News Release Archive | environment | Accuracy.Org

Climate: Record Heat, Policy Adrift

July 11, 2012

ANNE PETERMANN, anne at globaljusticeecology.org
Petermann is executive director of the Global Justice Ecology Project and coordinator of the STOP Genetically Engineered Trees Campaign. She said today: “The first six months of 2012 were the hottest ever recorded. Thousands of weather records were broken — with nearly 4,000 in June alone.

“These impacts have long been predicted by climate scientists, but are virtually ignored at the international policy level. After the UN Climate Conference in Durban last December, Nature Magazine stated, ‘It is clear that the science of climate change and the politics of climate change, now inhabit parallel worlds.’ The Rio+20 Earth Summit that took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil last month was no exception.

“Very little was accomplished inside the official Rio negotiations. Outside, however, corporate networks such as the Consumer Goods Forum were undertaking their own negotiations, promoting profitable climate change mitigation schemes such as ‘avoided deforestation.’

“This is a noble objective, except that there is no accurate official definition of ‘forests.’ Even plantations of GMO [genetically modified organism] trees can be called forests. For example, ArborGen, a joint initiative of timber companies International Paper and Mead Westvaco, is using climate change to promote genetically engineered non-native eucalyptus trees for production of second generation biofuels and biomass electricity.

“Eucalyptus trees are a documented invasive species in the U.S., and the oils they contain are explosively flammable. The Oakland firestorm of 1991 was fueled by eucalyptus trees. Jim Hightower calls ArborGen’s GE [genetically engineered] eucalyptus trees ‘living firecrackers.’ The Charleston Observer likened them to ‘flammable kudzu.’

“If GE eucalyptus are approved by the USDA, ArborGen plans to sell half a billion of them every year for planting on millions of acres from South Carolina to Texas. In regions already suffering from droughts, one lightning strike in a eucalyptus plantation could set off a catastrophic firestorm.”

Background: “Warmest Half Year On Record For U.S. Mainland, NOAA ‘State Of The Climate’ Reports“

Tagged With: Anne Peterson, environment,

Extreme Weather and Global Warming: “Media Miss the Forest for the Burning Trees”

July 3, 2012

NEIL deMAUSE, neil at demause.net, @neildemause
Neil deMause is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written extensively about climate change coverage for FAIR’s magazine Extra! — including the article “The Fires This Time: In coverage of extreme weather, media downplay climate change.”

He said today: “Despite overwhelming evidence that climate change is causing dramatic changes in weather patterns — from increasingly deadly heat waves and wildfires to hurricanes and tornadoes — media coverage has bent over backwards to avoid making the connection between extreme weather events and the warming climate. Instead, reporters have largely hidden behind the truism that there’s no way to say that any given event was caused by climate change. Yes, in the same way that it’s hard to show that any given person wouldn’t have gotten cancer without smoking cigarettes — but that doesn’t mean that journalists should avoid reporting that smoking kills.”

JOE ROMM, jromm at americanprogress.org
Romm is a senior fellow at American Progress, edits Climate Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. He recently wrote the piece “Hell And High Water Strikes, Media Miss the Forest for the Burning Trees.”

Romm said today: “It is a basic conclusion of climate science that as the average temperature gets warmer, heat waves — which are extremes on top of the average — will get more intense. For the same reason, heat waves will last longer and cover a larger region. Recent research further links Arctic warming, and especially the loss of Arctic ice, to more extreme, prolonged weather events ‘such as drought, flooding, cold spells and heat waves.’

“Since droughts are made more intense by higher temperatures, which dry out the soil, and by earlier snowmelt, more intense droughts have long been predicted to occur as the planet warms. Since wildfires are worsened by drought and heat waves and earlier snowmelt, longer wildfire seasons and more intense firestorms has been another basic prediction.

“We also know that as we warm the oceans, we end up with more water vapor in the atmosphere — 4 percent more than was in the atmosphere just a few decades ago. That is why another basic prediction of climate science has been more intense deluges and floods.

“Scientists have already begun to document stronger heatwaves, worsening drought, longer widlfire seasons, and more intense downpours. Global warming has ‘juiced’ the climate, as if it were on steroids. The question is not whether you can blame a specific weather event on global warming. As Dr. Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research told the New York Times, ‘It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.’”

