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PATH: BS | Science | Environment
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Celebrities Misled By 'Restore The Gulf' Campaign
Posted by Pile
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[Environment]
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 Not long ago, many celebrities got together to make a PSA for the "Be The One" campaign, urging people to sign a petition to save the Gulf of Mexico on the website RestoreTheGulf.com (very similar to the government's website at RestoreTheGulf.gov, which might have caused confusion). This all seems good, until you look at the fine print and dig below the surface... Which is what DeSmogBlog did. It turns out that the campaign's sponsors are "America's WETLAND Foundation", a front group for oil companies (Shell, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, etc), and "Women of the Storm", a Louisiana group with strong ties to America's WETLAND (the founder of the former is married to the chairman of the latter).
The end result seems to be a carefully-orchestrated snowjob by the oil and gas industry to try and get taxpayers to fund the cleanup of their own messes... |
READ MORE | 1 comment since 2014-02-15 23:49:48 | Comment on this Article |
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Top 10 Crazy Facts About The BP Gulf Oil Disaster
Posted by Pile
(17307 views) [E-Mail link]
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[Environment]
[Industry] |
 It's been more than seven weeks since BP's offshore oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, crude oil has been hemorrhaging into ocean waters and wreaking unknown havoc on our ecosystem -- unknown because there is no accurate estimate of how many barrels of oil are contaminating the Gulf.
Though BP officially admits to only a few thousand barrels spilled each day, expert estimates peg the damage at 60,000 barrels or over 2.5 million gallons daily. (Perhaps we'd know more if BP hadn't barred independent engineers from inspecting the breach.) Measures to quell the gusher have proved lackluster at best, and unlike the country's last big oil spill -- Exxon-Valdez in 1989 -- the oil is coming from the ground, not a tanker, so we have no idea how much more oil could continue to pollute the Gulf's waters.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster reminds us what can happen -- and will continue to happen -- when corporate malfeasance and neglect meet governmental regulatory failure.
The corporate media is tracking the disaster with front-page articles and nightly news headlines every day (if it bleeds, or spills, it leads!), but the under-reported aspects to this nightmarish tale paint the most chilling picture of the actors and actions behind the catastrophe. In no particular order, here are 10 things about the BP spill you may not know and may not want to know -- but you should. |
READ MORE | 1 comment since 2010-08-17 10:43:24 | Comment on this Article |
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Time Magazine Story Identifies What Really Destroyed New Orleans
Posted by Pile
(11985 views) [E-Mail link]
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[Environment] |
| The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment "Heckuva job, Brownie." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe. |
READ MORE | 3 comments since 2007-08-14 06:44:40 | Comment on this Article |
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United States: Eighth Best Country To Live In
Posted by Pile
(9499 views) [E-Mail link]
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[Environment]
[Society] |
Woo Hoo! We're #8!
The United States was ranked in eighth place, after Canada and Japan, in the report that rates not only per-capita income but also educational levels, health care, and life expectancy in measuring a nation's well-being.
Topping the list were Norway, Iceland, Australia, Ireland, and Sweden, but Africa's quality of life has plummeted because of AIDS, said a U.N. report released on Thursday. |
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Youtube user "potholer54" is gaining quite a reputation for his instructive and well-referenced videos debunking myths and showing the truth behind various social, cultural and scientific issues. In his latest post, he tackles pragmatic issues regarding global climate change, and looks deep into the skeptics and the resources they use to see who's really telling the truth...
Did you know that the "catfish" on that plate you're eating is not legally defined as a "catfish" by the US Federal government and is therefor exempt from certain regulations restricting the use of drugs and antibiotics?
Americans ate 475 million pounds of tilapia last year, four times the amount a decade ago, making this once obscure African native the most popular farmed fish in the United States. Unfortunately, it's not like other fish, nor does it offer the same health benefits commonly associated with eating fish...
It's easy to forget that each time we turn on a light, we are contributing to the ecological damage caused by the coal that generates electricity in this country. The Last Mountain gives us plenty of reasons to remember.
