In case after case around the world, water is being turned into a good for sale and for profit. Driven by a different vision and by economic necessity, a global counter-trend is growing to assure that household water be free or cheap, accessible, and safe, and that the earth’s water be kept pure and flowing. Marcela Olivera is a part of this movement. In 2000, she played a key role in organizing the massive protests in Cochabamba when residents of the city forced the Bechtel Corporation to give up control of the municipal water system, thereby restoring water as a human right for all instead of as a source of corporate income. This victory has been repeated elsewhere in Bolivia and around the world.

There have been a series of policies implemented in Bolivia intended to privatize our natural resources. One of these directly impacts people’s everyday lives: it’s the move to privatize water by giving contracts to multinational corporations to manage the municipal water supply and other sources of water. In Bolivia, there was a huge public outcry against this in 2000 and 2005 and, in the end, we were able to reverse the policy.

Now that’s the official, romanticized version of what happened, but nobody sees what’s happened since then. The struggle over who controls water is ongoing.

No one seems to pick up on how closely water issues are related to other urgent things that are now happening in Bolivia. Water is the one issue where everything intersects; it crosses over into political issues and economic issues in every country. In the struggle over water, people have also been fighting to have their voices heard and to better their living conditions. I think it’s really important that we understand that. Even the fact that Evo Morales is president now is really a result of the water war that broke out in 2000.

Full Story Here: Water Is Where Everything Intersects – Water in the Global Commons.

The U.S. has experienced the warmest 12-month period since recordkeeping began in 1895, according to the newest monthly “State of the Climate” report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Full Story Here: NOAA: US Experienced Warmest 12-Month Period in 117 Years | Common Dreams.

“Alarming amount” of plastic having ecosystem-wide effects

Plastic garbage in the ocean has increased 100-fold in the past 40 years and could have ecosystem-wide impacts, according to a study released Tuesday.

Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography looked at the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG), known as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch,’ and found an “alarming amount” of plastic trash, much in small bits.

The plastic trash was leading to an increase in “sea skaters,” a marine insect, eggs because the insects were using the increased plastic floating matter as to lay their eggs on. This increase may have widespread impacts across the marine food web.

Full Story Here: Plastic in ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ Has Increased 100-Fold | Common Dreams.

40 years after original ‘Limits to Growth’ new report says ‘short-termism’ and ‘over-consumption’ killing planet

Rising carbon dioxide CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere will continue to grow and cause an increase of 2°C in global temperatures by 2052 and could rise as much as 2.8°C by 2080, according to a new report sponsored by the international think tank Club of Rome. Such drastic temperature shifts are faster than other studies have predicted and would be high enough to trigger self-reinforcing climate change much sooner than previously thought. “Humankind might not survive on the planet if it continues on its path of over-consumption and short-termism,” the report suggests.

The main cause of global warming and climate change — and a panoply of future problems facing mankind — is the dominance of excessively short-term political and economic models, suggests the report’s author, Jorgen Randers.

“We already live in a manner that cannot be continued for generations without major change,” said Professor Randers, speaking in the Netherlands for the book’s launch on Monday. “Humanity has overshot the earth’s resources, and in some cases we will see local collapse before 2052 – we are emitting twice as much greenhouse gas every year as can be absorbed by the world’s forests and oceans.”

Full Story Here: Global Temperatures Could Rise by More than 2°C by Mid-Century: Report | Common Dreams.

Latest research shows continuing dramatic change in southern oceans

New research by Australian scientists suggests that up to 60 percent of “Antarctic Bottom Water”, the dense water formed around the edges of Antarctica that seeps into the deep sea and spreads out through the world’s oceans, has disappeared since 1970, reports Agence France-Presse. The research, by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), suggests that the phenomenon is a symptom of man-made climate change, but admitted the feedback effect it might have on ocean temperatures and Arctic climate is difficult to predict.

“It’s a clear signal to us that the oceans are responding rapidly to variations in climate in polar regions. The sinking of dense water around Antarctica is part of a global pattern of ocean currents that has a strong influence on climate, so evidence that these waters are changing is important,” said Dr Steve Rintoul, of CSIRO and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC.

“It’s not driving changes in climate,” Rintoul told AFP, but “it’s responding to changes in climate. So it’s a signal to us that things are changing around Antarctica.”

Full Story Here: Scientists: Deep Ocean Beneath Antarctic Responding Rapidly to Climate Change | Common Dreams.

New Keystone XL route a environmental disaster, say green groups

TransCanada, the Canadian company behind the controversial Keystone XL pipeline will reapply today for a federal permit to transport the ‘world’s dirtiest oil’ from the tar sands mines of Alberta to the United States, according to various reports.  The previous permit was rejected by the Obama administration after strategic pressure from environmentalists last fall

Thwarted by public opposition, the pipeline company has re-strategized by breaking up the pipeline into smaller segments and now hopes to achieve completion of the project by gaining approval for each leg separately. The relentless push by TransCanada — including a new route proposed for a section of the pipeline in Nebraska — have not slowed criticism of the overall project.

“The new Keystone route fails to avoid significant risks to an important aquifer and the rivers and streams that provide fresh water for millions of people and habitat for endangered species like the whooping crane, piping plover, and pallid sturgeon,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which has worked to stop the destructive pipeline project. “It’s a game of environmental roulette, and the American public is being asked to bear all the risk for a pipeline that will mainly benefit big oil’s bottom line by allowing export of dirty tar-sands oil to the global market.”

Full Story Here: TransCanada’s Relentless Push to Get Tar Sands Pipeline Continues | Common Dreams.

In New Mexico, firefighters stand in the remains of the Santa Fe Forest, which was burned last summer during the state’s worst wildfire in history. In Pakistan, a group of women hold dots in front of the makeshift shelter that became their home after the devastating floods in 2010 that displaced over 20 million people. In Lebanon, over 1,000 students made their dots the wheels of a giant bicycle to protest air pollution and request more bike-lanes to combat the problem. And in Vermont, citizens unfurl a “dot” banner at the site of a covered bridge that was swept away in the devastating flooding brought on by Hurricane Irene last August.

What do these seemingly disparate acts by people who live thousands of miles from one another have in common?  According to the environmental group 350.org — everything. And the images of these actions are part of a larger campaign organized to “connect the dots” between climate change extreme weather worldwide.  “We just celebrated Earth Day. May 5 is more like Broken Earth Day, a worldwide witness to the destruction global warming is already causing,” said Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, the global climate campaign that is coordinating the events. “People everywhere are saying the same thing: our tragedy is not some isolated trauma, it’s part of a pattern.”

Full Story Here: ‘Broken Earth Day’: Connecting Climate Change to Wild Weather | Common Dreams.

Experts say acknowledging the threat would call into question the safety of dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants in the U.S.

 More than a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the Japanese government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) present similar assurances of the site’s current state: challenges remain but everything is under control. The worst is over.

But nuclear waste experts say the Japanese are literally playing with fire in the way nuclear spent fuel continues to be stored onsite, especially in reactor 4, which contains the most irradiated fuel — 10 times the deadly cesium-137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. These experts also charge that the NRC is letting this threat fester because acknowledging it would call into question safety at dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants around the U.S., which contain exceedingly higher volumes of spent fuel in similar elevated pools outside of reinforced containment.

Reactor 4: The Most Imminent Threat

Full Story Here: The Worst Yet to Come? Why Nuclear Experts Are Calling Fukushima a Ticking Time-Bomb | Environment | AlterNet.

A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.

More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to the study, which was published in the journal Ground Water two weeks ago. Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well.

Scientists have theorized that impermeable layers of rock would keep the fluid, which contains benzene and other dangerous chemicals, safely locked nearly a mile below water supplies. This view of the earth’s underground geology is a cornerstone of the industry’s argument that fracking poses minimal threats to the environment.

Full Story Here: New Study Predicts Frack Fluids Can Migrate to Aquifers Within Years – ProPublica.

As Of Earth Day 2012, the organic and natural food superstore Whole Foods no longer carries fish considered unsustainable.

In a post on its company blog, Whole Foods explained that its decision to eliminate “red-rated” seafood — species that suffer from overfishing or catching methods that harm other marine life or habitats — is motivated by a desire to reverse these global trends. The sustainable seafood rating systems used by Whole Foods were devised by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch and the Blue Ocean Institute.

Whole Foods had already stopped selling orange roughy, shark, bluefin tuna and most marlin.

But do such high-minded measures really help the environment? Some scientists are now voicing doubt, saying that some labels lead customers to wrongly believe that the impact of choosing one fish over another is greater than reality.

Full Story Here: Whole Foods Seafood Ban: Unsustainable Fish No Longer Sold Include Skate And Atlantic Cod (PHOTOS).

In recent weeks some of the nation’s biggest media outlets have turned their eyes toward seafood sustainability—a subject that can be as slippery and tough to pin down as a fish flopping across the deck of a pitching and rolling fishing boat.

As consumers and corporate buyers allow sustainability ratings to drive more of their purchasing choices, it’s becoming increasingly important to know who is doing the rating and how they’re arriving at their decisions. The ultimate goal of such programs is to allow the market to drive behavior; in this case, the manner in which fishermen go about the business of fishing. But if doing so makes it impossible for fishermen to maintain their business, then the ratings are forfeiting one of the inherent goals of sustainability: the availability of fish over the long term.

Two recent pieces in the national news media expose some of the problems with the current piecemeal system of sustainability ratings that establish guidelines with no clear accountability to any third-party source. The New York Times’s Abby Goodnough analyzed a decision by the organic supermarket chain Whole Foods this month to no longer sell seafood not certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council or if it was red-listed by either the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program or the Blue Ocean Institute. And The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin probed questions about the credibility of such labeling in the first place.

Full Story Here: Sustaining Seafood Sustainability.

In a Rolling Stone interview published today, President Obama broke out of his self-imposed silence on climate change. He made some remarkable statements, including his belief that the millions of dollars pouring into the anti-science disinformation campaign will drive climate change into the presidential campaign.

Earlier this year the President omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address. And he (or the White House communications team) edited it out of his Earth Day proclamation.

But in this interview, Obama was actually the first to bring up climate change, noting it was one of many big issues he’s had to deal with and then slamming the GOP for moving so far to the right on the issue.

The big news was that the President expects climate change to be a campaign issue:

Full Story Here: Obama Stunner: Climate Change Will Be A Campaign Issue, We Need to Do Much More To Combat It | ThinkProgress.

Greg Palast :-:

Two years before the Deepwater Horizon blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP off-shore rig suffered a nearly identical blow-out, but BP concealed the first one from the U.S. regulators and Congress.

This week, EcoWatch.org located an eyewitness with devastating new information about the Caspian Sea oil-rig blow-out which BP had concealed from government and the industry.

The witness, whose story is backed up by rig workers who were evacuated from BP’s Caspian platform, said that had BP revealed the full story as required by industry practice, the eleven Gulf of Mexico workers “could have had a chance” of survival. But BP’s insistence on using methods proven faulty sealed their fate.

Full Story Here: BP Covered Up Blow-out Two Years Prior to Deadly Deepwater Horizon Spill | NationofChange.

The Gulf of Mexico is filled with mutated wildlife. Clawless crabs, eyeless shrimp and scarred fish are popping up everywhere leaving scientists to question just how much damage was done by the BP Oil Spill.

On April 20, 2010, an explosion aboard the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 people and spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels into the Gulf, in the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

According to an extensive report by Al Jazeera English, scientists and environmentalists are claiming that the deformed sea life is probably the result of the oil released into the Gulf and the chemicals they used to try to clean it up.

Tracy Kuhns, a commercial fisher from Barataria, La., told Al Jazeera, showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp, said,

Full Story Here: Eyeless Shrimp, Clawless Crabs and Mutated Fish Found in Gulf After BP Spill.

Grand Isle, Louisiana. When I returned to Cordova, Alaska, in December 2010 after my first six-month stint in the Gulf coast communities impacted by the BP oil disaster, fishermen greeted me wryly. “See you found your way home.”

Fishermen were interested in stories because even then, twenty-one years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, there was still no sense of closure. Exxon never “made it right.” How could Exxon “make right” family lives shattered by divorce, suicide, or strange illnesses stemming from the “cleanup” work? Or the sense of betrayal by the Supreme Court to hold Exxon to its promise to “pay all reasonable claims”?

As fishermen listened to the Gulf stories, one asked, “Do they know how f—ed they are yet?” No, I explained, they’ve only lost one fishing season and they just now are filing claims for the first deadline.

Full Story Here: Riki Ott: “Making It Right” After BP Oil Disaster Is Up to Us – Not BP.

Though BP has agreed to pay billions of dollars in damages, most believe that accountability has been slim compared to the still untold damage that was caused — much of which may not be fully realized for years to come. “BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences,” says Abrahm Lustgarten, the Polk Award-winning environmental reporter for Pro Publica, “and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist.”

Marine life in the gulf and the communities which dot its coast are rife with problems. As Phil Radford, Executive Director of Greenpeace USA and Aaron Viles, Deputy Director of Gulf Restoration Network write today: “Throughout the foodchain, warning signs are accumulating. Dolphins are sick and dying. Important forage fish are plagued with gill and developmental damage. Deepwater species like snapper have been stricken with lesions, and their reefs are losing biodiversity. Coastal communities are struggling with changes to the fisheries they rely upon. Hard-hit oyster reefs aren’t coming back and sport fish like speckled trout have disappeared from some of their traditional haunts. BP’s oily fingerprints continue to mar the landscape and destroy habitats.”

“People should be aware that the oil is still there,”

Full Story Here: Chorus of Anger says Little Learned from BP’s Gulf Disaster | Common Dreams.

Dow AgroSciences, a unit of Dow Chemical, and Monsanto Co. are among several global chemical and seed companies racing to roll out combinations of genetically altered crops and new herbicides designed to work with the crops as a way to counter rapidly spreading herbicide-resistant weeds that are choking millions of acres of U.S. farmland.

Dow and Monsanto say the new chemical combinations and new crops that tolerate those chemicals are badly needed by corn, soybean and cotton farmers as weeds increasingly resist treatments of the most commonly used herbicide – glyphosate-based Roundup.

Full Story Here: Farm group seeks U.S. halt on dangerous crop chemicals | Reuters.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded nearly two years ago to the day, beginning an oil spill that lasted three months and released some two hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. BP may have declared their mission accomplished, but the results of the spill are still trickling out.

The latest? Shrimp with no eyes, fish with lesions, and clawless crabs.

Scientists believe that shrimp, fish, and crabs in the gulf have been deformed by the chemical released to disperse oil during the spill. Fishers in the area say that they’ve been noticing deformities on their catches since. Al Jazeera reports:

“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” [Louisiana commercial fisher Tracy] Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.

According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”

Full Story Here: Legacy Of BP Oil Spill: Eyeless Shrimp And Fish With Lesions | ThinkProgress.

“President Obama’s proposal for these magnificent and imperiled animals is a gift to Big Oil”

The Obama Administration issued a proposed rule yesterday that disregards the effects of greenhouse gases on polar bear habitat leading one conservation group to say that the rule echoes former President George W. Bush’s plan, and that it will lead to the extinction of polar bears.

Noting that polar bears are only on the endangered species list precisely because of loss of habitat caused by greenhouse gases generated from activities outside the Arctic, the proposed rule excluding activities outside the range of polar bears from regulations will lead to the bears’ demise.

Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity called the rule “complete doublespeak,” the Associated Press reports.  “It’s saying, ‘Here is a rule necessary for the conservation of the polar bear,’ yet the only thing it does is exempt from regulation the overwhelming threat to the species.”

Full Story Here: Obama Echoes Bush, Sets Plan for Polar Bear Extinction | Common Dreams.

Drastic changes are ‘important climate change signals,’ researchers conclude

A rapid rise in sea levels in Southwest Pacific Ocean has ocurred, according to a new study, and researchers say human-made climate change is likely the cause for significant rises in the 20th century. Scientists from the University of Queensland in Australia, partnered with other British universities, measured sea levels going back 6,000 years and spotted significant increases in the 19th and 20th centuries. Of note is that a major spike in the late 20th century, starting around 1990, is likely linked to human-created climate change, researchers said.

“The 1990s peak is most likely indicative of human-induced climate change,” said Patrick Moss, a scientist from the University of Queensland. “Any drastic changes from the norm, which persist for several decades and over a wide area, represent important climate signals.”

Full Story Here: Study: Historic Rise to Sea Levels in Pacific Ocean Linked to Climate Change | Common Dreams.

An “unprecedented” number of fungus-caused diseases are threatening biodiversity and the global food supply, scientists say in a study published yesterday.

“In both animals and plants, an unprecedented number of fungal and fungal-like species have recently caused some of the most severe die-offs and extinctions ever witnessed in wild species, and are jeopardizing food security,” the study warned.

In the research published in the journal Nature, scientists from the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and institutions in the US say fungal infections destroy 125 million tons of the top five food crops – rice, wheat, maize, potatoes and soybeans. In addition to food crops, fungal infections are destroying trees, amphibians, bees, sea turtles and corals and bats.

Full Story Here: Fungal Threats to Biodiversity, Food Supply at ‘Unprecedented’ Levels | Common Dreams.

EPA rejects petition to ban pesticide; Paves way for widespread use on Dow Chemical’s genetically modified corn seeds

The Environmental Protection Agency rejected a petition to ban the sale of the 2,4-D pesticide, a major ingredient in the Vietnam-era defoliant ‘Agent Orange’. Despite its current widespread availability, use of 2,4-D could skyrocket soon because its main manufacturer, Dow Chemical, is hoping to receive approval to sell genetically modified corn seeds that are resistant to 2,4-D.

The decision from the EPA came in response to a lawsuit from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in January of this year, who filed the suit after the EPA refused to respond to a petition the environmental group first submitted in 2008.

Full Story Here: EPA Paves Pathway for ‘Agent Orange’ GM Corn | Common Dreams.

More than 15,000 warm temperature records broken during March

Jerry Meehl, climate scientist: “Everybody has this uneasy feeling. This is weird. This is not good.

The contiguous United States experienced the warmest March ever in the warmest start of the year ever in the warmest 12-month period ever, according to new data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The record warm March temperatures hit the entire nation with each state having experienced at least one record warm daily temperature. The NOAA reports that there were over 15,000 warm temperature records broken during the month.

The NOAA also connected the record breaking March temperatures to the slew of tornadoes saying that “warmer-than-average conditions across the eastern U.S. also created an environment favorable for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.”

Full Story Here: Record Warm March Temperatures Continue Record-Breaking Periods | Common Dreams.

Radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan have been detected in the great kelp forests off the California coast, according to a new study released by researchers at Cal State Long Beach. Following the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, a wave of radioactivity traveled across the Pacific Ocean.

