Category: Environmental
Letterman: ‘We’re screwed’
It’s good when normally non-political (at least, publicly) celebrities like David Letterman come out and attack corporate greed, because I suspect it has more of an impact. Letterman’s right, of course – but no one’s going to do anything to stop it because you can never really have enough money in your campaign chest:
David Letterman held nothing back last week when he voiced his concerns over fracking, calling the oil companies greedy, he plainly explained to America, “we’re screwed.”
The Late Show host went on to point out the issues with water contamination as a result of fracking, saying, “The Delaware Water Gap has been ruined. The Hudson Valley has been ruined. Most of Pennsylvania has been ruined. Virginia, West Virginia has been ruined. Colorado has been ruined. New Mexico has been ruined.”
Fracking is a controversial drilling method used for extracting natural gas. It has spread throughout the U.S. in recent years, despite growing acknowledgement of the risks involved. It has come under even more press in New York state recently, where activists are currently fight against reports that Governor Andrew Cuomo may allow fracking to take place in several counties.
Letterman joins fellow commedian, host of Late Night, Jimmy Fallon, who also recently discussed fracking on his show. Fallon joined Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono on stage for a song, titled “Don’t frack my mother.”
Doing the math of global warming
Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone. Please, go read the entire article:
If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.
Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world’s nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn’t even attend. It was “a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,” the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls “once thronged by multitudes.” Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn’t yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.
Corn crop estimated drop ‘by the hour’
Now remember, many of our foods are dependent on corn. The bulk of corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by livestock, poultry, and fish production. Approximately 12% of the U.S. corn crop ends up in foods that are either consumed directly or indirectly, and has many industrial uses including ethanol. So this is not good news at all – and will most likely translate into much higher food costs.
Good thing the administration has taken such bold moves to prevent further global warming, huh?
CHICAGO, July 17 (Reuters) – U.S. corn production has shrunk 7 percent versus the government’s downgraded estimate a week ago, a Reuters poll found on Tuesday, with a worsening drought likely to cause more damage before the month is out.
As the worst drought since 1956 begins to expand to the northern and western Midwest, areas that had previously been spared, analysts are slashing corn yield estimates by the hour. Some analysts are also starting to cut their forecasts on the number of acres that will be harvested as farmers opt to plough under their fields to claim insurance.
What began the season as a potentially record corn crop as farmers planted the biggest area since 1937, may now be the smallest in at least five years. Soybeans, which enter their key pod-setting phase later then corn, are increasingly at risk. The poll of 13 analysts pegged the average estimated corn yield at 137.2 bushels per acre, down 6 percent from USDA’s current forecast of 146 bushels.
The USDA dropped its yield estimate by an unprecedented 20 bushels per acre in its report on July 11. Corn production was pegged at 12.077 billion bushels, the smallest in 5 years, down 6.9 percent from USDA’s outlook. “We’re losing more yield with the additional stress now in the northern areas which up until now had been pretty good,” said Shawn McCambridge, analyst for Jefferies Bache.
Dear President Obama
End times
Yes, our leaders really are this venal and stupid.
Marcellus Shale study
A Duke University study that examined the possibility that Marcellus Shale drilling in northeastern Pennsylvania contaminates drinking water concluded that pathways in rock formations that allowed salinated water into shallow aquifers were naturally occurring and not a result of hydraulic fracturing.
Still, the authors warned in the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that those naturally occurring pathways could allow chemicals and contaminated water caused by fracking also to travel into the drinking water supply.
Avner Vengosh, a Duke University professor of geochemistry and a corresponding author of the paper, characterized it as “good news, bad news.”
“We’re ruling out [that] this saline water derived from today’s shale gas drilling,” he said.
But, he continued, “everything is not black and white. We’re just in the very beginning of understanding what’s going on. The result of this study does not apply to all of Pennsylvania or all areas of the Appalachian Basin. It needs to be duplicated.”
Katy Gresh, a spokeswoman with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said her office could not comment on the study because it had just seen it.
“We will review it,” she said, adding: “We’ve never seen any evidence in Pennsylvania of hydraulic fracturing contaminating drinking water supplies.”
