Why the Chill on Climate Change?

October 23, 2012 — Suzan

From Truth Dig:  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_the_chill_on_climate_change_20121021/

By Eugene Robinson
Oct 21, 2012

Not a word has been said in the presidential debates about what may be the most urgent and consequential issue in the world: climate change.

President Obama understands and accepts the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is trapping heat in the atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic long-term effects. Mitt Romney’s view, as on many issues, is pure quicksilver—impossible to pin down—but when he was governor of Massachusetts, climate change activists considered him enlightened and effective.

Yet neither has mentioned the subject in the debates. Instead, they have argued over who is more eager to extract ever-larger quantities of oil, natural gas and coal from beneath our purple mountains’ majesties and fruited plains.

“We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years,” Obama said in Tuesday’s debate. “Natural gas production is the highest it’s been in decades. We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment.”

Romney scoffed that Obama “has not been Mr. Oil, or Mr. Gas, or Mr. Coal,” and promised that he, if elected, would be all three. “I’ll do it by more drilling, more permits and licenses,” he said, adding later that this means “bringing in a pipeline of oil from Canada, taking advantage of the oil and coal we have here, drilling offshore in Alaska, drilling offshore in Virginia, where the people want it.”

If this is a contest to see who can pretend to be more ignorant of the environmental freight train that’s barreling down the tracks toward us, Romney wins narrowly.

Obama does acknowledge that his administration has invested in alternative energy technologies, such as wind and solar, that do not emit carbon dioxide and thus do not contribute to atmospheric warming. But he never really says why, except to say he will not “cede those jobs of the future” to other nations such as China and Germany.

Continue reading at:  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_the_chill_on_climate_change_20121021/

Posted in Climate Change, Ecology, Environment, Uncategorized. Comments Off on Why the Chill on Climate Change?

A Report from Tar Sands Blockade in Texas

October 23, 2012 — Suzan

From Earth Island Journal:  http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/a_report_from_tar_sands_blockade_in_texas

Behind the scenes with incredible people including Darryl Hannah and Eleanor Fairchild

by Julia Butterfly Hill
October 16, 2012

In January 2012, I, like many other people, thought the Keystone XL pipeline controversy was over. We had won a hard-fought victory in suspending the proposed tar sands pipeline from crossing the border from Canada into the USA. It seemed a major win for the environmental movement.

But shortly after reveling in the victory, I read the words of President Barack Obama (the same man who claimed he wanted to lead America away from dependence on oil) said during a March speech in Cushing, OK. “And today, I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done,” the president said.

To my horror and disappointment, that is exactly what he did. Today TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, has already started construction on the southern leg of the pipeline that will potentially stretch from Montana all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

In this case, “cutting through the red tape” includes allowing eminent domain laws to be used to take land from families, farmers, and Indigenous people in order to push this extremely dangerous pipeline. If completed, the pipeline will be filled with highly corrosive and toxic tar sands oil that will be pumped through the heartland of America and then (some of it, at least) will be exported to other countries.

Some residents in Texas and other allies who have come from all over the country are trying to stop this from happening. Last week I visited the courageous landowners and blockaders in ruralEast Texas who are putting their bodies on the line to slow down and, hopefully, halt the pipeline construction.

I am honored and humbled to be able to share part of their story.

• • •

In April of last year, I went to Dallas, TX and met with one of the landowners, David Daniel and his family, who were facing imminent destruction of their land from TransCanada and standing against the taking of their land through eminent domain abuse.  He shared with me his story — how he and his wife had travelled to many places looking for their perfect place to buy a piece of property where they would care for and steward their little piece of “Heaven on Earth” and raise their child to feel connected to living with the Earth and not just on it.  They found exactly what they were looking for in East Texas.  A property that had beautiful woods, huge, old trees, and spring-fed creeks curving and meandering through 22 acres.  There was one, particularly large, very old tree right next to one of the creeks that had a magic to it, that both David and his wife both felt drawn to so powerfully. It was on that spot that they both knew they had found “their place.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/a_report_from_tar_sands_blockade_in_texas

Posted in Chemical Pollution, Climate Change, Ecology, Environment, Uncategorized. Comments Off on A Report from Tar Sands Blockade in Texas

Dam Failures and Flooding at US Nuclear Plants

October 20, 2012 — Suzan

From the Union of Concerned Scientists:   http://allthingsnuclear.org/dam-failures-and-flooding-at-us-nuclear-plants/

,
October 19, 2012

Some 34 nuclear reactors—one-third of the U.S. fleet—could face flooding hazards greater than they were designed to withstand if an upstream dam fails, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff report written in July of last year.

The NRC has known about these risks for at least 15 years and has failed to adequately address them.

