Environment

BLM To Protect North Dakota Drinking Water

August 21, 2024 Sharon Kelly, DeSmog. Educate! Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Environment, North Dakota, Water

Last week, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced the results of its most recent oil and gas sale on public lands in North Dakota and Montana. The majority of the proceeds for this round come from a $15.1 million winning bid for a 273-acre parcel located entirely underneath the Missouri River, which serves as a major source of drinking water for millions of Americans. That relatively small lease is a big reminder of the ways shale extraction continues in and around places where people get their drinking water. The sale was made amid continuing battles over just how much public land will be made available to oil and gas drillers, and how much protection will be extended for public lands.

Climate Activists Celebrate Shutting Down Major Polluter

August 18, 2024 Whitney Wildman, Fight Back! News. Resist! Climate Justice, Environment, Minneapolis, pollution

Minneapolis, MN – On August 16, over 100 activists and community members held a celebratory rally in response to winning the struggle to shut down a long-time polluter, Smith Foundry. The Smith Foundry is one of several heavy industrial sites located in the residential Minneapolis neighborhood of East Phillips, one of the most diverse and working-class neighborhoods in Minnesota. The city has long used East Phillips as its toxic dumping ground, and, as a result, East Phillips has some of the highest rates of asthma and cardiovascular disease in the state. Notably, Smith Foundry operated as the top lead polluter in the county, further poisoning an already environmentally overburdened community.

Urgent Call To Action To Revoke The Snowbowl Memorandum Of Agreement

August 15, 2024 Robin Silver, Popular Resistance. Resist! Arizona, Environment, Indigenous Sovereignty, Sacred sites, Snowbowl

Flagstaff, Arizona - Environmental and cultural advocates are expressing outrage following the approval and signing of the Snowbowl Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) by the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation (ACHP), and the United States Forest Service (USFS). This agreement has been established without the incorporation of critical scientific monitoring provisions on the San Francisco Peaks Traditional Cultural Property (TCP), disregarding the recommendations of indigenous Tribes, involved scientist, and respected elders.

A Breath Of Fresh Air In San Diego Port Community

August 13, 2024 Roberto Camacho, Next City. Organize! California, Environment, pollution, San Diego

For decades, San Diego’s port communities like Barrio Logan and National City have been plagued with unhealthy air quality. Residents of communities bordering the 34 miles of coastline encompassed by the Port of San Diego face a barrage of toxic pollutants and other hazardous conditions from industrial shipyards, intersecting neighborhood freeways, and even the U.S. Navy. They believe these hazardous conditions would never be tolerated in San Diego’s more affluent areas. The fight for clean air has been a long, uphill battle for these working-class, historically Mexican-American and immigrant communities.

Kamala Harris’s Environmental Deceptions

August 10, 2024 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Environment, Environmental racism, History, Kamala Harris, San Francisco

Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and the strongest environmental protections the US had ever seen in response to the mass movements of the 1960s. After Nixon, environmental laws gradually improved until Bill Clinton’s administration started rolling them back, especially through global “free trade” deals like NAFTA and those of the WTO, putting the environmental movement on the defensive. Every president since Clinton, Democrat or Republican, has successively worsened environmental protections. Obama expanded fossil fuel production more than any other president in US history, and Biden continued to expand it even more than Trump had. There’s little reason to think that Kamala Harris would be different, and she’s already reversed her opposition to fracking.

DC Circuit Rules Against FERC Approval Of LNG And Pipeline Projects

August 6, 2024 Lindsay Stafford Mader, Sierra Club. Resist! climate crisis, Environment, FERC, Pipelines, Texas, Victory

On Tuesday, Aug. 6, the D.C. Circuit Court issued a decision that effectively cancels the previous approval of three harmful methane gas projects in South Texas by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), marking the first time a court has vacated FERC approval of an LNG terminal. In 2023, FERC reapproved Rio Grande LNG, Texas LNG, and the Rio Bravo pipeline, despite widespread concerns for the harm the projects would cause to the surrounding communities and the climate. The Sierra Club, the City of Port Isabel, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, and Vecinos para el Bienestar de la Comunidad Costera sued FERC for failing to adequately consider the environmental justice impacts and greenhouse gas emissions of the three projects, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act and the Natural Gas Act.

Dark Oxygen: Deep-Sea Discovery Challenges Scientific Assumptions

August 5, 2024 Felicity Bradstock, Naked Capitalism. Educate! Dark Oxygen, Environment, Oceans, Science and technology

The discovery of “dark oxygen”, oxygen produced deep under the surface of the sea, is shining a light on the potential risks of deep-sea mining for metals and minerals. There has already been great controversy over plans to approve deep-sea mining activities at the international level, to meet the growing demand for critical minerals, and the recent discovery demonstrates just how little we know about marine ecosystems. An international team of researchers recently discovered that oxygen is being made by potato-shaped metallic nodules deep under the surface of the Pacific Ocean. In July, their findings, which throw into dispute the concepts of oxygen production, were published in the Nature Geoscience journal.

Cry, The Beloved World

August 5, 2024 Gus Speth, Resilience. Strategize! Biodiversity, climate crisis, Environment, Sustainability

Here is a topic miles away from the 2024 elections, though it should not be. Its political salience is just about zero, but it concerns the future of life on Earth. I could be referring to the recent surge in spending on nuclear weapons, but the devastation I will write about is slower yet no less problematic. If you are of a certain age, you may remember the children’s book, The Wump World. It first appeared in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. Its message was clear. The bountiful, bucolic world of the Wumps, with its lovely bumbershoot trees and plentiful grasses for grazing, was denuded and impoverished by the Pollutians, who had colonized the Wump’s planet because they had destroyed their own.

