moi@thebearcave

It seems like an appropriate point in time to bring back my very first webpage|blog. In the fall of 1995 the Enviro-mental Outlook made its debut. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was one of the very first people to blog on the internet of the day. There wasn't a name for what I was doing. That all came later. I remember discovering when I wandered around the 'web' that there was a lesbian who had been blogging for about the same period of time. Because of our societally-imposed isolation gay, lesbians and trans people tend to be early adopters|adapters of any and all new communications technologies.

Concerning things enviro-mental in my own backyard, as it were, unlike Sarah Palin, I cannot see Naticoke, Ontario from my front doorstep; but I do comprehend that it still remains a primary source of the fossil fuel-related air pollution enveloping much of North America.

Greenpeace brought their "No Coal" campaign to Naticoke in 2007 (Click on image)

Tamara Lorincz: Healthy environment a 'right'
[Chronicle Herald, February 19, 2012]

Clean air, fresh water and fertile soil are essential to our well-being and survival. However, our Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms do not give Canadians a right to a healthy environment.

Yet 92 countries have incorporated the right to a healthy environment into their constitutions and this has led to profound legal progress and superior environmental performance, said David R. Boyd the author of The Environmental Rights Revolution.

Boyd is one of Canada's leading environmental lawyers and is also the author of Unnatural Law: Rethinking Canadian Environmental Law and Policy and Dodging the Toxic Bullet. Like his previous books, Boyd's latest is well-researched and written for a broad audience.

In The Environmental Rights Revolution, Boyd argues that the right to a healthy environment is like other fundamental rights because it is universal, moral and ensures human dignity, so should be included in a country's supreme law.

By using examples of the right in practice, the author overcomes the critiques that the right is too vague, redundant, ineffective and unenforceable to be recognized in a constitution.

...

[Continued here]

Rio+20 Earth Summit — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — June 20 to 22, 2012

Jonathan Watts: Rio+20 must 'unenvironmentalise' green issues, says G77 negotiator
[The Guardian, September 12, 2011]

Next year's Rio+20 United Nations summit must "un-environmentalise" the world's approach to sustainability so that it can reach out beyond the converted, according to a senior organiser in the host nation.

André Corrêa do Lago, the chief negotiator for Brazil, said the once-in-a-generation gathering should focus on economic opportunities so the principles of sustainability are accepted beyond the "usual suspects" of environment ministries and green NGOs.

The effort to broaden the principles of the original 1992 Rio Earth summit are likely to prove controversial. Supporters say the world needs a new, more inclusive approach to sustainability that emphasises the benefits to humanity because current efforts to protect nature are failing. Critics warn the increased emphasis on technology and markets will simply greenwash destructive levels of consumption and development.

The first Rio summit 20 years ago is seen as one of the most ambitious gatherings in the history of the United Nations. More than 100 heads of state signed up to a raft of actions, including efforts to halt the deterioration of the ozone layer, tackle climate change and reduce the loss of biodiversity. These issues have taken centre stage in international negotiations for the past two decades.

[Continued here]

• Rio+20 Portal: Building the Peoples Summit [rio20.net]

Peoples and citizens are already starting to prepare for the Summit Rio+20. Find here the Initiatives and the schedule of activities of the partners in the process. Find also the Documents and Proposals, and be part of the Rio+20 Community.

• Richard Black: Rio looks to the future [BBC, January 11, 2012]

This Rio summit, like the last one 20 years ago, isn't part of the UN negotiations on climate change or biodiversity or desertification or anything else.

It's bigger than that. It's a chance for world leaders to take a long view of where the global society is heading, and whether they're happy with that.

If they're not - and there's a welter of evidence showing that we're doing a pretty poor job of looking after the liveable bits of Planet Earth, let alone many of its inhabitants - it's a chance to agree some new principles.

• John Vidal: Leaked document reveals Rio+20 sustainable development goals [The Guardian, January 10, 2012]

Countries will be asked this summer to sign up for 10 new sustainable development goals for the planet and promise to build green economies at the first earth summit in 20 years.

According to a leak of the draft agenda document seen by the Guardian, they will also be asked to negotiate a new agreement to protect oceans, approve an annual state of the planet report, set up a major world agency for the environment, and appoint a global "ombudsperson", or high commissioner, for future generations. Dozens of heads of state, political leaders and celebrities are expected to go to the UN's Rio+20 sustainable development meeting, to be held in Brazil in June. ...

Unlike the 1992 earth summit when over 190 heads of state set in motion several legally binding environment agreements, leaders this time will not be asked to sign any document that would legally commit their countries to meeting any particular targets or timetables. Instead, they will be asked to set their own targets and work voluntarily towards establishing a global green economy which the UN believes will reduce poverty and slow consumption. ...

Unlike the 1992 earth summit when over 190 heads of state set in motion several legally binding environment agreements, leaders this time will not be asked to sign any document that would legally commit their countries to meeting any particular targets or timetables. Instead, they will be asked to set their own targets and work voluntarily towards establishing a global green economy which the UN believes will reduce poverty and slow consumption. ...

Brazil, which will host the conference, is planning a massive parallel meeting for non-government groups and individuals to debate and put pressure on governments to act.

• Leaked Rio+20 Earth summit ZERO DRAFT agenda (19 pages) [The Guardian, January 10, 2012]
• UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Global Sustainability (GSP): "Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing" [January 30, 2012]
• Richard Ingham: 100 countries back world environment agency [GMA News, February 1, 2012]

The idea is to beef up the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which critics say lacks muscle for dealing with the world's worsening environmental crisis.

But rather than be just a branch of the UN, the proposed agency would help implement international environmental standards and include grassroots groups and business, according to the proposal.

• Fred Pearce: Rio+20 shows little sign of living up to original Earth summit [The Guardian, February 9, 2012]

To put it mildly, the subsequent two decades have not lived up to the promises. George W. Bush effectively broke the climate treaty signed by his father, refusing to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol. Emissions have soared, resource plundering has intensified, nature is still on the retreat, the world has become less equitable, and climate change has gone from distant prospect to frightening reality. While the population bomb may be being defused, the consumption bomb is primed to destroy us all. ...

The summit badly needs outside input. Right now, the official Rio+20 agenda and draft text show few signs that politicians are willing to go beyond the green-sounding rhetoric we heard from their predecessors in the same city two decades ago. It wasn't enough then. It certainly isn't enough now.

• Duncan Clark: Revealed: How fossil fuel reserves match UN climate negotiating positions [The Guardian, February 16, 2012]

Those complexities notwithstanding, we can paint a broad-brush picture. For example, it was widely reported during the Durban talks that the key push for an ambitious deal was coming from an informal alliance of the EU, Africa and ASIS (the Alliance of Small Island States). I found myself wondering what proportion of the world's 'carbon reserves' these nations hold. Answer: not much. As the graph below shows, the regions pushing hardest for a global deal are home to only a tenth of the potential CO2 locked up in the world's remaining fossil fuel reserves.

Leo Hickman: Climate scientists back call for sceptic thinktank to reveal backers
[The Guardian, January 23, 2012]

Leading climate scientists have given their support to a Freedom of Information request seeking to disclose who is funding the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a London-based climate sceptic thinktank chaired by the former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson.

James Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies who first warned the world about the dangers of climate change in the 1980s, has joined other scientists in submitting statements to be considered by a judge at the Information Rights Tribunal on Friday. They will argue that Lawson's foundation routinely misrepresents and casts doubt on the work of climate scientists. Their statements will form part of the supporting evidence being presented by an investigative journalist who is appealing against an earlier rejection of his FOI request to the Charity Commission for it to make public a bank statement it holds revealing the name of the educational charity's seed donor, who gave £50,000 when it launched in 2009.

Brendan Montague, the director of an organisation called the Request Initiative, a "community interest company that makes Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of charities, NGOs and non-profits", is seeking to argue that, by authorising his request, the public interest will be served by ending the secrecy around the financing of Lawson's charity. ...

James Hansen told the Guardian: "Our children and grandchildren will judge those who have misled the public, allowing fossil fuel emissions to continue almost unfettered, as guilty of crimes against humanity and nature. But the eventual conviction of these people in the court of public opinion will do little to ease the burdens that will have been created for today's young people and future generations."

"The science is clear. Unless we restore the planet's energy balance and stabilise climate, by rapidly reducing fossil fuel emissions, we will leave today's young people a rapidly deteriorating climate system with consequences that will [be] out of their control. If successful, the FOI request may, by exposing one link in a devious manipulation of public opinion, start a process that allows the public to be aware of what is happening, what is at stake, and where the public interest lies."

[Continued here]

• Joe Romm: Climatologist James Hansen on "Cowards in Our Democracies" [Think Progress, January 28, 2012]

The public has the right to know who is supporting the foot soldiers for business-as-usual and to learn about the web of support for the propaganda machine that serves to keep the public addicted to fossil fuels and destroys the future of their children.

• James Hansen: Cowards in Our Democracies: Part 1 (a *.pdf file) [Columbia University, January, 2012]
• Bill McKibben:Why the energy industry is so invested in climate change denial [The Guardian, February 7, 2012]

In the face of such data - statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet - you'd think we'd already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we're witnessing an all-out effort to . deny there's a problem. ...

It's no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we've ever faced.

• Brendan DeMelle: Heartland Institute Exposed: Internal Documents Unmask Heart of Climate Denial Machine [Huffington Post, February 14, 2012]

Internal Heartland Institute strategy and funding documents obtained by DeSmogBlog expose the heart of the climate denial machine -- its current plans, many of its funders, and details that confirm what DeSmogBlog and others have reported for years. The heart of the climate denial machine relies on huge corporate and foundation funding from U.S. businesses including Microsoft, Koch Industries, Altria (parent company of Philip Morris), RJR Tobacco and more. ...

The January 2012 Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy states:

        "We will also pursue additional support from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. They returned as a Heartland donor in 2011 with a contribution of $200,000. We expect to push up their level of support in 2012 and gain access to their network of philanthropists, if our focus continues to align with their interests. Other contributions will be pursued for this work, especially from corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies."

• Exxon Secrets: Factsheet: Heartland Institute [Greenpeace]
• Heartland Institute [Source Watch]
• Brad Johnson: Internal documents: The Secret, Corporate-Funded Plan To Teach Children That Climate Change Is A Hoax [Think Progress, February 14, 2012]

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a "global warming curriculum" for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as "a major scientific controversy." This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.

• Brad Johnson: Confirmed: Anti-Science Blogger Admits Heartland Institute's 'Special Project' To Distort Temperature Data [Think Progress, February 15, 2012]

Questions about the authenticity of the leaked Heartland Institute documents are fading, as projects described therein are confirmed. Heartland's senior fellow James Taylor confirmed the existence of the climate-denier classroom curriculum project to ThinkProgress Green yesterday. Now, anti-science blogger Anthony Watts has confirmed that Heartland is funding his project to display weather station data, detailed in the leaked fundraising plan....

• Seth Borenstein: Heartland Institute's Leaked Documents Reveal Climate Skepticism Efforts [Huffington Post, February 16, 2012]

The documents showed how heavily Heartland relies on a single person it identified only as "Anonymous Donor." In the past six years, the man has given $14.26 million to the institute, nearly half its $33.9 million in revenue.

• Suzanne Goldenberg: Heartland Institute 'fights back' over publication of confidential documents [The Guardian, February 16, 2012]

Heartland maintains the documents posted on Desmogblog were obtained through deception, and one was fake. It has appealed to journalists to retract stories based on the documents. ...

Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA, said major companies began distancing themselves from Heartland and other institutes denying the very existence of climate change some years ago, moving their money to other organisations.

ExxonMobil, which donated $675,000 to Heartland up to 2006 according to Greenpeace, cut its ties to the thinktank after pressure from environmental organisations.

Even the Koch family, the oil billionaires who have bankrolled the Tea Party backlash against Barack Obama, have been lukewarm on Heartland.

• Suzanne Goldenberg: Heartland Institute faces fresh scrutiny over tax status [The Guardian, February 17, 2012]

The Guardian has learned of a whistleblower complaint to the Internal Revenue Service about Heartland's 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.

There was also a call from a group of climate scientists who have personally been on the receiving end of attacks from Heartland and bloggers funded by the thinktank, and whose email was posted online after a notorious 2009 hack, for Heartland to "recognise how its attacks on science and scientists have poisoned the debate about climate change policy," in a letter made available exclusively to the Guardian. ...

Heartland is also funding contrarians in Canada and other countries, the documents show.

• Joe Romm: Climate Scientists Slam Heartland for "Spreading Misinformation" and "Personally Attacking Climate Scientists to Further Its Goals" [Think Progress, February 18, 2012]

Heartland Institute documents revealed plans to dupe children and ruin their future, as Climate Progress reported earlier this week.

Now, seven leading climatologists victimized by the Climategate email theft in 2009 have published this letter in the Guardian:

        An Open Letter to the Heartland Institute

        As scientists who have had their emails stolen, posted online and grossly misrepresented, we can appreciate the difficulties the Heartland Institute is currently experiencing following the online posting of the organization's internal documents earlier this week. However, we are greatly disappointed by their content, which indicates the organization is continuing its campaign to discredit mainstream climate science and to undermine the teaching of well-established climate science in the classroom.

...

• Daniel Cressey: 'Climate-gate' researchers enter Heartland debate [Nature, February 19, 2012]

Leading climate scientists have told the controversial Heartland Institute to take a long hard look at itself, after a damming set of documents purported to be from the think-tank were leaked online. ...

