By Rachel Cernansky
Sourced from Treehugger
Posted at May 9, 2011, 2:31 pm
TransCanada has said its Keystone I pipeline spilled 500 barrels (21,000 gallons) of oil in North Dakota on Saturday morning. Friends of the Earth says the incident is the 12th spill from the Keystone I pipeline, which is not even a year old.
FOE describes more about this weekend’s spill:
According to eyewitnesses, Saturday’s rupture of the Keystone I pipeline sent a six-story high gusher of oil into the air. The spill occurred at a pumping station, but the spray contaminated soil and water in a nearby field before it could be contained.
The latest spill brings attention again to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, currently (and by the Obama administration. The XL pipeline would carry 900,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day from Canada to Texas. The Keystone I pipeline carries 591,000 barrels a day, and concerns—and opposition—are mounting.
All of us in the green movement are lost before the planet’s real nightmare: not too little fossil fuel – but too much
George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 May 2011 19.30 BS
Photograph: Daniel Pudles
All of us in the green movement are lost before the planet’s real nightmare: not too little fossil fuel – but too much.
You think you’re discussing technologies, and you quickly discover that you’re discussing belief systems. The battle among environmentalists over how or whether our future energy is supplied is a cipher for something much bigger: who we are, who we want to be, how we want society to evolve. Beside these concerns, technical matters – parts per million, costs per megawatt hour, cancers per sievert – carry little weight. We choose our technology – or absence of technology – according to a set of deep beliefs: beliefs that in some cases remain unexamined. Read the complete Post.
ANDREW MIALL
From Friday’s Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Apr. 22, 2011 2:00AM EDT
Well, Earth Day Canada® is now a “brand,” like your toothpaste.
It’s supposed to be about “empowering Canadians to achieve local solutions.” Its mission is “to improve the state of the environment by empowering and helping Canadians to take positive environmental action.” Its vision is that “Earth Day will remain Canada’s strongest positive voice in promoting constructive and sustainable environmental values, actions and solutions.”
Its website boasts a list of corporate sponsors. The sponsored activities seem to be mostly about picking up garbage on roads and the correct disposal of household chemicals. And there’s going to be a gala this summer: “Join us and a capacity crowd of 500 corporate and environmental leaders as we show you just how cool going green can really be.” Read the complete Post.
Feb. 27, 2011
A note from VPOE Jon Cooksey....
Hi all,
Thanks to all who took part in the GreenLibs phenomenon, and voted
yesterday! The very short version of what we accomplished is this: we
stopped (or greatly helped stop) Kevin Falcon from becoming the Premier of
BC. From talking to a lot of people, I'm guessing that was the goal that
got most people to sign up, so accomplishing it in a matter of 6 weeks was
no mean feat! This was a real grassroots movement, that sprouted in a lot
of different places at once. Many thanks to our friends at local
organizations like Conservation Voters of BC and Dogwood, who signed up
voters, interviewed the candidates, made recommendations and so on.
GreenLibs has been, from the start, a pragmatic idea based on the reality
that our next Premier would be one of the BC Liberal candidates, none of
whom were or are "green" by the standards we set. But beyond our primary
Anyone-but-Falcon goal, we also accomplished our secondary goal, which was
to get the word "environment" back on the lips of the candidates. Read the complete Post.
R A Leng
Emeritus Professor, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia
rleng@ozemail.com.au
Abstract
The world appears to be at a most critical period in recent history, a financial crisis precipitated by simultaneous and interrelated/ interactive events including Peak Oil (the end of inexpensive energy),other global resource depletion and climate change all of which are undermining food security particularly in developing countries. There is an urgent need to respond to these challenges in order to produce and deliver food to maintain the present world population, let alone the increased population predicted by 2030 of 8-10 billion people..
The primary underlying cause of world recession appears to be depletion in fossil fuel energy availability. The world has been using more fossil energy then is being discovered and it appears that the reserves of energy that can be cheaply mined are now at peak production (half these resources have been combusted). As oil reserves are depleted, prices will rise continuously with increasing scarcity and the extra demand now coming through the increased wealth in many emerging economies.
