This ‘Wild West’ industry could be facing some law and order

Federal officials are coming for America’s latest health trend. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is gearing up to tighten its oversight of cannabidiol, better known as CBD — the non-intoxicating chemical cousin of THC that is marketed as a natural remedy for a wide variety of ailments.

Since late last year, products containing CBD — from pills, oils, and cosmetics to drinks, gummies, and even dog treats — have proliferated across the country. The boom is largely thanks to a change in federal law in December 2018 that legalized hemp, a low-THC variety of marijuana that had previously been categorized with pot and harder drugs like cocaine and heroin. …

New research paves the way for cannabinoids without cannabis

As marijuana becomes increasingly mainstream — the legal cannabis market is estimated to reach $166 billion by 2025 — the potential for cannabis to change numerous industries from health to food is great. The future of cannabis may feature production facilities that have more in common with a craft beer brewery than a grow house — and leave out the plant altogether.

In a paper published today in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, biochemists at the University of California, Berkeley report what some cannabis industry experts are describing as a breakthrough in biosynthetic cannabinoid production. By using genetically modified yeast, the Berkeley scientists were able to convert simple sugars into the active chemical compounds in marijuana: tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). …

Scientists are gaining a better understanding of why, no matter the severity, many residents won’t heed orders to evacuate

Early Friday morning, Sept. 14, Hurricane Florence made landfall as a Category 1 storm near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Although the storm has lost some of its offshore strength, it’s still considered highly dangerous by authorities and is already causing severe flooding. By Thursday, North Carolina officials had issued evacuation orders in 16 vulnerable counties. Some are voluntary, but most are mandatory, covering around 1 million people, according to the state’s Department of Public Safety (DPS).

But, as in the cases of Harvey, Maria, Katrina, and other recent high-profile hurricanes, many people have chosen not to follow evacuation orders, putting themselves and emergency responders at risk. Keith Acree, a North Carolina DPS spokesperson, said the state has no way to monitor exactly how many people evacuated ahead of Florence, although he reported a steady stream of inland-bound traffic. …

How one Kenyan farmer went from ‘nothing’ to the envy of the neighborhood

This story originally appeared on National Geographic Voices blog.

The highway from Nairobi to Purity Gacaga’s dairy farm runs through the croplands of central Kenya: hundreds of square miles of maize and vegetables, interrupted halfway along by the country’s largest rice plantation sprawling toward the horizon like a glassy green sea. The rice is industrially irrigated, hence the green; in contrast, the maize and vegetable plots are rainfed, and with this year’s rainy season weeks late, the hills are brown, dusty, and denuded.

The highway leads to Embu, a hub of a half-million farmers and traders, where the produce of this region is gathered to be sent south to Nairobi or north to the pastoral drylands. Purity’s farm is a bumpy 15-minute drive out of town and, compared to the farms leading up to it, is scarcely recognizable as a farm. It looks more like a miniature rain forest: four acres of dense trees and shrubs nestled in a valley that in the early morning captures a low-slung mist. It’s only when you get closer, under the tree cover, that you see the dazzling array of tomatoes, coffee, kale, and napier grass, and the hand-built corral that houses three cows and a motley herd of goats. …

My surreal experience of Donald Trump’s election, far away from America

When Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States, I was sitting in a tin-roofed, dirt-floored cafe on the shore of Lake Victoria, in a bustling Kenyan fishing village called Usenge, waiting for a ferry and watching the sun rise. It should have been a serene morning. It wasn’t.

I was trying to follow the election, but my phone’s battery was dying and I had terrible data reception. Occasionally a latent WhatsApp message would dribble in, or the New York Timeshomepage would refresh, but mostly I was in the dark. I was pacing the floor, swilling milky tea, jabbing at my phone, and muttering to myself like a lunatic. Whenever I heard the words “Trump” or “Clinton” on the Kiswahili-language radio, I would grab the nearest patron and beseech them to translate. They were hardly paying attention to the news; their conversations were about that day’s market prices for the anchovies and perch they were about to gather from the lake. I got mixed messages. Trump was up, then Clinton was up, something about Florida, about Michigan. None of it made any sense. But I could tell the news wasn’t good. Something had gone terribly wrong. …

Some of the event’s sponsors might be part of the problem, not the solution.

You might not expect fossil fuel companies to pay for a conference designed to shrink their industry. But in Paris, that’s precisely what’s happening.

This week and next, roughly 40,000 diplomats, activists, policy experts, and journalists are gathering in the French capital for a round of high-stakes negotiations aimed at slowing climate change. They’re packed into a regional airport that, as described by our Climate Desk partners at the New Republic, has been converted to resemble a cross between the United Nations headquarters building, Disney World’s Epcot Center, and a natural history museum.

For two weeks, all these people need to be fed, housed, transported, entertained, and equipped with space to work. Unsurprisingly, it’s an expensive undertaking — budgeted by the French government at nearly $200 million, according to EurActiv France. About one-fifth of that tab is being picked up by private corporations. …

President Obama and dozens of other world leaders reportedly plan to attend the Paris negotiations.

On Saturday, just a day after terrorist attacks in Paris left at least 129 people dead and hundreds more injured, the French government vowed to forge ahead with a long-scheduled international summit on climate change.

The summit, which is scheduled to start in just two weeks, will take place at an airport in the northern suburbs of Paris, not far from the stadium that was the site of multiple bombings on Friday. There, world leaders plan to hash out final details of the most wide-reaching international agreement ever to combat climate change. White House officials confirmed to Politico that President Barack Obama still intends to attend the talks, as scheduled prior to the attacks. …

It’s an area half the size of Rhode Island.

The desert in Southern California could be in for a climate-friendly makeover, after the Obama administration released its plans to develop more renewable energy projects on federally owned land.

On Tuesday the Interior Department released the final version of a plan that would open up about half a million non-contiguous acres — half the size of Rhode Island — for projects such as wind and solar farms in the Mojave Desert and surrounding areas. It would also more than double the amount of land dedicated to protecting delicate desert ecosystems that are home to vulnerable species, including the desert tortoise.

The Mojave Desert, which stretches across most of Southern California, is a potential gold mine for clean energy. Earlier this year, the world’s largest solar farm opened there, near Joshua Tree National Park. According to Interior, the desert and the its surrounding area have the sun and wind potential to support 20,000 megawatts of renewable projects, about equal to the amount of solar energy installed nationwide today. …