Researchers including Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and Gavin Schmidt of NASA, say that Heartland was one of the groups that attacked scientists based on the stolen emails, which were purloined from the University of East Anglia's climate research unit.

• George Monbiot: We need to know who funds these thinktank lobbyists [The Guardian, February 20, 2012]

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers.

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

Luntz's technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution, or burning fossil fuels causes climate change, is still wide open, and that both sides of the "controversy" should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media. ...

This is plutocracy, pure and simple. The battle for democracy is now a straight fight against the billionaires and corporations reshaping politics to suit their interests. The first task of all democrats must be to demand that any group, of any complexion, seeking to effect political change should reveal its funders.

• Editorial: Climate denial in the classroom [Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2012]

...On one side of the "controversy" are credentialed climatologists around the globe who publish in reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journals and agree that the planet is warming and that humans are to blame; on the other are fossil-fuel-industry-funded "experts" who tend to have little background in climatology and who publish non-peer-reviewed papers in junk magazines disputing established truths. These are quickly debunked, but not before their findings have been reported by conservative blogs and news outlets, which somehow never get around to mentioning it when these studies are proved to be badly flawed. ...

Fortunately, if we're about to enter a battle over classroom instruction on climate change, it won't go on for decades, because the impacts of global warming are already patently obvious. Seven of the 10 warmest years since global record-keeping began in 1880 have occurred in the 21st century. Despite an intense campaign to discredit his work, Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph, which shows that temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century soared to their highest level in 1,000 years, has been validated repeatedly. Last year set a record for the most climate-related disasters in the United States costing more than $1 billion in damage each - drought-fueled wildfires in Texas, Hurricane Irene, and Mississippi River flooding were among the 14 cases.

These are facts, not philosophical or religious dogma. Another fact: Sophisticated climate models show that things are going to get a lot worse. It's bad enough that we're gambling our children's futures by doing so little to fight this problem; let's not ask their teachers to lie to them about it too.

• Joe Romm: Crossing the Line as Civilization Implodes: Heartland Institute, Peter Gleick and Andrew Revkin [Think Progress, February 21, 2012]

Humanity is putting its foot on the accelerator even though the world's top scientists and governments have repeatedly explained we are headed over a cliff. The people who will suffer the most are people who have not contributed to this impending catastrophe - future generations and the poorest among us.

This is such a colossally immoral and unethical act - collectively and in many cases individually - that most people, including the overwhelming majority of the so-called intelligentsia, simply choose to ignore it on a daily basis. That won't save a livable climate, however, nor it will stop future generations from cursing our names.

And so it is not surprising that many immoral and unethical acts that regularly occur on a far less grand scale are condoned or winked at or simply ignored.

• Debbie Fine: CAPAF General Counsel Responds To Heartland Institute [Think Progress, February 22, 2012]

On February 19, the Heartland Institute's General Counsel, Maureen Martin, sent a letter by e-mail and post addressed to Think Progress in response to revelations about the Institute. Yesterday, Debbie Fine, General Counsel for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, replied to Martin.

The letter sent to the Heartland Institute is well worth reading and reprinted in full here:

        Dear Ms. Martin:

        I am General Counsel of the Center for American Progress Action Fund ("CAP Action"). This letter responds to your February 19 message regarding our reporters' coverage of documents related to the Heartland Institute. Please be assured that CAP Action takes the accuracy of its reporting seriously.

        Your letter asserts that the document entitled "2012 Heartland Climate Strategy" is "fabricated and false." CAP Action has no interest in attributing a fabricated document to Heartland. Given the seriousness of this charge, and the fact that this document's "tone and content closely matched that of other documents that [Heartland] did not dispute,"1 we ask your assistance in verifying that the document is in fact "fabricated" rather than, for example, a draft of which you were not immediately aware. Please let me know the efforts that Heartland undertook to ensure that the document "was not written by anyone associated with Heartland," as well as the "obvious and gross misstatements of fact" it contains. We have removed this document from the website while awaiting your response.

        Your letter also notes that "Heartland has not authenticated" the remaining documents in the week since they were made public. To my knowledge, Heartland has never claimed that these documents were fabricated, and your February 15 admission that they were sent by a Heartland staff person to "an unknown person" posing as a Heartland board member suggests they are genuine. So does Heartland's February 15 apology to the donors identified in the documents. Subsequently, the newly-admitted source has indicated that he received these documents directly from Heartland and has not altered them. Nevertheless, we await the outcome of your continued efforts to "authenticate" these documents.

        Finally, your letter suggests that publication or even discussion of the Heartland documents "is improper and unlawful" because Heartland deems them "confidential." The Supreme Court has flatly rejected this notion, repeatedly declaring that the First Amendment protects the right to publish information obtained lawfully - even if underlying sources act improperly, erroneously, or in violation of the law. See, e.g., Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514, 535 (2001). As CAP Action has reported, our bloggers received the documents via an anonymous email. Our reporters did nothing to purloin any documents, they did not encourage anyone else to do so, and they did not know the sender's identity until many days later, on February 20, when the Huffington Post article titled: "The Origin of the Heartland Documents" was published. Faced with a substantially similar set of relevant facts in Bartnicki, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment prohibited recovery of damages for dissemination of an illegally-made recording that was left in a defendant's mailbox because "a stranger's illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern." Id.; see also Jean v. Massachusetts State Police, 492 F.3d 24, 29 (1st Cir. 2007) (applying Bartnicki). The same is true here, although we note that CAP Action takes no position as to whether the documents were lawfully obtained by the source.

        CAP Action has taken extraordinary steps to ensure that Heartland's perspective on these documents is included in our coverage. As your letter notes, CAP Action immediately and conspicuously linked to Heartland's February 15 press release regarding the documents and has subsequently noted Heartland's assertions in other blog posts in order to ensure that your position on these documents was reported fully and fairly. If you would like to provide us with additional information, including answers to the questions above, we will certainly consider it.

        This is not a full recitation of the relevant facts and CAP Action reserves all its rights, remedies and defenses concerning these issues.

        Sincerely,

        Debbie Fine

        General Counsel

Staff: Big freeze in Europe shows no signs of letting up as Venice's famous waterways ice over
[Daily Mail, February 7, 2012]

The big freeze shows no sign of letting up in Europe as Venice's famed waterways fell victim to sub zero temperatures this morning.

Water buses were stranded in some of the Italian city's canals after they froze solid in temperatures as low as -10C.

More than 60,000 homes were left without power in Milan and officials declared a gas supply emergency as the cold temperatures saw pipes burst.

Countries across Europe have been battling a severe cold snap for the last two weeks, with schools closed, public transport ground to a halt and snow melt threatening flooding to built up areas.

[Continued here]

• Andrew Freedman: What's Causing the Deadly Cold in Europe? [Climate Central, February 7, 2012]
• R. Jaiser, K. Dethloff, D. Handorf, A. Rinke And J. Cohen: Impact of sea ice cover changes on the Northern Hemisphere atmospheric winter circulation [Tellus, January 2, 2012]

• Staff: Record low rainfall puts UK on drought watch [Reuters, February 20, 2012]

While Scotland has seen its heaviest rainfall since records began 100 years ago and Wales and northwest England have been relatively wet, other parts of England have had their driest 12 months on record, with central and eastern England particularly affected.

The Durban, South Africa United Nations Climate Change Conference
December 2011

Jon Herskovitz and Nina Chestney: New U.N. climate deal struck, critics say gains modest
[Globe & Mail, December 10, 2010]

Climate negotiators agreed a pact on Sunday that would for the first time force all the biggest polluters to take action on greenhouse gas emissions, but critics said the action plan was not aggressive enough to slow the pace of global warming.

The package of accords extended the Kyoto Protocol, the only global pact that enforces carbon cuts, agreed the format of a fund to help poor countries tackle climate change and mapped out a path to a legally binding agreement on emissions reductions.

But many small island states and developing nations at risk of being swamped by rising sea levels and extreme weather said the deal marked the lowest common denominator possible and lacked the ambition needed to ensure their survival.

[Continued here]

• Richard Black: Canada wins few friends on climate [BBC, December 7, 2011]

In recent years, the approach of Stephen Harper's government has been to align its position on climate change as closely as possible to the US.

Its pledge to the UN climate convention (UNFCCC) under the Copenhagen Accords in 2009 even cites the US as a model: by 2020, to cut emissions from 2005 levels by "17%, to be aligned with the final economy-wide emissions target of the United States in enacted legislation".

In other words, whatever the US does, we'll do. ...

While other delegations hold news conferences in the main venue that are open to all reporters, Canada's have been held in an off-site hotel on an invitation-only basis.

• CBC News: Environment minister expects new climate deal by 2015 [CBC, December 11, 2011]

The 194-party conference agreed Sunday to start negotiations on a new accord that would put all participating countries under the same binding commitments to control greenhouse gases. It would take effect by 2020 at the latest.

• Fiona Harvey and John Vidal: Durban deal will not avert catastrophic climate change, say scientists [The Guardian, December 11, 2011]

Andy Atkins, executive director of Friends of the Earth, said: "This empty shell of a plan leaves the planet hurtling towards catastrophic climate change. If Durban is to be a historic stepping stone towards success the world must urgently agree ambitious targets to slash emissions." Although governments managed to find a last-minute deal that should lead to the first legally binding global agreement on climate change covering developed and developing countries, they did not discuss whether their pledges to cut emissions would prevent dangerous levels of global warming.

• Richard Black: Durban: Winners and losers [BBC, December 11, 2011]
The "quiet man" tactics worked perfectly. Canada took most of the heat early on; when ministers arrived, the US was barely visible, and if anyone appeared "hard-line", it was India and China - perfect for the US blame game.
• Geoffrey York: Climate deal marks 'lowest common denominator' [Globe & Mail, December 11, 2011]

In the early hours of Sunday morning, as an Indian negotiator made an emotional speech against a European climate proposal, Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent glanced around the vast room in the Durban convention centre and noticed the smug expressions of China's negotiators.

Throughout the marathon late-night talks here, China and India had fought to avoid any legal limits on their fast-rising carbon emissions. And under the agreement announced at 5 a.m. on Sunday, they seem to have won - for the next decade at least.

• Staff: Canada pulls out of Kyoto protocol [Telegraph, December 13, 2011]

Canada will become the first country to formally withdraw from Kyoto, which it says is badly flawed because it does not cover all major emitters of greenhouse gasses, notably the United States and China.

The news came as little surprise, especially since Mr Kent said last month that "Kyoto is the past." The right-of-centre Conservatives took power in 2006 and made it clear they would not stick to Canada's Kyoto commitments.

• Jeffrey Ssimpson: Canada's message: The world and its climate be damned [Globe & Mail, December 17, 2011]

Kyoto died long ago. Most of the countries that ratified Kyoto, starting with Canada, failed to meet their greenhouse-gas reduction targets. Big polluters - the U.S., China and India - didn't accept targets.

At the Durban climate-change conference, Canada got paddled by other countries. But Canada's reputation has been trashed so often, and with such evident good reason, what's one more blow?

Canada mocked its own greenhouse-gas reduction targets before, and it's mocking them again. The Harper government has a target of a 17-per-cent reduction from 2005 by 2020. The Environment Department's own figures, released in July, showed that emissions have risen by 7 per cent since the Conservatives took office. ...

According to a recent international poll, Canada has the highest number of citizens (22 per cent) of any economically advanced country who deny that human activity causes global warming. We can fairly presume the vast majority of this 22 per cent are in what we might loosely call the conservative world in Canada. They read the anti-global-warming newspapers and commentators, and they rely on the handful of academics who debunk global warming.

The poll numbers suggest that about half of Stephen Harper's supporters are climate-change deniers and skeptics. His government pays heed to this core, the world and its climate be damned.

• Joe Romm: An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces [Think Progress, September 28, 2011]
• Margo McDiarmid: Canada's air pollution experts moved to 'other priorities' [CBC, February 15, 2012]

Environment Canada has drastically cut back on its monitoring of air pollution that can cause health problems for Canadians, reassigning scientists involved in that monitoring to "other priorities."

In an email to CBC News, a department spokesman says Environment Canada is still providing "world class analysis" and will continue to "monitor the ozone through other means," but did not provide details on what those are.

• Pallab Ghosh: Canadian government is 'muzzling its scientists' [BBC, February 17, 2012]

Speakers at a major science meeting being held in Canada said communication of vital research on health and environment issues is being suppressed. ...

"The Prime Minister (Stephen Harper) is keen to keep control of the message, I think to ensure that the government won't be embarrassed by scientific findings of its scientists that run counter to sound environmental stewardship," he said. ...

The allegation of "muzzling" came up at a session of the AAAS meeting to discuss the impact of a media protocol introduced by the Conservative government shortly after it was elected in 2008. ...

Andrew Weaver, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, described the protocol as "Orwellian".

• Robin McKie: Attacks paid for by big business are 'driving science into a dark era' [The Guardian, February 19, 2012]

"In coming years, we will have to ask ourselves if public policies should be based on the advice of experts who have carried out robust and rigorous analysis of the evidence, or if they should be guided by lobbyists who appear driven by narrow ideological dogma.

(Click on image to enlarge)



CBC News: Tsunami debris already arriving, B.C. mayor says
[CBC, December 20, 2011]

The coastal community of Tofino, B.C., spent the Christmas season mentally preparing for the grim task of collecting, sorting and cataloguing debris from the tsunami that devastated parts of coastal Japan early this year.

Mayor Perry Schmunk is certain that items that were washed away in the March 11 disaster in northern Japan have already made it to B.C. shores, in particular at the surfing capital of Long Beach.

