Category: Environmental

Jon Stewart v. Oliver North

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Thank God for comedians who are actually old enough to remember exactly what happened in the past, because otherwise, these hypocrites would never be challenged by our Librul Media. An exceptionally good segment:

Jon Stewart rips Oliver North: Are you mad that prisoner-trading has ‘gone mainstream’? (via Raw Story )

Daily Show host Jon Stewart sarcastically commended Fox News on Wednesday for inviting convicted felon and former Army Lt. Col. Oliver North to comment on the U.S. deal to free POW Bowe Bergdahl — especially when North’s “commentary” included…

Continue reading “Jon Stewart v. Oliver North” →

We’re destroying everything

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Puffin

And no one seems to want to stop it:

Now, thanks to a grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the Puffin Cam offered new opportunities for research and outreach. Puffin parents dote on their single chick, sheltering it in a two-foot burrow beneath rocky ledges and bringing it piles of small fish each day. Researchers would get to watch live puffin feeding behavior for the first time, and schoolkids around the world would be falling for Petey.

But Kress soon noticed that something was wrong. Puffins dine primarily on hake and herring, two teardrop-shaped fish that have always been abundant in the Gulf of Maine. But Petey’s parents brought him mostly butterfish, which are shaped more like saucers. Kress watched Petey repeatedly pick up butterfish and try to swallow them. The video is absurd and tragic, because the butterfish is wider than the little gray fluff ball, who keeps tossing his head back, trying to choke down the fish, only to drop it, shaking with the effort. Petey tries again and again, but he never manages it. For weeks, his parents kept bringing him butterfish, and he kept struggling. Eventually, he began moving less and less. On July 20, Petey expired in front of a live audience. Puffin snuff.

“When he died, there was a huge outcry from viewers,” Kress tells me. “But we thought, ‘Well, that’s nature.’ They don’t all live. It’s normal to have some chicks die.” Puffins successfully raise chicks 77 percent of the time, and Petey’s parents had a good track record; Kress assumed they were just unlucky. Then he checked the other 64 burrows he was tracking: Only 31 percent had successfully fledged. He saw dead chicks and piles of rotting butterfish everywhere. “That,” he says, “was the epiphany.”

Why would the veteran puffin parents of Maine start bringing their chicks food they couldn’t swallow? Only because they had no choice. Herring and hake had dramatically declined in the waters surrounding Seal Island, and by August, Kress had a pretty good idea why: The water was much too hot.

Thanks to Shawn Sukumar Attorney at Law.

I’m sure it’ll be fine

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Oyster Creek Nuclear Station After Sandy

It’s not as if they’d lie to us:

Operators at the nation’s oldest nuclear plant have terminated an “unusual event” status that was briefly declared after staffers detected an odor of chlorine at the plant’s intake structure. The declaration at the Oyster Creek plant in Lacey Township occurred at 10:34 a.m. Wednesday.

Plant officials say the odor was emanating from piping that provides service water to plant systems. The leak was isolated and the odor dissipated, and officials say it posed no threat to plant workers, the environment or the public.

The “unusual event” declaration — which is the lowest of four levels of emergency classification — was terminated at 11:40 a.m. Normal plant operations continued while the declaration was in effect.

Oyster Creek is located about 60 miles east of Philadelphia.

Going in reverse

~ susie

365/126 100% solar powered radio solar panels. This is kzmu.

All these ALEC-dominated state legislatures are really having a ball, aren’t they:

The Ohio House of Representatives approved a bill on Wednesday that would roll back the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency law, making Ohio the first state to reverse standards meant to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

The bill passed out of a House committee on Tuesday and went to the floor Wednesday afternoon. The bill had already passed the Senate earlier this month.

The Ohio legislature approved the renewable energy and efficiency standards in 2008, when it passed them almost unanimously. But opponents of the measure have been trying to roll them back for several years. Last year, state Sen. Bill Seitz, a Republican from Cincinnati, said the standards are like “Joseph Stalin’s five-year plan.” (Seitz is a co-sponsor of this year’s bill.)

What a great plan

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Big Rig

This whole “let’s inject chemicals into the earth and we’ll worry later about the results”:

Range Resources on Tuesday disposed of Marcellus shale drilling sludge in West Virginia that was deemed too radioactive for a Washington County landfill.

The Cecil-based company sent two roll-off boxes of material from a well pad in Smith Township in Washington County to Meadowfill Landfill in Bridgeport, W.Va., spokesman Matt Pitzarella said. On March 1, representatives from Arden Landfill in Chartiers turned the material away after it tripped radioactivity monitors.

“It’s incredibly rare that you get hits for any radiation that all landfills cannot accept,” Pitzarella said, noting that hospital materials and municipal waste also contain radiation. “This same scenario exists in every single industry.”

