Environment Archives

From CBS News:
“My fear is that one of these days we are going to have an organism that’s resistant to everything that we know, and we’ll be left powerless.” …Drug resistant infections have sky-rocketed over the past two decades, killing an estimated 70,000 Americans last year alone. It’s an emerging health crisis that scientists say [...]

“Global warming theory predicts that global precipitation will increase, and that heavy precipitation events… will also increase. This occurs because as the climate warms, evaporation of moisture from the oceans increases, resulting in more water vapor in the air.” – Jeff Masters
From Time:
…There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive [...]

Just thought I’d mention that.
And if you have a kitten, raise it as an indoor cat. It’s better for the cat, too.
More info at:
American Bird Conservancy

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” – Mahatma Gandhi
As documented in The Cove, Sundance award-winner currently in theaters:
More than 20,000 dolphins and porpoises are being slaughtered each year and their meat, containing toxic levels of mercury, is being sold as food [...]

From the Washington Independent:
The announcement has left many environmentalists to wonder how EPA distinguished between the 42 projects it approved and the six it rejected. Indeed, if blowing the tops off of mountains and filling scores of valleys with toxic fill is not considered an environmental concern, many are curious what criteria the EPA are [...]

As a vegetarian, environmentalist, and bird lover, I would just like to say there are times when we must get tough with non-native species (like Canada geese) in order to save native species – and humans. This is the right thing to do.
Think of them as invading and terrorizing others, leaving those they have [...]

What are the ingredients in even the most expensive perfumes? The labels list “fragrance”, but what does that mean? Dozens of synthetic chemicals, most untested for safety to humans, animals, and the environment. The National Academy of Sciences reports that 95% of the chemicals used in fragrances today are synthetic compounds derived [...]

From the Humane Society:
Voters in California approved an historic ballot measure to halt the inhumane confinement of animals on factory farms?by an overwhelming margin.
Wayne Pacelle, President and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, said, “California voters have taken a stand for decency and compassion and said that the systemic mistreatment of animals [...]

Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen.
It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come [...]

Make it your Earth Day resolution…

earth911.org

Video at Raw Story
Endangered Birds at American Bird Conservancy

What a drag – I feel for him. I can barely listen to the murdering thug, myself. Shaking his hand at a public event? That would be very difficult.
From Contact Music:
Hollywood liberal ROBERT REDFORD only agreed to receive his 2005 Kennedy Center Honor from U.S. President GEORGE W. BUSH after he was [...]

From John Nicols in The Nation:
Having now won the Norwegian Primary, it is reasonable to ask why Al Gore would want to slog his way through the snows of New Hampshire.
But the inconvenient truth is that never has the man who might yet be president needed to more seriously consider his personal legacy–not to mention [...]

Read all about the twin freaks here…

Read about Live Earth… Watch it on Bravo TV all day today…
From Reuters:
Initially rebuffed by Washington, former Vice President Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts found a last-minute home in the U.S. capital on Friday after Native Americans offered their museum for the worldwide event.
A few blocks from the U.S. Capitol where some Republican lawmakers had [...]

From Kirsten Weir in Salon:
“No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored,” Carson wrote. “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I contend … that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man [...]

From the Boston Globe:
NASA is canceling or delaying a number of satellites designed to give scientists critical information on the earth’s changing climate and environment.
The space agency has shelved a $200 million satellite mission headed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor that was designed to measure soil moisture — a key factor in helping [...]

From Sheryl Crow’s global warming blog:
Last night Thelma and Louise drove the bus off the cliff or at least into the White House Correspondents Dinner. The “highlight” of the evening had to be when we were introduced to Karl Rove. How excited were we to have our first opportunity ever to talk directly to the [...]

Read all about Earth Day…
Join the Sierra Club…

From the AP:
“An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary that turned former vice president Al Gore’s power-point presentation on global warming into an engaging and entertaining film, won the Oscar Sunday night.
The best-documentary win was a triumph for Gore, who has kept a sense of humor about his loss in the 2000 election that was decided [...]

When the all the people running the country care about is giving more money to rich people, terrible things like this happen. From CBS News:
Most workers thought they would be OK. In part, they say, because of what they heard early on from public officials, including then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. “As you [...]

From the AP:
Breathing any amount of someone else’s tobacco smoke harms nonsmokers, the surgeon general declared Tuesday – a strong condemnation of secondhand smoke that is sure to fuel nationwide efforts to ban smoking in public.
“The debate is over. The science is clear: Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance, but a serious health hazard,” [...]

OK, so a logical person must ask, why would anyone dispute this? Science is science. Why are Republican politicians and their corporate contributors disputing this? The fast and easy guide to why they do what they do, as always, is Follow the money. Most often, that is your answer. Otherwise, [...]

From Katharine Mieszkowski in Salon:
To the tune of the Allman Brothers Band’s “Ramblin Man,” Al Gore’s face rides a cartoon airplane across a map of the United States. As he zips from coast to coast in a Web video clip titled “Al Gore: An Inconvenient Story,” a ticker at the bottom of the screen displays [...]

Just got my copy of the book today and I can’t put it down. For the faint of heart, it’s loaded with illustrations and an easy read… get the paperback…

From the AP:
If Al Gore had been as passionate and personable on the 2000 campaign trail as he is in the global-warming documentary ?An Inconvenient Truth,? he might be in his second presidential term now.
In this surprisingly entertaining film, director Davis Guggenheim has captured a side of Gore far different from the stiff political operator [...]

From Carl Pope of the Sierra Club:
Republicans were boxed in by their continued insistence that the only solution to the oil problem is to increase domestic supply. Experts know it won’t work, for the simple reason that the growth in world demand for oil is going to outpace any plausible increase in American output, but [...]

From Salon:
…The news today that George Bush is halting the accumulation of strategic oil reserves, recommending the elimination of environmental regulations that mandate specific blends of gasoline, and making wild statements of getting rid of boondoggle tax breaks for the likes of ExxonMobil can all be easily explained by one simple equation. High gas prices [...]

From Kelly Overton in the Washington Post:
In past decades we have removed animals from pastures, sunshine and fresh air to stack them on top of each other in petri-dish-like buildings. …As we observe the growing number of avian flu cases worldwide, bide time until the eventual large-scale outbreak of mad cow disease in the United [...]

The seal hunt will be starting soon. Canada’s commercial harp seal hunt is now bigger than it has been for 50 years, with over a million seals killed from 2003 to 2005. World experts agree that the size of the seal hunt puts the harp seal population at risk.
There is not a single reputable [...]

From CBS News:
In my more than three decades in the government I’ve never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public. As a government scientist, James Hansen is taking a risk. He says there are things the White House doesn’t want you to hear but he’s going to say them [...]

From the AP:
“I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm,” Bush said. In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President [...]

From Ira Boudway in Salon:
Local communities are left with cracked foundations, a contaminated creek, poisoned wells, and steep slopes that pour mud down when it rains because there is no vegetation to hold the soil in place. If you go to Google Maps, search for Hazard, Ky., and select the satellite view (or just click [...]

This week, oil giant ExxonMobil announced record-breaking profits for 2005: more than $36 billion — the largest profit ever recorded in history. Despite its enormous profits, ExxonMobil still refuses to act as an responsible company. Its policies include:
* Active support of drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge;
[...]

Another truly evil deed. From the AP:
The judge said Whitman knew that the collapse of the buildings released tons of hazardous materials into the air that would have endangered the public and yet she encouraged residents, workers and students to return to the area. A judge attacked former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd [...]

Yeah. Right. From the New York Times:
…The Energy Department will begin laying off researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the next week or two because of cuts to its budget.
A veteran researcher said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which [...]

From John Simerman, Dwight Ott, and Ted Mellnik of Knight Ridder:
Nearly 600 people who died because of Hurricane Katrina might have survived had floodwalls on two New Orleans canals not collapsed, a Knight Ridder analysis of where bodies were found after the storm indicates.
The bodies of at least 588 people were recovered in neighborhoods that [...]