After the Fukushima incident last spring, Stephen Manley and Chris Lowe, biology professors at California State-Long Beach wondered how released radiation would affect giant kelp canopies, a keystone for the coastal ecosystem.  What they found, low-levels of certain radioactive isotopes, seemed to have no impact on the kelp’s health, but their discovery adds anxiety for those who fear the ability for nuclear fallout to have long-ranging consequences.

Iodine 131 “has an eight-day half-life, so it’s pretty much all gone,” Manley told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But this shows what happens half a world away does effect what happens here. I don’t think these levels are harmful, but it’s better if we don’t have it at all.”

Full Story Here: Fukushima Radiation Found in California Kelp | Common Dreams.

Colorado is facing drought not seen since 2002, following the fourth-warmest and third-least-snowy winter in US history. Colorado State University scientists report that 98 percent of the state is facing these drought conditions.

The drought comes after a record-breaking warm winter that left very low “snowpack levels” in water basins. “Even though the reservoir levels are still strong and northeast Colorado soil moisture is still pretty good, we just don’t usually start out quite this warm and dry at this time — so this is very concerning,” CSU climatologist Nolan Doesken said. “In 2002, things didn’t seem that bad at the end of March, as March had been quite cool, with some snow.”

Colorado’s hydrofracking boom — a technology that heavily relies on water — only adds additional strain as farmers and drillers bid for a scarce resource:

Full Story Here: Frackers Outbid Farmers For Water In Colorado Drought | ThinkProgress.

Report implicates oil and natural gas drilling, aka fracking

A US Geological Survey research team has linked oil and natural gas drilling operations to a series of recent earthquakes from Alabama to the Northern Rockies.

According to the study led by USGS geophysicist William Ellsworth, the spike in earthquakes since 2001 near oil and gas extraction operations is “almost certainly man-made.” The research team cites underground injection of drilling wastewater as a possible cause.

“With gasoline prices at $4 a gallon, there’s pressure to rush ahead with drilling, but the USGS report is another piece of evidence that shows we have to proceed carefully,” said Dusty Horwitt, Senior Counsel and chief natural resources analyst at Environmental Working Group. “We can’t afford multi-million-dollar water pollution cleanups or earthquakes that could pose risks to homes and health.”

Full Story Here: USGS: Recent Earthquakes ‘Almost Certainly Manmade’ | Common Dreams.

Numerous countries are developing military presence in the Arctic

A new report reports that the Arctic shelf, with its disputed territory and vast energy resources, is becoming increasingly militarized. The study, released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, claims that Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway are all developing their military interests there and numerous other nations are seeking better access to the region.

Russia, the report finds, will create its own special armed forces by the year 2015 for the Arctic, aimed at protecting the country’s geopolitical interests in the region.

Full Story Here: Study: ‘Arctic Cold War’ Heats Up | Common Dreams.

We may have already passed the tipping points on global warming, say scientists at the Planet Under Pressure conference. At the London conference, scientists are giving a bleak view of the future of the planet due to catastrophic damage and growth by humans, saying we are close to the irreversible point of global warming.

Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute, gave an urgent warning that humanity needs to act radically on climate change. “We can … cap temperature rise at two degrees, or cross the threshold beyond which the system shifts to a much hotter state,” he said.

Full Story Here: On the Brink: Planet Near Irreversible Point of Global Warming | Common Dreams.

French gas giant dismissed concerns that the oil rig could explode

Four days into a gas leak which forced the evacuation of an oil rig in the North Sea, the French energy giant, Total, has said it “may be months” before the leak stops. The leak has led to, according to Reuters, a “cloud of explosive natural gas boiling up from the North Sea.”

Many are worried about the possibility of the rig exploding, and the possible damage this could cause. “If the gas cloud somehow finds an ignition source, we could be looking at complete destruction,” said Jake Molloy, an official with the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, in an interview with CNN. “This is an unprecedented situation and we really are in the realms of the unknown,” Molloy said of the leak from the Elgin platform in the North Sea, about 150 miles (240 km) east of the Scottish city of Aberdeen.

Total, however, has dismissed the possibility of an explosion. .

Full Story Here: ‘In the Realms of the Unknown’: North Sea Gas Leak Enters Day 4 | Common Dreams.

Radiation levels inside Fukushima’s reactor 2 have reached fatally high levels, and levels of water are far lower than previously thought, experts say today.

The current radiation levels are so high that even robots cannot enter. Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) says that new robots and equipment will need to be developed to deal with the lethal levels of radiation.

TEPCO spokesperson Junichi Matsumoto told the Associated Press, “We have to develop equipment that can tolerate high radiation” when locating and removing melted fuel during the decommissioning.

At ten times the lethal dose, the radiation levels are at their highest point yet.

Full Story Here: Experts: Radiation at Fukushima Plant Far Worse Than Thought | Common Dreams.

There are nearly 450 nuclear reactors in the world, with hundreds more being planned or under construction. There are 104 of these reactors in the United States and 195 in Europe. Imagine what havoc it would wreak on our civilization and the planet’s ecosystems if we were to suddenly witness not just one or two nuclear meltdowns, but 400 or more! How likely is it that our world might experience an event that could ultimately cause hundreds of reactors to fail and melt down at approximately the same time? I venture to say that, unless we take significant protective measures, this apocalyptic scenario is not only possible, but probable.

Consider the ongoing problems caused by three reactor core meltdowns, explosions and breached containment vessels at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi facility and the subsequent health and environmental issues. Consider the millions of innocent victims who have already died or continue to suffer from horrific radiation-related health problems (“Chernobyl AIDS,” epidemic cancers, chronic fatigue, etcetera) resulting from the Chernobyl reactor explosions, fires and fallout. If just two serious nuclear disasters, spaced 25 years apart, could cause such horrendous environmental catastrophes, it is hard to imagine how we could ever hope to recover from hundreds of similar nuclear incidents occurring simultaneously across the planet. Since more than one-third of all Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, this is a serious issue that should be given top priority.[1]

Full Story Here: 400 Chernobyls: Solar Flares, Electromagnetic Pulses and Nuclear Armageddon.

It was cold and they were forced to stand in the mud, in an area that couldn’t have been more than 15 feet across, but on Thursday, March 22nd, a coalition of indigenous, local, and regional activist groups rallied in Cushing, OK to protest President Obama’s visit to support the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Center for Energy Matters, Occupy encampments from Tulsa and Wichita, and local activists like Fannie Bates who for years has been fighting the oil giants’ stranglehold on Oklahoma and the legacy of her native ancestors.

While they, those standing against the pipeline, were tucked away on the outskirts of a park along a blocked off road, supporters of the pipeline, bused in from Arkansas by Americans for Prosperity, were given a prime location in town for everyone to see. Just south of them along Main Street was another group of pipeline supporters with equal visibility. When asked about this inequity, the police said, “they were probably on private property and have been given permission to be there by the property owner.” That private property was a public sidewalk, and we all know who really owns the sidewalks at the “pipeline crossroads of the world.”

Full Story Here: Obama Greeted by Protest Against the Pipeline in Cushing, OK | 350.org.

A video showing Rep. Cliff Stearns (R, Florida) announcing his desire to “sell off some of our national parks” was recently filmed and released on the Internet by the Florida Political Action Cooperative.

In a speech given at a town hall meeting in Belleview Florida, Stearns explained his position.

I got attacked in a previous town meeting for not supporting another national park in this country, a 200-mile trailway. And I told the man that we don’t need more national parks in this country, we need to actually sell off some of our national parks, and try and do what a normal family would do is — they wouldn’t ask Uncle Joe for a loan, they would sell their Cadillac, or they would take their kids out of private schools and put them into public schools to save to money instead of asking for their credit card to increase their debt ceiling.

Think Progress reports on the issue and notes the funds that US national parks bring into the treasury:

Our national parks represent America’s heritage, held in trust from one generation to the next.

Full Story Here: Republican Congressman Wants to ‘Sell Off Some of Our National Parks’ | Common Dreams.

To many Americans, climate change is weird weather and political debate. For the nation of Kiribati, it’s an existential crisis.

Kiribati, an island nation located in the central Pacific, rises just a few feet above sea level in many areas. Elevating ocean levels could soon render the entire country uninhabitable.

With leading world economic powers doing little to combat climate change, Kiribati is drawing up contingency plans to relocate the country’s entire population to another island nation, Fiji, if necessary.

Kiribati President Anote Tong told The Associated Press on Friday that his Cabinet this week endorsed a plan to buy nearly 6,000 acres on Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu. He said the fertile land, being sold by a church group for about $9.6 million, could be insurance for Kiribati’s entire population of 103,000, though he hopes it will never be necessary for everyone to leave.

Full Story Here: Entire Pacific Nation Readies Plan To Abandon Low-Lying Island And Move To Fiji Because Of Global Warming | ThinkProgress.

The contract assigning a third-party company to investigate the environmental impacts of the Keystone XL project adds to questions about the impartiality of the study, after the document was shown to be a binding contract between the outside company and the company building the pipeline, not the State Department.

The contract, posted quietly to a State Department website on Friday in response to a request by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), shows that it is a signed agreement between Entrix, an outside consultant, and TransCanada, the pipeline builder.

The posted version was also heavily excised, with most names and numbers, as well as some entire pages, blacked out.

“What appears to have happened was Entrix was doing an environmental study intending to minimize the potential environmental impacts of Keystone XL,” said Anthony Swift, an energy lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s sadly not incredibly surprising. We were dealing with an environmental review that was done by Entrix on TransCanada’s behalf, and that does not pass muster of environmental law.”

The State Department has previously defended the arrangement as following typical third-party contracting procedures.

