Environment Archives - Page 23 of 28

24Feb

By SHOAHNo Comments

Canada, Environment

The Media & the WWF Torture Scandal

News organizations have turned their own journalists into WWF cheerleaders By Donna Laframboise Click for source Earlier this month, BuzzFeed published a three-part exposé about violent goons, funded and equipped by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who persecute indigenous communities. In the words of the BuzzFeed journalists, the WWF works directly with paramilitary forces that have been accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people. As recently as 2017, forest rangers at a WWF-funded park in Cameroon tortured an 11-year-old boy in front of his parents… UK politicians have called on the government to respond to these “appalling and deeply disturbing” allegations. US senator Patrick Leahy has li...

22Feb

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Environment, USA

Bloomberg is a Climate Change Con Man

by JOSHUA FRANK Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair It’s an open secret in environmental circles that Michael Bloomberg is a climate change con man, and organizations like the Sierra Club that take hundreds of millions in donations from the former New York City mayor to fight coal, are complicit in his fraudulent scheme to coopt the climate change movement for his own profit. In Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, Bloomberg pompously claimed, “We’re closing the coal-fired power plants. If we could enforce some of the rules on fracking so that they don’t release methane into the air and into the water, you’ll make a big difference. But we’re not going to get rid of fracking for a while. And we, incidentally not just natural gas. You frack oil, as well. It is a technique,...

31Jan

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Environment, USA

Trump’s War on the Environment Imperils Us All

by GEORGE OCHENSKI Halsey, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. While the eyes of the nation are on the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the industry lobbyists he put in charge of federal environmental regulatory agencies have been busily carrying out an underhanded war on the environment. Attacking long-standing regulations on pollution of air, land, water, and endangered species that have, in large part, served the nation well has been their mission from day one of the Trump administration. Now, adding to the rogue’s list of rollbacks, the EPA has decided to gut the Clean Water Act, imperiling us, our children, grandchildren, and generations yet to come. This development, which will have very damaging and long-lasting consequences, may have surprised some because...

28Jan

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Environment, Health

A Climate Time Bomb With Trump’s Name Inscribed

by ROBERT HUNZIKER Photograph Source: NASA – Public Domain Thwaites, in West Antarctica, is the world’s most dangerous glacier. As of January 15th, scientists have labeled it: “A Climate Time Bomb.” Thwaites is crumbling apart on the underneath side where warm ocean currents circulate, which is clear evidence that global warming is really, truly hitting its stride even as America, obeying President Trump’s orders, rejected its commitment to Paris ’15, a major climate agreement of almost all the nations of the world. In point of fact, America is too focused on ceaseless (mindless) NYSE trading at new heights to give even a passing thought to something as remote as Thwaites Glacier crumbling apart from inside-out (9,072 miles away, forever far away in the mindset of simple-m...

28Jan

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Environment, USA

Don’t Kill 72 Grizzly Bears So Cattle Can Graze on Public Lands

by MIKE GARRITY – JASON CHRISTENSEN Greater Yellowstone grizzly. Photo: National Park Service. We have tens of millions of cattle in America but we only have about 700 grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Yet an October 2019 decision by the Bridger-Teton National Forest’s Pinedale District authorizes continued cattle grazing on 267 square miles of public lands that will result in the deaths of an estimated 72 grizzly bears in the Upper Green River and Gros Ventre River drainages on the southern border of Yellowstone National Park. In response, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Yellowstone-to-Uintas Connection, and Western Watershed Project recently sent a 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue to the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildli...

20Jan

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Environment

Mega Droughts Engulf Countries

by ROBERT HUNZIKER Photograph Source: Mark Heard from Calgary, Alberta, Canada – CC BY 2.0 Throughout the world, mega droughts are hitting hard with a ferocity not seen in decades and in some cases not seen in centuries. It’s not merely coincidental that as global warming accelerates droughts turn more vicious than ever before. All of which begs the logical question of when will world leaders wake up with a unified plan of action to mitigate carbon emissions, or is it already too late? Nobody knows for sure if and when it is too late, but the evidence is crystal clear that extraordinarily powerful droughts are decimating regions of the planet like there’s no tomorrow. An Australian research paper addressed the issue: Multi-century Cool-and Warm-Season rainfall Reconst...

20Jan

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Australia, Environment

Australia on the Chasm of Climate Catastrophe

by EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS Fires burning East Australia, December 2019. Courtesy NASA. Public Domain. Australia: coal and Murdoch are kings Australia has had a series of bad governments beholden to the coal industry and to the Rupert Murdoch propaganda machine. The media empire of Murdoch controls about 60 percent of the newspapers and television stations. The Murdoch message, just like the message of Fox TV in America, is in defense of the oligarchs and against environmental protection of any kind. This propaganda is in accord with the continued use of fossil fuels and the ceaseless destruction of the natural world. Young people brought up on this diet of lies become vociferous in their advocacy of violence and undemocratic politics. I used to write for a...

15Jan

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Environment

World Gone Wrong: an Environmental Diary of 2019

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Northern Harrier, Columbia marshlands. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. January, 2019 + Ryan Zinke, under investigation for trying to enrich himself in office, refused to step down from his post at the Interior Department until he could have a Christmas party with lobbyists and take pictures in front of a stuffed polar bear… + Zinke’s greed was largely personal. His likely replacement David Bernahrdt, a former lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, will dutifully feed the greed of the shareholders of big oil and coal. + The Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations all did a lot to advance the interests of Big Coal and almost nothing to fight black lung disease. + There are fewer North Atlantic Right Whales left in the...

8Jan

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Environment

CO2 and Climate Change, Old and New

by MANUEL GARCÍA, JR. Pulp Mill, Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. How long has science known about CO2-induced climate change, and are we clever enough today to geo-engineer our way out of cooking ourselves to extinction? In brief: a long time, and most likely no. Clive Thompson has written engagingly about the 19th century scientists — Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), Eunice Newton Foote (1819-1888), John Tyndall (1820-1893), Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927), Arvid Högbom (1857-1940), and Samuel Pierpont Langley (1834-1906) — whose work in aggregate pieced together the essential facts about CO2-induced global warming. [1] In 1856 Eunice Newton Foote, an American woman, suffragette and amateur scientist, conducted the first known experiment in CO2-induced climate change...

3Jan

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Environment, USA

Kill GDP to Help Save the Planet

by ROBERT HUNZIKER Image Source: Ali Zifan – CC0 There’s a problem with America’s favorite statistic: GDP. It avoids pretty much everything that’s actually, truly, really good for society, including the importance of robust ecology. Still, it’s the biggest measure of what’s happening with the economy and used around the world, even though horribly flawed. According to some forward thinkers, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the monetary value of all finished goods and services, is a distortion that needs fixing. Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s (former chief economist of the World Bank) new book: Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being, The New Press, 2019 tackles the issue by exposing its paramount importance in judging how society gauges prosperity...