2019, I couldn’t help noticing the dense swirls created by the very long linear leaves of some plants (sedges? beargrass?) that had found a home on the sometimes flooded bank of the creek. Mixed in were a few remnants of the wild onions (Allium canadense var. canadense) you saw here in May of that year. New giant ragweed plants (Ambrosia trifida) were coming up in some of the swirls:

 

I prepared this post almost two years ago but other things soon intervened that seemed more important to show. Last year I happened to end up at this place again and took more pictures. Now here we are another year later and I’m finally going to release the original post, but with an added green picture from my 2020 visit that shows a dewdrop-decked wild onion bud:

 

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And here are some can-do words from Zora Neale Hurston: “It seems to me that if I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game, and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it, even though I know some in there are dealing from the bottom and cheating like hell in other ways.”

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Autumn shorescape

On the sunny morning of November 17th I felt compelled to stop for the first time in years at the northern end of Redbud Isle in the Colorado River when we were driving west and saw how good things looked there. The trees turning orange-brown are bald cypresses, Taxodium distichum. Below is a closer view looking up at a bald cypress; the darkish clumps on some of the branches are ball moss (Tillandsia recurvata).

Here’s a relevant quotation for today: “And all the lives we ever lived / And all the lives to be, / Are full of trees and changing leaves….” ― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

A new way of looking at broomweed

In the recent post about experiments in zooming I mentioned that the fountain at the Lakes Blvd. and Howard Lane hadn’t gotten turned on by 7:10 in the morning, so I left and did other things. One of the first was to see what sorts of images I could make with the disc of the rising sun reflected in a nearby pond. I used those bright reflections to silhouette a broomweed plant, Amphiachyris dracunculoides.

Here’s an unrelated thought for today: “The notion that nothing might be anything is quite something.” — S.S.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Syrphid self-portrait

Don’t let the title mislead you. It wasn’t a syrphid fly that did a self-portrait, but me, inadvertently, when leaning in to take a picture of this hoverfly (Toxomerus marginatus) on a Texas yellow star (Lindheimera texana) a couple of miles from home on April 5th. If you’re having trouble seeing my reflection on the thorax in the main picture, below is an enlargement. These tiny flies are about a quarter of an inch (6mm) long.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

 

Fronds

Fronds caught my attention at the Bojo River Nature Reserve in Aloguinsan on December 17th.

The challenge was finding good ways to fill a rectangle.

In the last picture I took a different approach.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

5100

Over the 26 days from July 17 through August 11 we drove 5100 miles on a journey that took us as far afield as Toronto and New York. This was a combination trip:

• People, including some I hadn’t seen since 1973.
• Culture, primarily in the form of museums, most of which we got into for free thanks to reciprocal privileges from our membership in Austin’s Blanton Museum.
• Scenic places (had to do at least some nature photography, right?).

On July 17 we made the fatiguing 650-mile push to Memphis. The next morning I photographed a pond along the Austin Peay Highway northeast of Memphis.

Here’s a second view of that pond:

Not long afterwards I stopped at another pond a little further east:

In the shallows of that second pond grew a plant that, because of reflections, seemed to be floating in clouds:

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Repeating myself

Following coastal roads west from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on June 4th, I stopped in the vicinity of Chester to photograph pretty tree reflections in a pond.

Upon climbing back up from the bank of the pond, I noticed the new growth on a nearby evergreen tree.

About half an hour later and further west, I stopped to photograph attractive reflections in another pond.

Upon climbing back up from the bank of that pond, I noticed a nearby tree that had died and was covered with beard lichens.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

 

Red Deer River

Above is a pastel and some would say painterly view of the Red Deer River passing through Rosedale, Alberta, on August 26th. Below you see a cliff that’s on the same side of the river and that doesn’t hold on tightly to its future as a cliff. These two views tell you you’re looking at a part, more colorful than many others, of the Canadian Badlands.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman