The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recommended on Monday that the U.S. government lift protections for most populations of humpback whales, a species found in oceans around the globe.

The U.S. agency called for reclassification of the existing humpback whale population in 14 distinct categories, 10 of which, it recommended, should be removed from the federal “endangered” list.

In a statement released Monday, the NOAA said that protection and restoration efforts over the past 45 years had significantly helped in increasing the population of the mammals to a level where they no longer needed to be listed as an endangered species.

However, under the proposed new categorization, two population groups, including the one in western North Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan, will remain listed as threatened, and two others will continue to be listed as endangered.Even if the species is removed from the endangered list, it would still remain protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, NOAA said in the statement.

“As we learn more about the species -- and realize the populations are largely independent of each other -- managing them separately allows us to focus protection on the animals that need it the most,” Eileen Sobeck, assistant NOAA administrator for fisheries, said in the statement.

The commercial hunting of the humpback whales, which had once been pushed to the brink of extinction, was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1966. The U.S. first listed the animal as endangered in 1970. In the 45 years since then, the population of these whales increased to nearly 80,000, compared to nearly 5,000 during the peak of humpback whaling in the 1960s.

“To be able to bring a species to a point where their population is doing well and they no longer meet those requirements to be on the Endangered Species Act (ESA), I think that is a really important success for us as a nation,” Donna Weiting, director of the NOAA’s office of protected resources, reportedly said.

However, a few countries still allow the hunting of humpback whales. In Japan, Norway and Iceland, for instance, killing of these mammals is permitted for scientific research. Moreover, several humpback whales are also killed every year by Japanese fishermen in the Southern Ocean for meat and blubber.

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NOW WATCH: Watch these giant container ships collide near the Suez Canal

Americans tend to take it for granted that when we open a tap, water will come out.

Western states have been dealing with water problems for a while, but they won't be alone for long.

As drought, flooding, and climate change restrict America's water supply, demands from population growth and energy production look set to increase, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

These two changes squeeze our natural water reserves from both directions. The stress is becoming clear and will soon manifest as water scarcity problems all over our country.

The California problem

Over the last four years, Californians have gotten a big wake-up call, as drought forces them to reconsider water as a scarce commodity.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the region's water supplier, will deliver 15% less water to cities in the greater Los Angeles area starting in July. The supplier won't cut off delivering water if demand is more than the quota, but it'll charge local utility companies that sell residents water up to four times more than the normal rate for the excess. And naturally, the utility companies will pass the cost on to their customers.

The water companies' cuts are a reaction to California Governor Jerry Brown's executive order that cities throughout the state reduce the amount of water they use by 25% — a groundbreaking mandate from the Governor's office to limit water use for the first time ever.

A looming national issue

While the rest of the US hasn't been ordered to reduce water use, that doesn't mean we have a free pass to use as much water as we want. Many states — 4o out of 50 according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office— have at least one region that's expected to face some kind of water shortage in the next 10 years.

Here's what that looks like:

In some cases, shortages happen when there's not enough fresh water suitable for human use in the lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers we can access. Rain and snowfall does replace the water we take from these sources, but that refill takes time and depends on actually getting precipitation. Drought-stricken California, for example, has a much reduced snowpack this year compared to 2010, its last near-normal year. Less snowpack means less snow to melt and refill the state's reservoirs with fresh water people can use.

According to Tim Davis, the Montana Water Resources Division administrator, a water shortage could strike any part of the state in any given year, Elaine S. Povich reports for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

In other cases, like Montana, water demand just keeps increasing, the 2015 State Water Plan says, while the amount of water available changes from year to year, and even within a year, depending on precipitation. The discrepancy between demand and availability means the state is likely going to encounter a water crisis in the next few years. The state is already making contingency plans for potential drought conditions in the future, Davis told Povich.

In other, coastal areas of the US, rising sea levels taint fresh water coastal aquifers with salt water, which means that water can't be consumed anymore without expensive desalination treatment. This is a looming threat for eastern and southern Maryland, according to the Government Accountability Office report.

Those worries are compounded by population growth in central and southern Maryland, which is putting pressure on the water supplies there. Though water managers in Maryland don't anticipate statewide shortages, they told the GAO some areas may struggle to find enough water for everyone moving in, because there isn't a feasible way to dramatically increase the amount of water available. So even those of us who live in parts of the country not experiencing drought could stand to put less stress on our water supplies.

In Colorado, officials told the Government Accountability Office they're keeping an eye on the effects of fracking on the state's water supply. Using water for fracking could contribute to local shortages in the drought-prone state, which only gets 12-16 inches of precipitation every year. Plus, a previous GAO report highlighted the risk that fracking can contaminate the water supply so humans can't use even the water they normally could.

Also out West, the U.S. Census Bureau projects the populations of Nevada and Arizona will more than double between 2000 and 2030. But those two states get some of the nation's lowest amounts of precipitation, so more people will be vying to use water resources that already aren't plentiful.

Everybody's problem

While any given person may not be directly causing these water issues, everyone plays a role in how much drinkable water there is in the US. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the average American used 88 gallons of water per day in 2010, the latest year it surveyed water use.

The entirety of humanity in America uses 27,400 million gallons per day around the house, for stuff like preparing food, washing clothes, flushing toilets, and watering lawns.

The map below from the U.S. Geological Survey shows how that breaks down by state on a daily basis, which doesn't even include the water that goes into producing the energy, food, and products we use. (For example, it takes over a gallon of water to grow a single almond.)

This isn't just a US problem, either. The water crisis is even worse in many other countries, especially those without good infrastructure to get water from rivers and aquifers. The UN estimates a fifth of the world's population lives in an area where water is scarce, and another fourth of the world's people don't have access to water because countries lack the infrastructure to distribute it.

By 2030, nearly half of everyone in the world will be living in countries highly stressed for water, according to UN predictions. Bank of America Merrill Lynch reports that water scarcity is our biggest problem worldwide, and projects that climate change will only make it worse.

Ready access to water is not something everyone in the world can take for granted, and Americans may not be able to much longer.

SEE ALSO: Alarming charts show how fast California is losing its water

SEE ALSO: Sea-level rise is tainting drinking water — here are 4 ways to make it drinkable

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NOW WATCH: How Richard Branson Gets Fresh Water On His Private Island

Earth is a beautiful, one-of-a-kind place, two facts we're reminded of every year on April 22, also known as Earth Day.

To celebrate the natural world, we've rounded up some of the most beautiful and mesmerizing pictures of our home planet from Reuters.

Hopefully these images make you appreciate earth and how important it is to continue to protect and preserve our environment. 

Swans swim past changing autumn leaves in Sheffield Park Gardens in southern England.

Cherry blossoms are seen in full bloom in Tokyo.

Smoke and lava spew from Chile's Villarrica Volcano at the end of March.

It was a bright, clear morning on Mount Everest and a group of Sherpa porters were preparing a route up the world's tallest peak for their western clients.

But at 6:45 am, an enormous mass of ice ripped off the steep slope above and cascaded down the mountain face, killing 16 of them.

The avalanche, which occurred one year ago, was the deadliest accident ever on the iconic mountain.

The Sherpa community called off the climbing season's remaining ascents, which helped to bring attention to their often-poor working conditions and low pay.

In the year since the accident, attention has also turned to human impacts on the ecology of Mount Everest.

Researchers and climbers told VICE News that as the number of ascents each year has increased, so has the amount of garbage and human waste left behind.

And climate change, they say, may be transforming the mountain, bringing greater risks as glaciers melt and the mountain surface becomes more unstable.

Between 70,000 and 100,000 visitors descend upon Mount Everest each year, Alton Byers, director of science and exploration at the US-based Mountain Institute, told VICE News.

At base camp, visitors annually produce about 12,000 pounds of human waste each year, which often ends up in the waterways that nearby villages rely upon, he said.

"It's getting notorious — people getting sick from water contaminated by dumping human waste," he told VICE News.

Further downhill from base camp, lodge owners who house visitors before and after climbs use septic tanks that often leak, further polluting the water, Byers said. Springs have dried up due to warmer temperatures and changing precipitation patterns. In this way, the pollution is a "climate change stressor," he said, worsening the effects of global warming. Adding to the ecological degradation, lodge owners dispose of solid waste in huge, open-air garbage pits.

"The place is getting covered with landfills, creating an environmental hazard for humans and animals," Byers said.

Waste is an equally complex issue further up the mountain, where climbers frequent the same few routes to attempt safe ascents — and where they leave behind their refuse to avoid carrying any extra weight. Plastics, tents, oxygen tanks, and even the corpses of past climbers lay scattered on the slope.

Nepal's government has told climbers to bring down an amount of garbage on their descent equal to what they left behind, and a local guide, Dawa Stevens Sherpa, has started a non-profit to pay people who bring down waste.

But even these well-intentioned efforts at conservation have run into problems. The nearby village of Gork Shep has served as a dump for Mount Everest waste, but has already reached its limit, meaning waste must be hauled further downhill.

"It's unsightly but they ran out of room at Gork Shep, so they're taking it lower," Garry Porter, an engineer working in the region, told VICE News. "It's an eyesore."

Porter does not blame the climbing community for the waste. He says the remote terrain and inadequate infrastructure make waste disposal a particularly challenging problem — one that he and a team of other engineers think they can address. Over the past five years, the group has developed the Mount Everest Biogas Project, which aims to deploy equipment on Mount Everest that converts human waste into methane. The gas can be used locally for heating and cooking.

"In order to make projects like this work, they have to have economic benefits," Porter told VICE News, noting that local residents would benefit from the free fuel.

But the waste digesters typically rely on natural heat to break down human feces and Gork Shep is located at 17,000 feet — where temperatures are often too cold for the conversion process.

"We think we have a solution; we're all engineers," Porter told VICE News. "Our team has been looking at how to make the digester warm enough in this terrible environment."

Porter says the group aims to deploy their digesters next year.

As environmentalists and the local community work to minimize the impact of climbers on Mount Everest, climate change could be taking a sweeping toll on the slopes, some scientists argue.

John All is the director of the American Climber Science Program — and among the few who've reached the summit of Mount Everest. He told VICE News that the impact of climbers is relatively small.

"We're tiny little things on a gigantic mass of ice," he said. "What climbers impact doesn't really impact anybody but those climbers."

All's concern is the thinning ice. His friend, Asman Tamand Sherpa, was one of the victims of last year's avalanche — and All nearly died just a month later on a different, nearby slope, when he fell 70 feet into a crevasse.

"I broke 15 bones and six vertebra and I was bleeding internally, and I had to climb out of the crevasse," he told VICE News. He said crevasses were more abundant due to climate change, and that climbing was increasingly risky.

"What we're seeing is a massive reduction in glacial cover and a lot of instability, so what ice is left is moving quickly and not consolidated well," All explained. "The whole area has become much less trustworthy and now you know anything you do is going to potentially cause problems."

Jeffrey Kargel, a professor at the University of Arizona's Department of Hydrology and Water Resources who has conducted research around Mount Everest, told VICE News that it remains unclear what role — if any — climate change plays in avalanches on Mount Everest. He said it was "reasonable conjecture" that they were increasing in frequency as glaciers thinned, but that the proof has not yet been established.

"We can't jump to the conclusion that [last year's avalanche] was certainly due to climate change but these kinds of disasters are increasingly on the minds of the trekking and mountaineering companies that bring people up to the summit," Kargel told VICE News. "And people who live and work in the area are very impacted by climate change. They're concerned about the hazards that confront them."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter: @merhoffman

SEE ALSO: 60 pictures that will make you fall in love with Earth all over again

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows what the US would look like if all the Earth's ice melted

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Volcano Calbuco erupted on Wednesday in southern Chile, sending a plume of ash and smoke several miles up into the sky, local television images showed. 

CNN Chile reports a Red Alert has been issued for the surrounding area and people were being asked to leave.

The AFP reports the evacuation order applies to everyone within about a 6-mile radius of the volcano.

The last time Calbuco erupted, according to CNN Chile, was 1961, with its last reported "activity" in 1996, when it apparently emitted gases and steam.

Chile's Onemi emergency office says the eruption occurred about 1,000 km (625 miles) south of the capital Santiago near the tourist town of Puerto Varas.

About 1,500 people were being evacuated, authorities said.

"The eruption happened about half an hour ago. There are a lot of people out in the streets, many heading to the gas stations to fill up on gas," Derek Way, a resident of Puerto Varas, told Reuters.Chile, on the Pacific 'Rim of Fire', has the second largest chain of volcanoes in the world after Indonesia, including around 500 that are potentially active.

In March, volcano Villarrica, also in southern Chile, erupted in spectacular fashion, sending a plume of ash and lava high into the sky, but quickly subsided.

Plenty of pictures of the volcano have been coming in, many of them showing what appears to be a thick column of smoke and ash floating overhead. 

And here are some stunning photos from social media:

A look at where the volcano is located:

(Reuters reporting by Anthony Esposito)

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NOW WATCH: Watch these giant container ships collide near the Suez Canal

OSLO (Reuters) - Economic output by the world's oceans is worth $2.5 trillion a year, rivaling nations such as Britain or Brazil, but marine wealth is sinking fast because of over-fishing, pollution and climate change, a study said on Thursday.

"The deterioration of the oceans has never been so fast as in the last decades," Marco Lambertini, director general of the WWF International conservation group, told Reuters of the study entitled "Reviving the Ocean Economy".

Ocean output, judged as a nation, would rank seventh behind the gross domestic product of Britain and just ahead of Brazil's on a list led by the United States and China, the study said.

The report, by WWF, the Global Change Institute at Queensland University in Australia and the Boston Consulting Group, estimated that annual "gross marine product" (GMP) was currently worth $2.5 trillion.

That included fisheries, coastal tourism, shipping lanes and the fact that the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the air, helping to slow global warming. The study did not estimate the rate of decline in GMP.

Lambertini said the report aimed to put pressure on governments to act by casting the environment in economic terms and was a shift for the WWF beyond stressing threats to creatures such as turtles or whales.

"It's not just about wildlife, pretty animals. It is about us," he said.

The report, for instance, values carbon dioxide absorbed from the air at $39 per tonne, drawing on estimates by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to judge damage from warming such as more flooding or risks to human health.

The study estimated that total ocean assets, such as coral reefs, mangroves, shipping lanes and carbon absorption, were worth a total of $24 trillion, about 10 times annual output.

Governments have repeatedly promised, and failed, to prevent ocean degradation. A U.N. Earth Summit in South Africa in 2002, for instance, set 2015 as the goal for restoring depleted fish stocks.

Lambertini said U.N. sustainable development goals for 2030, due to be set in September, could help the oceans recover if properly implemented, along with a U.N. deal to combat climate change due at a summit in Paris in December.

He also urged governments to achieve a U.N. goal of creating protected areas to cover 10 percent of all ocean area by 2020, up from 3.4 percent now.

(Editing by Ralph Boulton)

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NOW WATCH: NASA discovered exactly where lightning strikes the most

NEW YORK (AP) — A clean-water advocate took an Earth Day swim in the polluted Gowanus Canal, a federal Superfund site.

"I'm going in!" yelled Christopher Swain, wearing a yellow-and-black protective suit and a green swim cap as he crossed a railing into the water near a sewage discharge point in Brooklyn, where a sign warns people to stay out of the water.

He was accompanied Wednesday by a woman in a kayak, paddling a few feet away from him.

"It's not safe to swim in here," he said afterward, stating the obvious. The canal water "tasted like mud, poop, ground-up grass, detergent, gasoline."

He didn't swallow, and he gargled with hydrogen peroxide.

Police stood watch but did not intervene. Swain, 47, got out about a half-hour later. He said the weather forecast cut his swim in half, but he promised to return another time.

"I've patiently waited for this to be cleaned up," the Boston-area resident said. "It's crazy that the most polluted waterway in the United States of America is in the United States of America's greatest city, New York."

The Gowanus Canal is known as one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States. The 19th-century canal was once a major transportation route. By law, it's being cleaned up to the tune of half a billion dollars. Cleanup efforts are slated for completion in 2022.

Much of the costs will be paid by the companies that caused the contamination or their successors.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency says contaminants include PCBs, which were banned in the U.S. in 1979.

The canal runs over 1.5 miles through a narrow industrial zone near some of Brooklyn's wealthiest neighborhoods. Swain estimated that he swam about two-thirds of a mile on Wednesday.

He described the water, fed by industrial waste including residue from heavy metals and chemicals: "It's really turbid. It's really cloudy. You can hardly see anything. It's gross."

Swain said it's clear environmental experts are working hard on the cleanup.

"It's slow, and it's a big job," he said. "But they're actually getting somewhere."

He said he hoped the Gowanus would someday be healthy enough for normal swimming.

"We put a man on the moon. We split the atom," he added. "We can clean up the Gowanus Canal."

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NOW WATCH: Scientists discovered why the Washington Monument is shrinking

A juvenile male pocket shark has been discovered, making it the second of this type of shark ever recorded, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say.

The teensy shark, extending just 5.5 inches (14 centimeters) in length and weighing a mere half ounce (14.6 grams), was found in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, though it was only recently identified, when Mark Grace, of NOAA Fisheries' Pascagoula, Mississippi, Laboratory, examined the specimen.

The Gulf pocket shark is one of two such sharks ever reported.

"Discovering him has us thinking about where Mom and Dad may be, and how they got to the Gulf," Grace said in a statement. "The only other known specimen was found very far away, off Peru, 36 years ago."

Grace discovered the shark in holdings at the Pascagoula lab. Scientists had collected the specimen, which was found to be dead when sorted from the rest of the catch, from the deep sea about 190 miles (305 kilometers) offshore Louisiana in 2010.

At that time the researchers identified the animal only as a member of the Dalatiidaefamily of sharks, which includes pocket sharks, Grace told Live Science. Before that collection, the only other specimen of pocket shark came from a female shark collected in 1984 in the Nazca Submarine Ridge in the southeast Pacific Ocean.

Though the shark could indeed fit into one's pocket, the researchers noted its tiny body isn't the source of the group's common name; rather, an orifice, or pocket, located just above its pectoral fin inspired the moniker. The orifice of the Gulf shark's pocket gland is 0.2 inches (4.2 millimeters) across.