Bridging The Human / Nature Divide Through Convivial Conservation

August 1, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Capitalism, Conservation, Environment, The Commons

The conservation movement has always lived within the contractions of the capitalist political economy. Much of it celebrates the global system of market growth, private property, and profit-making while trying, in irregular, PR-driven ways, to compensate for the appalling ecological destruction of this system by creating nature preserves. More recently, the conservation establishment has explicitly come to embrace market-based forms of conservation, such as eco-tourism, hunting, and the patenting of exotic plant genes. Land is recast as "natural capital" and made to pay tribute to markets to assure its own protection. The problem with both of these approaches to conservation is that they regard humans as entirely separate from nature, a premise that is biologically absurd.

Five Ways Permaculture Must Change

July 22, 2024 The Last Farm, Resilience. Create! Environment, Food Security, Invasive species, Permaculture, Science

I’ve been a permaculture enthusiast for over 25 years. It has influenced my thinking about ecology, subsistence, and the role of human beings in our biosphere. I have experimented with countless techniques, read dozens of books, and learned a wealth of things from other practitioners. I regard it as an overwhelmingly positive experience. That said, there have always been aspects of permaculture that haven’t sat right with me. This is made somewhat complicated by the fact that there are different strains of permaculture which lean in different directions; some I have more affinity with than others (I’m oriented towards science rather than mysticism.)

Big Oil Rallies To Obstruct Accountability

July 20, 2024 Emily Sanders, DeSmog. Resist! Big Oil, BP, Chevron, climate crisis, Energy, Environment, ExxonMobil, Fossil Fuels, Oil and Gas, Politics and Policy, Science Denial, shell

In the face of mounting scrutiny from local, state, and federal officials, fossil fuel companies and their allies are deploying a range of tactics to obstruct ongoing lawsuits and investigations concerning evidence that the industry has misled the public about the harms it knew its products would cause to the climate, environment, and human health. Far-right industry allies with ties to Chevron have mounted an “unprecedented” pressure campaign calling on the Supreme Court to stop a potentially historic climate deception lawsuit against oil majors from going to trial. Republican attorneys general are separately urging the Supreme Court to throw out similar climate fraud lawsuits from five states.

California Regulators Refuse To Enforce New Orphan Well Rules

July 18, 2024 Joe Fassler, DeSmog. Resist! California, Environment, Oil and Gas, Politics and Policy, Social Justice

As two of California’s largest oil and gas companies join by corporate merger, state regulators are declining to apply tough new rules governing the transfer of defunct oil and gas wells, DeSmog has learned. But a growing chorus of California legislators say that nonenforcement stance violates a groundbreaking law they fought to pass just months ago — and they, along with dozens of environmental groups, are demanding that regulators change course. “They’re just ignoring the statute,” Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an interview. “We need the governor to step in and tell the agency to follow the law,” she added

The Death Squads Hunting Environmental Defenders

July 10, 2024 Alessandra Bergamin, In These Times. Educate! Assassination, Environment, Environmental Activists, extrajudicial murder, History

Before the day’s light had begun to dim, Brandon Lee picked up his phone and texted Sister Genny. “Even until now,” he told the nun, “I feel like I’m being watched.” It was Tuesday, August 6, 2019, and the habagat season was pulling tropical storms across the mountains of the Cordillera, the rural interior of the Philippine island of Luzon. In Lee’s home province of Ifugao, the threat of a deluge had passed, leaving behind leaden skies and the sticky heat of the wet season. For a week, after a fraught decision made with his wife, Bernice, Lee had hardly left their home in the municipality of Lagawe. He no longer went to work at the office down the road, no longer walked his niece and daughter to school, no longer went anywhere on foot.

How To Create A ‘World Without Waste’; The Plastic Industry Has Ideas

July 10, 2024 Joseph Winters, DeSmog. Educate! Environment, False Solution, Plastic Industry, plastic pollution, Plastics

In the time it takes you to read this sentence — say, four seconds — the world produces nearly 60 metric tons of plastic, almost entirely out of fossil fuels. That’s about 53,000 metric tons an hour, 1.3 million metric tons a day, or 460 million metric tons a year. Those numbers are fueling widespread and growing contamination of Earth’s oceans, rivers, and the terrestrial environment with plastic trash. In March 2022, the United Nations’ 193 member states got together in Nairobi, Kenya, and agreed to do something about it. They pledged to negotiate a treaty to “end plastic pollution,” with the goal of delivering a final draft by 2025.

Fishery Protection Measures Marred By ‘Massive Conflicts Of Interest’

July 9, 2024 Brigitte Wear, Hazel Healy and Michaela Herrmann, DeSmog. Educate! Africa, Animals, Aquaculture, Environment, Fish, greenwashing, West Africa

Flagship initiatives to ensure “responsible sourcing” for the global aquafeed industry in West Africa are being undermined by systemic conflicts of interest, endangering efforts to safeguard critical fish stocks, DeSmog can reveal. The findings raise concerns at a time of growing evidence of the harms caused by the fishmeal industry in the region, prompting accusations of “greenwashing” from campaigners. In the last decade, factories producing fishmeal and fish oil – the engine of the carnivorous fish farming industry – have proliferated along the West African coastlines of Mauritania, Senegal and The Gambia.

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