"Definitely this stuff is increasing in incidence that is coming ashore," Schmunk said, pointing to some lumber with Japanese export stamps on it.

Although plastic water bottles with Japanese labels began washing ashore near Tofino at the beginning of December, some locals believed them to be typical ocean garbage. ...

"There [are] some personal items starting to show up, things like a toothbrush, socks - that sort of thing. Again, not the typical bottles," he told CBC News on Monday.

He said it is just the tip of a massive amount of debris predicted to be shifted by ocean currents toward the B.C. coast in 2014.

[Continued here]

• Roland Buerk and Staff: Japan earthquake: Tsunami hits north-east [BBC, March 11, 2011]

Cars, ships and buildings were swept away by a wall of water after the 8.9-magnitude tremor, which struck about 400km (250 miles) north-east of Tokyo.

A state of emergency has been declared at a nuclear power plant, where pressure has exceeded normal levels.

Officials say 350 people are dead and about 500 missing, but it is feared the final death toll will be much higher.

In one ward alone in Sendai, a port city in Miyagi prefecture, 200 to 300 bodies were found.

The quake was the fifth-largest in the world since 1900 and nearly 8,000 times stronger than the one which devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, last month, said scientists.

• Keven Drews: B.C. begins working group on Japanese tsunami debris [CTV News, December 25, 2011]

Julianne McCaffrey, a spokeswoman for the Emergency Management B.C., part of the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, has confirmed the government is creating a Provincial Tsunami Debris Working Group.

She said the arrival of the debris, which some experts have argued covers an area the size of California, has raised some "complex jurisdictional issues," which the working group will clarify, so officials hope to identify key members by Jan. 6.

• Jon Letman: Are Millions of Pounds of Japan's Tsunami Debris About to Hit US Shores? [AlterNet, February 21, 2012]

According to Japan's Ministry of Environment's Waste Management Division, the 9.0 magnitude temblor and tsunami generated some 25 million tons of debris in total, literally sucking the lives of thousands of people and their belongings out to sea. Since last March, the remains of destroyed buildings, vehicles, broken furniture, fishing boats, nets and miscellaneous flotsam has been adrift in the north Pacific vastness. But how much was pulled into the ocean and where it will end up, no one can really say for sure.

Scientists and experts in Canada and the United States and, in particular, the Hawaiian islands, recognizing the potential for a fourth leg to Japan's triple disaster, are trying to forecast a possible debris path as they prepare for what could be headed their way.

(Click on image to enlarge)

(Click on image to enlarge)



Staff: The 100-year battle to make Fukushima safe: Grim prediction as brave
workers expect to 'die within weeks' [Daily Mail, May 3, 2011]

A nuclear expert has warned it could be a 100 years before fuel rods at Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear plant are safe.

Dr John Price, a former member of the Safety Policy Unit at the UK's National Nuclear Corporation, said radiation leaks will continue and it could take 50 to 100 years before the nuclear fuel rods have cooled enough to be removed.

The warning comes as the mother of one of the workers who are battling to stop a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant said today that they all expect to die from radiation sickness 'within weeks'.

According to ABC News, Dr Price said: 'As the water leaks out, you keep on pouring water in, so this leak will go on forever.

'There has to be some way of dealing with it. The water is connecting in tunnels and concrete-lined pits at the moment and the question is whether they can pump it back.

'The final thing is that the reactors will have to be closed and the fuel removed, and that is 50 to 100 years away.

'It means that the workers and the site will have to be intensely controlled for a very long period of time.'

[Continued here]

• Kevin Krolicki, Scott DiSavino and Taro Fuse: Special Report: Japan engineers knew tsunami could overrun plant [Reuters, March 29, 2011]

When Tokyo Electric President Masataka Shimizu apologized to the people of Japan for the continuing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant he called the double disaster "marvels of nature that we have never experienced before".

But a review of company and regulatory records shows that Japan and its largest utility repeatedly downplayed dangers and ignored warnings -- including a 2007 tsunami study from Tokyo Electric Power Co's senior safety engineer.

• Justin McCurry: Japan raises nuclear alert level to seven [The Guardian, April 12, 2011]

Japan is to raise the nuclear alert level at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to a maximum seven, putting the emergency on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Nuclear safety officials had insisted they had no plans to raise the severity of the crisis from five - the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 - according to the international nuclear and radiological event scale. ...

The scale, devised by the International Atomic Energy Agency, ranks nuclear and radiological accidents and incidents by their severity from one to seven.

• Fukushima Nuclear Accident Update Log [IAEA, June 2, 2011]
• Fukushima Nuclear Accident index [The Guardian]
• AP: IAEA praises Japan for Fukishima nuclear cleanup [CBC, October 14, 2011]

In a preliminary report submitted to the government, the 12-member team said Japan had developed "an efficient program for remediation -- allocating the necessary legal, financial and technological resources to bring relief to the people affected by the accident, with priority being given to children."

• AP: More leaks of radioactive water found at crippled Japanese nuclear plant [Washington Post, February 3, 2012]

Workers spotted a leak Friday at a water reprocessing unit which released enough beta rays to cause radiation sickness, TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said. He said no one was injured and the leak stopped after bolts were tightened on a tank.

Matsumoto said TEPCO also found that 8.5 tons of radioactive water had leaked earlier in the week after a pipe became detached at Unit 4, one of the plant's six reactors. The company earlier had estimated that only a few gallons (liters) had leaked.

• Justin McCurry: Rising temperatures at Fukushima raise questions over stability of nuclear plant [The Guardian, February 8, 2012]

The temperature at the bottom of the No 2 reactor vessel had risen by more than 20C in the space of several days, although it remained below the 93C limit the US nuclear regulatory commission sets for a safe state known as cold shutdown. Tepco said it had also injected water containing boric acid to prevent a nuclear chain reaction known as re-criticality. ...

The use of bigger volumes of water to cool the No 2 reactor presents Tepco with the additional problem of a build-up of radioactive water. The utility said recently it had processed more than 220,000 cubic metres of contaminated water using treatment facilities, but added that as much as 95,000 cubic metres - enough to fill 38 Olympic-sized swimming pools - may have accumulated in the reactors' basements.

• Justin McCurry: Fukushima reactor readings raise reheating concern [The Guardian, February 12, 2012]

Confirmation that the temperature has risen above 80 degrees could force the government to reverse its declaration two months ago that the crippled plant was in a safe state known as cold shutdown. ...

Plant workers are unable to take accurate readings of the temperature inside the damaged reactor because radiation levels are still too high for them to enter and examine the state of the melted fuel, which is thought to be resting at the bottom of the reactor's pressure vessel.

• Staff: Inside Fukushima — in pictures [The Guardian, February 20, 2012]

Staff: Doomsday Clock advances one minute closer to midnight
[jconline, January 10, 2012]

It is now 11:55 p.m. on the symbolic clock that reflects threats to humanity and the planet, especially from nuclear weapons. Midnight represents the end of mankind from its own destruction.

The clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change and emerging technologies in the life sciences.

This afternoon's announcement was made in Washington, D.C., by the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Reasons for the Doomsday Clock's advance included no dramatic evidence in the reduction of nuclear weapons, the talk of developing new nuclear weapons systems and damage to the Japanese nuclear reactors from the earthquake and tsunami.

[Continued here]

• BBC News: Doomsday Clock moves one minute closer to midnight [BBC, January 10, 2012]

The failure by the US, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, Egypt and Israel to act on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and by North Korea on a treaty to cut off production of nuclear weapons material "continues to leave the world at risk from continued development of nuclear weapons", he said.

The potential for nuclear weapons use in regional conflicts in the Middle East, Northeast Asia and particularly in South Asia was also alarming, BAS said.

Global climate change was also an issue that needed to be addressed, according to Allison Macfarlane, a BAS Science and Security Board member.

"The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth's atmosphere," she said in a statement.

BAS called for the adoption of climate change agreements to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and significantly greater investment in renewable energy sources.

The group also said that the disaster at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, caused by the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, "raised significant questions" about nuclear reactor design and oversight.

Steve Rennie: Stay on top of environmental delinquents, Ottawa told
[Globe & Mail, December 13, 2011]

The feds may crack down on environmental delinquents, but Canada's environment watchdog says they don't do a good job following up.

A lack of follow-through is the main theme running through Environment Commissioner Scott Vaughan's latest reports, being tabled in Parliament on Tuesday.

"Federal environmental laws and regulations need to be enforced to foster good environmental stewardship," Mr. Vaughan wrote.

He looked at how the federal government polices the shipment of dangerous goods, enforces Canada's flagship environmental law and shares its scientific research with decision-makers.

Mr. Vaughan was also tabling two studies on fisheries and environmental monitoring.

The reports on dangerous-goods shipments and environmental enforcement noted similar problems.

[Continued here]

• Karl Nerenberg: Hill Dispatches: Surprise! Harper's own Kyoto Act is still the law! [Rabble.ca, December 14, 2011]

Scott Vaughn, the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, has a matter-of-fact, self-effacing manner. He doesn't seek to attract attention to himself. But he's getting a lot of attention, right now, for warning us all about those many large vehicles on our roads that carry dangerous substances.

Don't assume those trucks have been adequately inspected, Vaughn says, because we have no way of knowing they were. Even when Transport Canada's inspectors tell companies they are not complying with the safety rules, in the vast majority of cases there is no follow-up to make sure that the companies take corrective action.

• Jennifer Pagliaro: Long road ahead for environmental monitoring in the oilsands [Toronto Star, December 17, 2011]

Government "outsourcing" of environmental monitoring in the oilsands has created a fractured system lacking scientific credibility and transparency that caters to oil industry interests, top scientists and environmental groups say.

As environmental groups' criticism for development in the oilsands finds renewed vigour - with Kyoto abandoned and Total's Joslyn North strip mine approved in the span of less than a week - the disjointed array of monitoring groups tasked with protecting vulnerable ecosystems simply can't keep up.

And while the Alberta government promises plans for a new comprehensive monitoring system as early as next month, many are worried it will never match the pace of development.

• Shawn McCarthy: Ottawa backtracks on coal emissions [Globe & Mail, January 5, 2012]

The federal government is offering the provinces a way to avoid tough new regulations that would eventually force power companies to shut down the country's fleet of coal-fired power plants.

Environment Minister Peter Kent and Prime Minister Stephen Harper have privately indicated they are willing to provide flexibility in how new power-plant emissions rules are implemented, provincial and industry sources said Thursday. Mr. Kent is expected to release the final version of the long-promised regulations in the coming months.

• CP: Environment minister takes heat over coal emissions [Chronicle Herald, January 7, 2012]

Ontario's governing Liberals are slamming Environment Minister Peter Kent over a report he plans to backtrack on regulating coal emissions.

Relevant editorial cartoon

Mike De Souza: 'Secret' Environment Canada study warns of oil sands' impact on habitat
[Financial Post, December 22, 2011]

Contamination of a major western Canadian river basin from oil sands operations is a "high-profile concern" for downstream communities and wildlife, says a newly-released "secret" presentation prepared last spring by Environment Canada that highlighted numerous warnings about the industry's growing footprint on land, air, water and the climate.

The warnings from the department contrast with recent claims made by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Environment Minister Peter Kent that the industry is being unfairly targeted by environmentalists who exaggerate its impacts on nature and people.

The presentation noted figures from the Canadian Energy Research Institute, a collaboration among industry, government and academics, that estimate the oil sands sector is responsible for more than 100,000 direct and indirect jobs in Canada, and will contribute more than $1.7-trillion to the country's economy over the next 25 years.

But it warned that Alberta and other parts of Western Canada are facing a steep economic and ecological price tag for failing to crack down on the industry's collateral damage.

"Contamination of the Athabasca River is a high-profile concern," said the presentation, marked secret, but released to Postmedia News through access to information legislation.

[Continued here]

• The report [Download by way of Scribd]
• Editorial: Tar Sands and the Carbon Numbers [New York Times, August 21, 2011]

This page opposes the building of a 1,700-mile pipeline called the Keystone XL, which would carry diluted bitumen - an acidic crude oil - from Canada's Alberta tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast. We have two main concerns: the risk of oil spills along the pipeline, which would traverse highly sensitive terrain, and the fact that the extraction of petroleum from the tar sands creates far more greenhouse emissions than conventional production does.

The Canadian government insists that it has found ways to reduce those emissions. But a new report from Canada's environmental ministry shows how great the impact of the tar sands will be in the coming years, even with cleaner production methods.

It projects that Canada will double its current tar sands production over the next decade to more than 1.8 million barrels a day. That rate will mean cutting down some 740,000 acres of boreal forest - a natural carbon reservoir. Extracting oil from tar sands is also much more complicated than pumping conventional crude oil out of the ground. It requires steam-heating the sands to produce a petroleum slurry, then further dilution.

• Canada's Emissions Trends (a *.pdf file) [Environment Canada, July, 2011]
• Satellite Photos Illustrate Dramatic Expansion of Canadian Tar Sands [Think Progress, December 28, 2011]

Extraction of Alberta's energy-intensive tar sands has expanded steadily in recent years, with about 232 square miles now exposed by mining operations. That expansion is expected to double over the next decade, which could mean the destruction of 740,000 acres of boreal forest and a 30% increase in carbon emissions from Canada's oil and gas sector.

• CBC News: Harper warns pipeline hearings could be 'hijacked' [CBC, January 6, 2012]

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says his government will look into measures to prevent the approval process for energy projects from being "hijacked" by opponents of the developments.

Harper told journalists Friday he's heard concerns expressed about the use of foreign money by interveners opposed to an oilsands pipeline proposed for northern B.C. by Calgary-based Enbridge....