The report generated attention a month ago when its lead author, Richard Perkins, accused the NRC of deliberately whiting out passages before releasing the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Perkins suggested in a letter to the NRC inspector general that the NRC censored his report because it reveals “the NRC has been in possession of relevant, notable, and derogatory safety information for an extended period but failed to properly act on it.”

Nuclear reactors are built adjacent to rivers, lakes and oceans because they require vast quantities of cooling water. Many U.S. nuclear plants that are sited along a river have one or more dams located upstream. If a dam failed, the ensuing flood waters could overwhelm a plant’s protective barriers and disable critical safety equipment, causing an accident that could release a large amount of radiation, just as it did at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in March 2011. In that case, the flooding was caused by a tsunami, not a breached dam, but the result could be similar.

An article today by Tom Zeller in the Huffington Post posted the unredacted July 2011 NRC report. The report shows the risk of a nuclear accident from flooding appears to be greater than previously thought.

Continue reading at:   http://allthingsnuclear.org/dam-failures-and-flooding-at-us-nuclear-plants/

Posted in Climate Change, Ecology, Environment. Comments Off on Dam Failures and Flooding at US Nuclear Plants

Scenes of ‘Dust Bowl Days’ Return As Oklahoma Storm Causes Highway Pileup

October 20, 2012 — Suzan

From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/19

Year of high temps and record drought portends climate future for once fertile croplands

Common Dreams staff
Published on Friday, October 19, 2012 by Common Dreams

Dramatic video footage and eye witness accounts from Oklahoma on Thursday tell the story of a scene right out of the Depression-era ‘Dust Bowl days’ as a massive wind-swept cloud of ‘reddish-brown’ dirt made visibility impossible on a stretch of Interstate-35 between Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo.

The mid-western states have experienced some of the highest temperatures on record this year and a severe drought has devastated corn crops and turned once thriving fields to brown. Scientists make direct connections between these trends and the growing impact of climate change fueled by human-caused global warming.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Jodi Palmer, a dispatcher with the Kay County Sheriff’s Office, told the Associated Press. “In this area alone, the dirt is blowing because we’ve been in a drought. I think from the drought everything’s so dry and the wind is high.”

“You have the perfect combination of extended drought in that area … and we have the extremely strong winds,” said Gary McManus, the Oklahoma associate state climatologist, also speaking with AP.

“Also, the timing is bad because a lot of those farm fields are bare. The soil is so dry, it’s like powder. Basically what you have is a whole bunch of topsoil waiting for the wind to blow it away. It’s no different from the 1930s than it is now.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/19

Posted in Climate Change, Ecology, Environment, Food. Tags: , . Comments Off on Scenes of ‘Dust Bowl Days’ Return As Oklahoma Storm Causes Highway Pileup

Climate change fiction melts away just when it’s needed

October 19, 2012 — Suzan

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/oct/18/climate-change-fiction

It’s the most urgent problem of our era, but novelists appear singularly reluctant to address it

Posted by Thursday 18 October 2012

“Guys, the ice caps are melting now,” wrote Chris Ross in the Guardian Review last year. “Where are those stories?”

The review’s subject was a collection of short stories, I’m With the Bears, all on the issue of climate change. It featured good writing – from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Lydia Millet – but, as Ross put it, “much of this material seems to have been lifted from the wastebasket.” Why was no one writing fresh fiction about it?

One year on, the question still stands. “In spite of the stakes,” said Andrew Simms on the Guardian’s environment blog the other day, “the issue has receded from the political frontline like a wave shrinking down a beach.” It seems that the wave never quite reached our beach – the beach of fiction writing – in the first place.

Sure, there was Solar. Ian McEwan‘s 2010 satire of a balding, overweight scientist with marriage problems explicitly focused on “the most pressing and complex problem of our time”. That’s the one everyone could probably mention. But after that? There was mainly silence (if you leave aside poetry, where much more seems to be going on, most notably, perhaps, Tom Chivers’ ADRIFT project).

There’s apocalyptic fiction, of course, and you could, I suppose, connect a novel such as Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood to climate change. But is this type of literature really concerned with the issue, or does a vaguely related scenario merely serve as a purpose for other themes and situations? (Also, as environmentalists are increasingly keen to point out, climate change isn’t really about the end of the world at all; it’s about living conditions becoming harder and harder as we go along.)

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/oct/18/climate-change-fiction

Posted in Ecology, Environment, Uncategorized. Tags: , . Comments Off on Climate change fiction melts away just when it’s needed

Clean Coal is a Hoax, Mr. President, So Drop it

October 19, 2012 — Suzan

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/18-0

by Jeff Biggers
Published on Thursday, October 18, 2012 by Common Dreams

Out of all the meaningless slogans bantered around this election season, President Obama’s clinging to the “clean coal” banner ranks as one of the most specious.