Full Story Here: Keystone XL Contract Reveals More Evidence Of Conflict Of Interest.

A number of coincidental circumstances appear to make a compelling argument for the recent Youngstown-area seismic events to have been induced.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) has confirmed that a series of earthquakes in the state were caused by injecting leftover fracking fluids, “brine,” deep into wells.

ODNR stated today:

Geologists believe induced seismic activity is extremely rare, but it can occur with the confluence of a series of specific circumstances. After investigating all available geological formation and well activity data, ODNR regulators and geologists found a number of co-occurring circumstances strongly indicating the Youngstown area earthquakes were induced. Specifically, evidence gathered by state officials suggests fluid from the Northstar 1 disposal well [a deep injection well primarily used for oil and gas fluid waste disposal] intersected an unmapped fault in a near-failure state of stress causing movement along that fault.

Full Story Here: Confirmed: Fracking Caused Ohio Earthquakes | Common Dreams.

At the Republic Report, Lee Fang details how the Koch Industries petrochemical empire is involved in the boom in natural gas hydrofracturing. The right-wing Koch brothers have developed a vertical empire designed to extract wealth from every point in the hydrocarbon lifecycle. A small fraction of their profits is funneled into corrupting our political system, in order to prevent government from protecting society against the costs of the waste products.

The October 2011 issue of Discovery, the in-house Koch Industries newsletter, explains how the Koch Industries empire is profiting from the “really exciting” fracking boom:

– 1. Koch Pipeline is partnering with NuStar Energy to develop a dormant pipeline from Pettus, TX to refineries in Corpus Christi. The pipeline will transport natural gas from fracking sites in southern Texas. Koch Pipeline is a Koch Industries subsidiary.

Full Story Here: How The Kochs Are Fracking America | ThinkProgress.

Not surprisingly, we were disappointed with the positions adopted by The Global Partnership for Oceans, a new international alliance, coordinated by The World Bank. This coalition of major environmental groups, governments, and private sector interests has a chance to work together to find real solutions to the challenges of sustainably managing the world’s fisheries for the good of the oceans and the people who depend on them. Instead they’re parroting some of the same negative policies we’ve opposed for years.

Full Story Here: The World Bank’s Plans for Fisheries Could Destroy Fishing Communities | Food & Water Watch.

A proposal by Canadian oil firm TransCanada to seek new approval for segments of its Keystone XL pipeline project was greeted warmly by the Obama White House today. In a letter sent to the US State Department, the company said it would seek a ‘Presidential Permit application (cross border permit) in the near future for the Keystone XL Project from the U.S./Canada border in Montana to Steele City, Nebraska. TransCanada would supplement that application with an alternative route in Nebraska as soon as that route is selected.

In effect, TransCanada is using a divide-and-conquer method by splitting up the original Keystone route in two. The lower half of the pipeline would now start in Oklahoma and travel to Texas, but because it does not cross an international border it would not require the special cross-border permit. The northern half would still need federal approval, but TransCanada would begin building the lower half even without it. The company would apply separately to the various federal and state permits for the southern portion of the pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney responded to the company’s letter by saying, “We look forward to working with TransCanada to ensure that it is built in a safe, responsible and timely manner, and we commit to take every step possible to expedite the necessary Federal permits.”

Full Story Here: White House Vows to ‘Expedite’ New Pipeline Proposal | Common Dreams.

Scientist: With climate change fires will become more frequent, more intense and harder to stop.

This eery warning comes from Mike Flannigan, a senior research scientist with Natural Resources Canada and professor at the University of Alberta, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He says that fires will become more frequent, more intense and harder to stop.

Flannigan’s “conservative estimate” states there would be two to three times more fire activity in the northern hemisphere by the end of the century.

“If a fire is intense, aerial suppression is no longer effective, so even modern fire management agencies, like Canada, the United States and Australia — among the best in the world — will be extremely challenged,” he said.

Full Story Here: There Will Be Fire: The ‘Carbon Bomb’ ‘Waiting to Be Ignited’ | Common Dreams.

The action comes after the US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement last week approved Shell’s oil spill response plan for the Chukchi Sea off the Alaskan coast.  “The company’s oil spill response plan for the Chukchi Sea off Alaska was given the all clear by US authorities, even though it’s a work of almost complete fantasy,” said Greenpeace in a statement today.

The Press Association reports:

[Activists] scaled the gallery in Trafalgar Square, where an evening reception is being held for Shell, saying they wanted to demonstrate against plans to drill for oil in the Arctic this summer.

Full Story Here: Greenpeace from the Rooftop: ‘Do Not Drill in the Arctic’ | Common Dreams.

One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. Heartland has issued a press release claiming that some of these documents were sent to an outsider under false pretenses and that one document in the set is a fake, but the AP independently verified their contents.

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the climate-denial think tank Heartland Institute received funding from at least 19 publicly traded corporations in 2010 and 2011. The companies’ combined contributions exceeded $1.3 million for an array of projects. As Think Progress Green reported on Tuesday, the Heartland Institute’s projects included a secret plan to teach children that climate change is a hoax.

The companies backing the Heartland Institute:

Full Story Here: EXPOSED: 19 Corporations Funding Heartland Institute | ThinkProgress.

Pennsylvania’s state legislature has effectively signed a death warrant for some number of residents, who knows how many. Corbett’s about to make it official.

Pennsylvanians: Fight back — or suffer the consequences.

The fracking industry has written a bill that gives itself legal permission to poison Pennsylvanians-and keeps doctors who treat them once they’re poisoned from telling anyone else what poisoned them. The bill also essentially permits all gas drilling and processing activities anywhere, including in residential areas.

It’s all being sold as an “impact fee” bill. Counties that want the income will sign on — and that probably means most counties will.

The industry was helped in this covert operation by crooks in political office. Those political criminals should be held accountable (more on this below).

Full Story Here: Fracking Industry Colludes With Pennsylvania Legislature to Create Dangerous New Law | Truthout.

Scientists issue call for safeguards to prevent another nuclear disaster

A new study shows that last year’s catastrophic earthquake in Japan caused a seismic fault close to the Fukushima nuclear plant to reactivate, meaning another major earthquake could strike the area again, this time even closer to the Fukushima plant.

The new information (pdf) is published in European Geosciences Union’s journal Solid Earth.

The March 11, 2011 earthquake’s epicenter was about 160 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  The scientists in the study explain that new tremors are happening even closer to the site:

Full Story Here: Fukushima Nuclear Plant at High Risk for Major Earthquake | Common Dreams.

At this very moment, up to 25 million tons of debris–occupying an area roughly the size of California–is a on a collision course for the North American west coast.

The floating wreckage, often called flotsam, is a result of the massively destructive, 9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck just off the coast of Japan last March.

(SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO)

Peninsula College oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Jim Ingraham told the Huffington Post that the wreckage could include virtually anything that floats– portions of houses, boats, ships, furniture, cars and even human remains (athletic shoes can act as flotation devices).

Full Story Here: Japan Tsunami Debris May Soon Hit California Coast (VIDEO).

OPS:  RADIOACTIVE????????????

Senators will not get a pass from anti-tar sands activists

Beginning at noon today, a coalition of over a dozen environmental groups, progressive organizations, and socially minded businesses — including 350.org, NRDC, Sierra Club, MoveOn.org and companies like Patagonia and Northface — are launching a 24 hour “signature bomb” with the goal of sending the Senate over 500,000 messages opposing Keystone XL and urging Senators to block any amendments that reverse the President’s pipeline rejection.

UPDATE: (4:35 PM EST) According to reports:

Senate Republicans officially filed an amendment Monday afternoon to the transportation bill that would authorize the Keystone XL pipeline. The amendment is sponsored by Sens. John Hoeven, Mitch McConnell, Richard Lugar, David Vitter, Mike Johanns and Orrin Hatch.

And 350.org reports:

Click here to add your name to our growing movement wide petition to stop Keystone XL — there are over 300,000 signatures and counting: 350.org/kxl

Full Story Here: Groups Galvanize Against US Senate with 24 Hour ‘Signature Bomb’ | Common Dreams.

New data indicates warming of 2C now planet’s “most optimistic” scenario

New climate information from French scientists indicate that global warming of 2 C is the “most optimistic” scenario. Yet this is the amount of warming James Hansen has referred to as a “prescription for disaster.”

Agence France-Presse reports on the new climate scenarios:

 

French scientists unveiling new estimates for global warming said on Thursday the 2 C (3.6 F) goal enshrined by the United Nations was “the most optimistic” scenario left for greenhouse-gas emissions.

 

The estimates, compiled by five scientific institutes, will be handed to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

James Hansen: “Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient.  It would be a prescription for disaster.”

(IPCC) for consideration in its next big overview on global warming and its impacts. [...]

The French team said that by 2100, warming over pre-industrial times would range from two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) to 5.0 C (9.0 F

Full Story Here: Is ‘Prescription for Disaster’ Our ‘Most Optimistic’ Climate Future? | Common Dreams.

Occupy comes out to support a lawsuit that hopes to turn the tables on corporate farming behemoth Monsanto.

Monsanto, if you will, is the 1 percent of Big Agriculture–the scourge of small farmers everywhere. But now those farmers are fighting back, backed by activists from Occupy Wall Street.

First, some history. In 1982, Monsanto scientists were the first to genetically modify a plant cell. Three years later, the US Patent Office ruled that plants were a patentable subject matter.