A genetic analysis of a tissue sample from the Gulf shark suggested it belongs in the Mollisquama genus, and that pocket sharks are closely related to the kitefin and cookie cutter shark species, which are also part of the Dalatiidae family.

To figure out the species, Grace and his colleagues compared the newly identified specimen with written descriptions and photos of the one collected in 1984, identified as M. parini.

They found differences in appearance between the two sharks, including features of the animals' teeth and the number of vertebrae; in addition, the Gulf shark sports a cluster of light-emitting organs on its belly, something not seen or described in M. parini, the researchers noted in the Zootaxa journal article, published April 22, describing the newbie.

Those differences could also be the result of the sharks being different sexes and ages, as the female pocket shark was an adult. As such, researchers have placed the newbie into the Mollisquama genus without labeling its species.

Scientists are unsure the exact function of this pocket gland, though in 1984, scientists posited that the opening served to secrete pheromones for mate attraction. Another idea, Grace said, is that the orifice acts as a source of luminescence.

The Mollisquama pocket looks similar to the so-called luminous abdominal pouch on the dalatiid shark Euprotomicroides zantedeschia; that pouch may secrete a luminous fluid to attract prey or mates, or to elude predators, scientists have speculated.

The Gulf shark specimen is now part of the Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection at Tulane University's Biodiversity Research Institute in Belle Chasse, Louisiana. Others who contributed to the study of this shark include researchers at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and American Natural History Museum in New York City.

Follow Jeanna Bryner on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

• On the Brink: A Gallery of Wild Sharks
• Cyclops of the Sea: Pictures of a One-Eyed Shark
• Image Gallery: Great White Sharks

Copyright 2015 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

UP NEXT: Extremely detailed images of a rare goblin shark caught in Australia

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NOW WATCH: Underwater video captures sharks in feeding frenzy off the coast of the Bahamas

Bees don’t have the mouthpart sensitivity to taste — and thus can’t avoid — nectar tainted with neonicotinoid pesticides, new lab tests indicate.

And the charm of nicotine may even seduce bees into favoring pesticide-spiked nectar.

Outdoor tests also show that neonicotinoid exposure for some wild bees can be worrisome, a second paper reports.

Together, the studies renew questions about the widespread use of these pesticides on crops.

In the mouthpart tests, taste nerves in honeybees and buff-tailed bumblebees failed to show any jolt of reaction to three widely used neonicotinoid pesticides, says Geraldine Wright of Newcastle University in England.  

“I don’t think they can taste it all,” she says.

Bees buzzing among the floral riches outside laboratories would therefore not be able to avoid neonicotinoid-tainted nectar, she and her colleagues argue online April 22 in Nature.

Even though bees don’t taste the pesticides, something about their nicotine-related chemistry may bias bees to keep returning to the location of the spiked nectar, Wright suggests.

Offered a choice in the lab, both honeybees and bumblebees sipped more of the sugar water with a touch of a neonicotinoid pesticide in it than the plain sugar water.

Worries about what neonicotinoids do to pollinators reached such a peak in 2013 that the European Union banned use of those pesticides for two years, calling for more research. Studies have reported that exposure can impair bees’ skills at bringing home pollen and nectar, dimming their ability to navigate a landscape, for example. Debate has broken out over how lab studies apply to bees that can pick and choose flowers outdoors and how to interpret the results from field studies in complex landscapes.

In a new outdoor study, also reported April 22 in Nature, researchers paired eight fields in Sweden planted with rape seeds coated by pesticides including the neonicotinoid clothianidin with comparable fields sprouting untreated seeds.

Honeybee colonies allowed to forage over treated fields increased in collective weight as well as those working the untreated ones. Yet bumblebee colonies foraging in the treated fields failed to grow, report Maj Rundlöf of Lund University in Sweden and colleagues. And Osmia bicornisbees, a wild species that doesn’t live in colonies, nested at six of the eight untreated sites but at none of the treated ones.

“At this point, it is no longer credible to argue that agricultural use of neonicotinoids does not harm wild bees,” says Dave Goulson of the University of Sussex in England, who has studied bumblebees but was not involved in the new test.

Honeybees have been the main species tested for harmful effects of pesticides, Rundlöf says. Yet their reactions may not reflect what happens to other pollinators. Also, she points out, her experiment couldn’t detect changes of less than about 20 percent in honeybee colony growth. So she urges caution in assuming that the pesticides had no effect on the honeybees.

UP NEXT: Here Are The 10 Foods Most Likely To Be Covered In Pesticides

SEE ALSO: Scientists May Have Finally Pinpointed What's Killing All The Honeybees

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NOW WATCH: The Drone Revolution Is Coming To America's 2 Million Farms

SINGAPORE/TOKYO (Reuters) - One by one, Japan is turning off the lights at the giant oil-fired power plants that propelled it to the ranks of the world's top industrialized nations.

With nuclear power in the doldrums after the Fukushima disaster, it's solar energy that is becoming the alternative.

Solar power is set to become profitable in Japan as early as this quarter, according to the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation (JREF), freeing it from the need for government subsidies and making it the last of the G7 economies where the technology has become economically viable.

Japan is now one of the world's four largest markets for solar panels and a large number of power plants are coming onstream, including two giant arrays over water in Kato City and a $1.1 billion solar farm being built on a salt field in Okayama, both west of Osaka.

"Solar has come of age in Japan and from now on will be replacing imported uranium and fossil fuels," said Tomas Kåberger, executive board chairman of JREF."In trying to protect their fossil fuel and nuclear (plants), Japan's electric power companies can only delay developments here," he said, referring to the 10 regional monopolies that have dominated electricity production since the 1950s.

Japan is retiring nearly 2.4 gigawatts of expensive and polluting oil-fired energy plants by March next year and switching to alternative fuels. Japan's 43 nuclear reactors have been closed in the wake of the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima power plant after an earthquake and a tsunami - since then, renewable energy capacity has tripled to 25 gigawatts, with solar accounting for more than 80 percent of that.

