Archive for September 6th, 2011

Toxic Waste Victims Wait Years for Compensation

Inter Press Service: Thousands of victims affected by toxic waste dumping in 2006 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire's commercial capital, still have not received the economic compensation they were promised. "There is a complete lack of transparency as to what happened to the millions of dollars which should have been paid out by the government compensation scheme," Benedetta Lacey, special advisor on corporate accountability at Amnesty International, told IPS. According to a United Nations report published in 2009, toxic...

Canada: Native Lands Ruling Opens Up New Questions

Inter Press Service: dAs Canada's aboriginal community celebrates last month's milestone legal ruling regarding clear-cutting in Ontario and the forestry sector mulls its future strategy, discussions are taking place about how to carry out an impact assessment evaluating damage incurred by decades of industry encroachment on traditional lands and forests. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice in mid-August ruled that the province, which has offered companies logging and mining rights in the past, cannot infringe on...

Texas A&M prof says study shows that clouds don’t cause climate change

EurekAlert: Clouds only amplify climate change, says a Texas A&M University professor in a study that rebuts recent claims that clouds are actually the root cause of climate change. Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M atmospheric sciences professor considered one of the nation's experts on climate variations, says decades of data support the mainstream and long-held view that clouds are primarily acting as a so-called "feedback" that amplifies warming from human activity. His work is published today in the American...

Climate test for Obama: 1252 people arrested over notorious oil pipeline

Mongabay: Two weeks of climate disobedience at the White House ended over the weekend with 1,252 people arrested in total. Activists were protesting the controversial Keystone XL pipeline in an effort to pressure US President Barack Obama to turn down the project. If built the pipeline would bring oil from Alberta's tar sands through six US states down to Texas refineries. While protestors fear pollution from potential spills, especially in the Ogallala Aquifer which supplies water to millions, the major fight...

Two dead in Texas wildfires, homes destroyed

Reuters: Sixty separate wildfires, whipped by strong winds, were burning across Texas on Monday, destroying hundreds of homes and killing at least two people, officials said. Authorities in Gregg County, in northeast Texas, say a 20-year-old woman and her 18-month-old daughter were killed on Sunday when they were trapped in their mobile home by flames. The Texas Forest Service estimates 424 homes may have been destroyed so far, including 300 from the so-called Bastrop County Complex fire east of Austin....

Unlocked by melting ice-caps, the great polar oil rush has begun

Independent: It's the melting of the Arctic ice, as the climate warms, that makes it possible - and you can understand why they're all piling in. In July 2008, the US Geological Survey released the first ever publicly available estimate of the oil locked in the earth north of the Arctic Circle. Scramble for hydrocarbons above the Arctic Circle: click here to download graphic (900k) It was 90 billion barrels, representing an estimated 13 per cent of the world's undiscovered oil resources. If you're an oil...