“Clean coal” is a hoax, and the president knows it, and outside of appeasing a few Midwestern Big Coal sycophants and his Duke Energy coal buddy Jim Rogers, who helped to underwrite the Democratic Convention this summer in Charlotte, Obama has little to gain from invoking the offensive phrase.

You’re offensive, President Obama, to use your own words.

Offensive to coal miners and their families who have paid the ultimate price, offensive to people who live daily with the devastating impacts of coal mining and coal ash in their communities and watersheds, and offensive to anyone who recognizes the spiraling reality of climate change.

If Ameren, one of the biggest coal-supporting utility companies in the nation, can throw in the towel on the FutureGen “clean coal” boondoggle in Obama’s adopted state of Illinois, then why can’t our president at least state the truth during his election — or drop the sloganeering?

It’s sad enough to watch the president mock Republican Mitt Romney for his dead-on realization, once upon a time, that coal-fired plants kill.

It’s even sadder, as our nation drifts along in Titanic denial toward climate destabilization, for our president to crow about being a friend of a deadly rock.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/18-0

Posted in Ecology, Environment, Uncategorized. Tags: . Comments Off on Clean Coal is a Hoax, Mr. President, So Drop it

Over Half of All Wetlands on Earth ‘Destroyed’ in Last 100 Years

October 19, 2012 — Suzan

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/17-4

Common Dreams staff
Published on Wednesday, October 17, 2012 by Common Dreams

Over half of all wetlands in the world have been destroyed in the last 100 years due to residential and industrial development, water waste, over-consumption, and pollution says a new report released by the United Nations Environment Program.

According to the report, the “startling figure”—a 50 percent loss of wetlands on earth—signals years of neglect of our world’s ecosystems, as industrialization and development have trumped concerns of biodiversity and water scarcity. As a result, coastal wetland losses in many regions have occurred at a rate of 1.6 percent per year.

“Water security is widely regarded as one of the key natural resource challenges currently facing the world,” the authors of the report state. “Human drivers of ecosystem change, including destructive extractive industries, unsustainable agriculture and poorly managed urban expansion, are posing a threat to global freshwater biodiversity and water security for 80 per cent of the world’s population.”

The report was compiled through The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity project and presented at this year’s UN Convention on Biodiversity.

Reporting on this year’s convention, being held through the end of this week in India, Friends of the Earth International pleaded with the international community to put forth biodiversity protection policies such as vast conservation proposals and increased governmental regulation of resource extraction, as apposed to the business-based free market model known as the ‘Financialization of Nature,’ which has largely dominated the convention. Such policies promote market-based schemes like pollution trading, water markets, and privatization and commodification of common resources, frowned upon by environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and Food and Water Watch.

Complete article at:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/17-4

Posted in Ecology, Environment. Tags: , , , . Comments Off on Over Half of All Wetlands on Earth ‘Destroyed’ in Last 100 Years

Why I’m standing up to TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline in east Texas

October 18, 2012 — Suzan

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/17/daryl-hannah-transcanada-keystonexl-pipeline

Don’t buy the tale that this tar sands oil will make the US energy-independent. It’s export for profit, even as spills poison our water


guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 October 2012

On 4 October 2012, in rural east Texas, a 78-year-old great-grandmother, Eleanor Fairchild, was arrested for trespassing on her own property … and I was arrested standing beside her, as we held our ground in the path of earth-moving excavators constructing TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.

Seems there’s showdown in Texas – but, in fact, it’s a battle being waged all over the United States. It’s being fought by ordinary citizens of all colors, economic strata and political persuasions – against the world’s wealthiest multinational corporations, misinformation and deeply embedded fears. While I’m not a fan of war terminology, in these struggles, war analogies seem to highlight both the crisis at hand and perhaps the solution we seek.

Let’s face it, we are in times of great crisis: economic crisis, overpopulation crisis, climate crisis, extinction crisis, water crisis and a humanitarian crisis on so many levels. Energy, and how we create it, is a pivotal issue for many of these crises. It has become increasingly clear that we need to move in a different direction, yet as a species, we humans are uncomfortable with, and resist, change – though we know it is the very nature of life and not only essential, but inevitable.

Scientific findings warn us that a switch to renewable energy is essential if we are to avert disastrous climate change caused by carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. But since scientific findings and the climate crisis have been so successfully politicized – and I loathe politics – I’ll leave the horrifying ramifications of the global climate crisis out of this.

No matter what political rhetoric you choose to follow, or what course we choose to take with our energy options, there are things we all can agree on. As the second World Water Forum wisely stated:

“Water is everybody’s business.”

