With production surging by 4.4%, corn will drive world cereal grain production to record levels in 2020/2021, said the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in its first forecast of the new crops. It was the second forecast in a week of record global output as the planting season ends in the northern hemisphere. The FAO forecast cereal grain production of 2.781 billion tonnes, up 2.6% from the record set in 2019/2020.

In spite of uncertainties posed by the pandemic,” it said, prospects point to “a comfortable supply and demand situation…"

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Flashback 2019: ‘We really need to wake up quickly’: Al Gore warns of a looming food crisis caused by climate change - Wash Post - Oct 21, 2019: - 

Gore had invited 300 guests — chefs, farmers, food executives and activists — to “The Climate Underground,” a two-day conference last week at his family farm here that explored the intersection of food, climate change and sustainable agriculture...the main event was Gore’s slide show, delivered with his characteristic mix of bravado and humility, detailing the impacts of climate change on food systems worldwide...

Gore spent the better part of 90 minutes detailing the pressures of drought, heat, flooding, superstorms, “rain bombs,” invasive insects, fungi and bacterial blight on food producers. “We may be approaching a threshold beyond which the agriculture that we’ve always known cannot support human civilization as we know it,” he declared in a low growl. “That’s something we need to avoid.”

“There is a new colonialism just as oppressive as the original,” he said. “Some in the environmental movement believe they can sit in London, New York or Paris with the comforts of modern life and dictate to Africa how they should generate power.”

More here & here: 

People living in Denmark will need to sort their recycling into ten different containers, under a new deal that aims to cut 0.7m tonnes of emissions and make the country's waste sector carbon neutral by 2030.

“Birds have evolved over hundreds of years to fly certain paths to migrate,” said New Hampshire-based environmentalist Lisa Linowes. “You can’t throw a turbine up in the way and expect them to adapt. It’s not happening.” “Democrats have been sold a false narrative by the industrial wind industry,” said Kevon Martis, a Michigan-based environmentalist and co-founder of the Energy and Wildlife Coalition with Linowes.

“Many Democrats somehow imagine that industrial wind farms, which take hundreds of times more land than a natural gas plant, are better for the environment,” he added.

...

The wind industry claims house cats kill more birds than wind turbines. But cats mainly kill small, common birds like sparrows, robins, and jays, whereas wind turbines kill big, threatened, slow-to-reproduce species like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors. 

The rapidly spinning blades of wind turbines act like an apex predator that big birds never evolved to deal with. And because big birds have much lower reproductive rates than small birds, their deaths have a far greater impact on the overall population of the species.  For example, golden eagles will have just one or two chicks in a brood, and usually less than once a year, whereas a songbird like a robin could have up to two broods of three to seven chicks each year.

The UN warns that the raw materials used to produce electric car batteries are highly concentrated in a small number of countries and their extraction and refinement pose a serious threat to the environment. The U.N. trade body, UNCTAD, has issued a new report breaking down some of the unintended negative consequences of the shift, which include ecological degradation as well as human rights abuses. 
The report notes that metals such as cobalt, lithium, manganese, copper, and minerals like graphite “play a significant role in energy-related technologies such as rechargeable batteries that are used in a variety of applications ranging from electronics to electric vehicles as well as in renewable energies such as nuclear, wind, and solar power.”

Reservoirs in the heart of an ancient Maya city were so polluted with mercury and blue-green algae that the water likely was undrinkable. Researchers from the University of Cincinnati found toxic levels of pollution in four central reservoirs in Tikal, an ancient Maya city that dates back to the third century B.C. in what is now northern Guatemala. UC’s findings suggest droughts in the ninth century likely contributed to the depopulation and eventual abandonment of the city...

A geochemical analysis found that two reservoirs nearest the city palace and temple contained extremely high and toxic levels of mercury that UC researchers traced back to a pigment the Maya used to adorn buildings, clayware and other goods.

“Racism is ‘inexorably’ linked to climate change, said Penn State meteorologist Gregory Jenkins, because it dictates who benefits from activities that produce planet-warming gases and who suffers most from the consequences.” 

Kaplan continued to tout Jenkins’s nonsensical theory: “In a course he teaches called ‘Climate Change, Climate Justice and Front Line Communities,’ Jenkins traces this connection from slavery, which created the economic foundation for the industrial revolution, to modern-day policies that influence where people live and environmental risks to which they are exposed.” 

“The world of climate activism has historically been dominated by white men, said Dorceta Taylor, an environmental sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies the history of the environmental movement."

In the Los Angeles area, California's renewable energy, energy efficiency and electric vehicle programs are disproportionately rewarding wealthy ratepayers, whose high energy use is being "subsidized" by other ratepayers in the area, researchers at UCLA's California Center for Sustainable Communities found.