From Bloomberg:
U.S. Senate Democrats blocked a bid to allow oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, handing President George W. Bush a defeat on a top domestic priority.
The drilling provision is attached to the $453 billion defense budget for fiscal 2006, which passed the House Dec. 19. Democrats, with help from some Republicans, used [...]

Visit stopglobalwarming.org for what you can do (one thing is to urge your mayor to join the mayor of Seattle’s US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement)…

The fight isn’t over yet. From Katherine Mieszkowski in Salon:
Environmentalists were celebrating Thursday as House Republicans dropped a plan to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “We’re definitely popping the champagne,” said Melinda Pierce, lobbyist for the Sierra Club. “It’s a significant victory.”
Then again, those who oppose the controversial plan to drill [...]

Here is a copy of the Anatomy of a Disaster PDF…
From the Los Angeles Times:
President Bush activated the National Response Plan on Saturday, Aug. 27, two days before the hurricane struck, when he declared a federal emergency in Louisiana. Under the plan, this made the Department of Homeland Security “responsible for coordinating federal resources utilized [...]

He is following the words of Jesus. You know, the words the so-called “Christian Right” never mention, much less follow. Kurt Vonnegut on Bill Maher’s show last night said this; Maher replied they follow the old testament, not the new (the testament of Jesus). From Matthew Chapter 6:
Take heed that ye do [...]

These are the Camp Casey folks who stood with Cindy Sheehan.
Donate

No brainer. So of course, the no-brained Bush sheep bleat denials. From the Washington Post:
The deployment of thousands of National Guard troops from Mississippi and Louisiana in Iraq when Hurricane Katrina struck hindered those states’ initial storm response, military and civilian officials said Friday.
Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard [...]

From Real Time with Bill Maher:
We have another guest to help us put Hurricane Katrina in perspective. He is editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather, who teaches biological science at Stanford. Please welcome Professor Stephen Schneider. Professor.
STEPHEN SCHNEIDER [via satellite]: Hey, Bill.
MAHER: How are you, sir?
SCHNEIDER: I’m fine.
MAHER: Well, if [...]

Let’s see, keeping the wetlands is good for flood control. So why did Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume say environmentalists wanting to preserve the wetlands was a cause of the Katrina disaster on his show last night? His show, by the way, was hysterical. Hume, with his basset hound expression, kept bringing [...]

From Sidney Blumenthal in Salon:
By 2003, the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more [...]

From Michael Grunwald and Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post:
During the debate over the bill’s numerous subsidies, taxpayer groups questioned why thriving energy companies need federal aid to produce energy. … the energy bill that Congress passed yesterday… gave the federal government new eminent-domain powers to clear paths for power lines — a long-standing demand [...]

From the Huffington Post:
The Sierra Club’s lawyers have been sifting through the legal opinions of Judge Roberts, and the picture that emerges is quite alarming.
He was one of the few judges who thought that Vice-President Cheney should be allowed to keep the proceedings of his Energy Task Force secret as a matter of right (Sierra [...]

From Alternet:
Rainforest Action Network (RAN)… placed a …full-page ad in the New York Times on Thursday that featured Dick Cheney, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and William Ford, Jr., CEO of Ford. As part of its Freedom From Oil campaign, RAN’s ad posed the bold rhetorical question, “What do these three men have in common?” The [...]

From the Union of Concerned Scientists
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) distributed a 34-question survey to more than 460 NOAA Fisheries biologists, ecologists, botanists and other science professionals working in headquarters and regional and field offices across the country to obtain their perceptions of scientific integrity within the [...]

From AFP:
Vehicles powered by hybrid or clean diesel engines will double their US market share by 2012 as drivers shun gas-guzzlers because of high oil prices, new research predicted.
Such environmentally friendly engines are on course for 11 percent of auto sales by 2012 from 4.8 percent this year, according to the research study by JD [...]

From John Vidal in the Guardian:
President’s George Bush’s decision not to sign the United States up to the Kyoto global warming treaty was partly a result of pressure from ExxonMobil, the world’s most powerful oil company, and other industries, according to US State Department papers seen by the Guardian.
The documents, which emerged as Tony Blair [...]