Clean, regenerative energy could provide a way past peak oil and our detrimental fossil fuel addiction – if we collectively had the will to employ renewables, and addressed the change as urgently as the US did during the second world war when we unleashed our scientific creativity and industrial ingenuity to support the war effort. But there is no escape from peak water. We simply cannot live without uncontaminated water and food.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/17/daryl-hannah-transcanada-keystonexl-pipeline

Posted in Chemical Pollution, Corporate Abuse, Ecology, Environment, Fracking, Uncategorized. Tags: , , . Comments Off on Why I’m standing up to TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline in east Texas

The Risky Business of Eating in America

October 18, 2012 — Suzan

From Other Words:  http://www.otherwords.org/articles/the_risky_business_of_eating_in_america

By Jill Richardson
October 17, 2012

Long before human beings decoded the human genome or split the atom, they discovered that arsenic is very good at killing things. The ancient Romans prized it as a murder weapon because it could be mixed into food or drink without altering its color, taste, or smell. Plus, a tiny dose kills without fail.

What the Romans didn’t know about arsenic, and what scientists didn’t discover until the 20th century, is that a form of it — inorganic arsenic — causes cancer. And in 1999, the National Academy of Sciences found that the amount of arsenic legally allowed in U.S. drinking water posed serious cancer risks.

Since then, the U.S. government slashed the amount allowed in drinking water from 50 micrograms per liter to just 10. The potent carcinogenicity of arsenic was what Donald Rumsfeld might call an “unknown unknown” for most of human history. So was the fact that Americans can consume dangerous amounts of inorganic arsenic in one of our most common foods: rice.

Consumer Reports dropped that bombshell on the nation in September, recommending that adults limit rice consumption to just two servings per week if they wish to reduce their cancer risk from inorganic arsenic. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration didn’t go so far as to recommend Americans limit their rice intake. But the agency did say that “consumers should continue to eat a balanced diet that includes a wide variety of grains.” They also published their own data on arsenic in rice. It was consistent with the findings of Consumer Reports.

How did such a healthy food — often one of the first solid foods parents spoon into their babies’ mouths — suddenly become a deadly, cancer-causing agent? For one thing, rice is the only major crop grown under water. That allows it to absorb arsenic more easily than other crops. And though some arsenic will always occur naturally in soil and water, humans have added a whole lot more.

Continue reading at:  http://www.otherwords.org/articles/the_risky_business_of_eating_in_america

Posted in Corporate Abuse, Environment, Food, Medical Studies, Uncategorized. Tags: , . Comments Off on The Risky Business of Eating in America

End Polluter Welfare

October 17, 2012 — Suzan

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/16-1

by Bernie Sanders
Published on Tuesday, October 16, 2012 by Common Dreams

The Big Energy industries (oil, coal and gas) along with their political allies like Mitt Romney are waging war against sustainable energy and the need to transform our energy system and reverse global warming. In many instances they are aided and abetted by the very powerful nuclear power industry.

One of their main lines of attack (used repeatedly by Romney in his first debate with President Obama) is that the federal government is picking energy “winners and losers.” In fact, Romney has said he will not invest in “chasing fads and picking winners and losers” among energy technologies and he will allow the free market to determine energy development.

Romney is right about one thing. The government does pick winners and losers in the energy sector. What Romney has not told the American people, however, is that the big winners of federal support are the already immensely profitable fossil fuel and nuclear industries, not sustainable energy.

As a member of both the Senate Energy and Environment committees, I am working to stop the handouts to the fossil fuel industry. I have introduced legislation called the End Polluter Welfare Act. Rep. Keith Ellison filed the companion bill in the House of Representatives. Our measure calls for the elimination for all subsidies to the oil, gas and coal industries. Using the best available estimates from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation and other budget experts, we found more than $113 billion in federal subsidies will go to fossil fuel corporations over the next 10 years alone. These subsidies benefit some of the wealthiest corporations on the planet, including the five largest oil corporations, which made a combined profit of $1 trillion over the last decade. Unlike sustainable energy incentives, many of these fossil fuel subsidies are written permanently into the tax code by industry lobbyists, which means they never expire.

Let me give you just a few examples of outrageously strong federal support for Big Energy companies:

  • BP, after committing one of the worst environmental disasters in the modern history of America, was able to take a large tax deduction on the money it spent cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
  • Coal companies are able to sign single-bid sweetheart leases to mine on federal lands without paying fair value in royalties to the taxpayers of this country.
  • In 2009, Exxon-Mobil, one of the most profitable corporations in this country, paid no federal income taxes, and in fact received a rebate from the IRS. Many other large and very profitable oil companies also have managed to avoid paying federal income taxes in certain years.

