Category: Environmental

What happened to the Hurricane Sandy money?

~ susie

062812_4822_NJACE Award

I think this will turn out to be quite a story.

TRENTON — In advance of an expected 2016 presidential campaign, Chris Christie’s administration is stepping up efforts to control the Republican governor’s image at all costs — even skirting sunshine laws that permit public access to government records.

Getting the Christie administration to release its grip of records tracking use of federal Sandy recovery money has been particularly difficult for watchdog groups and media outlets, including the Asbury Park Press.

The Fair Share Housing Center recently received the first detailed information about housing recovery programs supported by federal grants — only after suing the administration for not complying with a public records request.

The Press has yet to receive Sandy recovery information the newspaper first sought four months ago. The Press asked for internal administration records from the contract bidding that resulted in Christie and his family starring in TV commercials for the $25 million “Stronger Than the Storm” tourism campaign.

In September, state officials told the Press a search had “identified hundreds of potentially responsive documents’’ and promised to begin sharing the information “on a rolling basis” starting in the second week of October.

For two months after the deadline, nothing was forthcoming — until some of the documents were released Friday, just hours after this story first appeared on the newspaper’s APP.com website. State officials said more information would be available later this month.

Not only are they blocking info on the federal funding, IIRC, we still don’t have an accounting of the private donations raised by the Springsteen-BonJovi-Billy Joel concert — which is being handled by Mary Pat Christie, former Wall St. banker and the governor’s wife.

The next time a wingnut says we had a ‘quiet’ hurricane season

~ susie

And that proves there’s no global warming, remind him the world is a much bigger place than the United States:

European winter storm claims nine lives (via AFP)

Icy winter storms with hurricane-force winds Friday lashed northern Europe, where the death toll rose to nine while hundreds of thousands were left without power or stranded by transport chaos. Emergency services across the region battled to evacuate…

Continue reading “The next time a wingnut says we had a ‘quiet’ hurricane season” →

Why Pennsylvanians should support Daylin Leach

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Just one more reason to give this guy a contribution:

Believe it or not, yesterday I heard the following from E. Christopher Abruzzo, Tom Corbett’s Nominee for Department of Environmental Protection Secretary:

“I have not read any scientific studies that would lead me to conclude that there are adverse impacts to human beings or to animals or to plant life at this small level of climate change.”

While it is absolutely galling that Corbett would have the audacity to nominate someone for the post of protecting our environment who hasn’t read anything, ANYTHING, about the human impact on climate change, it’s not unexpected.

However, I was the only member of the State Senate yesterday to hold Corbett’s nominee accountable, to ask hard questions, and to vote against his nomination.

Not good

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

So it’s even worse than we thought:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is spewing 50 percent more methane — a potent heat-trapping gas — than the federal government estimates, a new comprehensive scientific study says. Much of it is coming from just three states: Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

That means methane may be a bigger global warming issue than thought, scientists say. Methane is 21 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, the most abundant global warming gas, although it doesn’t stay in the air as long.

Much of that extra methane, also called natural gas, seems to be coming from livestock, including manure, belches, and flatulence, as well as leaks from refining and drilling for oil and gas, the study says. It was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The study estimates that in 2008, the U.S. poured 49 million tons of methane into the air. That means U.S. methane emissions trapped about as much heat as all the carbon dioxide pollution coming from cars, trucks, and planes in the country in six months.

That’s more than the 32 million tons estimated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration or the nearly 29 million tons reckoned by the European Commission.

“Something is very much off in the inventories,” said study co-author Anna Michalak, an Earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif. “The total U.S. impact on the world’s energy budget is different than we thought, and it’s worse.”

Still conflicted about the Keystone pipeline? Read this.

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

No one likes to talk about the dangers:

Jason Thompson used to love fishing in the lake he can see from his window in Mayflower, Arkansas, but these days, when he throws a line out into the water, the lure he reels back is covered in a sour, stinking black tar, the skirt of the jig stuck uselessly together. When he brings the fingers that touched the line up to his nose, he gets a whiff of the same putrid stench that filled the air for weeks after the oil pipeline burst—the smell that still rises out of the ground every time it rains.

Thompson hasn’t been fishing much. Ever since Exxon Mobil’s Pegasus pipeline burst in March and spilled an estimated 210,000 gallons of Canadian heavy crude oil two miles from his house, he’s had headaches of preternatural intensity, so bad they wake him up in the middle of the night. He has nosebleeds, and hemorrhoids even though he’s only 36; there’s a rash on his neck that has only gotten worse in the eight months since the spill; and some days he feels so weak that he can hardly get out of bed. He estimates that he has lost almost 35 pounds since the rupture, falling from a fit 220 down to 185. When he went to see a doctor in April, he was told he has a mysterious spot on one lung—but he hasn’t been able to afford to go back.

Hundreds of people in this working-class town of 2,200 have complained of symptoms like Thompson’s. And their maladies—respiratory disorders, nausea, fatigue, nosebleeds, bowel issues, throbbing headaches—echo the ones that appeared in Marshall, Michigan, where an Enbridge Energy pipeline burst in 2010. The two pipelines were carrying the same kind of oil: a heavy crude, or bitumen, mined in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, which is thicker and rawer than the oil extracted in the United States. This is also the oil that would flow in record quantities through the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, if President Barack Obama decides to approve it.
Continue reading “Still conflicted about the Keystone pipeline? Read this.” →

Global warming in action

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Storm chasers James Reynolds, Josh Morgerman and Mark Thomas were in the capital of Leyte Province, Tacloban, which received a direct hit from Super Typhoon Haiyan. This video shows some of the extreme winds of the eyewall, as filmed by James Reynolds. You can read an account of their escape from Tacloban on CNN.

Look at that storm. It’s like a giant tornado passing through.