From Bloomberg:
The U.S. Interior Department inspector general concluded that the Bush administration offered in 2002 to overpay a prominent Florida family for oil and gas rights on Everglades land, according to people familiar with the matter.
In a report to the Senate Finance Committee to be made public today, Inspector General Earl Devaney says the [...]

The Bush dynasty made their fortune in oil, Dick Cheney amassed $60 million as CEO of Haliburton Oil Company, and Chevron named an oil tanker the “Condoleezza Rice” after their former director. And that’s just the tip of the oil well. From Pure Energy Systems:
A new Yale University research survey of 1,000 adults [...]

From Andrew Revkin in the New York Times:
A White House official who once led the oil industry’s fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.
In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 [...]

Read about the drive at the site of organizer Seattle Mayor Nickels…

From Common Dreams:
Today the Bush administration will announce the formal repeal of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which was issued by the U.S. Forest Service in January 2001 to protect the last remaining wildlands in our national forest system. The rule placed about one-third (58.5 million acres) of the national forest system’s total acreage off-limits [...]

Just like the photo ops “clearing brush” on his ranch, wearing a fold-creased field jacket fresh from the shipping box. As the Daily Show said on Earth day, it’s just as well he scurried back in, because it might have started hailing as it did for his recent appearance on Earth Day, since “the [...]

Heard this on the Daily Show, funny but quite likely true:
Bush was scheduled to talk at Great Smoky Mountains National Park on Earth Day, but a sudden hail storm stopped him. Why, Jon Stewart asks? “Because the earth hates him!”

From Katharine Mieszkowski in Salon:
“Essentially, the agency adopted a do-nothing approach to mercury for the next 12 years,” said John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s clean-air program. When children in Dr. Kevin Browngoehl’s practice suffer from learning disabilities or attention problems, the pediatrician wonders whether methylmercury in the fish their mothers ate [...]

Now that there are no checks and balances in our government, the unfettered greed of neoconservative cronies drives policy, rather than what is best for all Americans. From Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker:
…Picking up where Reagan had left off, President George W. Bush, in 2001, included a drilling provision in his ill-fated energy [...]

From a letter from Carl Pope of the Sierra Club:
Dear Sierra Club Friend,
I am saddened to report that California’s Giant Sequoias are in trouble. Influenced by timber industry lobbying, the U.S. Forest Service is advancing a forest management plan that would allow logging and road-building inside the magnificent Giant Sequoia National Monument — once again [...]

Too bad more people don’t stop to find out what they are putting in their bodies. Or to consider the needless suffering we are inflicting upon our fellow creatures on earth, animals. From Rebecca Clarren in Salon:
The happy cow on the label of Horizon organic milk flies across the carton like some grocery-store [...]

Poor children, at that, because what other families would feel compelled to take money to expose their children to health risks? From the AP:
Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida said Wednesday he will block a vote on President Bush’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency until he receives assurances that a pesticide study being [...]

Business as usual. From Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post:
“They are saying if they fail to regulate mercury from power plants at all, it really wouldn’t make a difference. To acknowledge the real benefits would be to raise the next question: Why didn’t you go further?” When the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a [...]

Check out this cartoon…

From John Vidal in The Guardian:
It is described as the last great American wilderness and has been the battle ground between America’s most powerful oil interests and environmentalists for more than two decades. But yesterday the giants of the energy industry were celebrating a significant victory and looking forward to the chance to move into [...]

From the Chicago Sun-Times:
“At the behest of industry, the Bush administration has just endorsed the continued poisoning of children and pregnant women with mercury.” The Bush administration on Tuesday ordered power plants to cut mercury pollution from smokestacks by nearly half within 15 years but left an out for the worst polluters.
The Environmental Protection Agency [...]

From Peter Spotts in the Christian Science Monitor:
Scientists have long warned that some level of global warming is a done deal – due in large part to heat-trapping greenhouse gases humans already have pumped skyward.
Now, however, researchers are fleshing out how much future warming and sea-level rise the world has triggered. The implicit message: “We [...]

