Environmental Glance
Young people across the country are suing several government agencies for failing to develop a climate change recovery plan, conduct that amounts to a violation of their constitutional rights, says their lawyer Julia Olson.
Their futures are at stake, say the young plaintiffs.
“Climate change is the biggest issue of our time,” said 13-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez, a member of nonprofit Kids vs. Global Warming, a plaintiff in the suit.
“It’s not every day you see young people getting involved politically but the climate crisis is changing all that. Every generation from here on out is going to be affected by climate change,” added Roske-Martinez, who also founded environmental nonprofit Earth Matters and organized successful actions in his hometown of Boulder, Colo.
U.S. Youths sue U.S. government over climate inaction
Lynchburg, Va., oil train derailment illustrates threat to rivers
As Pat Calvert steers a small motorboat over the James River, it’s impossible to not notice the smell of motor oil, and it’s not coming from the boat.
Two days after a CSX train derailed and put three tank cars full of crude oil into the river, Calvert, who keeps tabs on the Upper James River for the James River Association, is only beginning to survey the spill’s impact. Wednesday’s derailment spared the town from catastrophe, but not the river.
Geophysicists link fracking boom to increase in earthquakes
The swarm of earthquakes went on for months in North Central Texas, rattling homes, with reports of broken water pipes and cracked walls and locals blaming the shudders on the fracking boom that’s led to skyrocketing oil and gas production around the nation.
Darlia Hobbs, who lives on Eagle Mountain Lake, about a dozen miles from Fort Worth, said that more than 30 quakes had hit from November to January.
“We have had way too many earthquakes out here because of the fracking and disposal wells,” she said in an interview.
Greenpeace activists block Russian tanker, arrested
Dutch police arrested 44 Greenpeace activists attempting to stop a Russian oil tanker from unloading its cargo of arctic oil in Rotterdam.
Armed anti-terrorist police boarded the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior and made the arrests. Although the ship was towed ashore and those arrested were taken to several Rotterdam police stations, the activists were quickly released. Several were members of the “Arctic 30” who were arrested in Russia in 2013 and jailed for over two months on piracy charges.
Megacities contend with sinking land
Subsiding land is a bigger immediate problem for the world's coastal cities than sea level rise, say scientists. In some parts of the globe, the ground is going down 10 times faster than the water is rising, with the causes very often being driven by human activity.
Decades of ground water extraction saw Tokyo descend two metres before the practice was stopped.
Speaking at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly, researchers said other cities must following suit.
Newfoundland Oil rigs moved due to iceberg threat
The province's offshore regulator sent a short tweet to signal some big movements at sea on Sunday.
The C-NLOPB, or Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, said two large oil rigs were taking evasive action against some equally massive structures off the east coast of Newfoundland.
Vancouver: Fracking comes to the world’s ‘greenest city’
From a plane landing in Vancouver, the city shimmers below. Skyscrapers sheathed in glass reflect water that lies on three sides of downtown. Forested mountains serve as a backdrop that has made it easy for politicians to brand Vancouver the world’s “greenest city.”
There is more to that reputation than just PR. Vancouver’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are among the lowest of any urban center in North America. The city council has made bicycling infrastructure a priority. And in 2008, the government of British Columbia enacted a relatively steep carbon tax that has earned international praise for lowering the province’s per capita consumption of fossil fuels to well below Canada’s average.
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