By Walt Hickey

Storm the Beach

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been in a standoff with about half of the 461 property owners along a barrier island in Pinellas County, Florida, over $42 million worth of new sand to repair their eroded beaches. The property owners are denying public access to the beaches, refusing to sign documents to grant the easements, which is currently leaving them exposed to the impacts of dangerous storms. The easement policy is decades old at this point and ensures that public money is not spent to restore private beaches. The current standoff goes back to 2017, but tensions began running hot last year after Hurricane Idalia eroded the beaches to a dangerous extent.

Jake Bittle, Grist

Careem

In 2022, ride-share service Careem announced it had finished its billionth ride, largely fueled by the app’s success in Pakistan, which accounted for about 30 percent of those rides. It was acquired in 2019 by Uber, and what’s come since is that Careem has effectively collapsed in the country, the third-ranked app behind inDrive and Yango. Careem has just 373,920 daily active users, well below the 2 million claimed by inDrive. Some of that is because Pakistan’s economy has been volatile, prompting Uber to de-emphasize a country where the rupee has fallen 20 percent against the dollar since 2022.

Zuha Siddiqui, Rest of World

Streams

A new analysis of 75 streams in Brooks Range in Alaska found that many of the pristine waterways have been turning orange, a discoloration most often seen when rivers are contaminated with runoff from mining operations. The study doesn’t cite mines as the issue, instead pointing the finger to climate change, which is melting permafrost and releasing previously frozen metals like iron, copper, zinc and cadmium. Those, in turn, are getting into the water after being frozen in the dirt for thousands of years, and are fouling the waterways.

Hannah Northey and Samantha Latson, E&E News

Whales

The vocalizations made by baby beluga whales come in at 120 decibels, 22 decibels below the calls of older belugas. That difference has a significant impact on how those newborns can be heard, with newborn calls reaching only 350 meters away, compared to the 6.5-kilometer range for adult belugas. That’s a problem given how loud the oceans are getting thanks to human activity: In 1980, the merchant shipping fleet was 700,000 ships, which today stands at 2 million.

Amorina Kingdon, Hakai Magazine

Mushroom Stumps

Pennsylvania supplies 64 percent of all the button mushrooms produced in the United States, a crop which annually comes in at 321,601 metric tons. On average, 29 percent of that weight — 93,264 metric tons — is discarded mushroom stumps, which is composted as it’s not desired by consumers of mushrooms. That said, there are still nutrients in mushroom stumps, and Pennsylvania also produces a whole lot of chicken, so scientists were interested if perhaps there isn’t some sort of arbitrage opportunity here. They found that broiler chickens fed a supplemented diet with 3 percent mushroom stump waste grew at the same rate as the birds in the control group, though pushing that percentage to 4 percent does slow growth.

Jeff Mulhollem, Pennsylvania State University

Commutes

A new study found that commutes of 50 miles or more applied to 8.9 percent of all commuters in the 2023-24 period, an increase from the 7.3 percent of commuters that did that kind of haul in the 2019-20 period. The percentage of commutes that were 35 miles or less still constitutes a majority, but the figure dipped a bit, a result that would make sense if a portion of commuters left municipal cores to move out into the sticks.

Anne Marie Chaker, The Wall Street Journal

Canadian

Canada’s CRTC, the telecom regulator, has ruled that in light of the Online Streaming Act that took effect last year, foreign streaming platforms like Netflix, Spotify and Disney+ that operate inside the country and make C$25 million or more must spend 5 percent of their Canadian revenues on local content production. The estimate has that coming in at C$200 million in new funding. I look forward to all sorts of incredible streaming television set in “New York” and definitely not a thinly veiled version of Toronto or Vancouver.

Etan Vlessing, The Hollywood Reporter

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