Nations have to prepare for a significant rate of depletion of oil reserves and large increases in costs of essentials relative to peoples purchasing power. World population expansion has been promoted by the availability of inexpensive oil, which has supported a “Green Revolution” by providing inexpensive inputs including fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, traction power( lowering the need for labour and reducing the numbers of people in farming) and in places irrigation water. Inexpensive oil allowed food to be produced cheaply but this will change greatly as oil prices rise creating the potential for major disruptions in food availability and even famine. Failure to deal with increasing demand for oil, rising world temperature, failing water availability ( from snow melt, river flows and depleting aquifers) and reduced crop land fertility and availability through erosion, pollution, sea level rise may cause a slump in food production leading to widespread world famine Read the complete Post.
VANCOUVER (January 29th, 2009) – A one-minute animated film made by a group of Vancouver filmmakers won the year-end “2008 People’s Choice Award” in the Friends of the Earth One-Minute Film Competition. Winners were announced in London, England by Friends of the Earth, an international organization seeking to inspire solutions to environmental problems.
Viewers from around the world voted for How to Boil a Frog as their favorite 60-second film among the top 10 entries shown online. This “cheeky animation of a frog incensed by the world hotting up due to climate change” was written and produced by North Vancouver filmmaker, Jon Cooksey. Cooksey has won a lunch in London with one of the judges, Trainspotting Producer Andrew MacDonald. In describing the film, MacDonald said, “The animation How to Boil a Frog is professionally made and fun – it pulls viewers in and gets them thinking about climate change through its original entertaining style.”
How To Boil a Frog tells the story of Lou, a South American tree frog, who appears to be enjoying a Jacuzzi, until we see that he is the proverbial boiling frog, and the heat source is a burning Earth. Lou tastes the planet, and discovers the source of this global warming: oil, factories, and cars. He yanks out the offending fossil-fuelled culprits, and bounces away on a happier planet.
Humanity is threatened by a global-warming crisis. Canada, facing the crisis of global financial meltdown, is looking for ways to keep people working. The time is ripe, it seems, for an era of massive, green public-works projects.
Projects like a 12-kilometre SkyTrain subway line connecting Vancouver to the University of British Columbia.
Imagine that train packed with smiling, eco-guilt-free students zipping on and off their secluded campus by the sea. The UBC subway line, which would run through the heart of the city, is already on the drawing board, slated for 2020. Provincial and Vancouver political leaders have voiced their enthusiasm. The price tag is set at $2.8-billion.
Well, hold on there. Patrick Condon, senior researcher at the Design Centre for Sustainability at UBC, has run further numbers and believes he has a more sensible plan.
Instead of building that train, you could give every new UBC undergrad the keys to their very own Prius automobile. Year after year. Forever.
That’s right. As Prof. Condon calculates in a new study, you’d start by putting the $2.8-billion price of the train into a trust that earns 6-per-cent interest. That would generate $168-million a year – about enough to give every full-time undergrad entering UBC a basic $25,000 hybrid vehicle. (No leather seats – we’re in crisis mode, you know.) Now wouldn’t the planet – not to mention UBC’s recruitment officers – like that approach more than just one measly new subway line? Read the complete Post.
By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com
Posted on December 3, 2008, Printed on December 4, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/109546/
George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America’s wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3,000.
His backers — among them the nastiest polluto-crats in America — are calling in their favors. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble.
If it is now too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must carry much of the blame. His willful trashing of the Middle Climate — the interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilization to flourish — makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity. Bush has waged his war on science with the same obtuse determination with which he has waged his war on terror.
Is it too late? To say so is to make it true. To suggest that there is nothing that can now be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new summary of the science published since last year’s Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that — almost a century ahead of schedule — the critical climate processes might have begun. Read the complete Post.
