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Archive for April 27th, 2013
Time for Texas to Get Ready for the Shale Boom
Posted by New York Times: KATE GALBRAITH on April 27th, 2013
New York Times: About a year ago, talk began circulating in this West Texas town about a huge oil-producing formation called the Cline Shale, east of the traditional drilling areas around Midland. Then the oilmen and their rigs arrived. Now homes and hotels are sprouting, “help wanted” signs have multiplied, and a major drilling company has cleared land to build an office and equipment yard. “It is coming, and it is big,” said Greg Wortham, the mayor of Sweetwater, who also serves as executive director of the...
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ESSAY: Freedom Isnt Free, Terrorism Is Pervasive
Posted by Water Conservation Blog on April 27th, 2013
Enduring occasional acts of random terror is the cost of living in a free society. Giving up civil liberties does not provide security, but rather enslaves you in a state of pervasive terror. The human family is threatened by systematized eco-terrorism and other assaults by the elite upon the poor far more than by infrequent criminal acts which the courts can and should handle.
By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk
Terrorism is the act of inspiring terror in others by harming presumed innocents. For many, unjust postmodern life on a dying planet is full of PERVASIVE TERROR. The term terrorism has been usurped by the nanny military state to mean only politically motivated violence that targets the public. While such murder is never justified, in fact it occurs rarely and is not a high-profile threat to most. It is one of the manageable costs of being free.
Infrequent criminal acts, of the sort that recently occurred in Boston and occur much more frequently around the world, are tragic but best handled by the criminal justice system. America has become such a drama-queen nation that it continues to incautiously react to such dastardly acts with endless pundit pontificating, needlessly ...
Arctic Snow Clears the Air
Posted by EurekAlert: National Science Foundation on April 27th, 2013
EurekAlert: National Science Foundation-funded researchers at Purdue University have discovered that sunlit snow is the major source of atmospheric bromine in the Arctic, the key to unique chemical reactions that purge pollutants and destroy ozone. The new research also indicates that the surface snowpack above Arctic sea ice plays a previously unappreciated role in the bromine cycle and that loss of sea ice, which been occurring at an increasingly rapid pace in recent years, could have extremely disruptive...
Researchers unmask climate secrets of sea spray and clouds
Posted by ClimateWire: Stephanie Paige Ogburn on April 27th, 2013
ClimateWire: In the late 1990s, the Hydraulics Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography nearly closed. The lab, founded in 1964, had lost its permanent funding.
Grant Deane, a physical oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego, stepped up to head the lab and rescue it from a possible shutdown. "I was a user of the facility at that time, but I had a broader vision for what could be done beyond my own work," Deane said.
Atmospheric chemist Kimberly Prather, who has just shed new...
Governments focus in on local solutions to climate change
Posted by Reuters: Megan Rowling on April 27th, 2013
Reuters: Governments across Africa and Asia are showing greater interest in supporting local activities to cope with more extreme weather and rising seas, experts say.
Planning and finance officials from seven countries launched a new network that will help them factor climate change into their development plans at an international conference on community-based adaptation to climate change in Dhaka this week.
The group consists of government members from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique,...
Shale gas no certain panacea for Britain
Posted by Voice of Russia: None Given on April 27th, 2013
Voice of Russia: A group of MPs has said that developing shale gas in the UK might not bring down energy prices in the same way it has in North America. They have also warned that developing shale gas would jeopardise the UK’s ability to meet statutory climate targets. VoR's Tom Spender reports.
Public concern
It is too soon to tell if shale gas will solve the UK’s energy problems.
That is the view of the Energy and Climate Change committee, which says conditions in the UK are different from those in the...
The E.P.A.’s Keystone report card
Posted by New York Times: Editorial on April 27th, 2013
New York Times: In the bland, formal language of interagency correspondence, the Environmental Protection Agency has written a trenchant review of the State Department’s most recent effort to assess the consequences of building the Keystone XL pipeline. The E.P.A’.s letter, issued Monday, at the end of the public comment period on the department’s latest draft environmental impact statement, is hardly a favorable report card. The letter commends the State Department for inching slowly toward an understanding of...
Canada: Alberta explores possibility of oil pipeline to Canada’s Arctic
Posted by Toronto Star: Jeff Green on April 27th, 2013
Toronto Star: Alberta has turned its eye to Canada’s Arctic as its latest possible avenue to pipe oil out and into the global market.
The province has backed a $50,000 feasibility study to see if it’s physically and financially viable to pump the oilsands bitumen to Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T., on the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean.
“We’re looking at market access in all directions,” said Mike Feenstra, press secretary for Alberta Energy Minister Ken Hughes.
The province says $30 billion in oilsands revenue...
Oil sands: Alberta eyes Arctic route to get its bitumen to market
Posted by EnergyWire: Margaret Kriz Hobson on April 27th, 2013
EnergyWire: At a time when Canadian officials are aggressively defending TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline project, Alberta's Energy Department is quietly considering an Arctic alternative to carry their bitumen to market.
The department is spending $50,000 to study the pros and cons of building a pipeline from Alberta's oil sands extraction sites north to the small native hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk along the shores of the Beaufort Sea in northwest Canada.
The study, which is being conducted by the Calgary...
In Montana, ranchers line up against coal
Posted by LA Times: Kim Murphy on April 27th, 2013
LA times: Out in these windy stretches of cottonwood and prairie grass, not far from where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer ran into problems at Little Bighorn, a new battle is unfolding over what future energy development in the West will look like.
Here, rancher Wallace McRae and his son, Clint, run cattle on 31,000 acres along Rosebud Creek, land their family has patrolled with horses and tamed with fences for 125 years.
They could probably go on undisturbed for 100 years more if the earth under the...