Harper's comments echoed those of oilsands advocacy groups, which have attacked several Canadian environmental organizations for accepting money from U.S. sources.

• Shawn McCarthy and Steven Chase: For the Harper government, the Gateway must be open [Globe & Mail, January 9, 2012]

Environmental groups say the Harper government is engaging in diversionary tactics aimed at tarnishing the image of pipeline opponents and deflecting attention from the serious risks posed by the project.

The government will bring forward new rules to set strict timelines on future environmental hearings on major energy projects. But Mr. Oliver said Monday that those new rules will not affect the current Gateway review, which is being conduct by an independent three-person panel representing the National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

• CP: Northern Gateway Pipeline: Kitimat Warns Ottawa Not To Ignore Them [Huffington Post, January 10, 2012]

Federal environmental approval hearings for the proposed Enbridge Inc., $5.5-billion Northern Gateway oil pipeline project from Alberta to northwest B.C. started at Kitimaat Village, the Haisla First Nations community that overlooks fjord-like Douglas Channel, the proposed site where oil tankers the size of the Empire State Building carry oil to Asia.

"Unfortunately, I think things will come to a head in Kitimat if politicians keep on getting involved, forcing the issue instead of letting us make the decision," said life-long Kitimat resident Manny Arruda. ...

Arruda's concerns were echoed in Ottawa by federal Liberal Leader Bob Rae, who equated Oliver's comments to messing with the legal system.

"I think it is as inappropriate for a minister or a prime minister to interfere and intervene and frankly intimidate an environmental process as it would be to interfere or intervene in a court case. It is entirely inappropriate," said Rae.

"Once the environmental process happens, the prime minister should keep quiet, Mr. Oliver should keep quiet and should respect the process. This is part and parcel of how this government operates." ...

University of Victoria history Prof. John Lutz, who studies Pacific northwest communities, said First Nations living along the coast are horrified about the prospect of an oil spill and the damage it could do to their fishing grounds.

"These are exactly the same waters where the unthinkable has already happened," he said about the Exxon Valdez spill. "When told that these tankers are so sophisticated there could never be an accident, the Hartley Bay people remind us that every tanker will pass the spot where the BC Ferry Queen of the North sank, sits, and continues to leak fuel into the food baskets of the Gitga'at."

• Editorial: Pipeline rhetoric is a radical attack on due process [Globe & Mail, January 10, 2012]
• Shawn Mccarthy and Steven Chase: Foes of Northern Gateway pipeline fear revoking of charitable status [Globe & Mail, January 10, 2012]

The Conservative-dominated Commons finance committee is set to begin a review of the charity sector, and several activists say government MPs have told business groups that the committee will look at the environmental sector's transparency, its advocacy role and the flow of funds from outside the country.

• Danielle Droitsch: Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline is Not a Jobs Plan, But an Oil Export Plan [Think Progress, January 13, 2012]

The Oil Goes to China, the Permanent Jobs Go to Canada, We Get the Spills, and the World Gets Warmer

You'll hear the GOP, the American Petroleum Institute, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce make wild claims about the job creation potential of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Don't be fooled. The pipeline company itself admits only "a few hundred permanent jobs" are created by Keystone XL.

The debate over whether Keystone XL creates jobs is a convenient diversion from something oil company backers don't want you to know: this is an export pipeline to help them access foreign markets and bypass the United States. Oil companies will make bigger profits and oil prices for Americans will increase. That's not a project that helps Americans. It's a project that helps Big Oil.

• Kelly Rigg: UK must rethink its unfailing support for Canada's fossil fuels [The Gaurdian, January 16, 2012]

As public hearings on the proposed Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline proposal got underway in British Columbia last week, natural resources minister, Joe Oliver, lashed out at "environmental and other radical groups" and "jet-setting celebrities." In an open letter, he accused them of being the stooges of foreign special-interest groups, opposing tar sands development in order to undermine Canada's national economic interest.

The letter was so far off the mark, one can only conclude that the government is becoming unhinged over the growing opposition to tar sands development. This should be a cue for Britain to reconsider its unfailing support for Canada on this issue in the European context.

Why the desperation? Because in the midst of a protracted battle at home, Barack Obama's decision in November to send back to the drawing board another proposed pipeline - Keystone XL - came as an unexpected and unwelcome surprise. As a result, government and industry are tag teaming on an all-out public relations war - a war that they realise they could actually lose. ...

Given Canada's lack of credibility on this issue - apart from this latest gaffe there have been a number of well-documented unsubstantiated claims - Britain's "greenest government ever" should stop doing Canada's bidding in Europe by seeking to weaken the fuel quality directive.

Given Canada's lack of credibility on this issue - apart from this latest gaffe there have been a number of well-documented unsubstantiated claims - Britain's "greenest government ever" should stop doing Canada's bidding in Europe by seeking to weaken the fuel quality directive.

• Laura Payton: Keystone XL pipeline proposal rejected [CBC, January 18, 2012]

A statement released by the department says it doesn't preclude TransCanada applying again with a different route.

The Canadian government wanted to see the pipeline go ahead.

A statement released by U.S. President Barack Obama put the blame on Congressional Republicans, who inserted a 60-day deadline for a decision on the pipeline in a December 2011 bill to continue U.S. payroll tax cuts.

"The rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline's impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment," Obama said in the statement.

"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."

• In Rejection Letter, State Department Concludes Purported Keystone XL Benefits Are Myths [Think Progress, January 18, 2012]

The pipeline, of great interest to the foreign tar sands company TransCanada and its investors, would have little benefit for Americans and many risks.

• Staff: PMO branded environmental group an 'enemy' of Canada, affidavit says [Toronto Star, January 24, 2012]

ForestEthics is also a registered intervener at hearings on Enbridge's planned Northern Gateway pipeline that would pump Alberta oil to freighters on the British Columbia coast destined for China.

But a former communications manager with ForestEthics says that senior federal officials referred to the group as an "enemy of the government of Canada" and an "enemy of the people of Canada" in a private meeting with the president of Tides Canada, Ross McMillan.

• Lucia Graves: House Democrats Seek To Subpoena Koch Industries Over Keystone XL [Huffington Post, January 25, 2012]

House Democrats took the political offensive on Keystone Wednesday, seeking to probe connections between the multi-billion dollar project and Koch Industries, the Kansas-based energy conglomerate that has funded many a conservative cause.

• Rob Gillies: Northern Gateway Pipeline Part Of Battle Over Canada's Oil Ambitions [Huffington Post, January 29, 2012]

Kitamaat Village, British Columbia -- The latest chapter in Canada's quest to become a full-blown oil superpower unfolded this month in a village gym on the British Columbia coast.

Here, several hundred people gathered for hearings on whether a pipeline should be laid from the Alberta oil sands to the Pacific in order to deliver oil to Asia, chiefly energy-hungry China. The stakes are particularly high for the village of Kitamaat and its neighbors, because the pipeline would terminate here and a port would be built to handle 220 tankers a year and 525,000 barrels of oil a day.

• Josh Wingrove: Alberta, Ottawa beef up oil sands monitoring [Globe & Mail, February 3, 2012]

Alberta and Ottawa will add more than 90 monitoring stations to beef up environmental testing in the oil sands, a costly new system expected to be financed by industry.

The new plan is set to roll out over the next three years and will swallow up the existing piecemeal system of air, water and land monitoring.

However, it will be run jointly by the federal and provincial governments - not independently, as recommended by one Alberta panel last year....

• Brad Johnson: 'Spoil': The Disaster Of The Northern Gateway Tar Sands Pipeline [Think Progress, February 6, 2012]

"Spoil," a 45-minute documentary by the International League of Conservation Photographers, highlights the potential environmental and social disaster that could result from the construction of the Enbridge Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline, through the eyes of some of the world's top nature photographers. That pipeline would go from Alberta's tar sands, over the Canadian Rockies, and through a fragile rainforest ecosystem in British Columbia to feed the energy-hungry Asian markets.

• PR: Lobby Busting Tour of EU Embassies Debunks Tar Sands Misconceptions [Council of Canadians, February 7, 2012]

The Council of Canadians, Climate Action Network Canada and the Indigenous Environmental Network have been meeting with Ottawa-based European Union Embassies to counteract Canadian lobbying against an important European climate policy.

"Canadian lobbying against the EU Fuel Quality Directive is riddled with misleading arguments and it does not represent the values many Canadians share," says Andrea Harden-Donahue, Energy and Climate Justice Campaigner with the Council of Canadians.

The Canadian Government, along with industry allies and the Alberta Government, have launched a coordinated lobby attack on a European Union policy that aims to take steps to address the climate crises. This attack, run as "The Oil Sands Advocacy Strategy" and led by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, is dangerous and irresponsible in the face of global climate change.

• Shawn McCarthy: Ottawa's new anti-terrorism strategy lists eco-extremists as threats [Globe & Mail, February 10, 2012]

"This is just one more step in their attempt to marginalize the environmental movement and to quiet its voice," John Bennett, executive director of Sierra Club Canada, said Friday. "It's an indirect suggestion that somehow environmentalism is attached to terrorism and that's just wrong."

On Thursday, Mr. Toews released a statement on the government's strategy, which will target not only known terrorist groups but "vulnerable individuals" who could be drawn into politically inspired violence.

• Mark Hume: Court ruling compels Ottawa to protect killer-whale habitat [Globe & Mail, February 12, 2012]

The ruling, issued on Feb. 9 means the government of Canada has got to start protecting habitat vital to the survival of killer whales on the West Coast. And that means a whole lot of ocean has to be managed differently - with everything from fish farms, to new docks, to tanker traffic seen through a different lens.

"We feel really good about this ruling," says Gwen Barlee, policy director of the Wilderness Committee, which was one of nine environmental groups that pursued the case with the help of Ecojustice, a non-profit law organization.

• Damian Carrington: Canada threatens trade war with EU over tar sands [The Guardian, February 20, 2012]

The move is a significant escalation of the row over the EU's plans, which Canada fears would set a global precedent and derail its ability to exploit its tar sands, which are the biggest fossil fuel reserve in the world after Saudi Arabia. Environmental groups argue that exploitation of the tar sands, also called oil sands, is catastrophic for the global climate, as well as causing serious air and water pollution in Alberta.

Darek Urbaniak, at Friends of the Earth Europe, which obtained the new documents, said: "These letters are further evidence of Canadian government and industry lobbying, which continuously undermines efforts to combat climate change. We find it unacceptable that the Canadian government now openly uses direct threats at the highest political levels to derail crucial EU climate legislation."

The unveiling of Canada's threats is the latest in a series of recent embarrassing revelations. On 12 February, the occurrence of a secret strategy "retreat" in London in 2011 was discovered. High-level officials discussed the "critical" issue of winning the tar sands argument in the EU, to "mitigate the impact on the Canadian brand" and to protect the "huge investments from the likes of Shell, BP, Total and Statoil". Representatives of Shell, Total and Statoil attended the meeting alongside the UK's state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

• Mike De Souza: Oilsands pose 'significant environmental and financial risk' to Alberta, says PCO [Regina Leader Post, February 20, 2012]

The industry has suggested that a shift in oilsands extraction to use steam to remove synthetic crude oil from natural bitumen deposits on site can reduce land disruption and provide for reductions in energy and emissions. But the memo, prepared for Wayne Wouters, the clerk of the Privy Council Office - the lead department in the federal government's bureaucracy - said this shift is actually accelerating the industry's impact on climate change, with emissions growth projected to be greater over the next decade than all other Canadian economic sectors combined.

    

Dare to compare 2001 aerial photo with 2011 aerial photo [NASA/Landsat/USGS]

    

Before and after [National Geographic]

Editorial: Getting Gas Drilling [by Fracking] Right
[New York times, December 11, 2011]

After several crowded and often raucous hearings, Gov. Andrew Cuomo agreed to give the public until Jan. 11 to comment on 2,000 pages of environmental analysis and proposed regulations designed to govern natural gas drilling in deep shale formations in New York State. The extension makes sense. The drilling decision is a momentous one, for the environment and the economy, and it is vitally important to get it right.

The issue is not the fuel. There is little doubt in our minds that natural gas, which is cheap, plentiful and cleaner than coal, could help greatly with the country's energy and climate problems.

The question is whether it can be safely extracted by a technique called hydraulic fracturing, which involves blasting water, sand and chemicals deep into rock formations to dislodge the gas. Done carelessly, the technique poses threats to water quality, local landscapes and the atmosphere that other states, including Pennsylvania, have failed to address adequately.

[Continued here]

• Drilling Down [New York Times, February 27, 2011 to December 31, 2011]

Articles in the Drilling Down series from The New York Times examine the risks of natural-gas drilling and efforts to regulate this rapidly growing industry.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: The Fracking Industry's War On The New York Times — And The Truth [Huffington Post, October 20, 2011]

Superb investigative journalism by the New York Times has brought the paper under attack by the natural gas industry. That campaign of intimidation and obfuscation has been orchestrated by top shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake aligned with the industry's worst bottom feeders. This coalition has launched an impressive propaganda effort carried by slick PR firms, industry funded front groups and a predictable cabal of right wing industry toadies from cable TV and talk radio. In pitting itself against public disclosure and reasonable regulation, the natural gas industry is once again proving that it is its own worst enemy.

• US fracking case a wake-up call: Greens [Sydney Morning Herald, December 12, 2011]

An announcement that coal seam gas fracking contaminated the drinking water of a US community should be a wake-up call for the nation, the Australian Greens say.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has for the first time implicated fracking - a controversial method of improving the productivity of oil and gas wells - in causing groundwater pollution.