Tagged With: environment, global warming, Joe Romm, Neil deMause,

Earth Summit: Questioning the “Green Economy”

June 21, 2012

The Miami Herald reports: “More than 50,000 people and representatives of more than 120 countries gather in Rio de Janeiro for the opening of the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development. Topics include the destruction of the rain forest, vanishing coral reefs, land grabs, the need for food security, clean water, the role of women in food production, safe drinking water, energy access, clogged transit systems, jobs and sustainable development as a way of fighting poverty. The conference marks the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio.”

Many environmental and indigenous groups and social movements attending the conference and the adjacent “People’s Summit” are questioning and criticizing the “green economy” approach as offering “false solutions.” — also see: Rio 20, Gears of Change

WINNIE OVERBEEK, winnie at wrm.org.uy
Overbeek is the executive secretary of World Rainforest Movement (Brazil/Uruguay). She wrote the piece “The Great Lie: Monoculture Trees as Forests,” which states: “Tree plantation companies were ‘pioneers’ in the green economy when, in the early 1990s, they started to influence public opinion with claims about the ‘sustainable production cycle’, promoting the positive idea that they were planting carbon-absorbing ‘forests’. However, the negative impacts of large-scale monoculture plantations on local communities and increasing unsustainable paper consumption, especially in the North, were left unmentioned.

“Monoculture oil palm, eucalyptus, rubber and jatropha plantations are also expanding, validated by their alleged ‘green’ benefits such as agrofuel production and carbon sequestration. Locating such plantations in the South allows polluting projects in the North to continue business as usual, due to the idea of the carbon tradeoff.

“Under the United Nations collaborative program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (known as REDD), carbon — not wood or pulp — has become the ‘product’ that offers the best market value and profits from trees. Those who pollute most can continue to evade their responsibility to reduce carbon emission levels by opting for the often cheaper alternative of ‘compensating’ their emissions by buying credits from carbon stored in forests. ‘REDD+’ goes further, including conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

“By commodifying forests, initiatives like REDD and REDD+ may weaken the struggles of forest peoples to guarantee rights to their historic lands and livelihoods. Carbon trading is likely to be distant from local communities’ needs and can impact severely on the lives and opportunities of local people.”

PATRICK BOND, pbond at mail.ngo.za
Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, Bond is author and editor of the recently-released books Politics of Climate Justice and Durban’s Climate Gamble. He wrote the piece “The Green Economy is the Environmentalism of the Rich,” which states: “Perhaps a few environmentally decent projects may get needed subsidies as a result of the G20 and Rio talkshops, and we’ll hear of ‘sustainable development goals’ to replace the fatuous UN Millennium Development Goals in 2015. But the overarching danger is renewed official faith in market mechanisms. No surprise, following the logic of two South African precedents: the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (Rio+10) and last December’s Durban COP17 climate summit. There, the chance to begin urgent environmental planning to reverse ecosystem destruction was lost, sabotaged by big- and medium-governments’ negotiators acting on behalf of their countries’ polluting and privatizing corporations.”
Bond also recently wrote “Inclusive Green Growth or Extractive Greenwashed Decay?”

PABLO SALON, solon at focusweb.org
Salon is the executive director of Focus on the Global South (Bolivia) and was the former ambassador from Bolivia to the United Nations. In his recent piece “At the Crossroads Between Green Economy and Rights of Nature,” he stated: “Nature cannot be submitted to the wills of markets or a laboratory. The answer for the future lies not in scientific inventions that try to cheat nature but in our capacity to listen to nature. Science and technology are capable of everything including destroying the world itself. It is time to stop geo-engineering and all artificial manipulation of the climate, biodiversity and seeds. Humans are not gods.”

LUCIA ORTIZ, lucia at natbrasil.org.br
Ortiz is a coordinator for Friends of the Earth, Brazil. She stated: “World leaders meeting at the Rio+20 Summit should listen to the demands of the alternative Peoples’ Summit in Rio to prove that the UN’s decision-making process and our governments take into account the greater public interest before profit. … The Rio+20 Summit should not promote the ‘green economy’ agenda, which is selling out nature and people, and greenwashing an unjust and unsustainable economic system.”

Tagged With: corporations, economy, environment, Lucia Ortiz, Pablo Salon, Patrick Bond, Rio 20, Winnie Overbeek,

Radioactive Tuna in U.S. from Fukushima * “Meltdown at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”

May 30, 2012

ROBERT ALVAREZ, kitbob at starpower.net
AP is reporting: “Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan’s crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.”

