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Feds failing in duty to protect water from oilsands development

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Canada.com - By Mike De Souza - Nov. 24 (Special Report) - The Harper government is failing to enforce federal law and exercise its constitutional authority in at least 10 different aspects of monitoring the exploitation of Alberta’s oilsands and its impact on water, says a new report to be released Monday.

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Pesticides that kill rodents also poison owls.

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

environmentalhealthnews.org - By Karen Kidd (synopsis) - Nov. 24 (Special Report) - Bait laced with the chemicals is eaten by the rodents. However the mice, rats and other rodents may live for several days after eating the bait. The poisoned animals often have different behaviors after they are poisoned and may spend more time out in the open, making them vulnerable to predators, including owls and other raptors. Birds of prey, like owls, are beneficial because they eat rodents and help keep their populations in check. The birds can be exposed to the rodenticides through their diets, and sometimes this has led to larger-scale poisonings.

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Study Suggest Black Women's Relative Invisibility in Society

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Miller-McCune - By Tom Jacobs - Nov. 24 (News Report) - New research finds black women are more likely to go unnoticed and unappreciated than black men or whites of either gender.

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How Limousine Liberals, Water Oligarchs and Even Sean Hannity Are Hijacking Our Water Supply

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Yasha Levine - Nov. 24 (Investigative Report) - A group of water oligarchs in California have engineered a disastrous deregulation and privatization scheme. And they've pulled in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars without causing much public outrage.

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The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened Is Almost Complete ... If It Weren't for Archives

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Mark Ames - Nov. 24 (News Analysis) - Reading through these credible accounts now, you can see how everyone from the PR flaks in the military to the rightwing machine would want somehow distract people from all the accounts of their pigheaded refusal to exempt or discharge Maj. Hasan, and you can then start to imagine how a lot of editors and viewers wouldn't put up much of a fuss if the story changed to something more palatable to the American public. So with no one interested in protecting Maj. Hasan's motives, and everyone interested in protecting the Army's behavior, the story gets changed from one of "it could have been prevented if Army bureaucrats/officers weren't such raging assholes to Maj. Hasan" to a barrage of leaks from unnamed Army officials, who argued that Maj. Hasan never said peep to anyone about wanting out of the service

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A Bing deal for Microsoft, News Corp.?

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By Tim Arango, Ashlee Vance - Nov. 24 (News Report) - Microsoft has been in early discussions about a pact to pay News Corp. to remove links to its news content from Google's search engine and display them exclusively on Microsoft's Bing. If such an arrangement came to pass, it would be a watershed moment in the history of the Internet, and set off a fierce debate over the future of content online.

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Farmer Ants Fertilize Their Gardens With Bacteria

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Brandon Keim - Nov. 24 (News Report) - Thanks to their vast underground fungus farms, leafcutter ants are one of Earth’s most successful species — and one secret of their agricultural success is bacteria, which the ants use like fertilizer.

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Darwin's masterpiece revisited - 11 November 2009

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Scientist - By Steve Jones - Nov. 24 (Special Report) - Unique among scientific theories, evolutionary biology finds its roots in a popular book by a single author.

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Some businesses waste more than £1m a year on excess energy, carbon trading trial finds

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

yorkshirepost.co.uk - By Tom Palmer - Nov. 24 (Special Report) - A PIONEERING carbon trading programme in Yorkshire has revealed some businesses are wasting more than a £1m a year on excess energy and would face six figure fines under future legislation.

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Mini ice age took hold of Europe in months

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Scientist - By Kate Ravillious - Nov. 24 (Special Report) - Just months - that's how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by and ice age

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Bio-fuel growth raises concerns about forests

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By John Flesher - Nov. 23 (News Report) - Forests are a treasure trove of limbs and bark that can be made into alternative fuels and some worry the increasing trend of using that logging debris will make those materials too scarce, harming the woodlands. For centuries, forests have provided

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Florida coalition targets pending federal pollution rules

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Miami Herald - By Curtis Morgan - Nov. 23 (News Report) - The target: A settlement a federal judge in Tallahassee approved last week in a lawsuit brought by five environmental groups against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It requires that federal regulators, for the first time, step in and set a state's water quality standards for nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that flow into waterways from fertilized lawns, sewage plants, farms fields, cattle pastures and a host of other sources.