Health officials advised a Wyoming community not to drink their water after the EPA found hydrocarbons from fracking in their wells.

Australian Greens senator for Queensland Larissa Waters said that, although Australia's hydrology was different from America's, the same thing could happen here.

• Lorna Siggins: US study on impact to drinking water likely to inform drilling policy in Europe [Irish Times, December 12, 2011]

The final report is not due until 2014, but a preliminary report issued by it last week found that compounds which were likely to be associated with fracking chemicals had been detected in the groundwater beneath Pavillion, a small community in central Wyoming.

The Wyoming community had been advised not to drink its water last year after the US EPA found low levels of hydrocarbons in wells. The Canadian Encana Corporation, which owns the Pavillion gas field, has questioned the US EPA findings.

NUIG environmental geology lecturer Dr Tiernan Henry says the US EPA's conclusions will have a significant influence on development of shale gas extraction in Europe, including Ireland.

• Abrahm Lustgarten and Nicholas Kusnetz: Feds Link Water Contamination to Fracking for the First Time [AlterNet, December 11, 2011]
• Bryan Walsh: Fracking: Sizing Up the Quakes That Come from Hydraulic Fracturing [Time, December 12, 2011]

We already know that hydraulic fracturing-the process of injecting millions of gallons of water and chemicals deep into the earth to exploit the natural gas trapped inside rock-can likely help cause earthquakes. The British energy company Cuadrilla Resources admitted earlier this year that fracking operations caused a series of small quakes in Lancashire, and scientists have raised concerns about an unusual number and strength of quakes that hit this fall in Oklahoma, a state that has long embraced fracking. Environmentalists are already worried about the risk of water contamination and air pollution from fracking and shale gas drilling-do we need to fear quakes as well?

• Renee Schoof: As shale fracking booms, environmental protection lags [McClatchyDC, December 21, 2011]

The biggest environmental issue, especially in Pennsylvania, the heart of Marcellus Shale formation fracking, is what happens to the wastewater that gushes up from deep in the Earth when a well is fracked. The water is full of salt and contains naturally occurring radioactive elements and metals from deep layers, as well as the fracking chemicals.

"The industry's practices have been rapidly evolving here over the last few years," said David Yoxtheimer, an extension agent at the Penn State Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research.

Pennsylvania geology lacks many underground wells where wastewater can be stored. Companies increasingly recycle the wastewater by cleaning it enough for new fracking jobs. The salt sludge that gets removed is sent to landfills. Some of the wastewater goes to wells in Ohio.

• Pete Spotts: How fracking caused an Ohio earthquake [Christian Science Monitor, January 2, 2012]

The link between "fracking" and earthquakes was thrown into stark relief over the weekend when a magnitude 4.0 quake struck Youngstown, Ohio - typically not a hot bed of noticeable seismic activity. The quake triggered shaking reportedly felt as as far away as Buffalo, N.Y., and Toronto.

The temblor struck Dec. 31 and was the latest and strongest of 11 minor-to-light quakes that have hit the region since March. The epicenters are clustered around a wastewater injection well for a hydraulic fracturing operation.

Understanding the potential effect hydraulic fracturing or related activities could have on local earthquake risks is one question some researchers hope to answer as they try to develop tools for communities.

• AP: Expert: Wastewater well for oil and gas drillers triggered minor earthquakes in Ohio [Washington Post, January 2, 2012]
• Paul Gallay: Hydrofracking: A Bad Bet for the Environment — and the Economy [Huffington Post, January 5, 2012]

As New York considers new hydrofracking regulations that would allow companies to drill an estimated 48,000 gas wells across the rural countryside, many see the pitched battle over the state's fracking plan as a tug-of-war between the environment and the economy. In reality, both will suffer if the frackers get their way.

Riverkeeper, the organization I lead, is devoted to protecting the Hudson River and the drinking water supply for nine million New Yorkers. We originally engaged with this issue to protect New York City's drinking water, but the risks go far beyond one watershed, even one so important it serves the nation's largest city.

• Karen McVeigh: Damning New Letter from NY State Insider: 'Hydraulic Fracturing as It's Practiced Today Will Contaminate Our Aquifers' [AlterNet, January 6, 2012]

A former staffer at a state government agency responsible for regulating hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has warned that allowing the controversial gas drilling method in New York would lead to contamination of the state's aquifers and would poison its drinking water. ...

"Not might contaminate our aquifers. Hydraulic fracturing will contaminate New York's aquifers. If you were looking for a way to poison the drinking water supply, here in the north-east you couldn't find a more chillingly effective and thorough method of doing so than with hydraulic fracturing."

• Paul Hetzler: Hydrofracking sure to contaminate water [Watertown Daily Times, December 13, 2011]
• Brendan DeMelle: Shale Gas Bubble: Insiders Suggest Fracking Boom Is a Bust [Huffington Post, January 11, 2012]

As news outlets across America take a more rigorous look at shale gas and fracking issues, it's encouraging to see how the media coverage is finally starting to cut through the oil industry's misleading rhetoric to explore the realities of the myth of gas as a viable 'bridge fuel.'

• Tim Kettler: Hydraulic fracking threatens environment, property rights [Coshocton Tribune, January 15, 2012]

The privately owned, for-profit group organizing landowners in Coshocton County [Ohio] to conduct directional drilling for Utica shale gas have presented much information covering the supposed benefits of hydraulic fracturing. Unfortunately, there has been little other information about the documented potential for environmental disaster and the assault on county landowners' property rights if they choose not to participate in their neighbors' drilling projects. ...

True, a royalty may be paid to landowners forced into their pool although the percentage, and actual amount is merely speculation. The oil and gas law does protect the nonparticipating landowner from liability for "actions or conditions associated with the drilling or operation of the well." This statement seems to imply that a participating owner could be held liable in the future should the lease fail to protect them, a disaster reaches insurance limits, bankruptcy of a driller or some unforeseen circumstance. The bottom line in this land grab is it can be done against a landowner's will and the drilling pool, perhaps his friends and neighbors, can require him to pay a share of the costs for a project he had no interest in or even is outright opposed to. The allowable amount can be up to twice the actual charges leaving a nonparticipating landowner paying profit to the drilling pool and environmentally and economically penalized for simply declining to enter into their agreement.

• Ellen Cantarow: Fracking's "Little Revolution": How a People-Powered Movement Fights Big Business for Clean Water [AlterNet, January 22, 2012]

Shale gas isn't the conventional kind that lit your grandmother's stove. It's one of those "extreme energy" forms so difficult to produce that merely accessing them poses unprecedented dangers to the planet. In every fracking state but New York, where a moratorium against the process has been in effect since 2010, the gas industry has contaminated ground water, sickened people, poisoned livestock, and killed wildlife. ...

But for once, this story isn't about tragedy. It's about a resistance movement that has arisen to challenge some of the most powerful corporations in history. Here you will find no handsomely funded national environmental organizations: some of them in fact have had a cozy relationship with the gas industry, embracing the industry's line that natural gas is a "bridge" to future alternative energies. (In fact, shale gas suppresses the development of renewable energies.)

• Robin Hahnel: Fracking: Anatomy of a Free Market Failure [The IndYpendent, January 24, 2012]

A recent New York Times article reported that rural landowners who had signed leases with gas and oil companies exchanging drilling rights on their property for royalty payments have discovered that they may have been misled. Many are now experiencing buyers regret. A review of more than 111,000 leases, addenda and related documents by The New York Times revealed:

        • Fewer than half the leases require companies to compensate landowners for water contamination after drilling begins. And only about half the documents have language that lawyers suggest should be included to require payment for damages to livestock or crops.

        • Most leases grant gas companies broad rights to decide where they can cut down trees, store chemicals, build roads and drill. Companies are also permitted to operate generators and spotlights through the night near homes during drilling.

        • In the leases, drilling companies rarely describe to landowners the potential environmental and other risks that federal laws require them to disclose in filings to investors.

        • Most leases are for three or five years, but at least two-thirds of those reviewed by The Times allow extensions without additional approval from landowners. If landowners have second thoughts about drilling on their land or want to negotiate for more money, they may be out of luck.

• Ewa Krukowska: EU Has Adequate Rules on Shale Gas Exploration, Study Shows [Bloomberg, January 27, 2012]

"The legal study confirms that there is no immediate need for changing our EU legislation," EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said in a statement published today. "This refers to the actual phase of exploration. We take environmental concerns seriously and will continue to monitor the development of shale gas extraction in the EU."

As companies such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil Corp. started drilling exploration wells in countries including Poland, the U.K and Germany, environmental groups raised concerns that hydraulic fracturing, the process of blasting sand, water and chemicals into shale that's made the U.S. the world's largest natural-gas producer, risks earthquakes and polluting water supply.

• Carrie Tait: Canada's energy industry sets 'fracking' guidelines [Globe & Mail, January 30, 2012]

Canada's energy industry on Monday rolled out six "operating practices" to protect water sources where companies drill for natural gas using an increasingly controversial technique.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the industry lobby group, said the new guidelines apply to all of its members exploring for and producing natural gas in Canada. The rules address hydraulic fracturing operations in shale gas and tight gas reservoirs.

Kate Sheppard: The Koch Brothers' Vast Right-Wing Media Conspiracy
[Mother Jones, February 4, 2011]

Koch Industries, a Kansas-based company founded in 1940 by father Fred Koch, is the second largest privately held company in America. Charles and David Koch are tied as the fifth wealthiest people in the nation, worth a combined $43 billion. Their money comes through a variety of business interests-ranching, mining, oil refining, and production of paper products, fertilizer, and chemicals. It would be an understatement to say that they have much at stake when it comes to efforts to cut climate-changing emissions.

Indeed, the brothers have spent $31.3 million since 2005 on organizations that deny or downplay climate change, according to a forthcoming report from Greenpeace that updates its report on Koch's climate denial work released last year. But it's the web of media influence the Kochs have created that perhaps accounts best for their power-particularly when it comes to sowing doubt about climate change.

[Continued here]

• Koch Industries: Still Fueling Climate Denial (2011 Update) [Greenpeace, 2011]

Billionaire oilman David Koch used to joke that Koch Industries was "the biggest company you've never heard of." Now the shroud of secrecy has thankfully been lifted, revealing the $55 million that he and his brother Charles have quietly funneled to climate-denial front groups that are working to delay policies and regulations aimed at stopping global warming.

• Suzanne Goldenberg: Changing climate of Republican opinion doesn't agree with Tea Party [The Guardian, December 2, 2011]

This won't make the Koch brothers happy: nearly two-thirds of moderate or liberal Republicans now believe there is solid evidence for global warming, according to a poll from the Pew research centre.

That's 22 points higher since 2009, the year the billionaire oil brothers first began pouring money into Tea Party groups working to discredit Barack Obama's green agenda.

The shift suggests that the Koch efforts to spread doubt about climate science may be backfiring.

• Emma Pullman: Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife: Not Even Canadians are Safe from the Kochs Anymore [deSMOGblog, January 27, 2011]

Despite the headway made in holding the Koch Brothers to account, they've creeped their way into Canada.

Well, let me be clear. It's not as though Koch Industries is a totally foreign force in Canada. Koch and its subsidiaries currently operate in seven Canadian provinces, and according to a Greenpeace report, Koch has held multiple leases in Alberta's tar sands, and since the 1990s the Koch Pipeline Company has operated the pipelines that carry tar sands crude from Canada into Minnesota and Wisconsin where Koch's Flint Hill Resources owns oil refineries.

• Emma Pullman: Koch Brothers Continue Their Canadian Takeover [deSMOGblog, March 27, 2011]

Last week, we reported that the oily brothers had set up shop to lobby in Alberta. But perhaps more disquieting than that is that, according to Environmental Defence, Alberta isn't the only province being strangled by the Kochtopus. The Koch brothers have officially registered to lobby in Ontario too.

• Kate Sheppard: Inside Koch's Climate Denial Machine [Mother Jones, April 1, 2010]

Who's behind a multi-million dollar campaign to seed doubt about climate change? It's not just Exxon and Chevron-it's also Koch Industries, an oil and gas giant that most people have never heard of, according to a new report from Greenpeace [2010 and 2011 reports available]. Koch's extensive funding of anti-climate work makes it the "financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition," says Greenpeace.

The Kansas-based company and its affiliates and foundations spent almost $25 million on "organizations of the 'climate denial machine'" between 2005 and 2008, according to the report. Koch Industries and the Koch family also spent $37.9 million between 2006 and 2009. "Although Koch intentionally stays out of the public eye, it is now playing a quiet but dominant role in a high-profile national policy debate on global warming," the report concludes.

The company is led by brothers Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, and is the second largest privately-held company in America. As I've reported previously, their estranged brother, William, is behind the efforts to block the Cape Wind offshore wind project in Massachusetts. Koch money comes through a lot of business interests - ranching, mining, oil refining, and producing paper products, fertilizer, and chemicals.

• Christine Shearer: Will Fossil Fuel Companies Face Liability for Climate Change? [AlterNet, January 4, 2012]

In a recent article in National Journal, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) President Tim Phillips said there is no question that AFP and others like it have been instrumental in the rise of Republican candidates who question or deny climate science: "We've made great headway. What it means for candidates on the Republican side is, if you . buy into green energy or you play footsie on this issue, you do so at your political peril."

AFP is a section 501(c)(4) organization, meaning it does not have to disclose its donors, but has been tied to significant funding from the Koch Family Foundations - founded by the billionaire Koch brothers of Koch Industries - as well as smaller donations from companies like ExxonMobil. Koch Industries and ExxonMobil are among the largest funders of studies questioning climate change science, often drawn upon by conservative politicians to legitimize their view that regulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is not needed because the science is still under debate.