Available for a limited number of interviews, Alvarez is a former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Energy and now a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. He said today: “Radioactive cesium from the Fukushima nuclear accident deposited over 600,000 square-miles of the Pacific, as well as the Northern Hemisphere and Europe. With a half-life of 30 years, cesium-137 mimics potassium as it concentrates in the food chain until it reaches Bluefin Tuna which are at the top. In addition to mercury, Cesium-137 has become another reason why pregnant women, should be discouraged from eating this fish.” Alvarez recently wrote the piece “Why Fukushima Is a Greater Disaster than Chernobyl and a Warning Sign for the U.S.”

KARL GROSSMAN, kgrossman at hamptons.com
Professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, Grossman is author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power and Power Crazy. He just wrote the piece “Meltdown at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Nuclear Denial and the Resignation of Gregory Jaczko,” which states: “The resignation last week of the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is another demonstration of the bankrupt basis of the NRC. Gregory Jaczko repeatedly called for the NRC to apply ‘lessons learned’ from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster in Japan. And, for that, the nuclear industry — quite successfully — went after him fiercely.

“The New York Times in an editorial over the weekend said that President Obama’s choice to replace Jaczko, Allison McFarlane, ‘will need to be as independent and aggressive as Dr. Jaczko.’

“That misses the institutional point.

“The NRC was created in 1974 when Congress abolished the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission after deciding that the AEC’s dual missions of promoting and at the same time regulating nuclear power were deemed a conflict of interest. The AEC was replaced by the NRC which was to regulate nuclear power, and a Department of Energy was later formed to advocate for it.

“However, the same extreme pro-nuclear culture of the AEC continued on at the NRC. It has partnered with the DOE in promoting nuclear power.

“Indeed, neither the AEC, in its more than 25 years, nor the NRC, in its nearly 30 years, ever denied an application for a construction or operating license for a nuclear power plant anywhere, anytime in the United States.”

Tagged With: environment, Fukushima, Karl Grossman, nuclear, Robert Alvarez,

BP Disaster Two Years Later

April 18, 2012

This Friday, April 20, is the two-year anniversary of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 workers and poured 200 million gallons of oil into Gulf waters. Sunday, April 22, is Earth Day.

CHRIS KROMM, chris at southernstudies.org
Kromm is executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, which is releasing a report today titled “Troubled Waters: Two Years After the BP Oil Disaster, a Struggling Gulf Calls for National Leadership for Coastal Recovery.” The report states: “The BP oil disaster has not gone away. Despite BP’s rosy ad campaign, fishing families are struggling to make ends meet and coastal residents are still reporting widespread illnesses from the spill. Gulf communities need national leadership to restore the coast and rebuild the economy — but in Washington, the BP disaster and Gulf recovery have fallen off the national radar. On the two-year anniversary of the BP spill, there are several key steps lawmakers can take to honor the nation’s promise for a full Gulf recovery.”

Kromm said today: “Two years later, Congress has yet to pass one piece of legislation addressing the BP oil spill, and Gulf recovery has slipped off the political agenda. But oil is still washing up on Gulf shores, and coastal communities are still reeling from hard hits to the fishing industry and widespread reports of illnesses related to the spill. Gulf residents are looking for national leadership to help restore the coast and fully recover.”

DERRICK EVANS, tccidirector at gmail.com
Evans is a resident of Gulfport, Mississippi and advisor to the Gulf Coast Fund, a community foundation. He attended BP’s shareholder meeting in London on April 12, 2012, and in an address to the gathering he said the response to the disaster has been a “fiasco.” Evans also invited BP executives and shareholders to visit the Gulf communities still affected by the disaster, and received a positive response from one BP board member.

He said today: “It was good to be able to meet with BP board member Ian Davis, who is the chairman of the Gulf of Mexico Committee and so has responsibility for ensuring that BP is keeping its promises to the people of the Gulf Coast. However, we were disappointed to learn that he knew nothing about the problems we are facing on the ground. He has now agreed to visit affected communities and see for himself what’s really happening, and so we look forward to helping him fulfill that promise.”

