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Archive for April, 2013
Vt. Panel Says State Green Law Applies on Tar Sands Pipeline
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on April 16th, 2013
Associated Press: Environmental regulators ruled Monday that the state's Act 250 land use law would apply to any proposal to reverse the flow in an oil pipeline system that crosses northern Vermont.
The ruling from the District 7 Environmental Commission coordinator in St. Johnsbury is a victory for environmentalists amid fierce debate over another pipeline, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to move tar sands oil from Alberta to Texas.
Groups like the National Wildlife Federation and the Vermont Natural Resources...
Posted in Water Conservation 
Comments Off on Vt. Panel Says State Green Law Applies on Tar Sands PipelineNew Report Finds: Keystone XL Would Increase Gas Prices and Reduce National Security
Posted by EcoWatch: Public Citizen on April 15th, 2013
EcoWatch: The proposed Keystone XL pipeline is likely to increase gas prices contradicting claims by pipeline proponents, a new Public Citizen report finds.
Public Citizen also concluded that because the Keystone pipeline is designed to promote exports from Canadian tar sands, it will reduce national energy security--not bolster it, as pipeline backers claim. The report, America Can’t Afford the Keystone Pipeline, documents rapidly increasing Chinese national government interests in Canadian tar sands,...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on New Report Finds: Keystone XL Would Increase Gas Prices and Reduce National SecurityAntarctic ice melting 10 times faster than 600 years ago
Posted by Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Sarah Clarke on April 15th, 2013
Australian Broadcasting Corporation: A report has found that the Antarctic summer ice melt is now occurring 10 times faster than it did 600 years ago.
Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and the Australian National University drilled a 360-metre ice core near the northern tip of the peninsula to to identify past temperatures.
The ice core gave an extraordinary insight into the temperatures, revealing the coolest conditions, and the lowest melt, occurred six centuries ago.
By comparison, it found temperatures now are...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Antarctic ice melting 10 times faster than 600 years agoWhen oil meets emotion: the Keystone conundrum
Posted by Calgary Herald: Darcy Henton on April 15th, 2013
Calgary Herald: Nebraska farmer Jim Tarnick vows to fight the Keystone XL pipeline to the finish because he believes its approval will be the death of his farm. It's a battle Tarnick says he can't afford to lose. "I will carry it on to the end," the 38-year-old farmer said Friday. "They will really have to take my land from me." If approved by United States President Barack Obama later this year, the Keystone XL pipeline will carry up to 830,000 barrels per day of oil-sands bitumen from Alberta and across Tarnick's...
Climate Change Didn’t Cause the Big Drought
Posted by International Herald Tribune: None Given on April 15th, 2013
International Herald Tribune: During his most recent State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama cited the Great Plains drought last year as an example of extreme weather caused by climate change.
According to a U.S. government report, things are not so simple.
A new report by the Drought Task Force found that the central Great Plains drought, the worst drought in Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota since record keeping began in 1895, was mostly not the result of climate change.
Instead,...
Climate Change Series: The Future Of Food
Posted by WBUR: Molly D. Anderson and John Reilly on April 15th, 2013
WBUR: Of all the uncertainties climate change presents, its impact on the production and distribution of food is one of the greatest. We are already feeling the effects: 2012 was a bad year for farmers, with droughts and erratic weather decimating crops and pushing up global food prices. Food prices are at historic highs and there have been two global food crises in the last five years leading to riots in Haiti in 2008 and contributing to the Arab Spring in 2011.
Molly D. Anderson and John Reilly examine...
Antarctic ice melting at record rate, study shows
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on April 15th, 2013
Press Association: Summer ice is melting at a faster rate in the Antarctic peninsula than at any time in the last 1,000 years, new research has shown.
The evidence comes from a 364-metre ice core containing a record of freezing and melting over the previous millennium.
Layers of ice in the core, drilled from James Ross Island near the northern tip of the peninsula, indicate periods when summer snow on the ice cap thawed and then refroze.
By measuring the thickness of these layers, scientists were able to match...
To Win Support for Keystone, Alberta Premier Pleads Poverty in D.C. Visit
Posted by InsideClimate: John H. Cushman Jr. on April 15th, 2013
InsideClimate: The premier of Alberta, Canada, made another visit to Washington D.C. last week, pleading again for U.S. approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would carry Alberta's heavy crude to refineries on the Texas coast. Without expanded access to markets in the United States and beyond, Premier Alison Redford said, her province's oil sands crude is selling for discounted prices—and that is creating big problems for Alberta's budget, which relies heavily on oil royalties. "It has really had an...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on To Win Support for Keystone, Alberta Premier Pleads Poverty in D.C. VisitDead dolphins and shrimp with no eyes found after BP clean-up
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on April 13th, 2013
Independent: Hundreds of beached dolphin carcasses, shrimp with no eyes, contaminated fish, ancient corals caked in oil and some seriously unwell people are among the legacies that scientists are still uncovering in the wake of BP's Deepwater Horizon spill.
This week it will be three years since the first of 4.9 billion barrels of crude oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, in what is now considered the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. As the scale of the ecological disaster...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Dead dolphins and shrimp with no eyes found after BP clean-upClimate change could hit Atlanta hardest, UGA research predicts
Posted by Online Athens: Lee Shearer on April 13th, 2013
Online Athens: The effects of climate change in Georgia might fall hardest on Atlanta and coastal counties, according to a University of Georgia graduate student’s research.
Binita KC, a doctoral candidate in UGA’s Department of Geography, mapped changing climate variables county by county, noting factors such as how much precipitation levels and temperatures have varied from historical averages, along with extreme weather measures -- flood, drought and heat waves.
Then she added in measures of so-called...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Climate change could hit Atlanta hardest, UGA research predicts