• Dan Bellerose: Cameco's requests to nuclear commission opposed by Northwatch [Sault Star, January 24, 2012]

The largest commercial uranium refinery in the western world, located 140 kilometres east of Sault Ste. Marie, immediately west of Blind River, is seeking to double its licence period and increase production capacity.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission heard the application from Cameco Blind River [Bill Koch] late last week in Port Hope, Ont., and a decision is expected in the coming weeks. ...

"Our environmental and safety performance merits a longer licence term," says Bill Koch, director of public and government affairs for the Cameco fuel services division.

• Robert Greenwald: Hauling the Koch Brothers Into Congress [Huffington Post, January 30, 2012]

There's ample evidence linking the Kochs' business to the Canadian tar sands, which is the dirtiest energy in North America. Indeed, the Koch brothers' stand to be among the pipeline's biggest beneficiaries. Even the Koch brothers' website confesses to being a party to tar sands oil.

The Koch brothers are doing whatever they can to avoid testifying in Congress, despite the fact that the Kochs informed the Canadian government of their "direct and substantial" interest in the pipeline. Waxman has been trying to get answers from the Koch brothers since last spring, but the Kochs have not cooperated.

At the same time, the Kochs' allies in Congress are doing their best to stonewall oversight. This outcome doesn't surprise me one bit given the Koch brothers' near-monopoly on the influential and powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. According to the Los Angeles Times, Koch Industries and its employees are the single largest oil and gas donors to the committee. They've contributed $279,500 to 22 of the committee's 31 Republicans and $32,000 to five Democrats. Talk about the best democracy money can buy!

• Campbell Clark and Shawn McCarthy: Harper relaxes accountability rules for China's use of uranium [Globe & Mail, February 10, 2012]

Stephen Harper has chosen to override the qualms of the government's non-proliferation experts to permit a multibillion-dollar business in exports of Saskatchewan uranium to China's nuclear industry. ...

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall lobbied Mr. Harper personally over the past year to reach the arrangement with Beijing. It means Saskatchewan's Cameco Corp. [Bill Koch] can now use Canadian uranium in two contracts worth up to $3-billion. ...

But the deal with Beijing has raised concerns in Ottawa, because it includes less stringent accounting for how the uranium is used than Canada typically demands, sources said. When Australia made a similar deal with China in 2008 that included less accountability, it faced criticism from other uranium suppliers, including Canada.

• Lee Fang: REPORT: Koch Fueling Far Right Academic Centers At Universities Across The Country [Think Progress, May 11, 2011]

Budget constraints and other problems at universities have allowed a small set of oligarchs to use school donations to interfere with academic integrity on campuses. A group of hedge fund managers, working through the Manhattan Institute's Veritas Fund, have created entire departments dedicated to advancing failed supply side ideas and climate skepticism. John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T Bank, a bailout recipient, has used his corporation's money to force college campuses to adopt Ayn Rand readings into their programs.

Overall, Koch is still a dominant player when it comes to meddling with academic integrity. Part of the effort is coordinated through operatives like Richard Fink, who doubles as a vice president at Koch's corporate lobbying office. Through an organization called the Association of Private Enterprise Education, Koch organizes these corporate-funded university departments into a powerful intellectual movement. The organization allows Koch staffers in Washington DC to request certain types of studies, interfere with hiring decisions, and reward loyal free market academics with hefty research grants.

    

60 Minutes: Blowout: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster
[CBS News, September 21, 2010]

Satellite image of Deepwater Horizon oil spill

The gusher unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spew crude oil. There are no reliable estimates of how much oil is pouring into the gulf. But it comes to many millions of gallons since the catastrophic blowout. Eleven men were killed in the explosions that sank one of the most sophisticated drilling rigs in the world, the "Deepwater Horizon."

This week Congress continues its investigation, but Capitol Hill has not heard from the man "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley met: Mike Williams, one of the last crewmembers to escape the inferno.

He says the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon had been building for weeks in a series of mishaps. The night of the disaster, he was in his workshop when he heard the rig's engines suddenly run wild. That was the moment that explosive gas was shooting across the decks, being sucked into the engines that powered the rig's generators.

[Continued here]

• David Barstow, David Rohde and Stephanie Saul: Deepwater Horizon's Final Hours [New York Times, December 25, 2010]

• BP 'Deepwater Horizon' oil spill index [New York Times]
• BP 'Deepwater Horizon' oil spill index [The Guardian]
• Greenpeace: Blogposts tagged 'Deepwater Horizon' [Greenpeace]
• John Mervin: Counting the cost of the BP disaster one year on [BBC, April 20, 2011]
• John Rudolf: Department Of Justice Investigates BP For Faulty Oil Spill Estimates [Huffington Post, August 22, 2011]

On April 25, 2010, BP assured the Gulf Coast that a disaster wasn't unfolding.

Five days earlier, the Deepwater Horizon, a BP-leased rig in the Gulf of Mexico, had suffered a massive blowout, killing 11 men and seriously injuring 17 others. The floating platform burned for two days, then sank in 5,000 feet of water. Less than 48 hours later, BP discovered a leak from its deep-sea well.

BP knew that the well, tapping a reservoir of at least 50 million barrels, could release vast amounts of crude oil, dwarfing tanker-sized spills. But the company's experts quickly calculated that the well was releasing just 1,000 barrels a day, an estimate it provided to the Coast Guard shortly after the leak was found. The Coast Guard made BP's figure public on April 24.

At a press conference the next day, a New Orleans reporter asked whether the leak could produce a spill on par with the Exxon Valdez disaster. Doug Suttles, an engineer and BP's chief operating officer for exploration and production, told him it could not.

• Leo Hickman: Greedy Lying Bastards: US filmmaker attacks oil industry [The Guardian, January 20, 2012]

Filmed over the past two years and across nine countries, Greedy Lying Bastards claims to be a "searing indictment of the influence, deceit and corruption that defines the fossil fuel industry":

        Rosebraugh documents the impact of an industry that puts profits before people, wages a campaign of lies to thwart measures to combat climate change, uses its clout to minimize infringing regulations and undermined the political process in the U.S. and abroad.By interweaving the stories of the victims of the Gulf oil spill and the global climate crisis, he lays bare the industry's deliberate pattern of irresponsibility. And, while oil companies worldwide exert influence over policies that will protect their revenues, those who speak out against the industry's reckless practices risk their livelihoods, and in some instances, their lives.

• Ramit Plushnick-Masti: Gulf Coast Environmental Destruction Highlighted By BP Oil Spill [Huffington Post, January 29, 2012]

For decades, farmers and fishermen along the Gulf of Mexico watched as their sensitive ecosystem's waters slowly got dirtier and islands eroded, all while the country largely ignored the destruction.

It took BP PLC's well blowing out in the Gulf - and the resulting environmental catastrophe when millions of gallons of oil spewed into the ocean and washed ashore - for the nation to turn its attention to the slow, methodical ruin of an ecosystem vital to the U.S. economy. Last month, more than a year and a half after the spill began, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a three-year, $50 million initiative designed to improve water quality along the coast.

• Julia Whitty: Exxon Valdez Oil Walloping Mom and Pup Sea Otters [Mother Jones, February 16, 2012]

A new paper in MEPS reports on the strong lingering effects of oil on sea otters in western Prince William Sound from the Exxon Valdez disaster that killed hundreds of thousands of birds and thousands of marine mammals 23 years ago.

The researchers report that exposure to oil has hardly ended-and the likelihood of exposure is highest for mothers with pups than any other members of the otter population.

Although initial assessments found the Exxon Valdez oil decayed quickly and therefore was of little consequence long-term to wildlife, these assessments have not held up in the long term. From the paper:

        [C]ontrary to claims of rapid recovery and limited long-term effects, ample evidence accumulated in the decades since the spill has demonstrated that not all injured species and ecosystems recovered quickly, with protracted recovery particularly evident in nearshore food webs... Sea otter population recovery rates in heavily oiled western [Prince William Sound] were about half those expected, and in areas where oiling and sea otter mortality were greatest, there was no evidence of recovery through 2000.

Robin Wauters: Facebook, Greenpeace Settle Clean Energy Feud After Two-Year Campaign
[Tech Crunch, December 15, 2011]

Remember when Greenpeace totally didn't like Facebook and its use of 'dirty energy' in its datacenters? Well, they're best buddies now. Greenpeace and Facebook this morning announced that they're teaming up on the promotion of renewable energy and "develop programs that will enable Facebook users to save energy and engage their communities in clean energy decisions".

Facebook also committed to using clean and renewable energy to power its own operations.

The news comes two years after the global campaigning organization launched its Unfriend Coal Campaign, enlisting online activists to call on Facebook to power its data centers with clean energy instead of coal. That campaign ends today.

[Continued here]

• AFP: Arsenic Found in Water Near Coal-Fired Plants [AlterNet, December 14, 2011]

An environmental monitor Tuesday identified 19 new sites across the United States where groundwater near coal-ash dumps from power plants was found to be contaminated with arsenic and other pollutants.

The Environmental Integrity Project said the pollution -- in some cases more than 10 times the maximum contaminant level for arsenic -- is a direct health threat to thousands of residents who live near plants which use coal. ...

While power plants smokestack emissions are regulated, environmentalists say laws are more lax on dumping of waste that can seep into groundwater.

• Bob Weber: Coal, not oilsands, the real threat to climate, study finds [Toronto Star, February 19, 2012]

When only commercially viable oilsands deposits are considered, the temperature increase is only 0.03C.

In contrast, the paper concludes that burning all the globe's vast coal deposits would create a 15C-degree increase in temperature. Burning all the abundant natural gas would warm the planet by more than three degrees.

David Eimer: China's disregard for the environment shows no sign of improving
[Telegraph, February 1, 2012]

China continues to struggle to balance the demands of growing its economy and lifting more of its 1.3 billion-plus people out of poverty, with the need to protect what is left of its environment.

Decades of loosely-regulated industrialisation has rendered vast swathes of China's land and waterways toxic. One-third of the Yellow River is not only incapable of supporting marine life but is so deadly it can't be used even for industrial purposes. The pollution that belches from coal-fired power plants and an ever-increasing number of cars has resulted in air quality in Beijing and other cities plunging.

Fields across the country are contaminated by the discharge from factories, while China's seas are also suffering. The massive oil spill in the Bohai Sea off the east coast last summer affected an area of 2400 square miles.

[Continued here]

(Click on image to enlarge)

Suzanne Goldenberg: Coral reefs report warns of mass loss threat
[The Guardian, February 23, 2011]

Three-quarters of the world's coral reefs are at risk from overfishing, pollution and climate change, according to a report.

By 2050 virtually all of the world's coral reefs - from the waters of the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean to Australia - will be in danger, the report warns. The consequences - especially for countries such as the Philippines or Haiti which depend on the reefs for food - will be severe. ...

The most immediate threat to reefs is overfishing, which has put about half of the world's reefs in peril. In the Indian and Pacific Oceans the danger is particularly acute, because of overfishing and extreme methods which use dynamite and other explosives to blast fish out of the water.

[Continued here]

• International Policy: United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development [Pew Environment Group]

While the Rio+20 agenda is ambitious and examines a plethora of environmental issues, there is insufficient emphasis on examining the human-caused influences which threaten the sustainability of ocean ecosystems and marine resources. Our oceans are in peril. Overfishing, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, destructive fishing practices and inadequate fisheries management have contributed to the systematic destruction of the marine environment and the species that reside within it.

The Pew Environment Group looks to global leaders to address key environmental issues impacting the ocean in the lead up to the UNCSD. There can be no healthy planet Earth, no "green economy," and indeed no sustainable future for humanity without a healthy ocean. Governments should continue the tradition of the Earth Summits and reach for a bold, courageous and visionary agreement at UNCSD to ensure the future viability of ocean ecosystems.

• Joan Yang: Bringing the Ocean Back into the Earth Summit [Pew Environment Group, March 1. 2011]

Oceans are currently managed through a fragmented system where national and international bodies possess separate and overlapping jurisdictions. This has created an international structure of governance that lags far behind the threats posed to marine ecosystems. Moreover, measures established by existing institutions to tackle gaps and inadequacies in ocean governance have not been broadly and effectively implemented. The Pew Environment Group has compiled a number of recommendations to bridge existing gaps and reform ocean governance in line with the themes of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.

• Graham Lloyd: Coral breakthrough offers climate hope [The Australian, January 21, 2012]

The research undertaken at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and published in the journal Nature Climate Change has overturned previously held assumptions about coral bleaching and which corals may survive in warmer waters.

According to PhD student Emily Howells, the findings demonstrate the potential for corals to adapt is more widespread than previously thought.

Further research is under way to establish the speed at which coral can adapt to rising water temperatures, and whether it will be fast enough to survive the impact of climate change.

• Carbon dioxide is "driving fish crazy" [ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, January 16, 2012]

Rising human carbon dioxide emissions may be affecting the brains and central nervous system of sea fishes with serious consequences for their survival, an international scientific team has found.

Carbon dioxide concentrations predicted to occur in the ocean by the end of this century will interfere with fishes' ability to hear, smell, turn and evade predators, says Professor Philip Munday of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

• Staff: Oceans have acidified more in the last 2,000 years 'than they did in the previous 21,000 years' [Daily Mail, January 22, 2012]

In some regions, acidity levels rose faster in the last two centuries than it did in the previous 21,000 years, a study from the University of Hawaii has shown.