AARON VILES, aaron@healthygulf.org
Viles is deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Network, based in New Orleans. He said today: “As we take stock two years into the worst oil drilling disaster we’ve ever seen, it’s clear an honest assessment brings cause for alarm. From dying dolphins to ongoing problems in the oyster fishery, the impacts to wildlife and the communities which rely upon a healthy Gulf remain. Even more outrageous is the inaction from Washington, D.C.

“Two years after the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 we had Earth Day and the birth of the modern environmental movement. Two years after the Exxon Valdez, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 was passed. Here we are, two years after the BP drilling disaster, and not a single law has been signed by the President to restore the Gulf or protect it from future disasters. It’s well past time for the nation to commit to the long-term health of this threatened ecosystem and the people it sustains.”

Tagged With: Aaron Viles, Chris Kromm, corporations, Derrick Evans, environment,

Welcome to the Energy Third-World: the United States

April 2, 2012

MICHAEL T. KLARE, via Leslie Brandon, leslie.brandon at hholt.com
Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of the new book The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. He just wrote the piece “A New Energy Third World in North America? How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State,” which states: “The ‘curse’ of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century ‘new Saudi Arabia’ for ‘tough energy’ — deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

“Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America — the Third World — where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

“Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

“The formula for making Canada and the U.S. the ‘Saudi Arabia’ of the twenty-first century is grim but relatively simple: environmental protections will have to be eviscerated and those who stand in the way of intensified drilling, from landowners to local environmental protection groups, bulldozed out of the way. Put another way, North America will have to be Third-Worldified.

“How we characterize our energy predicament in the coming decades and what path we ultimately select will in large measure determine the fate of this nation.”

Left-Right Coalition Urges $380 Billion in Cuts to “Polluting Technologies”

September 6, 2011

McClatchy reports that “the bipartisan ‘super-committee’ of six Democrats and six Republicans has a goal of finding at least $1.5 trillion more in deficit reduction by Thanksgiving … will hold its first meeting on Sept. 8 [Thursday].”

A coalition of organizations from both sides of the political spectrum recently released Green Scissors 2011, a report urging in $380 billion in cuts to what it sees as environmentally and economically harmful government spending. The group presents the cuts as a way to “protect our natural resources, reduce the growth of government spending, and make a significant dent in the national debt by eliminating harmful spending.”

See the full report at: GreenScissors.com

TYSON SLOCUM, TSlocum at citizen.org
Slocum is the director of the energy program at Public CItizen, a consumer watchdog group that contributed to the report. He said today: “At a time when working families are expected to belt-tighten, so too must wasteful public investments in mature, polluting technologies. For too long lobbyists kept these undeserving programs and tax preferences for the fossil fuel and nuclear industry funded.”

ELI LEHRER, elehrer at heartland.org
Lehrer is the vice president of the Heartland Institute, a think tank promoting limited government that also contributed to the report. He said today: “The Green Scissors report documents the breadth and depth of damage that government spending does to our environment. Cutting government in the right places can make for a cleaner, healthier environment.”

Tagged With: deficit, environment,

Germans Abandoning Nuclear Energy

May 31, 2011

AP reports: “Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany, announced plans Monday to abandon nuclear energy over the next 11 years, outlining an ambitious strategy in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster to replace atomic power with renewable energy sources.”

HARVEY WASSERMAN, solartopia at me.com
Wasserman edits nukefree.org and is author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, AD 2030 (which includes an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.). Wasserman said today: The future of nuclear power has taken severe blows in the wake of Fukushima, accelerating the prospects for a world based on renewable energy. Japan, Germany and Switzerland — all major players — say they will build no more commercial atomic reactors. [Read more...]

Tagged With: environment,

Commission on BP

January 6, 2011

RICHARD STEINER
A retired professor at the University of Alaska, Steiner was deeply involved in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and also followed closely the aftermath of BP’s Deepwater Horizon gusher. He said today: “There is nothing in the recent commission release regarding causes of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy that we didn’t already know, but it is good to have their confirmation. The report lends evidence to the contention that BP and its contractors were grossly negligent, as they knowingly put at risk the safety of the crew and the environment by cutting safety corners. That is the standard for gross negligence, and if proven will expose them to the higher, $20 billion, civil liability fine. [Read more...]

Filed Under: The U.S. Economy Tagged With: BP, drilling, environment, Ken Salazar, oil,

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