US Senate Deals Blow to Global Climate Talks

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/24-1

WASHINGTON - A year and a half after President Barack Obama breathed new life into global talks on a climate treaty, the United States is back in a familiar role -- the holdout.

The Senate's decision Thursday to shelve legislation on climate change is certain to cast a long shadow over December's meeting in Cancun, Mexico that will work on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

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Google Buys 20 Years' Worth Of Wind Energy To Power Data Centers

Hot on the heels of its $38.8 billion investment in two wind farms in North Dakota, Google has just signed a 20-year contract with an Iowa wind farm that enables the search giant to purchase wind power at a set rate over the next two decades.

The energy from the NextEra Energy Resources wind farm will be sufficient to power "several data centers," Google wrote on its blog.
In 2007, Google announced its intention to become carbon neutral by the end of the year.

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Anti-Immigrant Hard-liners Try to Co-Opt Environmental Movement

 Imagine 2050 / By David L. Ostendorf

Apply the Brakes is perhaps the stealthiest part of the restrictionist movement.

Who would have thought that the renowned Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute or Roderick Nash, author of the classic Wilderness and the American Mind, would involve themselves in a portion of the environmental movement that dallies with nativists and white nationalists?  Or that the Weeden Foundation, a mainstay funder of numerous environmental groups, might “steer the environmental movement toward a course fueled by bigotry and racism?”

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Big Oil Makes War on the Planet

Tomdispatch.com / By Ellen Cantarow

Our addiction to oil is now blowing back on the civilization that can't do without its gushers and can't quite bring itself to imagine a real transition to alternative energies.

If you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil -- and just know that you’re not alone.  In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of local populations for decades.

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The Bicycle's Big Comeback: Why Two-Wheelers Are Key for Reducing Oil Dependence

IPS News / By Lester R. Brown

The bicycle has many attractions as a form of personal transportation. It alleviates congestion, lowers air pollution, reduces obesity, increases physical fitness, does not emit climate-disrupting carbon dioxide, and is priced within the reach of the billions of people who cannot afford a car.

Bicycles increase mobility while reducing congestion and the area of land paved over. Six bicycles can typically fit into the road space used by one car. For parking, the advantage is even greater, with 20 bicycles occupying the space required to park a car.

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Clean, Green, Safe and Smart

Michael T. Klare, The Nation
July 15, 2010
http://www.thenation.com/article/37529/clean-green-safe-and-smart

This story is from a new special issue of The Nation on energy. Read more here.

If the ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico tells us anything, it is that we need a new national energy policy—a comprehensive plan for escaping our dangerous reliance on fossil fuels and creating a new energy system based on climate-safe alternatives. Without such a plan, the response to the disaster will be a hodgepodge of regulatory reforms and toughened environmental safeguards but not a fundamental shift in behavior. Because our current energy path leads toward greater reliance on fuels acquired from environmentally and politically hazardous locations, no amount of enhanced oversight or stiffened regulations can avert future disasters like that unfolding in the gulf. Only a dramatic change in course—governed by an entirely new policy framework—can reduce the risk of catastrophe and set the nation on a wise energy trajectory.

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Seepage Detected Near Blown-Out BP Well

by Chris Baltimore

BREAKING NEWS...

HOUSTON, Texas -- Engineers monitoring BP Plc's damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico detected seepage on the ocean floor that could mean problems with the cap that has stopped oil from gushing into the water, the government's top oil spill official said Sunday night.

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Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, Blowback Crude

By Ellen Cantarow
Posted on July 18, 2010, Printed on July 18, 2010
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175275/

[Note for TomDispatch readers:  If you haven’t gotten around to picking up my new book,The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, here’s your chance to get an increasingly rare copy of the first printing.  (The book is already back on press for a second go-round.)  In the meantime, I’ve embarked on what, for me, is something like a mini-radio blitz in the coming weeks -- my first stop being with historian and radio host Jon Weiner, always a wonderful experience. You can catch that encounter (at the 40-minute mark) by clicking here, or watch me talk about the book on Timothy MacBain’s first TomCast video here, or listen to me on a new TomCast audio interview here.  Remember that if you buy the book (or anything else) at Amazon.com via a TD link, we get a little cut of the proceeds at no cost to you.  Tuesday, by the way, I’ll turn 66.  In honor of that moment, TD will take a brief breather. Expect the next post Thursday.  Tom]

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Dyer’s Convincing Global-Warming Vision

by John R. MacArthur

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_rick14_07-14-10_C8J67CR_v34.1d60df5.html

Until very recently, global warming never struck me as the great issue of the day. I avoided Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" because it seemed too much like homework, and when I finally forced myself to watch it at home on DVD, I fell asleep. Then, last November, after e-mails were leaked from England's University of East Anglia that made their scientist authors appear high-handed and disingenuous - which came to be known as "Climategate" - I figured maybe I didn't need to wake up. [1]

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Obama Administration Poised to Provide Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Financing for Coal in India, Undercutting Clean Energy Jobs in the U.S.

WASHINGTON - July 14 - Tomorrow, the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank) board is scheduled to reconsider an application to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in financing to India's Reliance Power Ltd. for the 4,000 megawatt Sasan coal power and mine project. Three weeks ago, the board appropriately rejected financing for Sasan based on its massive carbon dioxide emissions. The project would generate some 26 million annual tons of CO2, more than the bank's annual emissions for all fossil fuel projects approved by Ex-Im Bank in 2009.[1]  

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Doomsday Methane Bubble Rupture?: How the BP Gulf Disaster May Have Triggered a 'World-Killing' Event

By Terrence Aym

Global Research, July 15, 2010

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20131

Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.

