RSS Feed
Archive for October 13th, 2011
House backs bill delaying toxic pollution controls
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 13th, 2011
Associated Press: The Republican-controlled House is continuing its campaign against environmental regulations, this time passing a bill to delay rules to curb toxic air pollution from industrial boilers and incinerators.
The legislation passed 274-142 on Thursday. It joins a host of other measures aimed at weakening, delaying or scrapping EPA regulations that Republicans view as job killers.
The measures have little chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate. The White House has threatened to veto them....
Posted in 
Lawmakers say pipeline approval process tainted
Posted by Reuters: Timothy Gardner and Jeffrey Jones on October 13th, 2011
Reuters: U.S. lawmakers will urge Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday to reject the proposed route of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, saying they are concerned the approval process has been tainted by alleged conflicts of interest.
Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat, will send a letter to Clinton, signed by more than 20 other lawmakers in the House, criticizing how her department has handled the review of TransCanada Corp's $7 billion pipeline proposal to move crude to Texas from Alberta,...
Coal Industry Deploys Donations, Lobbying as Its Issues Gain Prominence
Posted by Greenwire: Manuel Quinones on October 13th, 2011
Greenwire: As legislation to limit U.S. EPA's power to regulate coal ash hits the House floor this week, environmental advocates see industry footprints all over the bill's language. They say millions of dollars spent in lobbying and campaign contributions have yielded another congressional proposal to block Obama administration environmental oversight -- and have allowed the industry to frame the debate. "I think they have succeeded in turning the issue into a fight over recycling, whether recycling is good...
Q&A: Redesigning Urban Landscapes with People at the Centre
Posted by Inter Press Service: Jose Domingo Guariglia on October 13th, 2011
Inter Press Service: In May 2011, Brazilian journalist Natália Garcia decided to spend one year travelling to different cities around the world to better understand how to make urban landscapes more liveable for inhabitants.
She called her project Cidades para Pessoas (Cities for the People), and the 12 cities in her itinerary were chosen by Danish architect Jan Gehl, responsible for the new urban structure of Copenhagen, also known as "the city of the bicycles".
Garcia has already visited Copenhagen, Amsterdam,...
Starbucks concerned world coffee supply is threatened by climate change
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 13th, 2011
Guardian: Forget about super-sizing into the trenta a few years from now: Starbucks is warning of a threat to world coffee supply because of climate change.
In a telephone interview with the Guardian, Jim Hanna, the company's sustainability director, said its farmers were already seeing the effects of a changing climate, with severe hurricanes and more resistant bugs reducing crop yields.
The company is now preparing for the possibility of a serious threat to global supplies. "What we are really seeing...
Gore links Great Lakes problems to climate change
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 13th, 2011
Associated Press: Former Vice President Al Gore says dealing with the climate change crisis is essential to fixing some of the environmental problems plaguing the Great Lakes.
Gore drew links between results of a warming planet and regional issues affecting the lakes in a speech Thursday in Detroit during the annual meeting of the International Joint Commission, a U.S.-Canadian agency that advises both nations on shared waterways.
He said increasingly intense storms likely caused by global warming are overwhelming...
Al Gore at Wayne State: Climate change to blame for storms, droughts, wildfires
Posted by Detroit Free Press: None Given on October 13th, 2011
Detroit Free Press: Former vice-president and Nobel peace prize winner Al Gore was unbowed and unrepentant in blaming recent storms, droughts and wildfires on climate change.
Gore reeled off statistics about huge downpours in Pakistan and Colombia, wildfires in Australia and drought in Texas in the past year that he said are clear evidence of the looming climate crisis.
Even his own hometown, Nashville, had floods that experts said would onlly be expected once every 1,000 years, he said, and most people had no...
Ohio Shale Drilling Permits Sky Rocket as Potential EPA Moratorium Looms
Posted by Yahoo!: Tara Dodrill on October 13th, 2011
Yahoo!: The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) released shale drilling lease permit figures this week. The monitoring agency issued 45 Utica shale drilling permits this year. A distinct increase in permit requests and approvals occurred from July through September with 27 permits issued to unearth natural gas. Two Democrats from the Ohio House of Representatives authored a measure seeking to halt all hydraulic fracturing activity until the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can conduct...
Conference Renews Eroded Efforts to Combat Desertification
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 13th, 2011
Inter Press Service: Degradation of land is the world's quiet crisis, undercutting food production, increasing water scarcity, impoverishing hundreds of millions of people and affecting two billion overall. Nearly 20 million square kilometres of the earth's arable lands – an area twice the size of Canada – have already been degraded.
Each year, 12 million hectares of land, where 20 million tons of grain could have been grown, are lost to desertification. Unless this trend is reversed soon, feeding the world's growing...
Climate change: Countries plan for unpredictable weather
Posted by Financial Times: Charis Gresser on October 13th, 2011
Financial Times: High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/561c5308-ef38-11e0-918b-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1ahHqFv6o As researchers gain insights into the potential effects of climate change on agriculture, they are able to be more specific about the risk to food production in certain...