Once Japan reaches cost-revenue parity in solar energy, it will mean the technology is commercially viable in all G7 countries and 14 of the G20 economies, according to data from governments, industry and consumer groups.

A crash in the prices of photovoltaic panels and improved technology that harnesses more power from the sun has placed solar on the cusp of a global boom, analysts say, who compare its rise to shale oil.

"Just as shale extraction reconfigured oil and gas, no other technology is closer to transforming power markets than distributed and utility scale solar," said consultancy Wood Mackenzie, which has a focus on the oil and gas industry.Oil major Exxon Mobil says that "solar capacity is expected to grow by more than 20 times from 2010 to 2040."

Investors are also re-discovering solar, with the global solar index up 40 percent this year, lifting it out of a slump following the 2008/2009 financial crisis, far outperforming struggling commodities such as iron ore, natural gas, copper or coal.

Cheaper panels

By starting mass-production of solar panels, China is the driving force in bringing down solar manufacturing costs by 80 percent in the last decade, according to Germany's Fraunhofer Institute.

In Japan, residential solar power production costs have more than halved since 2010 to under 30 yen ($0.25) per kilowatt-hour (kWh), making it comparable to average household electricity prices.

Wood Mackenzie expects solar costs to fall more as "efficiencies are nowhere near their theoretical maximums."

Solar is already well-entrenched in Europe and North America, but it is the expected boom in Asia that is lifting it out from its niche.China's new anti-pollution policies are making the big difference. Because of these policies, Beijing is seeking alternatives for coal, which makes up almost two-thirds of its energy consumption.

China's 2014 solar capacity was 26.52 gigawatt (GW), less than 2 percent of its total capacity of 1,360 GW.

But the government wants to add 17.8 GW of solar power this year and added 5 GW in the first quarter alone, with plans to boost capacity to 100 GW by 2020.

Coal-dominated India, with its plentiful sunlight, could also take to solar in a big way.

Despite this boom, fossil-fueled power is far from dead.

"Additional generating capacity, such as natural gas-fired plants, must be made available to back up wind and solar during the times when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing," Exxon says.

(Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

SEE ALSO: Here's everything we know about Tesla's big April 30 announcement

SEE ALSO: Top Toyota executive says electric cars can't replace conventional vehicles long-term

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NOW WATCH: Watch these giant container ships collide near the Suez Canal

New earthquake hazard maps signal a watershed moment: They show that fracking's byproducts are clearly to blame for swarms of earthquakes plaguing several states.

The maps highlight 17 hotspots where communities face a significantly increased risk of earthquakes, and the accompanying report links the earthquakes to wastewater injection wells. Previous maps did not include earthquakes that are induced by human activities.

"We consider induced seismicity to be primarily triggered by the disposal of wastewater into deep wells," said Mark Petersen, chief of the National Seismic Hazard Project for the U.S. Geological Survey, which released the maps on April 23.

The earthquake hotspots include the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Arkansas, Alabama, Colorado and New Mexico. Until recently, many of these states were some of the places in the United States least likely to have an earthquake. But then, high oil prices brought in companies eager to exploit ancient seabeds where oil and gas mingle with brine.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, extracts far more water from these underground oil-laden rocks than traditional drilling. Currently, there is no way to treat, store and release the billions of gallons of wastewater at the surface. Instead, drillers pump the fluid back underground, below groundwater, where it sometimes triggers earthquakes.

For instance, in Oklahoma, state records show that companies injected more than 1.1 billion barrels of wastewater into the ground in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available. The following year, Oklahoma had more magnitude-3 earthquakes than California. The quakes clustered around wastewater injection wells.

Oklahoma's current earthquake rate is now 600 times higher than its prefracking rate, which was based on the state's natural seismicity, the state geological survey said Monday.

"We suspect the vast majority of these earthquakes are from produced wastewater," said Austin Holland, head seismologist for the Oklahoma Geological Survey.

Fracking itself can also induce earthquakes, but the technique has never caused earthquakes greater than magnitude 4. For comparison, an Oklahoma injection well triggered a magnitude-5.6 earthquake in 2011. Mining blasts and geothermal energy plants can also trigger earthquakes.

Quake road map

Until now, the USGS has usually excluded man-made or induced earthquakes from its earthquake hazard maps. The researchers who make the maps assume earthquake rates are more or less the same through time, and that's not the case with man-made quakes.

"These earthquakes are different from natural earthquakes because they turn on and off over short periods of time, sometimes over a period of a year," Petersen said.

So even as north central Oklahoma and Texas were suffering swarms of earthquakes, the 2014 hazard map showed little to no shaking risk for these states. The national map shows where earthquakes may strike in the next 50 years, how big they might be and how strong the shaking could get.

But now, there is no way for scientists to ignore the incredible rise in earthquakes in the central United States. With input from more than 150 scientists, the USGS decided to release a separate earthquake hazard map for man-made earthquakes. Researchers gauged a region's shaking risk by first looking for changing earthquake rates. Then, the scientists counted the previous year's temblors to forecast the next year's tally.

A one-year model is not useful for issuing building codes, but it is helpful for planning future activities, such as where to spend limited funds on bridge repairs, said Bill Ellsworth, a USGS seismologist who is studying injection well earthquakes.

A simplified version of the man-made earthquake hazard map will be published by the end of the year and will be updated yearly thereafter, Ellsworth said. (The agency will continue to issue the long-term forecasts every six years.) Scientists are still fine-tuning models that predict the shaking strength from man-made earthquakes, which tend to be shallower than natural quakes.

Researchers involved in the mapping project called for expanded seismic networks and public access to well-injection records on April 22 here at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America. Only a few injection wells cause headaches, so this data would help determine whether the small earthquakes at wells could lead to more damaging ones later on.

"This monitoring would fundamentally change how often and how accurately we can update these maps," said Andy Michael, a USGS geophysicist in Menlo Park, California, who was involved in the project.

Follow Becky Oskin @beckyoskin. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

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Close to half of all living species on the Earth could disappear by the end of this century, and humans will be the cause.

This is the Sixth Mass Extinction — a loss of life that could rival the die-out that caused the dinosaurs to disappear 65 millions years ago after an asteroid hit the planet. 

