Category: Disastrous

Another reason to hate Disney

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

San Diego Parade of Lights 2013
This is really disgusting:

An educational program funded by Ohio’s oil and gas industry and sponsored by Radio Disney has environmental activists – and some parents – up in arms over what they say is a hijacking of public education by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) interests, in a state sitting on billions of dollars’ worth of gas-rich shale.

The program, called Rocking in Ohio, went on a 26-stop tour of elementary schools and science centers across the state last month. It involves interactive demonstrations of how oil and gas pipelines work, and is led by three staffers from Radio Disney’s Cleveland branch. It is entirely funded by the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program (OOGEEP), which gets its money from oil and gas companies.

Radio Disney, a nationwide network of radio stations aimed at kids, has said it will take the tour to other states if it deems the program successful. The company could not be reached for comment in time for the publication of this story.

Environmental activists and parents have called the program “propaganda” for promoting a controversial industry. Fracking – a process in which thousands of gallons of water and chemicals are injected into deep wells in order to break up rocks that contain natural gas or oil – has been a boon to Ohio’s economy, but has caused myriad environmental issues in the state.

H/t Nicole Naum.

My idea of hell

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Unless they had heat — and snacks!

About 500 passengers aboard three Amtrak trains were stranded overnight in a remote part of northern Illinois because of blowing and drifting snow, Amtrak officials said today.

The trains were halted late Monday near Mendota, about 80 miles west of Chicago. The passengers were aboard the Southwest Chief from Los Angeles, the Illinois Zephyr from Quincy, Ill., and the California Zephyr from the San Francisco Bay area, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari told The Associated Press.

The trains became stuck around 4:15 p.m. ET Monday after they hit a 12-foot snow drift that paralyzed the engines, passenger Bryan Plummer told ABC News today by cellphone.

Amtrak officials say they are working to get the passengers off the trains safely.

“We’ve completed unloading the first train,” spokesman Magliari told ABC News this morning. “We’re now moving to unload the second. And all those passengers from those trains who spent the night overnight in Bureau County will be on chartered buses coming here to Chicago this morning.”

Laurette Mosley of California says she has been stuck for more than 14 hours on one of the trains. Mosley was en route to Chicago to attend her mother’s funeral.

Going into hibernation

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Ready for the Polar Vortex

Someone I know in Ohio said they were expected to be at -40 today, and that they even closed the churches Sunday. Notice how everyone on the teevee talks about the freeze, but they never think to mention the external factors they went into making it happen? Thanks, Exxon and Koch brothers!

CHICAGO — Hardy Midwesterners well accustomed to frigid weather found Monday’s blast of arctic cold to be far beyond anything in recent memory, breaking records and testing their legendary ability to cope with winter’s extremes.

Brutal subzero temperatures forced school closings, kept people home from work, stymied air travel and posed real danger to anyone lingering outdoors as arctic air swept across the Midwest on its way toward the East Coast.

Like a “how cold was it?” joke, the weather across much of the USA was so cold even western Michigan ski resorts shut down and some airlines, such as JetBlue Airways, simply stopped trying to operate most routes between Chicago, other Midwestern cities and the Northeast.

Tuesday promises to be even colder as the “polar vortex” of frigid arctic air advances, bringing what forecasters say will be record-breaking cold to the East and Northeast.

Below-zero temperatures, some into double digits, brought life to a virtual standstill across much of the upper and industrial Midwest. Chicago saw a record low minus 16, and Quincy, Ill., tied a record at minus 9. Wind chills across the Midwest were 40 below and colder.

The cold stretched into southern regions accustomed to a milder January. Waco, Texas, saw 16 degrees and Monroe, La., 19, both records.

Exxon to face criminal charges over fracking spill

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Exxon Tarsands Spill Mayflower, Arkansas

It’s about damned time these careless bastards face some serious jail time:

Exxon Mobil Corp. subsidiary XTO Energy will have to face criminal charges for allegedly dumping tens of thousands of gallons of hydraulic fracturing waste at a Marcellus Shale drilling site in 2010, according to a Pennsylvania judge’s ruling on Thursday.

Following a preliminary hearing, Magisterial District Judge James G. Carn decided that all eight charges against Exxon — including violations of both the state Clean Streams Law and the Solid Waste Management Act — will be “held for court,” meaning there is enough evidence to take the fossil fuel giant to trial over felony offenses.

Pennsylvania’s Attorney General filed criminal charges back in September, claiming Exxonhad removed a plug from a wastewater tank, leading to 57,000 gallons of contaminated water spilling into the soil. The Exxon subsidiary had contested the criminal charges, claiming there was “no lasting environmental impact,” and that the charges could “discourage good environmental practices” from guilty companies.

“The action tells oil and gas operators that setting up infrastructure to recycle produced water exposes them to the risk of significant legal and financial penalties should a small release occur,” Exxon said at the time.

Thanks to Ed Tayter.

I am so shocked

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Wildfires

I don’t exactly expect the Democrats to be much better, but I hope I’m wrong. Maybe we need some pitchforks!

A new study published in Nature suggests that climate change is even worse than scientists had previously anticipated, upgrading the forecast from “dangerous” to “catastrophic.” According to the study’s authors, temperatures are currently snared in an upward spiral: As earth gets hotter, the heat prevents sunlight-reflecting clouds from forming, trapping more heat and further exacerbating the problem. The result could be a temperature climb of 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

The alarming report follows yet another confirmation, this time by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that humans are almost indubitably the drivers of climate change. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has expressed concern, stating that “if this isn’t an alarm bell, then I don’t know what one is. If ever there were an issue that demanded greater cooperation, partnership, and committed diplomacy, this is it.”

