NewsTrust - Pollution - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Misconceptions plague debate over gas line proposals

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Anchorage Daily News - Jul. 01 (Editorial) - Exxon's decision to join forces with TransCanada has spurred a new round of debate over the best way to make sure Alaska gets a North Slope gas line. In that debate, some misconceptions are floating around and should be corrected.

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Why do we allow the US to act like a failed state on climate change

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By George Monbiot - Jun. 26 (Opinion) - There are mind-boggling concessions to the biofuels industry, including a promise not to investigate its wider environmental impacts. There's a provision to allow industry to use 2bn tonnes of carbon offsets a year, which include highly unstable carbon sinks like crop residues left in the soil (another concession won by the powerful farm lobby). These offsets are so generous that if all of them are used, US industry will have to make no carbon cuts at all until 2026.

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One More Threat to Clean Water

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Jun. 25 (Editorial) - The latest indignity was a 6-to-3 decision on Monday that will allow an American gold mining company to discharge 210,000 gallons a day of potentially toxic mining waste into a 23-acre lake near Juneau, Alaska. A joyous Sarah Palin, Alaska’s governor, called the ruling a “great victory” for Alaska and, astonishingly, “a green light for responsible resource development.”

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From a Theory to a Consensus on Emissions

Sun, 17 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By John M. Broder - May. 17 (Opinion) - “It is a steel fist of regulation covered by a velvet glove of emission trading,” Mr. Montgomery said. “Why not just impose a carbon tax?”

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About that "Energy Independence" President Carter...

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Lisa Margonelli - May. 16 (Opinion) - Energy Independence is a political term, but not a reality. The US has 3 percent of the worlds' oil reserves, and we use 24 percent of world's production with just 4-5 percent of the population. We've been committed to an industrial policy and a foreign policy built around oil imports since the 1930's, though we didn't really get into the soup until Roosevelt struck the Big Deal with Saudi Arabia in the early 1940's. Alternative sources of energy currently make up a pitifully small part of our energy mix.

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Earlier Puberty in European Girls

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Tara Parker-Pope - May. 04 (Opinion) - A 15-year study of young girls in Denmark found that the average age of breast development has fallen by a full year compared to girls studied in the early 1990s. The findings, published this month in the journal Pediatrics, add to a growing body of evidence that the timing of puberty is changing, possibly related to environmental exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals that mimic estrogen in the body.

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Moore’s Law and the Law of More

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Thomas L. Friedman - Apr. 25 (Opinion) - “Right now we’re paying a huge price — a tax — for everyone trying to achieve more in an unsustainable way. But the ‘More Tax’ is not imposed by the U.S. government. It is a tax imposed by the market and will continue rising indefinitely as more and more people want more and more stuff. It will steadily drive up gasoline prices, home heating prices and factory electricity prices. But because this ‘More Tax’ is set by the market and not the government, many opponents contend that there’s nothing to be done: ‘Oh, $4.50 a gallon gasoline — that’s just the market at work. We can’t do anything about that.’ And then all that tax money out of your pocket goes to enrich oil companies and petro-dictators.

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The campaign - The quest for 62 per cent

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Globe and Mail - By Dennis Baker - Apr. 23 (Comment) - I am thinking about running as a candidate.dennis baker-- The responce was to be arrested and charged with possesion for the purpose of trafficking.For some alleged drugs in a vehicle that I was a passenger Human excrement + nuclear waste = hydrogen

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Carbon Caps Are the Best Policy