251 million years ago a mammoth undersea methane bubble caused massive explosions, poisoned the atmosphere and destroyed more than 96 percent of all life on Earth. [1] Experts agree that what is known as the Permian extinction event was the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the world. [2]

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Promises of Relief in Haiti as the Rest of the World Falters

By Mitchell Rabin

A Better World Mondays & Wednesdays at 6 pm

As soon as the news of the underwater oil well made the splash that it did in the news, the Dutch government, highly equipped with the latest technology to capture oil-laden water, offered the U.S. government and BP their ships, which can capture some 400 cubic meters of water per hour.  For a yardstick, this one ship would have captured more water than all the ships the U.S. had in the Gulf at that time.  The Dutch are equipped for this kind of oil emergency and charge the oil companies who spill in the surrounding waters a pretty guilder for this service.  But in the case of the Obama Administration and BP, this multi-million- dollar service was offered free of charge, but “thanks but no thanks”.

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A Truly Toxic Issue: Our Chemical Environment

A truly toxic issue Modern life is saturated with carcinogenic chemicals. But without regulation, just how are we supposed to avoid them?

by Sadhbh Walshe

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jul/10/avoid-hazardous-chemicals

I used to be under the impression that you had a reasonable chance of avoiding debilitating and potentially fatal diseases like cancer if you just took a few simple precautions: ate plenty of fruit and vegetables, gave up smoking, drank in moderation and did a bit of exercise. It's since become apparent that the world we live in is so overrun with environmental pollutants that it is next to impossible to keep oneself truly healthy.

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BP Ruined a Mississippi Way of Life

by Dennis Bernstein

Eleven weeks into the BP oil catastrophe, millions of gallons of thick black crude continue to gush into the Gulf of Mexico.

According to one native ship captain who grew up "on the water" and whose family harkens back several generations to the 1930s, the situation has gone from a disaster to an apocalypse.

"We thought the place was coming back," said Captain Louis Skrmetta of Gulfport, Mississippi, "that we were recovering from Katrina, finally, after five years, feeling really optimistic, and upbeat, then this thing hits on April 20th, and let me tell you, it was devastating.

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Climate Change Means More Heatwaves, Premature Deaths, Scientists Warn

ENIVORNMENT NEWS WIRE  http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2010/2010-07-09-01.html

WASHINGTON, DC, July 9, 2010 (ENS) - Climate change is a serious health hazard that the United States must prepare for, according to government and university scientists from across the country.

They advised Thursday that climate models show that global warming will increase air pollution and trigger more heat waves, floods and droughts, all of which will threaten human health.

"Climate change is a quintessential public health problem," said Michael McGeehin, director of the Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency of the federal government.

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Pipeline Geopolitics: The Russia German Nord Stream Strategic Gas Pipeline

by F. William Engdahl

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20080

In the postwar history of the Federal Republic, German Chancellors tend to disappear once they pursue political goals that deviate from the Washington global agenda too much. In the case of Gerhard Schroeder, it involved two unforgiveable “sins.” The first was his open opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The second, far  more serious strategically, was his negotiations with Russia’s Putin to bring a major new natural gas pipeline directly from Russia, bypassing then-hostile Poland, to Germany. Today the first section of that Nord Stream gas pipeline has reached the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern coastal town of Lubmin on the Baltic Sea, making Lubmin into a geopolitical pivot for Europe and Russia.

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Former Top CIA Spy on How US Intelligence Became Big Business

by Jeremy Scahill

Few who have seen the dramatic privatization of US intelligence operations from the inside ever speak about the role private contractors play in covert operations--certainly not in public. In late June, however, the CIA's former top counterterrorism official, Robert Grenier, participated in a rare public discussion on issues ranging from the incredible extent to which the US has relied on contractors to fill sensitive national security positions; to battlefield contractors in Afghanistan; to allegations of contractor involvement in "direct action" (lethal) operations, as well as commenting on Blackwater owner Erik Prince's reported involvement in a secret CIA assassination program. The former spy also criticized what he called attempts by the US military to "overstep their bounds" by conducting intelligence operations that traditionally have fallen under the purview of the CIA.

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The New Frontier: Genetically Modified Oil Wars

Consumer Beware: the next generation of biotech crops focus directly on you. Unlike most of GM crops currently on the market, which are genetically altered to be herbicide and pesticide resistant, the new generation of GM crops are designed to express alleged nutritional benefits. Focusing on soybean oil — the fastest way to reach the broadest number of consumers because of its ubiquitous presence in many foods — biotech companies are mutating seeds used to produce oil designed to express various types of “nutritional” benefits.

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Freedom in the Grace of the World

by Chris Hedges

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/05-0

Earl Shaffer, adrift after serving in the South Pacific in World War II and struggling with the loss of his childhood friend Walter Winemiller during the assault on Iwo Jima, made his way to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia in 1947. He headed north toward Mount Katahdin in Maine and for the next 124 days, averaging 16.5 miles a day, beat back the demons of war. His goal, he said, was to ‘‘walk the Army out of my system.'' He was the first person to hike the full length of the Appalachian Trail.

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Over 25% of flowers face extinction – many before they are even discovered

Scientists say human activity could spell end for a quarter of all flowering plants, with huge impact on food chain.

More than one-in-four of all flowering plants are under threat of extinction according to the latest report to confirm the ongoing destruction of much of the natural world by human activity.

As a result, many of nature's most colourful specimens could be lost to the world before scientists even discover them, claims the research, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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