By 1985, Monsanto had already become a corporate giant by creating RoundUp, the most popular herbicide in the world. Now that it had the legal protection of seed patents in addition to the biotechnology to genetically manipulate its seeds, Monsanto scientists engineered a specific brand of Monsanto seeds that were RoundUp-resistant—unlike organic, natural seeds, these seeds are sterile and have to be re-planted each year, ensuring that customers return year after year to replenish their supply.

In order to achieve a monopoly over the market, and keep farmers from saving their own seed as they have done for centuries, Monsanto begin to purchase as many seeds as possible—spending $8 billion and acquiring over 20 seed companies over the past decade alone. Today, Monsanto controls 93 percent of soybean crops, 86 percent of corn crops, 93 percent of cotton crops, and 93 percent of canola seed crops in the United States alone.

Full Story Here: Occupy vs. Monsanto: Activists, Farmers Fight the Corporation They Fear Will Take Over All America’s Crops | | AlterNet.

What scientists are beginning to understand about the cause of colony collapse could be a message for all of us.

It’s often said that we have bees to thank for one out of every three bites we take of food. In addition to producing honey, honeybees literally criss-cross the United States, pollinating almonds, oranges, melons, blueberries, pumpkins, apples, and more. And while carrots are a biennial root crop that are harvested long before they flower, all carrots are planted from seed, and honeybees pollinate the carrot flowers that produce the seeds. Other species of bees, both social and solitary bees, pollinate other crops. And the populations of all these species of bees are in decline.

The decline of bees has been in the headlines for several years, and theories to explain their deaths abound. But perhaps there is not just one single cause. University of California San Diego professor of biology James Nieh studies foraging, communication and health of bees. “I would say it’s a combination of four factors; pesticides, disease, parasites, and human mismanagement,” says Nieh. Bees might be weakened by having a very low level of exposure to insecticides or fungicides, making them more susceptible if they are attacked by viruses or parasites. “It’s kind of like taking a patient who is not doing so well — very weak, poor diet, exposing them to pathogens, and then throwing more things at them. It’s not surprising that honeybees are not very healthy.”

Full Story Here: Have Bees Become Canaries In the Coal Mine? Why Massive Bee Dieoffs May Be a Warning About Our Own Health | Food | AlterNet.

Also: Japan’s Nuclear Exclusion Zone Shows Few Signs of Life

The temperature of Reactor #2 at Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has soared overnight and remained mysteriously high Monday, despite more water being pumped through it.

On January 27th, the reactor’s internal temperature was 113º F, Monday the temperature soared to 164º F.  Japanese authorities require that the reactor temperature remain below 176º F.

* * *

Japan’s NHK TV reports:

The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant says the temperature in the No.2 reactor remains high despite the injection of additional water.

A thermometer at the bottom of the reactor showed 73.3 degrees Celsius on Monday morning. It was around 45 degrees on January 27th and 71.7 degrees at 4 PM on Sunday.

Tokyo Electric Power Company began injecting 10.6 tons of water per hour from around 1:30 AM on Monday. That’s one ton more per hour than before.

Full Story Here: Temperature Soars Mysteriously Inside Fukushima Nuclear Reactor | Common Dreams.

In a scathing letter to the editor, thirty-eight of the world’s top climatologists have rebuked Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for its publication of a “scientist” op-ed denying the threat of manmade global warming. The letter, authored by climate scientist Kevin Trenberth and colleagues from the world’s top science institutions, tells the Wall Street Journal editors to “Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate“:

You published “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” (op-ed, Jan. 27) on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

Full Story Here: Climate Scientists Rebuke Rupert Murdoch: WSJ Denier Op-Ed Like ‘Dentists Practicing Cardiology’ | ThinkProgress.

In response to an op-ed printed late last week in the Wall Street Journal, signed by sixteen ‘scientists’ and entitled, ‘No Need to Panic About Global Warming,’ thirty-nine climate scientists have penned a letter, printed in today’s WSJ, arguing that taking advice on climate change from scientists who have either “no expertise in climate science” or “extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert” is akin to allowing dentists perform heart surgery.

Suzanne Goldenberg reports for The Guardian:

The Wall Street Journal has received a dressing down from a large group of leading scientists for promoting retrograde and out-of-date views on climate change.

In an opinion piece run by the Journal on Wednesday, nearly 40 scientists, including acknowledged climate change experts, take on the paper for publishing an article disputing the evidence on global warming.

The offending article, No Need to Panic About Global Warming, which appeared last week, argued that climate change was a cunning ploy deployed by governments to raise taxes and by non-profit organisations to solicit donations to save the planet.

Full Story Here: Wall Street Journal Slammed for Giving Platform to Climate Change Deniers | Common Dreams.

For decades Monsanto used Snow Creek, a small local waterway that flowed past its plant, to dispose of PCBs. The company claims that they just didn’t know any better – that as soon as they became aware that PCBs were a human and environmental health problem, they took steps to stop the dumping and to protect local residents and workers. But as documents that the company was forced to turn over during a series of lawsuits that began in the late 1990’s show, their claimed ignorance of the harmful impacts of PCBs is just another in a long, ongoing list of Monsanto’s endless lies.

As early as 1938 Monsanto knew from researchers that PCBs caused liver damage in rats. In the 50’s they started to tell their own workers to wear protective clothing and respirators when working around PCBs, while at the same time they continued to dump their poisons out into the West Anniston community. In 1966, Monsanto hired a Mississippi State University biologist to dunk fish into Snow Creek. The study found that “all 25 fish lost equilibrium and turned on their sides in 10 seconds and all were dead in 3 ½ minutes,” their skin broken and bleeding. The fact the Creek was lethal didn’t stop Monsanto. By 1969 the company was pouring 250 pounds of PCBs a day into the creek that feed into the area’s drinking water supply and which many local residents, including children, used for fishing, playing and recreating. That year, Monsanto researchers found fish in the local community fishing spot with PCB levels 7,500 times the legal limit. A company memo concluded, “there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges.” Instead, Monsanto executives enlisted state officials to try and “handle the problem quietly without release of the information to the public.”

Full Story Here: Monsanto Returns to the Scene of the Crime | Food & Water Watch.

“The science is now clear, bees poisoned by neonicotinoid pesticides are much more likely to die from disease, gather less food and produce fewer new bees.”

Bayer-produced imidacloprid harmful to bees even at very low levels

A new study published in Naturwissenschaften – The Science of Nature by a leading bee expert provides damning evidence that a widely used pesticide, even at low levels, is responsible for the recent catastrophic decline in honey bees. Dr. Jeff Pettis of the USDA’s Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, MD led the study.

Colony collapse disorder, as this phenomenon is known, has been getting worse since 2006.

The news has brought renewed calls for these pesticides, which only became widely used in the 1990s, to be banned as honey bees are key to human’s survival – pollinating 70 per cent of the crops which produce most of the world’s food.

The pesticide that the study (pdf) looked at was imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides worldwide. It is neonicotinoid insecticide produced by Bayer CropScience.

Full Story Here: More Damning Evidence Points to Pesticide as Cause of Mass Bee Deaths | Common Dreams.

OPS: is this really a surprise to anyone?!  Really?

“It’s Madison Avenue hell”

“Hydraulic fracturing” is more commonly known as “fracking.”

During this week’s State of the Union address, President Obama said:

“It was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock, reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.”

But he never said the F-word, no doubt pleasing industry lobbyists.

Full Story Here: No Fracking Way! Industry Says Word ‘Frack’ Has Been Co-Opted | Common Dreams.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.<br>

THIRTY-NINE YEARS AGO, CONGRESS SIGNED INTO LAW A HISTORIC PIECE OF LEGISLATION THAT WOULD, FOR MORE THAN THREE DECADES, TURN THE TIDE OF OUR POLLUTED WATERWAYS AND HOLD BIG POLLUTERS ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.

When the Clean Water Act was enacted, the Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it literally caught fire, the majestic Hudson River’s fishery was gone and Lake Erie was declared all but dead. This bold legislation put forward by visionaries in Congress returned control of our nation’s waterways to the citizens of the United States as part of the public trust. However, today the concept of the public trust, the commons, is being quickly eroded by corporate polluters and their cronies in Congress who are determined to return to the era of using out nation’s waterways as open sewers, toxic dumps and landfills.

Despite the fact that the Clean Water Act has been responsible for providing millions of Americans with opportunities to swim, drink and fish in clean water, every branch of our federal government—the legislative, executive and judicial—have taken aim at the Act. The courts have worked to narrow the definition of “waters of the United States,” the Bush Administration used its power to narrow that definition even further, and Congress made efforts to chip away at the Act. Even the states have joined the party, cutting clean-water enforcement budgets every time they face a fiscal challenge. Now, however, our Congress is launching the most aggressive, nefarious attacks on our right to clean water in the nation’s history.

Full Story Here: Clean Water Safeguards Headed Down the Drain? « EcoWatch: Uniting the Voice of the Grassroots Environmental Movement.

America’s television meteorologists are the primary source of climate information for most Americans, and are second only to scientists — who have much less access to the general public — in the level of trust they are given. Yet more than half of TV weather reporters don’t believe in human-induced climate change, even as our poisoned weather grows more extreme.

Forecast the Facts, a new campaign of 350.org, the League of Conservation Voters, and the new Citizen Engagement Lab, aims to turn the tide. The first call to action challenges the American Meteorological Society to vote next week for a strong climate change statement that rejects science denial:

It’s a big problem: weather reporters reach millions of people every night, and right now they’re not telling their viewers the full story. We can change that. Meteorologists are meeting this month at the annual conference of the American Meteorological Society, where the AMS Council will vote on a new official statement on climate change. Denier meteorologists don’t want the statement to pass, and are doing everything they can to derail the process. We can’t let that happen.