It goes without saying that most people no longer believe what British Petroleum is saying publicly about the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf and the condition of the well structure. The reality is much more frightening... In a few crevices in Cyberspace, experts in the industry are whispering what they think is really going on...
A first-hand account of heading along the Louisiana coast and examining the effect of the BP Horizon oil spill.
Plaquemines parish president, Billy Nungesser makes a plea to the government to take over the project and stop British Petroleum's control over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as he watches the coastal marshes become irrevocably destroyed by the oil slick...
Right now large areas of the United States are blanketed by a snowstorm, and as predictable as the eventual accumulation of flies on a turd, the conservatives have come out of the woodwork to champion these atypical weather events as "proof" that there is no global warming. Rachael Maddow and Bill Nye respond to the current trend using some amusing analogies...
The Obama Administration recently declassified about 1,000 satellite photographs of Arctic ice the Bush Administration had kept under wraps. The photos didn?t make much of a splash until recently, when two English newspapers, the Guardian and the Daily Mail, published some startling examples of the effects of global warming and how the Bush administration sought to cover this up.
Leave it to a 17-year-old foreign student to run some tests on the popular sweetener sucralose that is Splenda, and find out that the substance does not seem to break down in normal wastewater treatment and might be around in our water supply for a long time, in possibly high enough concentrations to cause harm to people and animals..
Just after midnight on December 22, levees broke at the The Kingston coal power plant, and a man-made pond containing toxic ash - essentially the leftovers from the nearby coal-burning power plant - burst its walls, and more than one billion gallons of coal ash spilled into the Tennessee River and its tributaries.
Every state in the country has U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects, and many of them are in dangerous "vulnerable" condition. 
As global climate change threatens to bring flooding to some areas, and drought to others, the southeastern U.S. is in the grip of the worst drought in decades. One small town in Tennesse has completely 
It's a new modern environmental nightmare: disposable chopsticks. Really. China produces about 45 billion pairs of these little wooden marvels each year, to be used once and then tossed into the nearest landfill, wasting whole forest's worth of trees for a quick rice bowl and the thrill of not having to lug around your own chopsticks.
I've been making it a regular job to go around the city every now and then and take pictures of the "Rebuilding Effort" that has been going on since the Army Corps of Engineers destroyed the city of New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Come take a look at the latest installment...
Global warming. It has many causes, primarily human burning of fossil fuels. But there are a number of factors that may add to it. For example, as polar ice caps melt, sunlight that would have once reflected away from the earth is now absorbed by the darker land and water underneath, making things even warmer. It's the global warming feedback loop.
The Inuit, the native peoples of the world's Arctic regions in Russia, Canada, Alaska, and Greenland (you may know them by the old name, Eskimo), have a little problem. They're having more girl babies than boy babies. A lot more. In some cases, twice as many. And in at least one area in northern Greenland, they're only having girl babies.
So you want to keep the weeds out of your flower bed. How about some nice mulch? How about some nice, cheap mulch made by clear-cutting and grinding up the cypress forests that help to prevent coastal erosion, weaken hurricanes, and provide habitat for wildlife? I mean, trees grow back, right?
There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue, according to a major scientific study. Stocks have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating, according to international team of researchers in the journal Science.
According to MediaMatters, CNN has crossed the line. On Wednesday, the self-proclaimed "Most Trusted Name in News" aired an hour-long special on Global Warming that was anything BUT news.
Google's popular map portal has replaced post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery with pictures taken before the storm, leaving locals feeling like they're in a time loop and even fueling suspicions of a conspiracy.
A recent population survey from the Louisiana Recovery Authority has reported that of the pre-Katrina population of 454,000 people in New Orleans, only about 187,000 remain today. More than a year later, 59% of the population has not returned since the hurricane and the large-scale flooding caused by the failure of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' faulty flood protection system.
This is one of the neatest webcams ever. Imagine a live camera on a watering hold streaming live video from Africa.
I know, I know...it sounds really goofy. Little old ladies knitting sweaters for tiny penguins; this is like the crazy woman who