Environment

 by beyondnuclearinternational Irish Sea to be site of seismic blasting at cost of sea life By Linda Pentz Gunter Imagine being subjected to ear-shattering blasts every ten seconds, twenty four hours a day for four straight weeks? By any metric, that would qualify as the most appalling form of torture. But that is exactly what is about to be inflicted on whales, dolphins, seals and other marine creatures in the Irish Sea if a new wave of opposition cannot stop it. The Irish Sea is already the most radioactive sea in the world, in large part a result of decades of radioactive discharges from the Sellafield reprocessing facility on the Cumbrian shoreline. Now, Nuclear Waste Services (NWS) has contracted a company called Shearwater Geosciences to blast its und...

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER Image by Kelly Sikkema. Climate change and global warming, which is the largest part of the ‘change’ aspect, is suddenly getting the kind of special treatment that’s reserved for national tragedies. A special commission has been established to investigate a way out of the biggest human-caused failure of all time. It wouldn’t be quite so disturbing if it were not for the fact that the truth about the widespread danger from fossil fuels has been in the public domain for decades now. People in the highest positions academically, politically, and the business community have known for decades that CO2 emissions will eventually overheat the planet. But, none of them had the balls to stand up to the fossil fuel companies and rightwing hacks and the despica...

BY RICHARD HEINBERG Refinery, Ashland, Kentucky. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. Similar to the two navigational hazards mythologized as sea monsters in ancient Greece—Scylla and Charybdis—which gave rise to sayings such as, “between the devil and the deep blue sea” and “between a rock and a hard place,” modern energy policy has its own Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand is the requirement to maintain sufficient energy flows to avoid economic peril. On the other hand is the need to avert climate catastrophe resulting from such activities. Policymakers naturally want all the benefits of abundant energy with none of the attendant climate risks. But tough choices can no longer be put off. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s response of imposing sanctions on Russia are forci...

BY WES JACKSON – ROBERT JENSEN Chip barge and mills, Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. In a 1970 poster for the first Earth Day and a cartoon the following year, Walt Kelly’s Pogo offered a hard truth about ecological crises: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” That doesn’t mean there are no differences in individuals’ contribution to those crises. Landowners, not agricultural workers who harvest crops, bear responsibility for chemical contamination of the soil. A fast-food restaurant cashier who has to drive to work and the CEO of an oil company cashing in on hydrocarbons are not equally culpable. But how much are landowners’ choices constrained by economic realities outside their control? If all the energy companies stopped producing fossil fuels in ...

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER Jewish settlers accused of destroying Palestinian olive trees Photograph Source: ToddBF – CC BY 2.0 A long time ago in the Milky Way galaxy on a planet named Earth the trees died. It only happened once in the planet’s history. It was during the Permian-Triassic 252 million years ago. Henk Visscher, PhD, Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University makes a living studying exposed fossil beds of the transitional period of the Permian to Triassic era, aka: “The Great Dying.” Significantly, layers of fossils prior to the great extinction event contain lots of pollen, typical of a healthy conifer forest. But, in the Permo-Triassic boundary the pollen is replaced by strands of fossilized fungi, representing an exploding population of nature’s scavenge...