Is California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan Really About Conservation?
To understand what California Governor Jerry Brown’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan is all about, you have to understand a bit of history. Back in 1982, once and future governor Jerry Brown pushed through a plan to build a canal that would divert water from the Sacramento River before it gets to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River […]
Feds To Resume Oil And Gas Leases Despite Fracking Report That Raised "Grave Concerns"
Jim Kenna, the California Director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, told reporters on a conference call last Thursday that a new scientific report commissioned by the agency to study the environmental impacts of fracking has cleared the way for the leasing of public land to oil and gas companies in the Golden State. Environmentalists, on the other […]
Australia’s Climate Change Conspiracy Theorists Get Angry Over Radio Interview That Never Happened
In the space of six days, Rupert Murdoch‘s The Australian newspaper has published five news stories and an opinion piece attacking the credibility of the Australian government’s weather and climate agency, the Bureau of Meteorology. I’ve covered the guts of the early stories over on my Planet Oz blog for The Guardian. But the core of it […]
Stealth Carbon Bombs Stopped In Their Tracks
North America is now the biggest producer of oil in the world thanks largely to Canada’s tar sands and North Dakota’s Bakken shale, and West Coast refineries are looking to cash in. But not all crude is created equal, and oil companies hoping to import tar sands oil and Bakken crude — known as “cost-advantaged crude” […]
Clean Energy Jobs Surge Just In Time for Labor Day
“This Labor Day weekend, the story is that more Americans are working because of clean energy.” That’s the statement released by Environmental Entrepeneurs Executive Director Bob Keefe to accompany his organization’s Labor Day jobs report. As the report shows, it’s certainly looking sunny for the sustainable energy and transportation sectors, which created some 12,500 new […]
Global Warming Already Dangerous, May Be Irreversible: Draft IPCC Report
Problems caused by climate change are likely already dangerous and global warming may be irreversible, according to a draft science report by a United Nations committee. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) report, leaked earlier this week to a number of major media organizations, said continued greenhouse gas emissions caused primarily by burning oil, coal […]
Obama Opened Floodgates for Offshore Fracking in Recent Gulf of Mexico Lease
In little-noticed news arising out of a recent Gulf of Mexico offshore oil and gas lease held by the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the floodgates have opened for Gulf offshore hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). With 21.6 million acres auctioned off by the Obama Administration and 433,822 acres receiving bids, some press accounts […]
State Dept. Overseers of Contentious Enbridge Tar Sands Pipeline Workaround Have Industry, Torture Ties
The Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and other green groups recently revealed that pipeline giant Enbridge got U.S. State Department permission in response to its request to construct a U.S.-Canada border-crossing tar sands pipeline without earning an obligatory Presidential Permit. Enbridge originally applied to the Obama State Department to expand capacity of its Alberta Clipper (now […]
Mount Polley: A Wake-Up Call For Canada’s Mining Industry
This is a guest post by David Suzuki. When a tailings pond broke at the Mount Polley gold and copper mine in south-central B.C., spilling millions of cubic metres of waste into a salmon-bearing stream, B.C. Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett called it an “extremely rare” occurrence, the first in 40 years for mines operating here. […]
Florida Governor Rick Scott Meets With Climate Scientists, Learns Nothing
Republican Florida governor Rick Scott has always had a huge problem when it comes to the environment. To begin with, he has repeatedly made it clear that he does not believe in climate change, and certainly not the role that human beings play in exacerbating the problem. But, facing a fierce opponent with a stellar […]