But it is not just fossil fuel companies. The nuclear industry also benefits from massive corporate welfare. The non-partisan Congressional Research Service reports that the nuclear industry has received over $95 billion (in 2011 dollars) in federal research and development support in the last 65 years. Nuclear corporations currently have access to billions in federal loan guarantees to build new plants and enrich uranium. They also have federal tax incentives for mining uranium, producing nuclear electricity and even decommissioning a plant.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/16-1

Posted in Chemical Pollution, Corporate Abuse, Economic Issues, Environment. Comments Off on End Polluter Welfare

Pinkwashing Fracking? How the Komen Board Is Cashing in on Shale Gas

October 17, 2012 — Suzan

From Truth Out:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/12094-pinkwashing-fracking-how-the-komen-board-is-cashing-in-on-shale-gas

By Steve Horn
Saturday, 13 October 2012

The Wizard of Oz was spot on when he saidto “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” That’s good life advice if you fall into the “Ignorance is bliss” camp. For a journalist though, it’s doing the exact opposite that’s a sin qua non for the job.

Kevin Begos of the Associated Press took the Wizard’s advice to heart in his July 22 story titled, “Experts: Some fracking critics use bad science.”

Citing “Gasland” director Josh Fox’s viral video “The Sky is Pink” as an example, Begos wrote, “Opponents of fracking say breast cancer rates have spiked exactly where intensive drilling is taking place — and nowhere else in the state…But researchers haven’t seen a spike in breast cancer rates in the area.”

As his main source of expertise on the breast cancer issue, Begos turned to Chandini Portteus, Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation’s Vice President of Research, Evaluation, and Scientific Programs. Of the connection between fracking and breast cancer she stated, “what we do know is a little bit, and what we don’t know is a lot.”

Sara Jerving of the Center for Media and Democracy came to diametrically different conclusions in her April 2012 probe for PR Watch, writing,

Benzene, which the U.S. EPA has classified as a Group A, human carcinogen, is released in the fracking process through air pollution and in the water contaminated by the drilling process. The Institute of Medicine released a report in December 2011 that links breast cancer to exposure to benzene.

Up to thirty-seven percent of chemicals in fracking fluids have been identified as endocrine-disruptors — chemicals that have potential adverse developmental and reproductive effects. According to the U.S. EPA, exposure to these types of chemicals has also been implicated in breast cancer.

Continue reading at:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/12094-pinkwashing-fracking-how-the-komen-board-is-cashing-in-on-shale-gas

Posted in Environment, Fracking. Comments Off on Pinkwashing Fracking? How the Komen Board Is Cashing in on Shale Gas

Extreme Weather: Preview or Feature, No One Wants to See the Full Climate Change Show

July 9, 2012 — Suzan

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/08-4

by Susan Casey-Lefkowitz
Published on Sunday, July 8, 2012 by The Switchboard / NRDC Blog

With 2012 being another year of violent storms, wildfires, floods and extreme heat, we can argue whether this is a preview or the main feature, but no one wants to see the full climate change show. Some still debate whether a specific extreme weather event is due to climate change, but what is clear is that these kinds of events are our future if we don’t change direction.

Last week, my family and millions of others lost electricity for days during a period of 100+ degree temperatures. The past week’s extreme heat was coupled with power outages and damage to homes along a 700 mile swath of destruction from a band of “super derecho” violent thunderstorms that cut trees in half. People in the D.C. region are now seriously debating spending tens of billions of dollars on putting power lines underground. That is one of many un-anticipated costs of climate change.

We are very exposed as a country. The violent storms and extreme heat show how exposed we are, as do the many instances of coastal flooding, flashfloods, droughts and wildfires. We like having big trees in our yards. We like living on the shorelines, in the deserts and on the mountains. But how much longer can we live in places where we are prone to floods, fires, and extreme heat? And where will it be safe if we allow climate change to continue?

We can pretend that ice doesn’t melt when it is hot. The North Carolina legislature tried this with a bill to force sea level rise forecasts to be based on past patterns instead of on forward-looking projections using climate change data. They met with disbelief that any leader could think that ignoring a problem would make it go away. With the US Geological Survey determining that the mid-Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Massachusetts is a ‘hot-spot’ with sea levels already having risen 3-4 times faster than the global average over the last two decades, coastal communities are having serious conversations about what this means for their future.

Modern society is based on trust. For example, airlines have to be safe or people won’t fly. Banks and the financial system need to be safe or people won’t invest. Our energy choices also need to be trustworthy.  I can’t think of anything worse that taking away people’s trust when it comes to their safety in their homes and daily lives. Yet we are on a business as usual path that depends on fossil fuels and does not do enough to curb climate change pollution.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/07/08-4

Posted in Environment, Uncategorized. Comments Off on Extreme Weather: Preview or Feature, No One Wants to See the Full Climate Change Show

Unrelenting Heat Wave Bakes All in Its Reach

July 9, 2012 — Suzan

From The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/us/temperatures-soar-as-heat-wave-continues.html

By and
Published: July 7, 2012

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — An unrelenting and record-setting heat wave peaked this weekend, beating a broad swath of states into sweaty submission, with above-normal triple-digit temperatures stretching from St. Louis to Washington.

