Sunday, Nov 24th
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Environmental News Archive
When looking for evidence of humanity's hand in climate change, it's easy to spot the belchers of greenhouse gases sitting at eye level: snaking rivers of bumper-to-bumper cars, say, or vapor-shrouded smokestacks at power plants.
Few people tend to look straight up, though, which if you had done it last Friday would've yielded a jittering mess of billowy streaks.
state laws protect us and our children. They do, in many cases, but NOT went it comes to health and safety regulations concerning the fracking of natural gas and oil. In Ohio, there are so many holes in the oil and gas regulations that the loopholes are big enough to drive a bus through.
I wondered what would happen if a truck full of liquid waste (brine) from a horizontally hydrofracked well hit a school bus on one of our rural roads – say Ohio Rt.144 in Athens County where a permit for the Atha Injection well is pending. So I started asking questions.
Almost exactly nine months ago on May 22, 2012, I wrote an editorial in the Fort Collins Coloradoan newspaper, Fort Colllins Should Ban Fracking. And yesterday, on Feb. 19, a sharply divided Fort Collins City Council voted 5-2 to ban fracking in the City of Fort Collins.
Nine months ago the conversation around fracking was relatively new in Colorado and few people and environmental groups were directly addressing it. Now, nine months later, very much has changed—fracking is in the news constantly, many environmental groups are engaged in the fight to stop fracking and the issue is escalating wildly throughout the public across the state.
On Sunday, an estimated crowd of 35,000 people joined the Forward On Climate rally in Washington, DC, where protesters delivered a clear message to President Obama: Take immediate action on climate change by rejecting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
Organizers of the rally described as the “largest in U.S. history” also called on the president to issue overdue Clean Air Act standards to limit carbon pollution from power plants.
After four months helping in ground zero recovery post-Sept. 11, New York City Police Officer Nick Russo sought respite by moving with his family to the rolling hills of Orange County, on the northern fringe of the metropolitan area.
The county has gotten a reputation as a haven for generations of retired or commuting police and firefighters from the city; the hamlet of Westtown wears the nickname "Guns & Hoses."
Robert Kennedy Jr., actress Daryl Hannah, civil rights leader Julian Bond and dozens of other activists attached themselves to the White House gates Wednesday in the latest attention-getting protest against the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Police arrested 48 protesters, who notably included Sierra Club President Allison Chin and Executive Director Michael Brune. That made Wednesday’s event the first officially sanctioned act of civil disobedience allowed in the environmental group’s 120-year history.
The two key ingredients in a big snow: just cold-enough temperatures and a lot of moisture. Combine the chilled air converging on the East with the massive moisture coming from the Gulf of Mexico region and you've got the "perfect setup for a big storm," Kevin Trenberth, of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, told The Huffington Post in an email.
As Trenberth explained, the ideal temperature for a blizzard is just below freezing -- just cold enough to crystalize water into snow. Below that, the atmosphere's ability to hold moisture to create those snowflakes drops by 4 percent for every one degree Fahrenheit fall in temperature.
The Rheas ultimately decided to stay at home in North Carolina and retired in rural Lee County outside of Raleigh. What they didn’t realize is that the new home they bought sits above the Deep River Shale basin, an area potentially rich with deposits of natural gas that makes it the next likely location for fracking.
To make matters worse, because of two arcane laws known as split estates and forced pooling, they may not even have the right to say whether gas companies can drill on their property.
Last year's super drought ook a big bite out of the two most prodigious US crops, corn and soy. But it apparently didn't slow down the spread of weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup (glyphosate), used on crops engineered by Monsanto to resist it. More than 70 percent of all the the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the US is now genetically modified to withstand glyphosate.
Back in 2011, such weeds were already spreading fast. "Monsanto's 'Superweeds' Gallop Through Midwest," declared the headline of a post I wrote then. What's the word you use when an already-galloping horse speeds up? Because that's what's happening. Let's try this: "Monsanto's 'Superweeds' Stampede Through Midwest."
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