Author Archive

Natural gas fracking fires protest over pollution fears

Guardian: Western Pennsylvania is considered the birthplace of commercial oil drilling. On 27 August 1859, Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and changed the course of history. Now, people there are busy trying to stop wells, and the increasingly pervasive drilling practice known as fracking. Fracking is the popular term for hydraulic fracturing, the technique used to extract natural gas from deep beneath the earth's surface. Fracking is promoted by the gas industry as the key to escaping...

Extreme weather events forecast storm over climate change denial

Guardian: Evidence supporting the existence of climate change is pummeling the United States this summer, from the mountain wildfires of Colorado to the recent "derecho" storm that left at least 23 dead and 1.4 million people without power from Illinois to Virginia. The phrase "extreme weather" flashes across television screens from coast to coast, but its connection to climate change is consistently ignored, if not outright mocked. If our news media, including – or especially – the meteorologists, continue...

Keystone XL: a line in the sand for Obama

Guardian: The White House was rocked Tuesday, not only by the 5.9 Richter-scale earthquake, but by the protests mounting outside its gates. More than 2,100 people say they'll risk arrest there during the next two weeks. They oppose the Keystone XL pipeline project, designed to carry heavy crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the US Gulf Coast. A "keystone" in architecture is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the arch together; without it, the structure collapses. By...

A perfect storm of stupid

Guardian: More than 100 people have been killed in Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas as tornadoes hit central and southern US, in the worst year for tornado fatalities for decades. High temperatures are also leading to warnings of an intense hurricane season.The troubled sky reveals The grief it feels. These two lines were written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem "Snow-Flakes", published in a volume in 1863 alongside his epic and better-known "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere". Much of the news...