This time, though, we’re the asteroid.

At least that's how Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of "The Sixth Extinction," sees it.

"We are deciding," Kolbert writes, "without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy."

In "The Sixth Extinction," Kolbert traces our understanding of extinction from the first time it was proposed as a theory in the 1740s until now, with scientists mostly agreeing that humans may be causing it.

It took scientists a long time to accept that entire species could disappear

It used to be that when researchers came across old animal bones, their first goal was to identify them with a species that already existed. In 1739, for example, when a group of researchers unearthed the first Mastodon bones, they assumed they were looking at the remains of two different animals — an elephant and a hippopotamus.

It wasn't until French naturalist Georges Cuvier suggested that the bones were from "a world previous to ours" that researchers first started to consider the idea that an entire species could have existed and then disappeared.

This realization should awaken us to the idea that our impact on the planet could have serious implications. 

One of the main culprits in the sixth extinction, Kolbert says, is climate change, but modern agriculture and a rapidly growing human population have contributed as well. By warming the planet, introducing invasive species to different areas, and encouraging the spread of previously contained fungi and viruses, people are killing the life around us.

Here's Kolbert:

No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.

We know what mass extinctions look like. And a growing number of scientists have agreed that we are likely causing a new one.

Yet we are doing surprisingly little to curb the tide.

"It is estimated," Kolbert writes, "that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion."

That adds up to between 30% and 50% of all life on Earth that could be gone by the end of the century— unless we start taking action now.

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Human activity isn't just warming the planet. We're also causing earthquakes, and have been for decades.

Scientific evidence points to fracking as the cause of dramatically more frequent earthquakes in Oklahoma and other high fracking areas of the US, including Texas.

The state is having an average of 2.5 earthquakes of at least magnitude 3 every day, when it used to average only 1.5 a year.

It isn't the fracking that actually causes the earthquakes, but the disposal of the wastewater created during the process. Fracking companies pump this dirty water into the earth in a place with deep underground faults, so it doesn't return to the surface. The theory is that this activity on the fault line lubricates Earth's plates where they rub against each other, allowing them to move more freely, causing more frequent earthquakes.

While these quakes aren't happening at the exact time that companies are pumping liquid into faults, researchers have been studying the link between the two and are fairly certain they are connected.

"The picture is very clear" that this water can cause faults to move, USGS geophysicist William Ellsworth told the AP.

"The real earthquake"

Fracking is big business for Oklahoma — somewhere between 15% and 20% of all jobs in Oklahoma are related to fracking according to Energy Wire and Bloomberg. Perhaps, then, it doesn't come as a surprise that state officials have only recently admitted the connection between fracking and the state's increased seismic activity.

It also shouldn't surprise that Jon Stewart goes to town with this juxtaposition of science and special interests on The Daily Show.

After laying out the data about Oklahoma's earthquakes using recent news reports, Stewart shows a clip of Oklahoma's governor, Mary Fallin, questioning whether the increase in earthquakes is man-made or natural.

Stewart paraphrases her: "Is it, as common sense might suggest, the seemingly obvious connection to fracking, or is the Lord using our great state as a shake weight?"

As well as common sense, scientific evidence suggests the former. In a surprise move, the state of Oklahoma has at last gotten on board and accepted the evidence, according to the next news clip played on the Daily Show.

"That right there is the real earthquake," Stewart quipped in mock astonishment.

Now what?

Despite that admission that oil and gas drilling operations are causing earthquakes, the Oklahoma House of Representatives turned right around and approved a bill to prevent cities and towns from regulating those oil and natural gas drilling operations, the next clip on the show reports.

Jon Stewart is all incredulous scorn at that decision.

"You finally admit that fracking has turned your state into one giant Brookstone massage chair, and your first response is to ensure that no one can ever stop it," he says to the state of Oklahoma. "Why?"

A news clip of University of Washington seismologist John Vidale answers. Vidale says current practice is the cheapest option, "and it works well, except for the earthquakes and the contamination of groundwater."

Not negligible exclusions, Jon Stewart seems to think.

Watch the whole video here, courtesy of Comedy Central. The full video includes Stewart's remarks on Earth Day and "Dunk," the NSA's new recycling education mascot who encourages kids to dig through their school's trash to find things to recycle.

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Japan's bloody dolphin hunts have gotten the country's aquariums suspended from the world body that oversees the humane treatment of animals in captivity.

The "drive hunts" were featured in the Oscar-winning 2009 documentary "The Cove," which included graphic footage of dolphins being herded into coastal inlets, with some captured and the rest killed for meat.

The World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) announced this week that its Japanese affiliate has now been suspended for refusing to stop taking dolphins seized in those hunts.

The Switzerland-based WAZA "requires all members to adhere to policies that prohibit participating in cruel and non-selective methods of taking animals from the wild," the organization said in a statement announcing the decision.

But despite several years of talks, WAZA and the Japanese Association of Zoos and Aquariums (JAZA) "could not reach agreement" on the issue.

In the wake of the decision, the Earth Island Institute urged Japan's government to stop the hunt.

"WAZA has taken action; now JAZA and Japan must take action for the dolphins," the group's associate director, Mark Palmer, told VICE News.

The hunts are conducted around the fishing port of Taiji in the fall and winter. There was no immediate response from JAZA, but conservationists cheered the decision — even as some said dolphins have no place in any aquarium.

"Even as an entity that is all about the captivity industry, today WAZA has taken an important step to distance itself from the slaughter that turns the waters of Taiji red with blood — blood that WAZA does not want on its hands," said the activist group Sea Shepherd, which monitors the annual hunts.

"The tide is turning. One day, the cove will be a permanent and peaceful blue and profiting from the suffering of these familial and intelligent beings will be a practice driven into the past."

And Naomi Rose, a marine biologist at the US-based Animal Welfare Institute, told VICE News the decision "means the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums is finally recognizing that this behavior from one of its members is intolerable."

The Earth Island Institute's Dolphin Project says 751 dolphins were killed in this year's Taiji hunts by February, with another 80 captured and 251 released. Captive dolphins are sold to zoos in Asia for tens of thousands of dollars apiece, Rose said, while American aquariums haven't taken dolphins from Japan since 1992.