Full Story Here: Forecast The Facts Exposes America’s Climate-Denier TV Weathermen | ThinkProgress.

Bill McKibben: “This is a victory for Americans who testified in record numbers”

The White House has rejected the proposal for the tar sands carrying Keystone XL pipeline today, news sources are reporting.

The Toronto Star reports:

U.S. President Barack Obama denied TransCanada Corp.’s application to build the pipeline, citing a “rushed and arbitrary deadline” imposed by Congress to review the project.

“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” Obama said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

350.org founder and Keystone XL protest leader Bill McKibben reacting to expected news of pipeline rejection stated:

Full Story Here: Obama Administration Rejects Keystone XL Pipeline | Common Dreams.

Study: Rising CO2 affecting brains, central nervous systems of sea fish

New research shows the disastrous consequences the world’s rising carbon dioxide levels are having on ocean life.

A team of researchers from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University published their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change. They document how elevated CO2 is “driving fish crazy.”

The Australian Associated Press reports that the new research point to ocean problems beyond acidification.  From Professor Phillip Munday, one of the researchers:

Full Story Here: Goodbye, Fish: Rising CO2 Direct Threat to Sea Life | Common Dreams.

Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented “frenzy of hate” after a video featuring an interview with him was published last week by Climate Desk.

Emails contained “veiled threats against my wife,” and other “tangible threats,” Emanuel, a highly regarded atmospheric scientist and director of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate program, said in an interview. “They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive.”

“What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I didn’t feel very good about that at all,” Emanuel said. “I thought it was low to drag somebody’s spouse into arguments like this.”

Full Story Here: MIT Climate Scientist’s Wife Threatened In A “Frenzy of Hate” | Mother Jones.

Fueled by billions of tons of greenhouse pollution, a surge of record warmth has flooded the United States, shattering records from southern California to North Dakota. “Temperatures have reached up to 40 degrees above early January averages in North Dakota,” the Weather Channel reports. Cities are seeing late-April temperatures at the start of January — Minot, ND hit 61 degrees, Aberdeen, SD hit 63 degrees, and Williston, ND hit 58 degrees, all-time record highs for the month of January.

Daily record highs have been set in Des Moines, Iowa (65 degrees), Rapid City, S.D. (73 degrees), International Falls, Minn. (46 degrees), St. Louis, Mo. (66 degrees) and Fargo, N.D. (55 degrees), to name a few locations. Although the record warmth subsides on Friday for the Plains, the mild air mass will bully its way eastward. We’re talking temperatures in cities such as Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit and Cincinnati enjoying highs on the order of 10-to-20 degrees above average. High temperatures around 5-to-15 degrees above average will make it all the way to the East Coast including New York City, Washington, D.C. and Charlotte, N.C.

“There has never been a 60 degree temperature recorded during the first week of January in Minnesota’s modern climate record.” Southwestern Minnesota reached the lower 60s.

Full Story Here: Record Heat Floods America With Temperatures 40 Degrees Above Normal | ThinkProgress.

Dean Baker :-:

Deficit hawks try to scare us about the debt we’re leaving. That’s economic nonsense – unlike the costs of global warming

It is remarkable how efforts to reduce the government deficit/debt are often portrayed as a generational issue, while efforts to reduce global warming are almost never framed in this way. This contrast is striking because the issues involved in reducing the deficit or debt have little direct relevance to distribution between generations, whereas global warming is almost entirely a question of distribution between generations.

Seeing the debt as an issue between generations is wrong in almost every dimension. The idea that future generations will somehow be stuck with some huge tab in the form of the national debt suffers from the simple logical problem that we are all going to die. At some point, everyone who owns the debt being issued today, or over the next two decades, will be dead. They will have to pass the ownership of the debt to someone else – in other words, their children or grandchildren. This means that the debt is not money that our children and grandchildren will be paying to someone else. It is money that they will be paying to themselves.

There are certainly issues of intra-generational distribution. If Bill Gates’s grandkids own all the debt, then there will be a serious issue of income inequality 50 or 60 years out – but that is not an intra-generational issue

Full Story Here: Climate change – our real bequest to future generations | Dean Baker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Fish are the last wild food that most of us will eat.

A few days from now, a single bluefin tuna will make international headlines when it sells for an ungodly amount of money — perhaps more than $100,000 – at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. And while the high price of the first bluefin of the year will be extraordinary, the rarity, and thus the prestige and high pricetag of bluefin in general, provides a clue to humans’ dietary history. Once upon a time, wild foods were a regular and beloved part of the American diet. Today, the American epicure might dine on foraged mushrooms and ramps, but for many of us, fish are the last wild food we eat. What happened? And what are we missing?

Georgia Pellegrini, a chef who has worked in elite restaurants in New York and France, decided to answer this question for herself when she set out to hunt her own food. As her new book’s title implies – Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time – she entered into a masculine realm in which she was often the only woman. Pellegrini traveled across the United States and even England, hunting everything from squirrel to elk. As much as she stands out as a woman, she also stands out among the local and sustainable food movement. (An anthropologist recently pointed out that the local food movement “has been reticent to embrace hunting as an integral part of sustainable eating.”)

Full Story Here: We’ve Lost Nearly All of Our Wild Foods — What Happened? And What Are We Missing? | Food | AlterNet.

The headlines of 2011 were driven by global warming disasters and the popular uprising against the powers-that-be who have accumulated profit at the expense of the future of humanity. The United States faced the most billion-dollar climate disasters ever, with 14 distinct disasters costing at least $53 billion to the U.S. economy. Stymied by the election of the science-denying Tea Party Congress, the Obama administration failed to pass climate pollution or oil and coal safety legislation in response to the disasters of 2010. The administration fought back attacks on investment in renewable energy and stopped the rush to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, spurred by mass protests.

Full Story Here: Poisoned Weather: Year 2011 In Photos | ThinkProgress.

The year 2011 brought the most billion-dollar climate disasters to the United States ever, piling history-making events on top of each other to catastrophic results. The litany of disaster included a scorching drought that rivaled the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, a tornado season twice as bad as the great 1974 tornado outbreak, and flooding worse than the the great 1927 flood on the Mississippi River. This year of disaster was the result of the unlimited burning of fossil fuels, which has trapped increasing amounts of heat in the atmosphere, disrupting our climate system.

In an interview with PBS News Hour, Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters described the effect of the hundreds of billions of tons of global warming pollution as being like “steroids for the atmosphere,” intensifying extreme weather to unprecedented results:

We look at heat waves, droughts, and flooding events. They all tend to get increased when you have this extra energy in the atmosphere. I call it being on steroids for the atmosphere. Normally, you have the everyday ups and downs of the weather, but if you pack a little bit of extra punch in there, it’s like a baseball hitter who’s on steroids. You expect to see a big home run total maybe from this slugger, but if you add a little bit of extra oomph to his swing by putting him on steroids, now we can have an unprecedented season, a 70 home run season. And that’s the way I look at this year. We had an unprecedented weather year that I don’t think would have happened unless we had had an extra bit of energy in the atmosphere due to climate change and global warming.

Watch the program:

Full Story Here: Our Weather On Steroids: The Mind-Boggling Climate Disasters Of 2011 | ThinkProgress.

Today marks one week to go before the holiday frenzy kicks into its highest gear. By next Friday, people will be so focused on holiday logistics that many consumers wouldn’t notice if the FDA green lighted AquaBounty Technology’s Genetically Engineered (GE) salmon, a scientific experiment they’ve been reviewing for close to two decades.

Although that will make for a nervous week around here, we are heartened by this past week’s latest round of criticism for GE salmon, as scientists lined up in the halls of Congress and on a National Public Radio debate to discredit a dodgy environmental risk-assessment of GE salmon. With so many concerns raised about its environmental impact, and given the FDA’s history of making controversial announcements right before a holiday, could this be the year the agency approves GE salmon?

When the FDA announced16 months ago that GE salmon was safe, many of us worried that regulatory approval was imminent. But in the intervening months, the agency has suffered slings and arrows from scientists and legislators alike, unhappy with the agency’s inadequate risk assessment of GE salmon, which, if approved, would be the first genetically engineered animal to enter the U.S. food supply.

Full Story Here: Will a Bad Week for AquaBounty and the FDA be Enough to Keep GE Salmon Off Our Plates? | Food & Water Watch.

If Santa is ever in need of some replacement reindeer, he will have considerably less to choose from than he would have 10 years ago.

The world’s largest reindeer population has plummeted up to 92 percent in the last few decades. Once standing at 900,000, the George River herd now stands at 74,000, according to Survival International.

Important to the Innu and Cree people of Quebec and Labrador in eastern Canada, iron-ore mining, hydro-power flooding and road building are reportedly to blame for the depleting numbers of reindeer.

Full Story Here: Georgia River Reindeer Population Dramatically Dropping (PHOTOS).

A Shell deepwater drilling site off the Nigerian coast that the company reported leaking on Wednesday may have spilled up to 2.4 million gallons, according to nonprofit environmental satellite monitoring group SkyTruth.

If so, that’s far worse than indicated in statements made so far by Royal Dutch Shell, which has put the amount of oil leaked at the Bonga offshore site at “less than 40,000 barrels,” (1.7 million gallons).

“That could mean anything from 1 gallon to 1.7 million gallons,” John Amos, founder and president of satellite-imaging nonprofit SkyTruth told TPM.

Full Story Here: Satellite Imagery Indicates Shell Spill May Be Worse Than Reported | TPM Idea Lab.