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Fred Krupp - Mar. 24 (Opinion) - Curbing carbon emissions will spur a new generation of competition for the old ways of generating energy, especially from Big Oil. So when Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson says he favors a carbon tax over a cap-and-trade system, it's worth asking why the energy giant would want to put a government levy on its own product. Perhaps Exxon has concluded what many analysts already know: That the best chance to overhaul our oil-addicted economy is through a cap on fossil-fuel pollution. And that has Big Oil running for cover. A cap is not only a very different policy compared to a carbon tax, but a far superior approach, environmentally and economically. From an environmental point of view, the difference is stark. A cap is a legal limit on pollution. There is no guessing what will happen -- the level of emissions is set in law, and enforcement of that limit proceeds accordingly. No air pollution problem has ever been solved except by imposing a legal limit on emissions. Environmental taxes have worked well to raise revenue, but without a cap they inevitably become a license to pollute in unlimited amounts. Moreover, to require that other countries make the reciprocal commitments necessary to lower global pollution, we have to enact our cap -- and have other nations do the same in a transparent, verifiable and enforceable way. A carbon tax doesn't make such a system of commitments possible.

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Hope in the Mountains

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - Mar. 24 (Opinion) - Yesterday was a great day for the people of Appalachia and for all of America. In a bold departure from Bush-era energy policy, the Obama administration suspended a coal company's permit to dump debris from its proposed mountaintop mining operation into a West Virginia valley and stream. In addition, the administration promised to carefully review upward of 200 such permits awaiting approval by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

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President's trip to Canada defines critical carbon moment

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By James E. Hansen - Feb. 17 (Opinion) - The Canadian media are full of speculation that the Canadian government will push for special treatment and protections from global warming regulation of its fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions -- the tar sands oil development in Alberta, where much of Canada's oil is derived. Such protection would be disastrous for life on our planet. The tar sands of Canada constitute one of our planet's greatest threats. They are a double-barreled threat. First, producing oil from tar sands emits two to three times the global warming pollution of conventional oil. But the process also diminishes one of the best carbon reduction tools on the planet -- Canada's Boreal Forest.

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Bush selling off our land in his going-out-of-business sale

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Timothy Egan - Dec. 16 (Opinion) - Imagine if President Bush, on his last day in office, invited his friends to lift the Lincoln portrait from the White House Dining Room, take the 18th-century furniture from the Map Room and -- for good measure -- poison the Rose Garden on the way out. In essence, he is doing the same thing this month with land that belongs to every American -- the magical redrock country of the Southwest.

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Some Carbon Candor

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - Dec. 05 (Editorial) - Liberal interest groups, think tanks, lobbyists, bloggers and other nuisances are inundating the incoming Obama Administration with advice, but James Hansen recently managed to say something interesting. Namely, the famous NASA scientist had the nerve to expose some of the global-warming fantasies widespread among children and politicians.

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We Need a Global Carbon Tax

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Opinion Journal (WSJ) - By Ralph Nader, Toby Heaps - Dec. 03 (Opinion) - If President Barack Obama wants to stop the descent toward dangerous global climate change, and avoid the trade anarchy that current approaches to this problem will invite, he should take Al Gore's proposal for a carbon tax and make it global.

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U.S. has its own melamine problem

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By James E. Mcwilliams - Nov. 27 (Opinion) - For all the outrage about China, what U.S. consumers and government agencies studiously fail to scrutinize is how much melamine pervades our own system. In casting stones, we've forgotten our own house has more than its share of exposed glass.

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Green-sky proposal

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

MarketWatch - By Thomas Kostigen - Nov. 13 (Comment) - The drag of poor air quality on the economy is mounting, costing the state of California alone close to $30 billion per year and, if my own reckoning is somewhat accurate, about six percent of total U.S. gross domestic product, or about $700 billion, a figure that should sound pretty familiar. China, which just this year surpassed the U.S. in carbon emissions, or pollution, on a total tonnage basis, figures its poor air quality costs it 5.8% of GDP due to health-care costs and lost days of labor. Extend that same formula of associated costs to the U.S. and you get hundreds of billions of dollars in losses, losses we can ill afford, especially now. California alone, which has the nation's worst air quality, according to the American Lung Association, loses $28 billion each year due to smog-related deaths, work and school absences, emergency room visits, and asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses, says a new study by Cal State Fullerton.