The paper’s conclusions that contamination was not caused by fracking were based on two major points:
Continue reading “Marcellus Shale study”
Bad news
What could possibly go wrong?
TRENTON — In a ruling that could affect tens of thousands of contaminated sites in New Jersey, a state appeals court Friday said the Department of Environmental Protection does not have the authority to require owners or operators of industrial sites to certify the land is “clean” before they are sold and redeveloped.
Environmentalists called the decision a “major setback” in cleaning up contaminated sites in New Jersey and said this was an unintended consequence of legislation that was supposed to help less polluted sites get cleaned up quickly.
Acknowledging the gravity of its decision, the three-judge appellate panel said no action can be taken on the sites for 30 days, giving time for a potential appeal to the state Supreme Court.
“We conclude that the department, despite its important regulatory role and its expertise over environmental matters, acted in the present context beyond its legislatively delegated powers,” Judge Jack Sabatino wrote in the 36-page decision.
Let’s pretend it’s not happening
Media Matters has done an impressive job, doing that which the corporate media refuses to do: Putting the western wildfires squarely in the context of global warming. More importantly, they’ve documented the fact that the media is indeed mostly ignoring the subject. Gee, I wonder why?
While numerous factors determine the frequency, severity and cost of wildfires, scientific research indicates that human-induced climate change increases fire risks in parts of the Western U.S. by promoting warmer and drier conditions. Seven of nine fire experts contacted by Media Matters agreed journalists should explain the relationship between climate change and wildfires. But an analysis of recent coverage suggests mainstream media outlets are not up to the task — only 3 percent of news reports on wildfires in the West mentioned climate change.
The major television and print outlets largely ignored climate change in their coverage of wildfires in Colorado, New Mexico and other Western states. All together, only 3 percent of the reports mentioned climate change, including 1.6 percent of television segments and 6 percent of text articles.
METHODOLOGY: We searched Nexis and Factiva databases for articles and segments on (wildfire or wild fire or forest fire) between April 1, 2012, and June 30, 2012. News outlets included in this study are ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. MSNBC and Fox News were not included in this analysis because transcripts of their daytime coverage are not available in the Nexis database.
[…] Of nine fire scientists who responded to email inquiries, seven agreed that journalists should explain how manmade climate change could worsen wildfire risk in certain parts of the western U.S. The other two emphasized other major factors that determine the extent of fire damage, or highlighted the regional and subregional variations that make it difficult to draw broad conclusions.
Continue reading “Let’s pretend it’s not happening”
Fukushima report released
Watch Are U.S. Nuclear Plants Ready for a Fukushima-Like Meltdown? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
And just to bring this Fukushima report a little closer to home, there are 23 of G.E.’s flawed Mark I reactors right here in the good old U.S. of A. Add to that the increasing incidence of earthquakes in unexpected places (caused by the injection of fracking waste fluid into the ground), and we’ve got a “no one could have known!” just waiting to happen here.
Maybe someone should do something?
Yes, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima was sparked by the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, but a Japanese parliamentary report said Thursday the disaster that followed was man-made, and suggested more plants were susceptible.
That last bit is probably the most disturbing angle of the 641-page report, which said Tokyo Electric Power Company didn’t take the damage to its nuclear power plant seriously enough quickly enough, and which “accused Tepco and regulators at the nuclear and industrial safety agency of failing to take adequate safety measures, despite evidence that the area was susceptible to powerful earthquakes and tsunamis,”The Guardian’s Justin McCurry reports. Tepco has argued that the tsunami was a “once-in-a-millennium” event, for which they couldn’t realistically prepare, The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi writes.
The scary thing, though, is that the report found that it could have been the earthquake itself, not just the unusually large tsunami, that damaged the plant and sparked meltdowns in three reactors. “By suggesting that the plant may have sustained extensive damage from the quake — a far more frequent occurrence in Japan — the report in effect casts doubts on the safety of Japan’s entire fleet of nuclear plants,” Tabuchi wrote.
In the end, the report concluded that the disaster was “profoundly man-made” and could have been prevented.