Ocean acidity makes it harder for organisms such as molluscs and coral to construct the protective layers they need to survive.

• Staff: Countries adopt UN-backed declaration to enhance protection of marine environment [United Nations, January 28, 2012]

Delegates from 65 countries attending a United Nations-backed conference in the Philippines have agreed to step up efforts to protect the world's oceans from land-based activities, stressing the marine environment's central role in the transition to a low-carbon, resource-efficient green economy. ...

"The Manila Declaration signals a new way forward for all of us," said Amina Mohamed, UNEP Deputy Executive-Director, who led the agency's delegation at the meeting.

"The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June is an excellent opportunity to take the Manila Declaration to a global audience and initiate action to reduce the impact of land-based activities on the marine environment," she said.

"It is essential that we sustain our momentum to achieve on-the-ground improvements in the health of ocean and coastal ecosystems, for which the continued and co-ordinated effort of the international community is vital," added Ms. Mohamed.

• Staff: Seagrass 'tens of thousands of years old' [BBC, February 2, 2012]

Researchers found genetically identical samples of Posidonia oceanica up to 15km apart, which suggested that the species was extremely long-lived.

The team added that the organism - which provides food and shelter for many species - is under threat from climate change. ...

The researcher added that the plants' extreme longevity also indicated that the species displayed an ability to adapt in order to survive over such a length of time.

Richard Black: Costa Concordia: An ecological disaster?
[BBC, Janaury 17, 2012]

Satellite image of ship wreck

We have a big ship with tanks full of fuel, aground on an island in a sea fringed with natural protected areas.

So the worst case scenario is pretty bad.

Isola del Giglio, where the stricken cruise ship rests, is part of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park, the largest marine protected area in Italy.

Among its inhabitants are important plants and birds and some rare frogs, while the seas support coral, cetaceans and the occasional Mediterranean monk seal - a critically endangered species.

[Continued here]

• Alessandra Migliaccio and Marco Bertacche: Costa Rushes to Remove Fuel, Avoid Spill From Stricken Ship [Bloomberg Businessweek, January 17, 2012]

Smit Salvage, a unit of Royal Boskalis Westminster NV, contracted by Costa Crociere SpA, owner of the stricken Costa Concordia, is ready to begin inspecting the ship as soon as tomorrow. The company will need two to four weeks to take the fuel off the ship, executives said on a conference call today.

"The vessel is stable and we feel confident that removal can be done in a fairly rapid way," Kees van Essen, Smit's manager of operations, said during the call. There have been no leaks so far and salvage operations don't increase the chance of leaks, he said. ...

Weather conditions since the accident have been calm, though a storm front is forecast to move into the area on Thursday.

• Staff: New Zealand oil spill: 'It's heartbreaking' [BBC, October 11, 2011]

Officials say 350 tonnes of oil may have leaked from the 775ft (236m) Rena, which ran aground on the Astrolabe Reef off the port of Tauranga on Wednesday.

Residents close to vulnerable coastlines have been told to stay away from the shore and not touch the heavy globs of oil, which the authorities say are toxic. ...

Dave Tee is one local resident who has been visiting the beach in Tauranga.

"I live just across the road from the stretch of coast where the cargo ship hit the reef.

"I went down to the beach twice on Tuesday to help with the clean-up and to take pictures. ...

"The remains of birds and fish are being washed up on the shore. There are dead penguins, jellyfish, sea-snails. ...

"This is only the second day of the oil spill. It can only get worse.

• Staff: Stricken cargo ship Rena breaks up off New Zealand [BBC, January 8, 2012]

A cargo ship which ran aground off the coast of New Zealand three months ago has broken in two, spilling containers and threatening a new oil spill.

Heavy seas snapped off the stern section of the Greek-owned Rena, which leaked large amounts of fuel on becoming stranded in October.

Up to 300 containers have been washed overboard, with most expected to sink.

While a new oil leak is feared in coming days, clean-up teams expect it to be smaller than the initial escape.

The stranding has been described as New Zealand's worst maritime environmental disaster.

• Tom Kington: Costa Concordia: Storms threaten to shift marooned cruise liner and release oil spill into a wildlife haven [The Guardian, January 21, 2012]

Teetering on a narrow rock shelf, its tanks filled to the brim with thousands of tonnes of fuel, the marooned cruise ship Costa Concordia has been described by an environmental expert as "a bomb ready to go off in the most protected natural area in the Mediterranean". With predicted rough weather threatening to send the 114,000-tonne vessel plummeting from shallows off the island of Giglio into 70-metre depths, fears are growing that 2,400 tonnes of fuel could be released into the crystal-clear waters, home to whales, dolphins, turtles and dozens of rare plant species. ...

"If the tanks break up, any oil slick will be taken north by currents up the east coast of Giglio towards the islands of Elba and Montecristo, so we are all watching the ship closely," said Fabrizio Serena, a marine protection officer with the regional authority of Tuscany.

• AP: Italian officials mull removal of fuel from cruise ship [USA Today, January 23, 2012]

Smit said on Monday that Italian authorities have indicated it can begin the removal once a second absorbent boom is in place around the ship and following the arrival of an oil removal vessel, expected later Monday. The booms are used "to reduce the possibility of polluting shorelines and to help make recovery easier," the company said on its website.

"Based on the current insights, it is understood that the Italian marine authorities will permit oil removal activities to commence once these precautionary measures have been put in place," Smit said in a statement. ...

Already, some diesel and lubricants have leaked into the water near the ship, probably from machinery on board. Officials have characterized the contamination as superficial.

• Nick Squires: Costa Concordia: oil salvage operation under way [Telegraph, January 24, 2012]

The Rotterdam-based firm says it hopes to start pumping out the 2,400 tonnes of fuel by the weekend.

It will take four to six weeks to safely empty the ship's massive fuel tanks, a company representative said as he watched the barge head towards the Costa Concordia - a distance of just a few hundred yards. ...

Smit has a team of 40 men on the island and faces a race against time to avert an environmental disaster before bad weather starts to close in.

They will drill holes in the hull of the liner and use huge pumps and pipes to suck the fuel out. It will then be siphoned into a large tanker.

• Fulvio Paolucci and Nicole Winfield: Rough seas force delay in start of fuel extraction from grounded cruise ship off Tuscany [Toronto Star, January , 2012]

Rough seas off Italy's Tuscan coast forced a delay in the planned Saturday start of the operation to remove a half-million gallons of fuel from the grounded Costa Concordia, and officials said pumping may now not begin until midweek. ...

Dutch shipwreck salvage firm Smit has been contracted by the Concordia's owner Costa Crociere SpA, a unit of Miami-based Carnival Corp., to remove the fuel. Smit's divers have made the necessary preparations to begin pumping out fuel from six outer tanks that hold more than half of the 500,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil that are aboard the ship.

The rest of the fuel is contained in inner tanks that are harder to access.

• AP: Italy cruise ship fuel being pumped out [CBC, February 12, 2012]

After nearly two weeks of delays because of rough seas and bad weather, the pumping got under way on the first of 15 tanks that are believed to hold around 84 per cent of the fuel on board, Italy's civil protection department said.

Officials say it will take 28 consecutive days of pumping to empty the tanks.

[Informative slide-show included]

• AP: Two-thirds of Costa Concordia fuel removed [CBS News, February 19, 2012]

Mark Kinver: Africa's rainforests 'more resilient' to climate change
[BBC, January 6, 2012]

An international conference agreed that the region's surviving tree species had endured a number of climatic catastrophes over the past 4,000 years.

As a result, they are better suited to cope with future shifts in the climate.

The event at the University of Oxford looked at the "fate of Africa's tropical forests in the 21st Century". ...

"In some senses, African forests have gone through a number of catastrophes in the past 4,000 to 2,000 years," he told BBC News.

"They are already much lower in diversity, and have lost species that would have been potentially vulnerable. But the species that remain are relatively adaptable, have broad ranges and have adapted to quite rapid changes in rainfall.

[Continued here]

• Jeff Wells: Protecting Canada's 'Blue' Forest [National Geographic, March 28, 2011]

Water scarcity and contamination are serious and growing global concerns for people and nature. We have already seen how mismanagement of water resources can lead to enormous environmental disasters, such as the drying up of the Aral Sea or groundwater arsenic pollution in Bangladesh.

Enhanced regulatory oversight is critical, but one of the best and most affordable things we can do for future generations is to identify and protect the Earth's remaining pristine lakes, rivers and wetlands. There is no better place to start than Canada's boreal forest, where we have the rare opportunity to safeguard one of the last, great storehouses of our global freshwater supply. ...

North-flowing boreal rivers are crucial to Arctic ice creation and impact ocean currents that travel thousands of miles. These river deltas and estuaries are rich with nutrients and attract high concentrations of oceanic species, including large numbers of beluga whales during calving and molting stages.

• Damian Carrington: Secret forest sell-off 'shopping lists' drawn up by conservation groups [The Guardian, January 11, 2012]

A huge public backlash against proposals from the environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, to dispose of England's state-owned woodlands forced her into a humiliating U-turn and apology. The independent panel will make its final recommendations this spring, and has already condemned the government for "greatly undervaluing" the nation's forestry estate. ...

The 'Domesday forest' plan aims to raise woodland in England from less than 10% to the 15% recorded by the Doomsday book in 1086, by 2050. Our Forests call the plan ambitious but achievable and Porritt notes that planting trees remains one of the most cost-effective ways of tackling global warming. Existing government plans are to plant a million trees over four years.

• Rob Ferguson: Ontario's maple trees threatened by longhorn beetles, environment watchdog warns [Toronto Star, January 10, 2012]

While the beetles have already been found in several areas of the GTA and quarantine zones have been set up for the destruction of any infested broad-leafed trees, beetles "loose and heading north" from New York state could start chewing through maples here within 10 years, Miller warned Tuesday.

Global warming could also make it too hot and dry for new maples to grow "in a few decades,' Miller added.

• Staff: The world's biggest and most vulnerable trees — in pictures [The Guardian, January 26, 2012]

The biggest trees in the world are dying off rapidly as roads, farms and settlements fragment forests and trees come under prolonged attack from severe droughts and new pests and diseases. Here is a selection of the world's biggest trees under threat.

• Deborah Hastings: Fiery Demise for a Titan of Nature [The Daily, February 2, 2012]

Known as "The Senator," or simply "The Big Tree," the hollowed-out majestic timber, standing at 118 feet tall, ignited before dawn. Firefighters watched helplessly as the oldest tree east of the Mississippi - and the fifth oldest in the world - blazed and then collapsed in a heap of flaming embers.

The American Forestry Association bored a small hole in The Senator in 1946, determining the tree was approximately 3,500 years old....

Nadia Gilani: How many endangered animals can you spot in the World Wildlife Fund's
poster warning about deforestation? [Daily Mail, January 12, 2012]

Now you see them, now you don't — a striking portrayal of animals hidden in a rain forest which could all be wiped out as a result of deforestation are revealed in a poignant poster.

[Continued here]

(Click on image for another view)



Justin Gillis: As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks
[New York Times, December 16, 2011 ]

A bubble rose through a hole in the surface of a frozen lake. It popped, followed by another, and another, as if a pot were somehow boiling in the icy depths.

Every bursting bubble sent up a puff of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas generated beneath the lake from the decay of plant debris. These plants last saw the light of day 30,000 years ago and have been locked in a deep freeze - until now.

"That's a hot spot," declared Katey M. Walter Anthony, a leading scientist in studying the escape of methane. A few minutes later, she leaned perilously over the edge of the ice, plunging a bottle into the water to grab a gas sample.

It was another small clue for scientists struggling to understand one of the biggest looming mysteries about the future of the earth.

[Continued here]

• Nick Collins: Arctic sea ice 'to melt by 2015' [Telegraph, November 8, 2011]

Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, said the ice that forms over the Arctic sea is shrinking so rapidly that it could vanish altogether in as little as four years' time.

Although it would reappear again every winter, its absence during the peak of summer would rob polar bears of their summer hunting ground and threaten them with extinction.

• CP: Lack of ice could be causing more seal deaths: study [CTV, January 4, 2012]

The research by scientists at Duke University in North Carolina tracked the decrease of sea ice due to global warming and the mortality of harp seals from 1992 to 2010.

David Johnston, a marine scientist who co-wrote the report, said it's the first study to show that seasonal ice cover in the four seal breeding areas of North America has receded by as much as six per cent per decade.

"There has been a string of light ice years recently and we're starting to be concerned that if ice continues to decline, this might have longer-term effects on the harp seal population," Johnston said from his office in Beaufort, N.C.

• Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis [National Snow and Ice Data Center]
• Neven Acropolis: Arctic Sea Ice Update: Spectacular and Ominous [Think Progress, February 13, 2012]

This winter was looking more or less like previous years, until about a month ago. A flip in atmospheric patterns that brought very late winter conditions to Europe, also had an effect on the fringes of the ice pack on the Atlantic side of the Arctic. Large swathes of sea water in the Barents and Kara Seas that ought to have been completely frozen over, opened up and total Arctic ice growth came to a practical standstill on various graphs, such as the Cryosphere Today sea ice area graph.

Nick Collins: Turtles 'face extinction' without marine protection
[Telegraph, February 18, 2012]

Current marine protection areas designed to preserve under-threat species generally cover fixed geographical spots where they feed, mate or rear their young.

But to prevent endangered turtles, sharks and other creatures from dying out the designated no-fishing zones ought to be made mobile to ensure the species are always protected, experts said.

Although the concept has existed for some time, it has only recently become technologically feasible to constantly monitor endangered animals and shift conservation areas accordingly.