Conservationists have been pressuring WAZA for the past several years to suspend the Japanese association, "and they kept coming up with reasons why this wasn't the right tactic," she said. Now, she said, the hope is that pressure will spur Japan to reforms.

"They don't like being publicly embarrassed, and this is publicly embarrassing," she said.

Follow Matt Smith on Twitter: @mattsmithatl

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It's now more environmentally friendly to fly than to drive the same distance. 

That doesn't make it good for the environment, exactly, but Reuters' John Kemp reports on a new study out of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan:

Transporting one person a distance of one mile by aircraft consumed on average the energy equivalent to 2,465 British thermal units (BTUs), compared with 4,211 BTUs for moving one person one mile by car, in 2012.

If fuel use is adjusted to account for commercial freight and mail carried on passenger aircraft, flying consumed just 2,033 BTUs per person mile, according to researcher Michael Sivak.

When you account for the freight moved by aircraft, that means that flying is twice as efficient as driving. That's contrary to common belief. Take this passage from a 2013 New York Times story: 

For many people reading this, air travel is their most serious environmental sin. One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or to San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person. The average American generates about 19 tons of carbon dioxide a year; the average European, 10.

This both is and isn't true. Air travel is better for the environment when compared with driving the same distance, but people often fly because they are going much further than they would like to drive. It's much worse to take a 6 hour flight than a 6 hour drive. But between a six hour drive and a one-hour flight of the same distance, flying is likely the better environmental option.

Kemp says that cars replaced airplanes as the most energy-intensive things Americans do around the turn of the millennium. Since the 1970s, he says, "the amount of energy consumed per passenger-mile by aircraft has fallen by almost 80 percent while the efficiency of driving has improved by less than 17 percent."

It's important to note, as the Times passage hints at, that this research is for the United States, with its notoriously giant cars. The average energy-efficiency of a car in Europe or Asia is likely greater.

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There are a few constants in this changing world: death, taxes, and trash.

Humans have been producing garbage since the beginning, leaving archaeologists the task of piecing together ancient civilizations not by what they built, but by what they threw into prehistoric landfills called middens.

But now a few cities want to change that grand, dirty tradition and move into a future where trash is a thing of the past.

With its One NYC plan, New York City is the most recent (and one of the largest) cities to take on the challenge of producing zero waste. The goal? By 2030, the city of 8 million will no longer send waste to landfills, instead recycling or composting the detritus of our modern lives.

So how is a nearly 400-year-old city better known for garbage strikes (see 1911, 1968 and 1981) going to clean up its act in just 15 years? The city has a number of initiatives planned to reduce its garbage load. By 2018, the city plans to expand its organics program (composting food and biodegradable waste) from serving 100,000 households to serving the entire city.

By 2020, there will be single-stream recycling, a method in which all recyclables go into a single bin and get sorted out later. Other initiatives include promises to "reduce the use of plastic bags and other non-compostable waste,""make all schools "Zero Waste Schools," and "reduce commercial waste disposal by 90 percent by 2030."

It's an ambitious and admirable goal. Many also wonder if it's a realistic one, especially since other cities have tried and failed to reach a zero waste future. In 1996, Canberra, Australia set itself the goal of becoming zero waste by 2010 but ultimately failed. Canberra did manage to divert a lot of waste from landfills, but the city wasn't able to meet its own deadline, in part because the amount of waste generated by the city kept going up. Recycling increased dramatically, but the city still fell short.

There are a few glimmers of hope, however. San Francisco is also working towards a zero waste future by the year 2020, and early results are promising. Their focus is on making it easy to separate trash from recyclables and compostables, eventually making it so that everything fits into either of the latter categories. It seems to be working. In 2012, the city sent just 428,048 tons of trash to the landfill. That's compared to New York's sanitation department, which carts away about 3.8 million tons of trash annually — 76 percent of which ends up in a landfill.

But one of San Francisco's largest hurdles is laziness. In apartments outfitted with trash chutes, but lacking similar recycling or compost chutes, residents in those buildings have to carry their recyclables out to the street, an unappealing option when the trash chute is just down the hall and so easy to use. New apartment buildings need to have three different trash chutes, but tackling the problem in older buildings is not easy. Essentially, the San Francisco Department of the Environment (SF Environment) is trying to convince landlords to close existing trash chutes, making taking out the trash just as difficult as taking out the recycling.

Another of the hurdles is at the very start of the waste process — making sure that the new doodads and thingamabobs we craves so much (and the packaging that we carry them home in) are recyclable to start with. SF Environment is working with legislators and manufacturers to make this a reality.

Will New York end up like Canberra or San Francisco? We'll get back to you on that in about 15 years. See you in the future.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science

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There’s a thriving market for ivory on Craigslist, some of it from elephants killed illegally, according to a new report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Wildlife Conservation Society.

In a spot investigation conducted between March 16 and March 20, the animal-rights groups found 615 ivory items listed on the site—ranging from jewelry to furniture—worth more than $1.5 million.

The seller of one such item, two hand-carved tusks depicting “Japanese art and culture,” was asking for either $800 or “AR 15 ammo of equal value.” Another item, an elephant tusk carved into the shape of a Japanese “empress,” was being sold for $25,000.

A ban in 1980 made it illegal to import ivory into the U.S., but there are loopholes that allow importers to circumvent the prohibition. The ivory for sale on Craigslist is marketed as pre-ban (and thus legal), but the report points out that it’s hard to determine which items are legit. It concludes that online marketplaces like Craigslist should add filters in search tools that would flag any ivory item.

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As California's water crisis worsens and residents are being told to use less water, the drought shamers have come out.

Concerned citizens who spot wasted water are taking pictures and posting them to social media with the hashtag #droughtshaming.

One guy even rides his bike around Los Angeles to take pictures of water wasters for shaming purposes.

It's a social media phenomenon that's already being mocked, like in this tweet of a screenshot from The Nightly Show on Comedy Central:

People are doing some extreme things to save water, and trying to shame their social media followers to do the same.

While you may not be ready to use your shower run off water to cook, the daily shower has come under fire: Melissa Dahl at Science of Us wondered if we need to consider it "a luxury rather than a hygenic necessity."

