Another day, another oil spill, shutting down a substantial stretch of the Mississippi River around New Orleans. The spill occurred on Saturday when a barge carrying oil crashed into a tugboat between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Authorities closed the stretch of river on Sunday and still can’t say exactly how much oil was spilled, […]
Duke Energy’s accidental release of thousands of pounds of coal ash into North Carolina’s Dan River is doing damage far more profound than anyone imagined. This is the time of winter hibernation for turtles, who nest in the river bed. Waking up to find their homes filled with choking poison, they are crawling onto the […]
Oklahoma, where the wind goes sweepin’ ‘cross the plains…is also home to a regular annual quota of “meaningful” earthquakes. According to geographical records, the state usually gets anywhere between forty and a hundred quakes of Richter 2.5 or higher. But last year that number went up by 100 percent…and this year, as of February 18, […]
Just like you should mistrust any company with the word “Freedom” or “Patriot” in its name, don’t assume that a company named “U.S. Oil Sands” is based in the USA. To be fair to truth-in-advertising advocates, of course, the second part of the name is accurate. This Canadian firm just got a permit to pull […]
Get ready to submit a comment about the Keystone XL. Here are four bullet point versions of the same idea: the people who are proposing the pipeline are totally (TOTALLY!) untrustworthy. Pick one, add a few lines of your own, and off you go. • The oil industry has a long and ugly record of […]
The Tar Sands extraction, before and after. When you’re making a public comment, just select one from each group, and you’ll have your very own “original” comment. a – (The Keystone XL pipeline) b – (The extraction of Tar Sands oil) c – (This project) a – (is catastrophic on multiple levels of scale.) b […]
We haven’t succeeded in killing off all our primate relatives yet. A group of scientists has discovered an enormous society of chimpanzees deep in the forests of the DRC and Central African Republic. There may be as many as ten thousand chimps previously unknown to researchers, with their own behavior patterns and communicative vocabulary. The […]
These crazed John-Birch-Society sociopaths have basically formed their own Republican party, which wasn’t hard because the Republican Party is ALWAYS for sale to the highest bidder. And they’re busy amassing even more money than they can supply on their own, by bringing in more of their sort of tycoons — the ones who actively look […]
Well, the numbers are in. And 2012 offers a bit of good news, for those who like their good news heavily upholstered by depressing caveats. Global CO2 emissions have reduced when considered as a percentage of global GDP, to a lower rate than any time in recent history. Now, that doesn’t mean that we’ve actually […]
Here are some bullet points for anyone who wants to visit Regulations.gov and make a public comment about the Keystone XL pipeline. • The inevitable leaks will contaminate one of the nation’s most important aquifers with carcinogens. • Extracting tar sands oil is going to devastate huge expanses of forest, leaving a moonscape behind and […]