With this new and arbitrary deadline, the punditocracy is relitigating the question of whether it should be built. The DC political elite assumed that the pipeline was an inevitability, dismissive or ignorant of the popular opposition to a risky, foreign tar sands pipeline cutting across the center of the nation. Most were blindsided when the State Department announced it needed to review its obviously flawed assessment of the project, and when the state of Nebraska held an emergency legislative session against the pipeline.

Full Story Here: The Fight Over Keystone XL Now Has A 60-Day Deadline | ThinkProgress.

Fukushima Prefecture — As bitter winds blow around cesium and other radioactive particles spewed from the nearby Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant’s reactors, Naoto Matsumura lights a cigarette, which he considers relatively good for his health.

“I would get sick if I stopped smoking; I have a lot to worry about,” says Matsumura, 52, who reckons he is the only person still living within a 20-km radius of the world’s worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl.

According to reports from Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency published in August, following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, and subsequent explosions at three reactors about 13 km from Matsumura’s door, the plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) has released 168 times more radiation than the atomic bombs that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Full Story Here: Lone holdout’s first nuclear winter looms in Tohoku | The Japan Times Online.

The Environmental Protection Agency released far-reaching air pollution regulations Wednesday, 21 years after they were first mandated by Congress and six days after they were signed by the agency.

The rules require coal- and oil-fired power plants to lower emissions of 84 different toxic chemicals to levels no higher than those emitted by the cleanest 12% of plants. Companies have three years to achieve the standards, and EPA has made clear a fourth year and perhaps even more time are also available to them.

“We’re delighted,” says Janice Nolen of the American Lung Association. “After waiting 21 years, it looks like we may actually have a rule that will help to save 11,000 lives a year and reduce exposure all across the country to a bunch of really toxic substances.”

“It’s hard to overstate the significance of this rule,” says John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “This is a generational achievement that marks America cleaning up dirty power plants once and for all.”

Full Story Here: New EPA rules target mercury, gas pollution – USATODAY.com.

Agreements to bail out banks happen in days – but despite some good progress at Durban, we still don’t have a legally binding deal to bail out the planet

They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades.

Nicholas Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to the banks. That is just one government’s contribution: yet it amounts to 12 times the annual global climate change bill. Add the bailouts in other countries, and it rises several more times.

This support was issued on demand: as soon as the banks said they wanted help, they got it. On just one day the Federal Reserve made $1.2tr available – more than the world has committed to tackling climate change in 20 years.

Full Story Here: Why is it so easy to save the banks – but so hard to save the biosphere? | George Monbiot | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

Yesterday President Obama introduced a rule that would finally extend federal minimum wage and overtime protections to two million workers who provide home-based care to the elderly and people with disabilities. For 37 years a loophole that puts home health care workers in the same “companion” category as babysitters has prevented those workers from receiving these key labor rights.

The administration’s action rectifies a longstanding injustice by simply ensuring home care workers are covered by the same protections other workers get under the Fair Labor Standards Act. But Congressional Republicans and their corporate allies are speaking out against the move:

Full Story Here: Congressional Republicans Fight Minimum Wage Protections For Exploited Health Care Workers | ThinkProgress.

On one hand, we have shale gas companies who have been rushing into various regions of the country to extract gas using a dangerous extraction process that involves toxic chemicals potentially contaminating our drinking water. On the other hand, we also have investor-owned water utilities (IOU’s) who are taking a public resource out of the hands of the public and profiting greatly from it. What happens when you put them both together? The results are revealed in the latest Food & Water Watch Report, Why the Water Industry is Promoting Shale Gas Development and they could involve the over-generalization of water quality tests, increased water rates and big profits… for the investors.

Full Story Here: Are Privatized Water Utilities in Cahoots With Shale Gas Companies? | Common Dreams.

High exposure to radiation possible before officials acted

Some residents near the Fukushima No. 1 plant might have been exposed to up to 19 millisieverts of radiation during the first four months of the nuclear crisis, the Fukushima Prefectural Government said Tuesday.

This indicates residents subject to the greatest exposure may have been outside the immediate evacuation area, in locations where radioactive hot spots were later revealed and prompted belated evacuation advisories long after the crisis started March 11.

The radiation estimates are based on atmospheric and other external readings and forecasts and do not include food, water and other means of exposure.

Full Story Here: Fukushima Evacuations Too Late Outside No-Go Zone | Common Dreams.

A new global climate deal has been struck after being brought back from the brink of disaster by three powerful women politicians in a 20-minute “huddle to save the planet”.

A major crisis had been provoked after 3am on Sunday morning when the EU clashed furiously with China and India over the legal form of a potential new treaty. The EU plan to bind all countries to cuts was close to collapse after India inserted the words “legal outcome” at the last minute into the negotiating text.

EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard, backed by UK energy secretary Chris Huhne, said it would have made the EU plan legally meaningless and would have forced the EU to walk away, effectively collapsing the negotiations.

Full Story Here: Durban climate deal struck after tense all-night session | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

What it means, in climate terms, is that we’ve all but lost the battle to reduce the damage from global warming. The planet has already warmed about a degree Celsius; it’s clearly going to go well past two degrees. It means, in political terms, that the fossil fuel industry has delayed effective action for the 12 years since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It means, in diplomatic terms, that the endless talks underway in Durban should be more important than ever–they should be the focus of a planetary population desperate to figure out how it’s going to survive the century.

But instead, almost no one is paying attention to the proceedings, at least on this continent. One of our political parties has decided that global warming is a hoax–it’s two leading candidates are busily apologizing for anything they said in the past that might possibly have been construed as backing, you know, science. President Obama hasn’t yet spoken on the Durban talks, and informed international observers like Joss Garman are beginning to despair that he ever will.

Full Story Here: The Most Important News Story of the Day/Millennium | Common Dreams.

Current pledges for curbing carbon emissions will doom the world to global warming of 3.5 C, massively overshooting the UN target of 2 C, researchers reported at the climate talks here on Tuesday.

Output of heat-trapping carbon gases is rising so fast that governments have only four years left to avert a massive extra bill for meeting the two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) target, they said.

“The current pledges are heading towards a global emissions pathway that will take warming to 3.5 C goal (6.3 F),” according to an estimate issued by a consortium of German researchers.

The world is on a “high-warming, high-cost, high-risk pathway,” they said.

Full Story Here: World ‘Heading for 3.5 C Warming’: Study | Common Dreams.

Nearly nine months after Fukushima Daiichi was ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami, the plant continues to pose a major environmental threat. Before the latest leak, the Fukushima accident had been responsible for the largest single release of radioactivity into the ocean, threatening wildlife and fisheries in the region, experts have said.

The new radioactive water leak called into question the progress that the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, appeared to have made in bringing its reactors under control. The company, known as Tepco, has said that it hopes to bring the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown by the end of the year.

Full Story Here: More Radioactive Leaks From Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant – NYTimes.com.

Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.

The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.

The researchers said the high growth rate reflected a bounce-back from the 1.4 percent drop in emissions in 2009, the year the recession had its biggest impact.

Full Story Here: 2010 Carbon Dioxide Output Shows Biggest Jump Ever – NYTimes.com.

During the peak of Ukraine’s Chernobyl cataclysm of 1986, the Black Sea was registering 1,000 becquerels per cubic metre of water; this appears miniscule in comparison to nuclear levels at Fukushima’s peak recorded at 100,000 becquerels.

Scientists first believed the ocean would dilute the radioactivity, but Al Jazeera has learned that dangerous concentrations of radioactive caesium remain.

Al Jazeera’s Steve Chao reports from Fukushima, Japan.

Full Story Here: Fukushima disaster’s marine fallout.flv – YouTube.

Law Would Force Presidential Decision on Controversial, Destructive Pipeline in 60 Days

WASHINGTON – December 2 – The House Subcommittee on Energy and Power held a hearing today on legislation called the “North American Energy Security Act,” which would require President Barack Obama to issue a permit on the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline within 60 days of the law’s enactment or determine the pipeline is not in the national interest. The legislation comes on the heels of a decision by the State Department to delay the pipeline’s approval to allow for more study of its environmental impacts on our land, air, water and climate.

“Once again congressional Republicans are paying more attention to their deep-pocketed campaign contributors in oil and gas than to the American public, which overwhelmingly opposes more tar-sands development, including the Keystone pipeline,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If it passes, this law will end careful consideration of the devastating impacts of Keystone, doing terrible damag

Full Story Here: Lawmakers Push Disastrous Legislation on Keystone XL | Common Dreams.

High winds and the beginning stages of snowfall prompted the Chicago Police Department to shut down the lakefront bike path from Olive Park to Fullerton Tuesday morning, as gusts brought waves from Lake Michigan dangerously high and close to shore, Fox Chicago reports. A wind advisory is in place until 9 p.m. Tuesday, and gusts are reportedly moving at up to 50 miles per hour.

Cook County officials believe this foreshadows dangerously severe winter weather this season and have advised the Department of Homeland Security to prepare accordingly.

Full Story Here: Cook County Homeland Security Gears Up For Brutal Weather This Season (VIDEO).

The recent loss of sea ice in the Arctic is greater than any natural variation in the past 1½ millennia, a Canadian study shows.

“The recent sea ice decline … appears to be unprecedented,” said Christian Zdanowicz, a glaciologist at Natural Resources Canada, who co-led the study and is a co-author of the paper published Wednesday online in Nature.

“We kind of have to conclude that there’s a strong chance that there’s a human influence embedded in that signal.”

Full Story Here: Arctic Sea Ice Shrinking at ‘Unprecedented’ Levels | Common Dreams.