But the unnerving escalaton in climate change is unlikely to be abated without significant U.S. support—and for the time being, the Republican Party insists on stonewalling any efforts to offset the human-caused warming process. Given that the U.S. is the second biggest contributor to climate change, its participation in any international resolution is absolutely vital. Yet with one major political party blocking such support, the odds seem increasingly likely that 2100 will, indeed, bring with it a “catastrophic” increase of global heat.

What the hell is happening at Fukushima?

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

We know that TEPCO is in the dangerous process of removing fuel rods from the No. 4 reactor, but since Japan is on the verge of passing a state secrets law that would make it a serious offense to leak information about Fukushima or for journalists to try to get that information, it’s just highly unlikely that anyone will tell us if there’s another nuclear disaster. We do know that steam has been observed coming from the Reactor 3 building three times this week, and we know what it’s been associated with in the past — which ain’t much, but it’s all we have:

Tepco (translation), Dec. 27, 2013: At around 7:00 am on December 27, and confirmed by the camera that from Unit 3 reactor building, 5th floor near the center, steam is generated. Have not been identified abnormal plant conditions of 54 minutes at 7:00 am the same day, the indicated value of the monitoring post (meteorological data of 50 minutes at 7:00 am, 5.1 ℃ temperature, 93.1% humidity).SOURCE: Tepco (July 24, 2013)
Continue reading “What the hell is happening at Fukushima?” →

How they paid for climate change denial

~ susie

funding

A Drexel University professor has untangled how the funding was established by special interests to push climate change denial:

To uncover how the countermovement was built and maintained, Brulle developed a listing of 118 important climate denial organizations in the U.S. He then coded data on philanthropic funding for each organization, combining information from the Foundation Center with financial data submitted by organizations to the Internal Revenue Service. The final sample for analysis consisted of 140 foundations making 5,299 grants totaling $558 million to 91 organizations from 2003 to 2010.

Key findings include:

  • Conservative foundations have bank-rolled denial. The largest and most consistent funders of organizations orchestrating climate change denial are a number of well-known conservative foundations, such as the Searle Freedom Trust, the John William Pope Foundation, the Howard Charitable Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. These foundations promote ultra-free-market ideas in many realms.
  • Koch and ExxonMobil have recently pulled back from publicly visible funding. From 2003 to 2007, the Koch Affiliated Foundations and the ExxonMobil Foundation were heavily involved in funding climate-change denial organizations. But since 2008, they are no longer making publicly traceable contributions.
  • Funding has shifted to pass through untraceable sources. Coinciding with the decline in traceable funding, the amount of funding given to denial organizations by the Donors Trust has risen dramatically. Donors Trust is a donor-directed foundation whose funders cannot be traced. This one foundation now provides about 25% of all traceable foundation funding used by organizations engaged in promoting systematic denial of climate change.
  • Most funding for denial efforts is untraceable. Despite extensive data compilation and analyses, only a fraction of the hundreds of millions in contributions to climate change denying organizations can be specifically accounted for from public records. Approximately 75% of the income of these organizations comes from unidentifiable sources.

“The real issue here is one of democracy. Without a free flow of accurate information, democratic politics and government accountability become impossible,” said Brulle. “Money amplifies certain voices above others and, in effect, gives them a megaphone in the public square. Powerful funders are supporting the campaign to deny scientific findings about global warming and raise public doubts about the roots and remedies of this massive global threat. At the very least, American voters deserve to know who is behind these efforts.”

This study is part one of a three-part project by Brulle to examine the climate movement in the U.S. at the national level. The next step in the project is to examine the environmental movement or the  movement. Brulle will then compare the whole  flow to the entire range of organizations on both sides of the debate.

Dept. of Trust Us, We Wouldn’t Do Anything To Hurt You

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Fracking wastewater site

Imagine that. I suppose we’ll have to imagine, since by law, they don’t have to tell us what they’re using to pollute our water supply. From the University of Pennsylvania MedPage:

Surface and ground water samples taken from hydraulic fracking sites in a drilling-dense area of Colorado showed higher levels of estrogenic, anti-estrogenic and anti-androgenic chemical activity than reference sites with limited drilling, researchers found.

Evidence of endocrine-disrupting activity in a selected subset of chemicals used in the controversial oil and natural gas extraction process was also shown in a study published online ahead of print in the journal Endocrinology.

Fracking Spill Sites Had Twice the EDCs

Water samples from drilling sites in Garfield County, Colo. that experienced fracking spills or accidents showed moderate to high levels of the endocrine-disrupting chemical (EDC) activity, while samples from sites with little drilling showed very little activity, wrote Susan C. Nagel, PhD, of the University of Missouri in Columbia, and colleagues.

“We found no significant anti-androgenic activity at any of our control sites and significant anti-androgenic activity at all of the spill sites,” Nagel told MedPage Today.

On average, water at fracking spill sites had double the amount of total endocrine-disrupting activity compared with control sites, she said.

Nagel characterized this association as strong, and said the study is the first to show an association between fracking and endocrine-disrupting activity.

Around 750 chemicals have been reported to be used in hydraulic fracking, including more than 100 known or suspected to be endocrine-disrupting.

Fracking Exempt From Water Protection Regulations

But the permanent underground injection of chemicals used in fracking is not regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency and has been exempted from multiple federal regulatory acts, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act.

Thanks to Karin Riley Porter.