That may be true, but your daily shower length probably isn't how you waste the most water.

Water Wasters

Soon, water shortages won't be just a California problem. Many states — 4o out of 50 according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office— have at least one region that's expected to face some kind of water shortage in the next 10 years.

And people are starting to understand that they should conseve water. Throughout the US, the trend for personal water use is headed down. In 2010, the average American used 88 gallons of water at home every day for bathing, drinking, cleaning, and watering lawns, according to the U.S. Geological Survey Water Use Report, down from 98 gallons in 2005.

"We're doing better. We still have a ways to go, in part because we're still adding people to this country," Jonah Schein of the EPA's WaterSense water conservation program told Business Insider.

Where America's water really goes

Our water wasting isn't limited to long showers and watering sidewalks. Here's a chart showing how America actually uses water, according to the U.S. Geological Survey:

Don't freak out too much about the amount used to produce thermoelectric power — most of that water is recycled back into the water supply. The next biggest area of water use is irrigation, followed by public supply, which goes to domestic, commercial, and industrial use.

This is not to say personal water use is an insignificant fraction of a fraction of a fraction of total water use. If everyone takes a few simple steps, the water savings can add up.

57% of the public supply slice is used at home, and indoor water use further breaks down something like this:

Showering is not a negligible chunk of our indoor water use, but it ranks behind flushing toilets and washing clothes, which have not attracted as much ire.

And notice the 13.7% of our water use that goes to leaks. That slice doesn't even need to be there.

How you can actually save water

If you really want to save water, fix leaks around your home, but feel free to clean up with a shower.

"We don't encourage people to take less showers. We encourage people to make sure that their showerhead is operating as it's supposed to be and that it's not leaking or dripping," Tara O'Hare of the EPA's WaterSense program told Business Insider.

On average, 9.5 gallons of water a day are lost to leaks per person, and that water serves absolutely no purpose, not even a frivolous one.

Dysfunctional toilet flappers, small, inexpensive rubber pieces that regulate when and how much water flows from the tank to the bowl, are one of the most common causes of leaks, Schein said.

If a toilet flapper is not working right, it can let water run from the tank to the bowl when the toilet isn't flushing. That water is just being plain wasted, to the tune of about 21,600 gallons of water per month for just a single toilet, according to figures provided by the WaterSense program.

Another way water gets wasted is through inefficient fixtures. Faucets, showerheads, and toilets with the EPA WaterSense label are at least 20% more efficient than standard models.

The EPA says Americans could use 260 billion fewer gallons of water per year if everyone changed their showerheads to more efficient models. That's a 2.6% savings of the amount of water we use at home every year.

If all old and inefficient toilets were replaced, the EPA estimates we could save 520 billion gallons of water every year, 5% of total water use in homes.

"We're not asking people to make sacrifices or asking them to make drastic changes," O'Hare said. "We are just suggesting there are small things that they can do to be more efficient."

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Lagos (AFP) - Shell has agreed with Nigerian fishing community of Bodo in the Niger Delta to start the clean up of two devastating oil spills in 2008, activists and locals said Saturday.

"Shell officials met with representatives of Bodo community in Port Harcourt yesterday (Friday).

The meeting was attended by officials of the Dutch embassy, UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), Amnesty International and some local activists," Steven Obodekwe of the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development lobby group told AFP.

"It was agreed that the clean up would commence in July or August," he said.

Local fisherman Christian Kpandei who is among the 15,600 affected by the spills, said a foreign contractor had been hired for the job.

"The company involved in the clean up of the massive spills in the Gulf of Mexico is handling the job. The clean-up will start by August," he said.

He said Bodo residents were looking forward to the exercise, adding that almost all the people affected by the spills had been compensated.

"Virtually all the 15,601 claimants have been settled. I am one of the beneficiaries. There are only 150 people that are yet to collect their compensation because of some issues of inheritance," he said.

Shell officials were not immediately available for comment on the development.

Godwin Ojo of Port Harcourt-based Environmental Rights Action said the clean up was belated.

"Shell should stop breaching its agreements with its host communities. The clean up is long over due. It should have started in January," he said.

Under a compensation deal hammered out in London in January, Shell's Nigerian arm agreed to pay £55 million (77 million euros) to people in Bodo following a three-year legal battle over the 2008 spills that devastated their environment.

The Shell Petroleum Company of Nigeria (SPDC) was to pay around $53.5 million (£35 million) compensation to 15,600 Nigerian fishermen whose livelihoods were affected, and a further £20 million to the wider community.

Each individual was to receive around £2,200, equivalent to around three years' income on the Nigerian minimum wage, said their London-based lawyers Leigh Day.

SPDC, a major oil operator in Nigeria, has repeatedly insisted that most oil pollution in the Niger Delta region was caused by sabotage, theft and illegal refining.

Nigeria is Africa's biggest crude producer, exporting some two million barrels per day but much of the Niger Delta oil region remains deeply impoverished.

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You might've heard that if there's one food you shouldn't be buying in the middle of California's drought, it's almonds.

Compared with many other nuts and veggies, almonds seem particularly wasteful, requiring a whole gallon of water per nut.

But what about the foods we eat that aren't nuts or vegetables?

I'm talking about meat.

Red meat, in particular. From raising the cows to washing and processing the meat, burgers and steaks require far more water per ounce than a handful of nuts do.

This chart, from a presentation made by University of California Davis professor Blaine Davis, makes the difference pretty clear:

Those arrows point to "forages" and alfalfa — crops raised almost exclusively for feeding farm animals. In California, the largest milk-producing state in the US, the vast majority of these animals are cows. "Forages" include the fields that get watered for cows to graze on and the corn and other irrigated crops that later get churned into cow feed.

Both of these use way more water than the almonds and pistachios shown near the top of the chart.

The difference is even more dramatic when you think about how much water is required to produce just one ounce of each food.

A whopping 106 gallons of water goes into making just one ounce of beef. By comparison, just about 23 gallons are needed for an ounce of almonds (about 23 nuts), the Los Angeles Times reported recently.

So stop with the almond-shaming, and start eating less red meat.

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