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Low carbon economy must be part of economic recovery

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Telegraph - By Elliot Morley - Oct. 21 (Opinion) - Low carbon economy must be part of economic recoveryTelegraph.co.uk?- 18 minutes agoSome commentators, and indeed some politicians, have used the deteriorating economic circumstances to argue that tackling climate change through the transition to a low carbon economy is a luxury item: that it is too expensive, could damage ...

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Plan a family, save the world

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Neal Peirce - Oct. 07 (Opinion) - So what will our next president do? Will he boost U.S. global family-planning funding to the $1 billion a year that advocates propose, working with other nations to make family planning and modern conception services globally available? The issue's not just moral: In an environmentally imperiled world, it's strategic and critical. John McCain's anti-abortion, anti-birth-control-assistance record is unequivocal. So is Barack Obama's diametrically opposed position: in favor of activist government support for family planning, domestically and internationally.

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Gore's Rebellion

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Opinion Journal (WSJ) - Sep. 29 (Opinion) - I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration." He added, "clean coal does not exist."

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Its green medal hopes are lost but Beijing must race on

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Isabel Hilton - Jul. 31 (Opinion) - For the past 30 years, Beijing's frenetic modernisation has followed an outdated and unsustainable path - a city of the car, strangled by multiplying ringroads and congested urban motorways, the bicycles and buses that used to predominate pushed off the road by private vehicles. In earlier times, heavy industry plant was situated in the capital, and Mao Zedong would point proudly to smokestacks as evidence of progress. The public health legacy of both phases of development has been disastrous, with air pollutants routinely many times over World Health Organisation safety levels.

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Beijing, IOC growing desperate on air pollution

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - By Alex Ely - Jul. 28 (Opinion) - With the 2008 Olympic Games just 10 days away, Beijing officials are scrambling to improve the city's awful air quality. One drastic measure that city officials are considering would essentially ban 90 percent of private-owned automobiles from the roads. This comes after an initial ban has already forced residents to drive every other day.

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Radio 4 series - Am I Normal?

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - By Vivienne Parry - Mar. 05 (Opinion) - We expect health professionals to tell us if we're 'normal' or not, but how do they decide where to draw the line between someone who's OK and someone who isn't? Vivienne Parry investigates.

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The machine gun of capitalism

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

San Francisco Chronicle - By Mark Morford - Feb. 06 (Opinion) - There is no eliminating the dark side of capitalism, the gluttony and the greed and the violent underbelly. There is only minimizing, shifting the emphasis, changing the pitch and angle of approach, trying to take what is, at its very heart, a flawed and self-destructive system, and making it into something proud and interesting and vibrant, something actually worth defending. Can it be done? Is it still possible? No matter how many poetic Barack Obama speeches, no matter how many pragmatic Hillary Clinton promises, it's a question that seems far bigger than both of them. And the truth is, it's really the only question that matters.

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Healthy Food: Fresh pesticides

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By (board) - Jan. 30 (Editorial) - The dangers of pesticides on what should be our healthiest foods ought to spur or reinforce caution on the part of the public. That's largely because regulators have done a poor job of studying and controlling pesticides.

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Dye Me A River

Sat, 05 May 2007 09:38:47 -0700

Treehugger - By John Laumer - May. 05 (Opinion) - ehuacan Mexico is known as the "heartland of Mexico's denim industry," a heart that sometimes launders enough jeans to bleed blue dye and bleach into rivers used to irrigate corn fields. And, no, this is not how blue corn tortillas came about. As reported in a PlanetArk story, "Dozens of industrial laundries, some of which put the finishing touches to jeans for export, discharge a cocktail of bleach, dye and detergents into Tehuacan's wide valley with almost no government controls, residents say...Water from the denim laundries runs through Tehuacan, where it mixes with municipal sewage and is discharged untreated in a foaming green torrent to a river that feeds irrigation systems in the downstream village of San Diego Chalma."

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