Satellite tracking devices are now small and affordable enough that they can monitor the precise location, including the depth, of large numbers of sea creatures.

[Continued here]

• Mary Ormsby: Ontario snapping turtle endangered yet hunted [Toronto Star, February 18, 2012]

The officers had uncovered a wildlife heist. The poachers who'd plundered the Lake Scugog area had 10 live snapping turtles, 123 bullfrogs and two Midland painted turtles - animals likely destined for restaurant tables or the underground exotic pet industry.

It was a theft that also highlighted the vulnerability of the Ontario snapping turtle, a popular target of poachers and a creature at the hub of a hunters-versus-protectionists debate: the ancient, armoured snapping turtle is on the Canadian and provincial endangered species lists - yet it is legally hunted in Ontario.

Poachers, road kills, human persecution, habitat destruction, nest predation, pollution - all raise questions about the sharp-beaked beast's future.

Lucy Siegle: Invasive non-native species: attack of the aliens
[The Guardian, January 15, 2012]

There is a war going on in the parks, gardens, ponds, rivers and greenhouses of Britain. At stake is the future of the country's native flora and fauna. This time it's not just under threat from the usual foes - lorry parks and a tendency to pave over front gardens - but from the 2,000-plus non-native species of animals and plants that are estimated to have found their way here.

Not all are deadly invaders. Some non- natives, such as the horse chestnut (origin Asia), even become pillars of the community; but some can wreak havoc, crowding out precious native species, spreading parasites, stealing food sources and blanketing waterways, choking the life out of native aquatic plants with their tendrils.

This march of invasive species - moving from the environment where they evolved to ones where they did not - is a worldwide issue. If it were flu, we'd probably call it a global pandemic. Scientists now take it so seriously that the UN's Millennium Ecosystems Assessment gave invasive species joint top billing along with climate change when it came to threats against biodiversity. This is not an issue to be trifled with.

[Continued here]

• Invasive Species in Canada [Government of Canada (2012)]
• Invasive Species in the Great Lakes Region [Great Lakes Information Network (2012)]
• Bowdeya Tweh: Dollars continue to flow for Asian carp control [NWI.com, January 12, 2012]

Federal and state officials said Thursday that Asian carp control efforts in the Great Lakes would continue this year with congressional commitments to maintain funding similar to the previous fiscal year.

U.S. Asian carp czar John Goss said efforts such as environmental DNA sampling, research on fish habits and rapid response fish catches so far are proving effective in stopping Asian carp from gaining a foothold in the Great Lakes. Goss spoke Thursday at the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee's first Indiana public meeting this year.

"We are all very committed to protecting the ecosystem in the Great Lakes," Goss, of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said.

• Progress On Fighting Invasive Species In Ontario [Ministry of Natural Resources Canada]

...

Controlling Purple Loosestrife in Ontario

Galerucella beetles have been shown to control purple loosestrife, an invasive wetland plant. The Ministry of Natural Resources has worked with the University of Guelph, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters and many other partners on the Ontario Purple Loosestrife Biological Control Program. Beetles have been released in more than 400 locations across Ontario since 1993. The beetles have reduced the abundance of purple loosestrife in more than 80 per cent of the release sites.

...

• Nick Squires: Island of Montecristo to be bombed with poison after rat infestation [Telegraph, January 15, 2012]

The rodents are believed to have arrived on the four-square-mile island as stowaways on boats a few years ago but have now multiplied.

Authorities are planning to use aircraft to bombard the island with poison pellets in a bid to tackle the infestation.

The plan is to drop around 26 tonnes of pellets on the island at the end of this month.

• Brian Resnick: Why Are Enormous, Alligator-Eating Pythons Invading Florida? [The Atlantic, February 2, 2012]

America has a border problem, but it's not the one you're thinking about. Foreign invaders arrive in this country quietly, often in shipping containers from Asia or as exotic pets. At first, small populations are hardly noticed. Then, when becomes apparent that these invaders have no natural enemies here, their numbers explode exponentially.

Rhett A. Butler: Biofuel breakthrough: kelp could power cars
[Mongabay, January 20, 2012]

Researchers from the Bio Architecture Lab in Berkeley, California engineered E. coli bacterium to digest brown seaweed and produce ethanol as a byproduct. Kelp, which grows up to a meter a day and is abundant in temperate coastal regions, is a type of brown seaweed.

"BAL's technology to ferment a seaweed feedstock to renewable fuels and chemicals has suggested an entirely new pathway for biofuels development, one that is no longer constrained to terrestrial sources," said Jonathan Burbaum of the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency, which helped fund the research. "When fully developed and deployed, large scale seaweed cultivation combined with BAL's technology promises to produce renewable fuels and chemicals without forcing a tradeoff with conventional food crops such as corn or sugarcane."

[Continued here]

• Zoe Cormier: Biofuel from beneath the waves [Nature, January 19, 2012]

Many researchers are exploring ways to produce ethanol without using food crops such as sugar cane or maize (corn), and have turned to different feedstocks including switchgrass, the succulent plant jatropha, cyanobacteria and green algae. However, producing biofuels from sugar cane or maize not only detracts from food supplies, but also takes up huge areas of arable land. In the case of maize, more energy is required for growing and harvesting the crop than can be gained from the ethanol produced.

• Mark Schrope: Biofuel Research Suffers From Gaps [Chemical & Engineering News, January 20, 2012]

After a review of a decade's worth of biofuels research, scientists with the Environmental Protection Agency have concluded that significant knowledge gaps will likely prevent experts from adequately assessing biofuels' full environmental impacts (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es2023253). While researchers have paid substantial attention to greenhouse gas emissions, the new study says, they have focused little on how the production and use of biofuels affects biodiversity and human health.

"The last 10 years or so of research may have left us short of understanding what biofuels really may do to global economies, the environment, and society," says Caroline Ridley, an ecologist with the EPA's National Center for Environmental Assessment, in Arlington, Va., who led the study.

Alok Jha: Swiss create 'janitor satellite' to clean up space
[The Guardian, February 15, 2012]

More than half a century of sending objects into space has left the Earth surrounded by junk. Bits of long-dead satellites, spent rocket stages and other debris orbit the planet at almost 18,000 mph, each chunk a potential hazard to working satellites or astronauts.

The Swiss have a plan, however. Scientists at the Swiss space centre at EPFL, the federal institute for technology in Lausanne, want to send a "janitor satellite" into orbit, to sweep up debris and permanently remove it from orbit.

The SFr10m (£7m) satellite, called CleanSpace One, could launch within five years, according to EPFL.

[Continued here]

• Mohammadreza Madi: Cleaning up Earth's orbit: A Swiss satellite tackles space debris [École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, February 15, 2012]

John Timmer: Turning Ireland's water and wind into energy exports
[ars technica, February 20, 2012]

Advances in wind power have made well-sited turbines a very cost-effective method of generating power-when they're working. The variability of wind in even the best of sites, however, can cause wind farms to go from nothing to producing a power output that exceeds demand. This variability has made figuring out how to smooth out the energy produced with wind a major topic of research.

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of science, a panel on energy storage included a talk by Igor Shvets, a researcher at Trinity College in Dublin. Shvets is involved in the planning for an audacious scheme called Spirit of Ireland that would turn large areas of the west coast of that country into a renewable energy powerhouse. If the plan is rolled out to its full extent, Ireland could even end up sending its electricity under the Irish Sea to the UK.

[Continued here]

• Spirit of Ireland

(Click on image to enlarge)



Graham Smith: That's an idea worth floating: The amazing wildlife haven built on water designed to combat urban pollution [Daily Mail, January 17, 2012]

Wide open spaces in cities are becoming an increasingly scarce commodity as the world's urban population continues to expand.

Now an architect has developed a floating park that is a haven for wildlife and will in turn address the rise in pollution.

Koen Olthuis, of Dutch firm Waterstudio, has unveiled the Sea Tree, a multi-tiered structure comprising of layered green habitats.

The water-based park will provide valuable living areas for birds, bees, bats and other small animals, bringing positive green effects to urban environments.

It will also extend underwater, providing aquatic creatures with an environment to thrive.

[Continued here]

• Seabra Affairs blog

Richard Black: Wave and tidal power need support, say MPs
[BBC, February 19, 2012]

The Energy and Climate Change Committee says the UK had in the past lost its early lead on wind power through lack of support, and must not make the same mistake again on marine energy.

Its report recommends increasing funding and improving links between UK and Scottish programmes.

The Carbon Trust recently said marine power could create 10,000 jobs by 2020.

By 2050, it said, the global market could be worth £340bn, with the UK claiming about one-fifth of the business.

[Continued here]

• Mike McKimm: Strangford Lough generator given all-clear [BBC, January 17, 2012]

Leo Hickman: US climate scientists receive hate mail barrage in wake of UEA scandal
[The Guardian, July 5, 2010]

Climate scientists in the US say police inaction has left them defenceless in the face of a torrent of death threats and hate mail, leaving them fearing for their lives and one to contemplate arming himself with a handgun.

The scientists say the threats have increased since the furore over leaked emails from the University of East Anglia began last November, and a sample of the hate mail sent in recent months and seen by the Guardian reveals the scale and vitriolic tone of the abuse.

The scientists revealed they have been told to "go gargle razor blades" and have been described as "Nazi climate murderers". Some emails have been sent to them without any attempt by the sender to disguise their identity. Even though the scientists have received advice from the FBI, the local police say they are not able to act due to the near-total tolerance of "freedom of speech" in the US.

[Continued here]

• David Adam and Allegra Stratton: Science Museum unveils climate change map showing impact of 4C rise [The Guardian, October 22, 2009]
• Understanding and Solving the Climate Change Problem [Stephen H. Schneider's blog at Stanford University]
• Clive Hamilton: Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial [ABC.net.au, February 22, 2010]

Australia's most distinguished climate scientists have become the target of a new form of cyber-bullying aimed at driving them out of the public debate.

In recent months, each time they enter the public debate through a newspaper article or radio interview these scientists are immediately subjected to a torrent of aggressive, abusive and, at times, threatening emails. Apart from the volume and viciousness of the emails, the campaign has two features - it is mostly anonymous and it appears to be orchestrated.

The messages are typically peppered with insults. One scientist was called a "Loudmouth, arrogant, conceited, ignorant wanker".

• Tu Thanh Ha: Canadian climate scientist finds fame, hate mail in U.S. [Globe & Mail, January 10, 2012]

Katharine Hayhoe is now a figure of some fame and controversy in the United States, for her sin is that she is an evangelical Christian who is also a climate scientist trying to convince skeptics that climate change is for real. ...

"It'd be a lot easier to stay home. It's not easy having people standing up and screaming at you. It's not easy opening your mail in the morning and seeing a hundred e-mails, each one more hateful than the last," Dr. Hayhoe said Monday, in her first interview with a Canadian news outlet. ...

That introduction to the sharp-elbowed world of politics was the latest blow for the 39-year-old, who already had a taste of hostile audiences from public speaking at Christian schools, seniors homes, farmers' group and book clubs. ...

"There's a well-organized campaign, primarily in the United States but also in other countries, including Canada and Australia, of bloggers, of people in the media, of basically professional climate deniers whose main goal is to abuse, to harass and to threaten anybody who stands up and says climate change is real - especially anybody who's trying to take that message to audiences that are more traditionally skeptical of this issue."

• James West: MIT Climate Scientist's Wife Threatened in a "Frenzy of Hate" and Cyberbullying Fomented by Deniers [Think Progress, January 15, 2012]

Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented "frenzy of hate" after a video featuring an interview with him was published recently 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."

• Steve Valk: Climate Deniers Hit New Low With Vicious Attacks on Scientists [Huffington Post, January 15, 2012]

Anyone who has ever listened to Hayhoe would be as sickened as I was over the vitriolic attacks she has endured in the past week. Being both a climate scientist and an evangelical Christian, Hayhoe speaks to faith communities, explaining the science of climate change in easy-to-understand language and also offering the spiritual perspective on global warming: What would Jesus do about climate change?

• Bryan Walsh: Does El Nino — and Climate Change — Really Cause Civil Wars? [Time, August 24, 2011]

For several years now, a few academics have been fighting a civil war over the possible effects of climate and global warming on, well, civil war. In 2009 Marshall Burke, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored a paper arguing that higher temperatures increased the risk of civil conflict-and that the warming predicted by 2030 could cause a 54% increase in armed civil conflict in Africa, leading to 393,000 additional battle deaths. Then the following year Halvard Buhaug, a senior researcher at the Centre for the Study of Civil War in Oslo, published a study arguing that Burke's work was essentially poppycock. Buhaug combed through the same data Burke used, finding little evidence that temperature had much impact on the intensity of civil conflict-and noting that the past 10 to 15 years, when temperatures were unusually high, also saw a drop in African warfare. If warming had a discernible effect on civil wars, it was far less important than geopolitical factors, population growth and economic changes.

• News on Livestock and Development [ILRI Clippings blog]
• Bryan Walsh: Virological Trade: Screening Imported Wildlife for Emerging Microbes [Time, January 11, 2012]

Border customs agents are on the look out for many things: illegal drugs, stolen goods, smuggled liquor and sometimes even people. Add one more target: animal-borne viruses. In a new study published on Tuesday in the journal PLoS One, scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the EcoHealth Alliance, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other institutions reported on the first effort to identify new viruses in wildlife products that had been smuggled illegally into the U.S. And it turns out there may be a lot of bugs hitching a ride into the country along with dead wildlife-and that could have serious consequences for public health.