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Naomi Klein on Climate Debt: Why Rich Countries Should Pay Reparations To Poor Countries For The Climate Crisis

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Naomi Klein, Amy Goodman - Nov. 23 (Interview) - With the Copenhagen climate summit two weeks away, best-selling journalist Naomi Klein examines the grass-roots movement behind the climate debate proposal that argues all the costs associated with adapting to a more hostile ecology—everything from building stronger sea walls to switching to cleaner, more expensive technologies—are the responsibility of the countries that created the crisis. Klein also discusses the 10th anniversary of the Seattle WTO protests and the 10th anniversary of her first book, “No Logo.”

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Population & Environment: a Progressive, Feminist Approach

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

TruthOut - By Laurie Mazur - Nov. 23 (Opinion) - If we take seriously the need to protect the planet and distribute its resources more equitably, it becomes clear that it would be easier to provide a good life—at less environmental cost—for 8 billion rather than 11 billion people. This is especially true for climate change: an analysis by Brian O'Neill at the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimates that stabilizing world population at 8 billion, rather than 9 billion or more, would eliminate one billion tons of CO2 per year by 2050-- as much as completely ending deforestation.

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Rising sea levels threaten Caribbean region -

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Chris Kraul - Nov. 23 (News) - The effect of climate change is anything but hypothetical to retired Colombian naval officer German Alfonso. Just ask him about the time his neighborhood in this historic coastal city became an island.

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EPA: Uranium from polluted mine in Nev. wells

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Associated Press - By Scott Sonner - Nov. 23 (News Report) - A new wave of testing by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that 79 percent of the wells tested north of the World War II-era copper mine have dangerous levels of uranium or arsenic or both that make the water unsafe to drink. And, more importantly to the neighbors, that the source of the pollution is a groundwater plume that has slowly migrated from the 6-square-mile mine site.

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Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Julia Angwin, Geoffrey A. Fowler - Nov. 23 (News Report) - (Subscription required) Wikipedia.org is losing unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police the world's fifth-most-popular Web site.

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Extremes back climate experts' warnings

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

theaustralian.com.au - By Jared Owens, Lanai Vasek - Nov. 23 (News) - IT was a weekend of extremes. Melbourne copped a month's worth of rain in just 17 hours, NSW grappled with "catastrophic" bushfire conditions and record November temperatures -- and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong linked the unpredictable weather patterns to the effects of global warming.

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New report asserts R.I. CO2 emissions soared 24 percent

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

projo.com - Nov. 23 (News Report) - A new report from a group called Environment Rhode Island asserts that Rhode Island’s carbon dioxide emissions have soared 24 percent between 1990 and 2007, which is going in the wrong direction for a state trying to reduce its impacts on climate change.

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Warming's impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:54:22 -0800

Seattle Times - By Seth Borenstein - Nov. 22 (Special Report) - Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated - beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.

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Climate change sceptics and lobbyists put world at risk, says top adviser

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By David Adam - Nov. 22 (News Report) - Climate change sceptics and fossil fuel companies that have lobbied against action on greenhouse gas emissions have squandered the world's chance to avoid dangerous global warming, a key adviser to the government has said.

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Road to Copenhagen Part: US Climate Legislation & Lobbyists

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy - By Jeff Smith - Nov. 22 (News Analysis) - Called the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, the Waxman-Markey bill was fought hard by the energy industry. According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, “More than 460 new businesses and interest groups jumped into lobbying Congress on global warming in the weeks before the House neared its historic vote on climate change legislation.” You can see from the chart above that there was a spike in the amount of lobbying just prior to the bill’s passing.

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Hacked E-mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Andrew C. Revkin - Nov. 21 (News Report) - The e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university will undoubtedly raise questions about the actions of some scientists.

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Acid Oceans Leave Fish at More Risk from Predators

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - Nov. 21 (News Report) - Fish reared in water acidified by CO2 may become fatally attracted to the smell of their predators, say scientists.

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"Big Bang" experiment advancing fast

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Reuters - By Jonathon Lynn - Nov. 21 (Special Report) - After a year's delay, scientists at the world's biggest accelerator have restarted an experiment to recreate "Big Bang" conditions that had sparked suggestions the earth would be sucked in by millions of black holes.

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