The Texas town of Groesbeck is on the verge of running dry.

“We have about two weeks of water left,” Groesbeck Mayor Jackie Levingston said. Her central Texas town, population 4,300, is one of the latest victim’s of the state’s ongoing drought.

A lack of rain and the summer’s intense heat — more than 90 days of triple-digit temperatures — combined to dry out the Groesbeck water supply.

“We lost more water to evaporation than we were using this summer,” Levingston said in a telephone interview.

Full Story Here: Texas town still suffers effects of heat, drought; water supply down to two weeks – CNN.com.

Even if the worst nuclear accident in 25 years leads to many people developing cancer, we may never find out.

Looking back on those early days of radiation horror, that may sound implausible.

But the ordinary rate of cancer is so high, and our understanding of the effects of radiation exposure so limited, that any increase in cases from the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster may be undetectable.

Several experts inside and outside Japan told The Associated Press that cancers caused by the radiation may be too few to show up in large population studies, like the long-term survey just getting under way in Fukushima.

Full Story Here: Fukushima Plant Disaster Long Term Effects Still Unknown.

Simulation determines much of east, northeast likely contaminated

Radioactive cesium from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant probably reached as far as Hokkaido, Shikoku and the Chugoku region in the west, according to a recent simulation by an international research team based on data after March 20, a week after the hydrogen explosions.

Large areas of eastern and northeastern Japan were probably contaminated, with concentrations of cesium-137 exceeding 1,000 becquerels per kilogram of soil in some places, says the study, which was posted Monday on the website of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers for the U.S.-based organization said the study, based on the partial data readings, is the first to estimate potential cesium contamination across the country. But the scientists also played down the impact of the fallout on the three distant regions.

Full Story Here: Cesium fallout widespread | The Japan Times Online.

Last Friday the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) released a detailed timeline of events at Fukushima in the days following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, titled “Special Report on the Nuclear Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.”

The report doesn’t seem to break much new ground, but is a nice summary of what is known about those initial days.

INPO is a not-for-profit organization set up by the nuclear industry following recommendations of the Kemeny Commission that investigated the March 1979 Three Mile Island accident.

Full Story Here: All Things Nuclear.

Researchers say tropical regions of richest diversity are most at risk of losing frogs, toads, newts and salamanders

If the current rapid extermination of animals, plants and other species really is the “sixth mass extinction”, then it is the amphibian branch of the tree of life that is undergoing the most drastic pruning.

In research described as “terrifying” by an independent expert, scientists predict the future for frogs, toads, newts and salamanders is even more bleak than conservationists had realised.

Around half of amphibian species are in decline, while a third are already threatened with extinction. But scientists now predict that areas with the highest diversity of amphibian species will be under the most intense threat in the future.

Full Story Here: Amphibians facing ‘terrifying’ rate of extinction | Environment | The Guardian.

KAMPALA – An increase in heat waves is almost certain, while heavier rainfall, more floods, stronger cyclones, landslides and more intense droughts are likely across the globe this century as the Earth’s climate warms, U.N. scientists said on Friday.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) urged countries to come up with disaster management plans to adapt to the growing risk of extreme weather events linked to human-induced climate change, in a report released in Uganda on Friday.

The report gives differing probabilities for extreme weather events based on future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, but the thrust is that extreme weather is likely to increase.

“It is virtually certain that increases in the frequency and magnitude of warm daily temperature extremes … will occur in the 21st century on the global scale,” the IPCC report said.

Full Story Here: Extreme Weather Set to Worsen With Climate Change: IPCC | Common Dreams.

One fillet of fish a month. That’s about how much seafood a Washington State resident eats, according to the assumptions used to set cleanliness standards for the state’s abundant rivers, streams, lakes and coastal waters. But many experts say that estimate, which influences the safety of the state’s salmon, clams and other edible aquatic life, doesn’t jive with reality.

“It’s a gross underestimate,” says Catherine O’Neill, a law school professor and faculty fellow at the Center for Indian Law and Policy at Seattle University. She said the one-fillet-a-month metric is too low for the general population, and an even worse estimate for the large number of Asian Americans and native tribes in the Pacific Northwest, for whom seafood plays a central dietary role.

“People are recommended to eat more fish than that, irrespective of culture,” O’Neill tells The Huffington Post. The American Health Association advises eating the omega-3-rich food at least twice a week.

‘TEETHING ON SALMON JERKY’

Full Story Here: Water Pollution Regulations Underestimate Fish Consumption, Endangering Public Health.

Federal officials, responding this week to a year-old Freedom of Information Act request filed by environmental activists seeking to shine a light on the State Department’s review of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, withheld or redacted portions of emails, meeting notes, agendas and other items, according to copies of the materials provided to reporters. The environmental group Friends of the Earth filed the information request in December of last year, and two earlier batches of documents were delivered without significant redactions in September and October.

The activists also say that unredacted emails in the latest document release provide further evidence supporting their claim that the State Department has been unduly influenced by representatives of TransCanada, the Calgary-based company behind the pipeline proposal. The State Department has vigorously denied those charges.

The redactions in question primarily involve emails and notes relating to meetings held by State Department staff in January and May of this year. In some cases, agenda items for the meetings have been blanked out. In others, the subject lines, the names of file attachments, or substantial passages in the body of emails are obscured.

Full Story Here: Keystone XL: Activists Ask What State Department Is Hiding.

• Climate change particularly sensitive during presidential race
• BBC says Attenborough features heavily on final episode, and he is not famous outside UK
• Environment groups brand decision ‘unhelpful’

An episode of the BBC’s Frozen Planet documentary series that looks at climate change has been scrapped in the U.S., where many are hostile to the idea of global warming.

British viewers will see all seven episodes of the multi-million-pound nature series throughout the Autumn.

But U.S. audiences will not be shown the last episode, which looks at the threat posed by man to the natural world.

It is feared a show that preaches global warming could upset viewers in the U.S., where around half of people do not believe in climate change.

Full Story Here: Frozen Planet Climate change episode won’t be shown in US | Mail Online.

OPS; Good gawd. Now the Brrits have given up on us, and ignorance trumps.

Full Story Here: Koch-Funded Scientist Who Believes In Global Warming Is Coming To Congress | ThinkProgress.

Yet tuna still aren’t fished sustainably, something that conservationists and big U.S. tuna companies are trying to fix. This illustrates one part of the pressure on the world’s oceans to feed a growing global population, now 7 billion. It also underscores the difficulties people have in balancing what they take against what must be left in order to have enough supplies of healthy wild fish.

“It’s serious. On a global basis, we’ve pretty much found all the fish we’re going to find,” said Mike Hirshfield, chief scientist at the advocacy group Oceana. “There’s not a lot of hidden fish out there. And we’re still heading in the wrong direction, taken as a whole.”

Full Story Here: Can the Oceans Continue to Feed Us? | Truthout.

The ongoing radiation catastrophe stemming from three out-of-control nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, has taken a back seat to far graver news events of late: Michael Jackson’s doctor, fund-raising by presidential hopefuls, the World Series and Netflix stock.

Meanwhile, reporting about the on-going disaster relentlessly repeats the minimization and trivialization of radiation risk that began March 11, with the largest earthquake in Japanese history and the unprecedented tsunami that left over 26,000 people dead or missing and 80,000 still living in shelters.

Radioactive contamination of soil, tap water, rain water, groundwater, beef, fish, vegetables, animal feed and incinerator ash are almost always said to be of little or “no immediate” danger, which helps explain why Fukushima has faded from public consciousness.

Full Story Here: Radiation Reporting: Blind, Idiotic, Corrupt – or All Three | Truthout.

Those pipelines, which now carry slightly more than 1 million barrels a day from Canada’s oil sands to the United States, can be expanded by adding pumping stations. Some companies, notably Enbridge, already have plans to boost the capacity of their lines and speed the journey of crude from Alberta to Texas.

“It’s inevitable that it will get here. This oil will have to find a market,” said Fadel Gheit, oil analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. “All these competing pipelines are going to rethink their strategy.”

Full Story Here: Keystone delay unlikely to stall big oil companies – The Washington Post.

Dilma Rousseff said in a statement that she wants a “rigorous investigation” to determine responsibility for the spill near the well being drilled by Chevron’s Brazilian subsidiary.

The statement says the Mines and Energy Ministry and the National Petroleum Agency will conduct the probe.

The oil spill was detected on Thursday.

In a statement emailed Saturday, the oil company said it was “responding to oil seeps and a subsequent sheen in the vicinity of the Chevron operated Frade project in water depths of approximately 3,800 feet (1,200 metres).” Frade is located 230 miles (370 kilometres) off the northeast coast of Rio de Janeiro state.

Full Story Here: Brazil investigates Chevron oil spill off Rio de Janeiro coast.

WASHINGTON— The Obama administration announced plans today to expand offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and offer additional lease sales in the sensitive waters off Alaska. Ramping up offshore drilling raises the risk of disastrous spills, puts wildlife in harm’s way and deepens U.S. dependence on the fossil fuels driving the global climate crisis.

“Last year’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was supposed to be a wake-up call about the dangers of offshore drilling, but it looks like President Obama hit the snooze button and slept right through it,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We just can’t keep expanding offshore drilling and not expect to have more disastrous spills.”

The five-year plan announced today will set the stage for 15 lease sales in six offshore areas, including the Arctic’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas and portions of the Gulf of Mexico near areas where development has so far been off-limits.

Full Story Here: Obama’s Offshore Oil Plan a Disaster for Wildlife, Climate | Common Dreams.