The Republican Congress just tacked a resolution to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into a budget bill in order to avoid meaningful discussion of the issue. Drilling in ANWR is not only incredibly poor environmental policy, but also incredibly short-sighted and ineffective energy policy. All it’s going to do [...]

The Bush administration and their rubber stamp Republican congress have never been ones to look at the big picture – their motto is anything for a quick buck for themselves and their cronies. From the New York Times:
Any number of modest efficiencies could achieve the same result without threatening the refuge. Simply closing the [...]

The self-appointed “God’s chosen ones” in this country have allowed the land of the free to become a corporatocracy. All they get out of the deal is a bone thrown by corporate-backed politicians now and then. Bones like school prayer laws (laws that directly contradict the teachings of Jesus, see Matthew 6:5-8) and [...]

From Thomas Friedman in the New York Times:
… I believe that combining environmentalism and geopolitics is the most moral and realistic strategy the U.S. could pursue today. Imagine if President Bush used his bully pulpit and political capital to focus the nation on sharply lowering energy consumption and embracing a gasoline tax.
What would that buy? [...]

From Amanda Griscom Little in Grist:
Will class-action plaintiffs still get their day in court?
The Erin Brockoviches of America could have a much tougher time going after polluters if the Class Action Fairness Act — which the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve last week — is signed into law.
The bill, which will be put to [...]

I gave up eating meat and poultry several years ago when I learned of the outright cruelty (and the environmental devastation) perpetuated by the meat and poultry industry.
If only everyone knew the excruciating torment these animals endure – and for no reason but greed. Please read here about the infamous practices supported by KFC [...]

And of course, Bush Co. opted not to support Kyoto. Tony Blair finally located his guts and told Bush, “If America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda too.” From Steve Connor in The Independent:
Global warming [...]

From the Los Angeles Times:
Overriding objections by New Mexico’s governor, the Interior Department announced a final plan Monday for expanding oil and gas drilling on Otero Mesa, a rare desert grassland and one of a handful of places in the western U.S. where opposition to drilling had united ranchers, property rights advocates, hunters and conservationists.
The [...]

For the second year in a row, the Bush Administration has announced a harmful new forest policy on the eve of the Christmas holiday. Last December 23, the administration announced they were opening up pristine parts of the Tongass National Forest to new logging and development. Last month, they released damaging new regulatory changes to [...]

From Arianna Huffington:
It’s not hard to see why Bush has hopped aboard the Apocalypse Express. Acting like there’s no tomorrow dovetails just as neatly with his corporate backers’ rapacious desires as it does with his evangelical backers’ rapturous desires. It offers him a political twofer: placating his corporate donors while winning the hearts and votes [...]

Media consolidation by big business means corporations define reality for the masses as it best benefits themselves. Must read article in Online Journal.

From Glen Martin in the San Francisco Chronicle:
The Bush administration issued a new rule Wednesday streamlining the planning process for the nation’s 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands.
The new U.S. Forest Service rule essentially transfers much of the policy- making power for national forests and grasslands from Washington to the regional and district levels. [...]

This is a must read. From Bill Moyers:
In public testimony Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”… The “Christian” fundamentalists believe once Israel has occupied the rest of its “biblical lands,” legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the [...]

From Geoffrey Lean in the Independent:
George Bush’s new administration, and its supporters controlling Congress, are setting out to dismantle three decades of US environmental protection.
We will now see an assault on the law which will set the US in the direction of becoming a Third World country in terms of environmental protection.
Philip Clapp, president of [...]

This cartoon by Matt Wuerker says it all

Is it just me that thinks we should be alarmed that we can’t eat fish anymore? I don’t know, seems kind of like a red flag of some kind to me, but the Bush Administration only sees the color of money. From Katharine Mieszkowski in Salon:
Under the legislation the Bush administration calls Clear [...]

Bush and Ehrlich shared rides in Sinclair helicopters, and they share a hatred of the environment. Ehrlich is doing to Maryland what Bush did to Texas. That’s what happens when the Democrats field a weak candidate in a blue state. The shortsighted, greedy Republicans won’t be satified until all of America from [...]