The searing heat withered crops in the fields, buckled roadways and caused at least two train derailments. At least 36 weather-related deaths have been reported since the temperatures first shot up 10 days ago.

“I’m avoiding the outside world,” Monica Fuhrman, 21, of Centreville, Va., said Saturday morning in Washington as she walked through Dupont Circle on her way to an indoor conference at Howard University. “I can’t handle heat like this. It’s too miserable.”

More than 200 record highs were broken on Friday throughout the Midwest and along the East Coast. And more records fell on Saturday. In Washington, the high was 105, which was a record for the day and 1 degree shy of the hottest temperature ever recorded there.

In St. Louis, the thermometer hit triple digits before 11 a.m., extending the city’s record streak of 100-degree days to 10 in a row.

The St. Louis medical examiner confirmed three heat-related deaths and said it was investigating six more. In Chicago, the authorities said the heat had claimed at least six lives as of Friday night. In Virginia, officials reported 10 heat-related deaths, and 10 people died in Maryland, health officials said.

Many of the deaths have been elderly people found in stuffy homes without air-conditioning.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/us/temperatures-soar-as-heat-wave-continues.html

Posted in Environment, Uncategorized. Comments Off on Unrelenting Heat Wave Bakes All in Its Reach

Global Protests Against Draconian Education Cuts, Tuition Hikes

May 25, 2012 — Suzan

From The Nation:  http://www.thenation.com/blog/168049/global-protests-against-draconian-education-cuts-tuition-hikes

Allison Kilkenny
on May 24, 2012

Austerity protests have become part of the new global landscape, a reality underscored by a wave of recent protests in Philadelphia and Quebec.

More than 1,000 people rallied Wednesday to protest the Philadelphia District’s plans to “transform schools,” a pleasant euphemism generally meaning school closures and mass layoffs. The Philly district plans to possibly lay off 2,700 blue-collar workers, including every member of SEIU B2BJ Local 1201, the city school union representing bus assistants, cleaners, mechanics and other workers.

Philly.com reports that all these workers have received pink slips and could be let go by the end of the year.

Eleven men and three women were arrested during Wednesday’s protest, including B2BJ president George Ricchezza, union health and welfare administrator Dennis Biondo and retired teachers Lisa Haver and Ronald Whitehorne, among others. They were later released and are to be arraigned in June.

The individuals were arrested for “clogging traffic,” according to a local CBS affiliate.

Earlier in the month, the school system announced that it expects to close forty public schools next year and sixty-four by 2017, shocking figures that received little national attention, prompting Black Agenda Report’s Bruce A. Dixon to publish an article titled, “Why Isn’t Closing 40 Philadelphia Public Schools National News?”

Continue reading at:  http://www.thenation.com/blog/168049/global-protests-against-draconian-education-cuts-tuition-hikes

Posted in Class War, Education, Environment, Equal Treatment, Globalization, Hard Times. Comments Off on Global Protests Against Draconian Education Cuts, Tuition Hikes

‘Faster Than We Thought’: An Epitaph for Planet Earth

May 24, 2012 — Suzan

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/23-5

by John Atcheson
Published on Wednesday, May 23, 2012 by Common Dreams

Sometime later this Century, a writer will sit down and attempt to document how his or her grandparents’ generation could have all but ignored the greatest disaster humanity has ever faced.

It won’t be a pleasant world she lives in. Cities and countries will be locked in an expensive battle with rapidly rising seas; but after spending trillions of dollars, most of the world’s ports will have been abandoned anyway.

Up to seventy percent of the planet’s species will be wiped out.  Gone. Vanished. Kaput. Songbirds will no longer serenade us.  Butterflies will no longer dazzle us.  The boreal forests – the largest belt of green in the world – will be gone.

Brutal heat waves will be the norm. Off-the-chart hurricanes and storms will be the rule.  Deserts will have expanded.  Haboobs, giant black blizzards of dust will sweep across vast portions of the US’s high plains and the southwest. The Amazon rainforest will be a shrunken, wizened remnant of a once vast source of life.

The once bountiful seas will be acidic crypts in which jellyfish and other primitive forms spread in vast sheets across the surface, covering the rotting hulks of the fish we used to eat.

Agricultural productivity will collapse, famine will be widespread.

Money for anything other than preventing catastrophe will be scarce.

By 2050, as many as a billion climate refugees will roam the Earth, spreading unrest, poverty, disease and misery. By the century’s end?  Who knows?

