Biology
Breach
October 23, 2013, from Huffington Post
The leak at the Primrose oilsands project in northern Alberta has likely contaminated groundwater aquifers, the province states in an environmental order.
Sticky bitumen, which rose to the surface over six months ago, says the order, "has entered local non-saline groundwater aquifers, likely contaminating the groundwater," according to the Edmonton Journal....
The new order confirms a major problem, groundwater contamination, and should raise a red flag about CNRL's high-pressure steam process known as fracking, for extracting bitumen, New Democrat environment critic Rachel Notley told the Edmonton Journal.
October 23, 2013, from Al Jazeera
Hundreds of kilograms of oily debris on beaches, declining seafood catches, and other troubling signs point towards an ecosystem in crisis in the wake of BP's 2010 oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
"It's disturbing what we're seeing," Louisiana Oyster Task Force member Brad Robin told Al Jazeera. "We don't have any more baby crabs, which is a bad sign. We're seeing things we've never seen before."
Robin, a commercial oyster fisherman who is also a member of the Louisiana Government Advisory Board, said that of the sea ground where he has harvested oysters in the past, only 30 percent of it is productive now.... Louisiana's Republican Governor Bobby Jindal ... recently said, "Three and a half years later, BP is spending more money - I want you to hear this - they are spending more money on television commercials than they have on actually restoring the natural resources they impacted."
October 23, 2013, from Huffington Post
Residents in several lower-income Chicago neighborhoods say a dirty oil byproduct from a nearby BP refinery is creating environmental and health hazards -- and no one is doing enough to stop it.
"Us little people, we're not millionaires, we're working stiffs," East Side resident Frank Caporale, a Chicago garbage truck driver, told the Sun-Times. "We are being overcome by a super company that we don't have a say in, whether we want it here or not. It's like it came and we're stuck with it."
Dust from petroleum coke or "petrocoke" is produced at the nearby BP refinery in Whiting, Ind. but the oil byproduct is stored in Chicago shipping yards on the city's South Side.
October 23, 2013, from South China Morning Post
Dense, choking smog blanketed several northern cities yesterday, with visibility in some areas reduced to less than 10 metres. Drivers complained they were unable to see traffic lights. Air pollution in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, rose above the highest point on the government's index for the second consecutive day. The city was forced to take the unprecedented step of closing kindergartens, primary and middle schools because of the smog.
October 23, 2013, from Springfield News-Leader
A malfunction at City Utilities' John Twitty Energy Center earlier today sent a cloud of ash billowing over the surrounding area.
CU said in a news release that a piece of equipment at the power plant "experienced a brief malfunction" that "allowed fly-ash that is normally collected to be released into the atmosphere."
"City Utilities has resolved the situation at the power plant and as required, the incident was reported to the proper authorities," the release said.
CU said the fly-ash that was released "is not hazardous to people, animals, or vegetation and can be rinsed with water from most surfaces. CU recommends that residents who have vehicles that the ash has landed on to have them washed commercially."
October 23, 2013, from Huffington Post
The Transportation Department office charged with overseeing the 2.6 million miles of pipelines in the United States is spending more time at oil and gas industry conferences than it is addressing spills and other incidents, a watchdog group contends in a new report.
Between 2007 and 2012, staff from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration spent 2,807 days at conferences, meetings and other events sponsored by the oil, gas and pipeline industries, according to the report from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). That's nearly three times as many as the 970 days the staffers spent responding to spills, explosions and other significant incidents on the pipelines they regulate.
October 23, 2013, from NPR
The U.S. government Tuesday announced new rules for snowmobiles in Yellowstone that should make the country's oldest national park cleaner and quieter.
The rules were 15 years in the making because of intense wrangling between snowmobile operators and environmentalists. But both groups support the plan and give credit to snowmobile makers for designing cleaner machines.
Under the new plan, fewer than 51 groups of snowmobiles -- each with up to 10 vehicles -- will be allowed into the park per day, beginning in December 2014. The rule also sets new limits on snow coaches, larger vehicles that bring tourists into Yellowstone. And as of December 2015, snowmobiles will have to pass stringent tests for noise and air pollution before they'll be admitted inside the park. Experts say few existing snowmobiles can pass these tests.
