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Archive for August 6th, 2010
ALERT UPDATE: India’s Dongria Kondh Tribal Way of Life Threatened by British Vedanta Mining Lets Build on Initial Success
Posted by Water Conservation Blog on August 6th, 2010
TAKE ACTION HERE NOW!
Vedanta Resources, a British mining company, is set to destroy the forests, wildlife and way of life of the Dongria Kondh people. A new protest email has been added which is going to Indian government officials in support of local demands. Please take part in this new protest target. Also, our action to date has caused HSBC and WestLB banks to publicly distance themselves from Vedanta and Niyamgiri mining, an early success. This is reflected in the updated 2nd email to send. Please send both! EI is doing this alert in close consultation with local communities through John Seed and Rainforest Information Centre, Australia.
TAKE ACTION HERE NOW
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Comments Off on ALERT UPDATE: India’s Dongria Kondh Tribal Way of Life Threatened by British Vedanta Mining Lets Build on Initial SuccessInvader Carp May Have Been at Home
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 6th, 2010
Associated Press: A 3-foot-long Asian carp discovered in a Chicago waterway near Lake Michigan appears to have spent most of its life there and may have been planted by humans who did not know the environmental risk it posed, researchers said Thursday. Tests suggested it was not a recent arrival to the waterway and probably did not get there by evading an electric barrier meant to prevent the species from infesting the Great Lakes, said Jim Garvey, a biologist at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The ...
BP’s top oil spill response exec back to old job
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 6th, 2010
Associated Press: The BP executive responsible for the petroleum giant's response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is returning to his old job in Houston. BP announced Friday that Doug Suttles will leave immediately for his previous job as chief operating officer for BP Exploration and Production. He has spent more than three months managing the oil spill response. Suttles will be replaced by Mike Utsler, who has been running BP's command post in Houma (HOH-muh), La., since April. Utsler ...
Thirsty Cows, Poor Nations and the Tragic Ironies of Climate Change
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 6th, 2010
Huffington Post: Today, every office in the small South American nation of Bolivia is closed as the country celebrates its 185th Independence Day. Every office, that is, but the tiny, sparsely equipped mayoral office of Pasorapa. A small municipality of 5,000 in the heart of Bolivia's Andean valleys, the town recently declared a state of natural emergency. Though never a lush region, a drought has slowly set in over the course of the last decade as annual levels of rainfall have declined and temperatures ...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Thirsty Cows, Poor Nations and the Tragic Ironies of Climate ChangeSpurned Chinese developers blast U.N. CO2 rulings
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 6th, 2010
Reuters: Developers behind the 19 Chinese wind and hydropower projects rejected by a U.N.-backed clean energy investment panel have accused the board in charge of making arbitrary and non-transparent rule changes. Most said they had no choice but to reapply to try to earn internationally tradeable carbon offsets they said were needed to make their projects viable. At its meeting in Bonn, Germany, at the end of July, the Executive Board running the U.N.'s Clean Development Mechanism ...
A ‘Small’ Spill: China’s Environmental Tango
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 6th, 2010
New York Times: Not long after taking up work in Beijing, I ran across an interesting chart that, reduced to a nutshell, says this: when Beijing's air is bad, the government tweaks things to make its pollution reports look better than they really are. Pig-lipsticking, of course, is anything but a Chinese invention, but on Chinese environmental matters, it has long been something of an art. Consider November 2005, when Harbin's city government announced that it was shutting down the city water supply ...
Ancient Hawaiian Glaciers Yield Climate Impact Clues
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 6th, 2010
redOrbit: Boulders deposited by an ancient glacier that once covered the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii have provided more evidence of the extraordinary power and reach of global change, particularly the slowdown of a North Atlantic Ocean current system that could happen again and continues to be a concern to climate scientists. A new study has found geochemical clues near the summit of Mauna Kea that tell a story of ancient glacier formation, the influence of the most recent ice ...
United Kingdom: 1 in 4 Blue Flag beaches ‘should lose status’
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 6th, 2010
Press Association: More than a quarter of Britain's top-rated beaches should be stripped of their Blue Flag status, campaigners said today. According to research by Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), 34 beaches are unable to comply with a requirement imposed by the Blue Flag programme to warn the public about raw sewage spilling into the sea. Britain has 131 beaches which have passed strict tests to fly the flag - showing excellence in water quality and beach cleanliness. But using the Freedom ...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on United Kingdom: 1 in 4 Blue Flag beaches ‘should lose status’Polar bears face melting chemical cocktail
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 6th, 2010
Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Polar bears, the icon of the Arctic, are under threat from the twin challenges of climate change and chemicals that are not breaking down in the region's cold waters. Research published in the journal Science of The Total Environment shows the retreat of sea-ice in the Arctic could increase the exposure of species such as polar bears to persistent organic pollutants, which include flame-retardants and substances used to harden plastics. Scientists believe the pollutants, locked ...
Russia: Planes diverted and offices close as Moscow chokes
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on August 6th, 2010
Reuters: Dense clouds of acrid smoke from peat and forest fires choked Russia's capital on Friday, seeping into homes and offices, diverting planes and prompting exhausted Muscovites to wear surgical masks to filter the foul air. Air pollution surged to five times normal levels in the city of 10.5 million, the highest sustained contamination since Russia's worst heatwave in over a century began a month ago. "It feels like I'm in a burning house and I can't escape," said Yelena Petrenko, ...
Posted in Water Conservation Comments Off on Russia: Planes diverted and offices close as Moscow chokes