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/23-5

Posted in Ecology, Environment, Uncategorized. Comments Off on ‘Faster Than We Thought’: An Epitaph for Planet Earth

Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into Moose Graveyard

May 23, 2012 — Suzan

From Scientific American:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rapid-climate-changes-turn-north-woods-into-moose-graveyard

Moose may disappear from boreal woods as circumpolar regions warm and transform

By Daniel Cusick and ClimateWire
May 18, 2012

ALONG THE GUNFLINT TRAIL, Minn. — If moose disappear from the boreal forest of northern Minnesota, as some biologists predict, they will not exit with a thunderous crash. Climate extinctions come quietly, even when they involve 1,000-pound herbivores.

Experts who have studied the Northwestern moose — Alces alces andersoni — believe they are witnessing one of the most precipitous nonhunting declines of a major species in the modern era, yet few outside Minnesota fully appreciate the loss.

The moose is an iconic species whose existence is woven into the social, economic and cultural fabric of this region. Its elongated head and wide antlers are emblazoned on everything from T-shirts to tire flaps. The 1960s cartoon character Bullwinkle J. Moose and his flying squirrel friend Rocky were residents of the fictionalized town of Frostbite Falls, Minn.

But the animals that inspired Bullwinkle are not what they were. Here, even healthy bulls — whose size, strength and rutting prowess make them the undisputed kings of the North Woods — are dying from what appear to be a combination of exhaustion, exposure, wasting disease triggered by parasites and other maladies.

The biologists are baffled and also helpless.

Continue reading at:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rapid-climate-changes-turn-north-woods-into-moose-graveyard

Posted in Environment, Uncategorized. Comments Off on Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into Moose Graveyard

How Rural America Got Fracked: The Environmental Nightmare You Know Nothing About

May 22, 2012 — Suzan

From Michael Moore:  http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/how-rural-america-got-fracked-environmental-nightmare-you-know-nothing-about

By Ellen Cantarow
May 21st, 2012

If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out.  As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand — and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.

March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” daytime temperatures soared to nearly 80 degrees — bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message.

In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.

Yet this peaceful rural landscape is swiftly becoming part of a vast assembly line in the corporate race for the last fossil fuels on the planet. The target: the sand in the land of the cranes.

Five hundred million years ago, an ocean surged here, shaping a unique wealth of hills and bluffs that, under mantles of greenery and trees, are sandstone. That sandstone contains a particularly pure form of crystalline silica.  Its grains, perfectly rounded, are strong enough to resist the extreme pressures of the technology called hydraulic fracturing, which pumps vast quantities of that sand, as well as water and chemicals, into ancient shale formations to force out methane and other forms of “natural gas.”

That sand, which props open fractures in the shale, has to come from somewhere.  Without it, the fracking industry would grind to a halt. So big multinational corporations are descending on this bucolic region to cart off its prehistoric sand, which will later be forcefully injected into the earth elsewhere across the country to produce more natural gas.  Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.

“The valleys will be filled… the mountains and hills made level”

Continue reading at:  http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/how-rural-america-got-fracked-environmental-nightmare-you-know-nothing-about

Posted in Chemical Pollution, Environment, Uncategorized. Comments Off on How Rural America Got Fracked: The Environmental Nightmare You Know Nothing About

The Walmartization of America Redux: How the Relentless Drive for Cheap Stuff Undermines Our Economy, Bankrupts Our Soul, and Pillages the Planet

December 17, 2011 — Suzan

From Common Dreams:   http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/16-4

by John Atcheson
Published on Friday, December 16, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

If you want to know why the middle class disappeared and where they went, look no further than your local Walmart.  People walked in for the low prices, and walked out with a pile of cheap stuff, but in a figurative sense, they left their wages, jobs, and dignity on the cutting room floor of the House of Cheap.

Welcome to the logical end point of Reagonomics.  Welcome to Ayn Rand’s nightmare vision of morality, where we know the price of everything but the value of nothing; where predatory behavior is celebrated and the notion of community is blasphemy.

In his excellent documentary, Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price, Robert Greenwald carefully documents how Walmart’s giant box stores lower wages across the entire retail sector, impose high social and economic costs on the states and communities in which they operate, and destroy local businesses.

Yet the low prices – which come at such a high cost – are irresistible to American consumers.  Walmart has virtually cornered the retail market and amassed astounding wealth in the process.

But it’s not just Walmart.  Big box stores now rule across the board in the US retail economy in everything from electronics to pet supplies. And it’s not just retail. The entire US economy is now organized around the notion that getting us cheap stuff – the more the better – is the sine qua non of economic policy.

There was a time when corporations understood that paying their employees a living wage had economic and societal benefits.  Henry Ford famously said he wanted his employees to be able to afford to buy the cars they made and launched six decades of prosperity.