Range Resources returned the material to the work site to be tested before finding a place to dispose of it. No residents or workers were at risk, said John Poister, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

Good news

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Coal power plant and oilseed rape

Even if it is somewhat like locking the barn door after the horse is out. But still!

President Obama is expected to announce a series of executive actions and agreements on Friday morning that will advance solar power and energy efficiency in the United States, part of his pledge to tackle climate change without having to go through a gridlocked Congress…the initiatives will represent an 850-megawatt increase in solar power deployed, or enough to power 130,000 homes. They will also lead to more $2 billion in energy efficiency investments in Federal buildings, $26 billion in savings for businesses on energy bills, and a 380 million metric ton decrease in carbon pollution — the equivalent of taking about 80 million cars off the road for a year, the statement said.

Freedom!

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

viloniadamage

This is where that nasty government regulation comes in handy. If only tornadoes didn’t happen so much in the states with the most minimal building codes, where they consider regulation to be an infringement on their freedom:

VILONIA — The National Weather Service (NWS) reports there has been speculation about why the Arkansas tornado received a EF-4 rating despite the fact that numerous homes were removed from their foundations with only slabs remaining.

“Years ago, that might be justification for an F5 rating on the original Fujita scale,” a writer on the NWS website explains. “These days, the quality of the construction is examined before a rating is assigned. One of the factors determining the rating is the use of anchor bolts.”

As shown in the picture, the home to left in the Vilonia (Faulkner County) area had cut nails instead of anchor bolts to fasten the structure to the foundation.

In fact, according to the article, in Vilonia (Faulkner County), there was little indication of anchor bolts where homes once stood.

At a subdivision to the southwest of town, the official survey results read,”Houses completely destroyed; only slabs remaining at several places. No anchor bolts used in foundations.”

So what does this mean?

While the article points out using cut nails to secure homes to the foundation is widely practiced and the minimum standard in most of the building codes – Dr. David Prevatt, Associate Professor of Civil and Coastal Engineering at the University of Florida says they may not provide enough security in high winds.

“It is my opinion that cut nails can only be considered a temporary connection while installing a wall,” Dr. Prevatt says. “They are in no way, shape or form have the capacity to resist the sliding loads or the uplift loads reduced by high winds that impact the walls of a building.”

Which means, without those anchor bolts, it took less wind to sweep houses away in Vilonia. This explains the EF4, and not EF-5, rating the NWS ultimately gave.

Oh, stop

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

A15-Fukushima Dai-ichi Sakae Nuclear Plant/Fukushima Dai-ichi Power Station Shrine

I’m sure it’ll all be fine:

A government-backed plan for a frozen underground wall to limit water contamination at the wrecked Fukushima atomic station needs further vetting for potential risks to the environment, an adviser to the plant’s operator said.

The plan, which is intended to keep groundwater from seeping into the basements of the plant’s damaged reactor buildings, may not function as intended because it’s based on untested assumptions about the site’s hydrology, said Dale Klein, who chairs Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Nuclear Reform Monitoring Committee.

“Are there any unintended consequences?” Klein asked at a press conference today in Tokyo. “We’re concerned about safety and environmental protection.”

Thanks to Kush Arora.

A breath of fresh air?

~ susie

Grey smokestacks, grey sky

This is a pleasant surprise:

In a victory for environmentalists and the Obama administration, the Supreme Court today ruled to uphold the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule set by Obama’s EPA in 2011. The rule requires 28 states to reduce power plant emissions that can negatively affect the air quality in neighboring states. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in the case.

The Court ruled 6-2 in favor of the rule with Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagen, Roberts and Kennedy joining Ginsburg in supporting the EPA mandate. Justices Anton Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented from the majority, arguing that the court’s decision ”feeds the uncontrolled growth of the administrative state at the expense of government by the people.”

While Thomas and Scalia may support the right of one state’s power plants to pollute downwind states with pollutants that cause respiratory illnesses and increase the risk of heart attacks for the downwind residents, the courts other justices disagreed. The Court majority determined that the EPA rule was a reasonable mandate consistent with the EPA’s mission, and that upholding the rule would improve the air quality for the American people. 

The states of Texas, Ohio, and Michigan opposed the ruling. Some companies that operate coal-fired power plants including Xcel Energy and American Electric Power Company, also opposed the court’s decision. Environmentalists and proponents of clean air on the other hand were pleased with the outcome. Fred Krupp, speaking on behalf of the Environmental Defense Fund, applauded the ruling, stating: 

The Supreme Court’s decision means that our nation can take the necessary steps to ensure healthier and longer lives for the 240 million Americans at risk from power plant smokestack pollution near and far.