Saturday, Jul 27th
Last update11:32:54 PM GMT
Environmental Glance
Just how bad has the coal ash situation gotten in the United States? So bad that the Department of Homeland Security has told Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that her committee can't publicly disclose the location of coal ash dumps across the country.
The pollution is so toxic, so dangerous, that an enemy of the United States -- or a storm or some other disrupting event -- could easily cause them to spill out and lay waste to any area nearby.
Single-use plastic bags, a staple of American life, have got to go, the United Nations' top environmental official said Monday.
Although recycling bags is on the rise in the United States, an estimated 90 billion thin bags a year, most used to handle produce and groceries, go unrecycled.
“Our American way of life—300+ million people enjoying historically unprecedented material living standards—is not sustainable.”
Let me repeat Clugston’s words, “…not sustainable.” California cannot sustain its own addition of 1,700 people and 400 vehicles added to that state—daily! It cannot sustain its projected added 20 million people. It does not possess enough water today! The USA cannot continue adding 3.1 million annually, net gain, on its way to adding 100 million in 26 years.
“America is irreparably overextended—we are living hopelessly beyond our means, both ecologically and economically. The available supplies of many critical ecological resources and economic resources upon which we depend will soon be insufficient to enable our American way of life,” Clugston said.
He’s not pretending or making this up! We exploded our civilization to over 300 million people that need to be watered, fed, housed and educated. We’re failing across the nation in May 2009 so what will it be like with an added 100 million? Darned frightening!
Five "uncontacted" tribes are at imminent risk of extinction as oil companies, colonists and loggers invade their territiories. The semi-nomadic groups, who live deep in the forests of Peru, Brazil and Paraguay, are vulnerable to common western diseases such as flu and measles but also risk being killed by armed gangs, according to a report by Survival International, which identifies the five groups as the most threatened on Earth.
Climate change poses as great a threat to the world as the nuclear arms race, scientists warned yesterday as they called on leaders to take urgent action to tackle the problem.
The scientists and Nobel laureates attending a three-day conference hosted by St James's Palace drew up a memorandum calling for global greenhouse gas emissions to peak by 2015. The memorandum from the experts, who included the US energy secretary Steven Chu, said a new global deal on emissions expected at the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen in December was urgently needed.
The environmental organization WWF just released a study that paints a bleak picture of what will happen to the Coral Triangle if nothing is done to protect it. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg led the research team. He says that negotiations to curb carbon emissions, to be held in Copenhagen next December, will be crucial for its survival.
Charge your iPod, kill a polar bear? The choice might not be quite that stark, but an energy watchdog is alarmed about the threat to the environment from the soaring electricity needs of gadgets like MP3 players, mobile phones and flat screen TVs.
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