Continue reading at:   http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/16-4

Posted in Austerity, Class War, Corporate Abuse, Depression, Economic Issues, Employment, Environment, Uncategorized. Tags: , . Comments Off on The Walmartization of America Redux: How the Relentless Drive for Cheap Stuff Undermines Our Economy, Bankrupts Our Soul, and Pillages the Planet

Air Too Dangerous to Breathe: How Gas Drilling Can Turn Rural Communities Into Industrial Wastelands

December 15, 2011 — Suzan

From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/story/153417/air_too_dangerous_to_breathe%3A_how_gas_drilling_can_turn_rural_communities_into_industrial_wastelands_%5Bwith_photos%5D/

Drilling is just the tip of the iceberg. Compressor stations have been associated with significant headaches, bloody noses, skin lesions, blisters, and rashes.

By Nina Berman
December 13, 2011

View a slideshow from award-winning photographer Nina Berman below. You can see more of Nina’s work at NOOR.

The exploding faucet may have launched the movement against fracking, but it’s the unsexy compressor station that is pushing it to maturity.

Last week, more than a hundred activists from Pennsylvania and New York, including actor Mark Ruffalo, brought thousands of gallons of drinking water to 11 families in Dimock, Pa., who had been left dry after Cabot Oil and Gas stopped their water deliveries.

The mess Cabot created in 2009 from shale gas drilling had now been cleaned, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which meant no more water for the Dimock 11, the holdout families in a long-running feud over water contamination and cleanup.

At issue was the safety of well water symbolized by a jug filled with brown fluid taken from Dimock resident Scott Ely’s well. Held aloft by Ruffalo, who was flanked by families and Gasland director Josh Fox, the crowd challenged officials to come and take a swig if the water was so safe. Paul Rubin, a hydrogeologist, painted a grim picture, laying out a future of continued water contamination. The Ely water had arsenic, manganese, aluminum, iron, and lead at several times the maximum contaminant level (MCL) for safe drinking water.

The visuals were dramatic, and the anti-frack action ended with supporters triumphantly holding a huge water line that snaked from a tanker truck on Carter Road to a family’s “water buffalo” — a large storage tank. The Dimock 11 were now supplied.

Continue reading at:   http://www.alternet.org/story/153417/air_too_dangerous_to_breathe%3A_how_gas_drilling_can_turn_rural_communities_into_industrial_wastelands_%5Bwith_photos%5D/

Posted in Chemical Pollution, Corporate Abuse, Ecology, Environment, Uncategorized. Tags: . Comments Off on Air Too Dangerous to Breathe: How Gas Drilling Can Turn Rural Communities Into Industrial Wastelands

After Durban: Climate Activists Target Corporate Power

December 15, 2011 — Suzan

From Yes Magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/madeline-ostrander/after-durban-climate-activists-target-corporate-power

After another disappointing round of UN negotiations, climate justice activists have a new strategy.

by Madeline Ostrander
posted Dec 13, 2011

“I feel like I’ve written the same story for the past three years,” climate reporter Kate Sheppard tweeted from Durban, South Africa, last week.

Indeed, this year’s United Nations climate negotiations in Durban—the Conference of the Parties, where world governments get together ostensibly to talk about reining in climate change—proceeded much like the previous two. Experts predicted the talks would fall apart. Scientists released frightening warnings about the world’s failure to act (including a report that greenhouse gas emissions shot up 5.9 percent last year, likely the largest increase since the Industrial Revolution). The talks ended in the early morning hours on Sunday with an extension of the Kyoto Protocol and a two-page agreement (called the “Durban Platform”) to make another agreement by 2015, next time “with legal force.” But the negotiations produced no binding commitments from the participating nations substantive enough to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, a threshold that was once considered “safe,” though new research suggests even that much warming poses serious environmental and economic dangers. Still, many major press outlets proclaimed the “Durban platform” a success, because it was, perhaps, better than not having an agreement at all.

Many of the citizen groups that gathered at Durban see the talks as a failure. Inspired, in part, by the Occupy movement, they are beginning to cry foul at the ways they believe corporate influence at home has stymied their governments’ participation in the U.N. process year after year.

“We’re not going to be overly distracted by the ongoing shell game of endless U.N. negotiations,” Bill McKibben, founder of the climate activist group 350.org, said in a statement after the close of the climate talks. “We know that the real debate is between the bottom line of the scientists, and the bottom line of the fossil fuel companies … we’re going to take on the subsidies that make the oil companies so rich, and the systemic corruption that makes them so politically powerful.”

Continue reading at:   http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/madeline-ostrander/after-durban-climate-activists-target-corporate-power

Posted in Anti-Globalization, Corporate Abuse, Environment, Uncategorized. Tags: , , . Comments Off on After Durban: Climate Activists Target Corporate Power
« Older posts