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Climate
Chaos
October 23, 2013, from Huffington Post
The Amazon rain forest's dry season lasts three weeks longer than it did 30 years ago, and the likely culprit is global warming, a new study finds.
Rain falls year-round in the Amazon, but most of the annual deluge drops during the wet season. (The rainy season's timing varies with latitude.) Scientists think that a longer dry season will stress trees, raising the risk of wildfires and forest dieback. The forest's annual fire season became longer as the dry season lengthened, according to the study, published today (Oct. 21) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
October 23, 2012, from London Guardian
The Pentagon ranks it as a national security threat and, left unchecked, climate change is expected to cost the US economy billions of dollars every year -- and yet it has proved the great unmentionable of this election campaign.
Amid unprecedented melting of the Arctic summer sea ice, new temperature records in the US and a historic drought, the last of three presidential debates wound up on Monday night without Barack Obama or Mitt Romney ever uttering the words climate change.
October 23, 2009, from New Scientist
...As well as guzzling resources, cats and dogs devastate wildlife populations, spread disease and add to pollution. It is time to take eco-stock of our pets.
To measure the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet, the Vales analysed the ingredients of common brands of pet food. They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.
October 23, 2009, from TIME Magazine
...Are biofuels really green? A pair of new studies in the Oct. 22 issue of Science damningly demonstrate that the answer is no, at least not the way we currently create and use them. In the first study, a team of researchers led by Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., projected the effects of a major biofuel expansion over the coming century and found that it could end up increasing global greenhouse-gas emissions instead of reducing them. In the second paper, another team of researchers led by Tim Searchinger of Princeton University uncovered a potentially damaging flaw in the way carbon emissions from bioenergy are calculated under the Kyoto Protocol and in the carbon cap-and-trade bill currently being debated in Congress. If that error in calculation goes unfixed, a future increase in biofuel use could end up backfiring and derailing efforts to control global warming, according to the paper.
October 23, 2009, from Scientific American
...During the Bush era, however, the CEQ came to play a large role in setting environmental policy, particularly in the area of climate change. Lawyer Philip Cooney, a CEQ chief of staff and a 15-year veteran of the American Petroleum Institute, spent the first term of the administration editing science reports from various agencies on climate change to downplay the role of greenhouse gas emissions -- emphasizing elements of uncertainty from a 2001 National Research Council report on climate change, according to an investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Following his resignation in 2005 immediately following reports of the editing, ostensibly for "family reasons," he joined ExxonMobil....Cooney himself made 294 edits to the administration's 364-page Strategic Plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program posted July 24, 2003, "to exaggerate or emphasize scientific uncertainties or to deemphasize or diminish the importance of the human role in global warming..."
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
October 23, 2012, from The Daily Climate
Bill McKibben is lanky, soft-spoken, scholarly and engaging. He may also be the closest thing the U.S. environmental movement has to a leader.
And he's in show business now. Still soft-spoken, but very, very angry.
On a crisp night earlier this month, a mostly-Gen Next crowd filled the University of Vermont's Allen Chapel to see the dress rehearsal of the coast-to-coast road show that McKibben hopes will ignite a campus movement.
"Do the Math" will visit 20 cities starting Nov. 7. It mixes McKibben's grim analysis with a little inspiration and hope, with a goal of inspiring America's youth to righteous anger, and to lead where the grown-ups have utterly failed.
October 23, 2009, from ApocaDocs
The huge, surprising, and tear-making day-of-action went viral, for Oct. 24th regarding 350 ppm CO2 (see 350.org for amazing pics). 4500 registered actions worldwide. It's just an inkling of the massive citizen action we must undertake to save the world (or at least a world that includes civilization).
Humans need to recognize what we are doing to ourselves, to our brothers and sisters worldwide, and to our ecosystem. The 'Docs have been confronting the reality for years, so that we can illuminate it.
So today we're just going to kick back in a low carbon way and watch it all unfold.... as the 350 movement takes hold.
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ApocaDocs