Some good news for a change:
More major U.S. corporations join boycott of Alberta oil sands fuels
EDMONTON - Another four major U.S. companies are joining the move to either avoid or completely boycott fuel produced from Alberta's oilsands.
"We feel stabbed in the back," Pawa said. "This was really a dastardly move by an administration that said it was a friend of the environment. With friends like this, who needs enemies?"
Plaintiffs' attorneys are shocked by the Obama administration's decision to side with the wrong people on a case known as AEP vs. Connecticut seeking to apply the common law of nuisance to polluters.
A new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism analyzed the coverage of news stories about the Gulf Coast oil spill. The results show that, while everyone else was busy trying to plug the leak, Fox News was putting a "top kill" on coverage of the catastrophe.
Brought to you by...
News Corpse
The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.
Good science, bad news:
Despite growing awareness of the problem of plastic pollution in the world's oceans, little solid scientific information existed to illustrate the nature and scope of the issue. Now, a team of researchers from Sea Education Association (SEA), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and the University of Hawaii (UH) published a study of plastic marine debris based on data collected over 22 years by undergraduate students in the latest issue of the journal Science.
A previously undefined expanse of the western North Atlantic has been found to contain high concentrations of plastic debris, comparable to those observed in the region of the Pacific commonly referred to as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."
The greatest concentration of the more than 64,000 pieces of collected plastic was centered at a latitude roughly corresponding to Atlanta, Georgia.
Said SEA scientist Kara Lavender Law, the Science paper's lead author, "Not only does this important data set provide the first rigorous scientific estimate of the extent and amount of floating plastic at an ocean-basin scale, but the data also confirm that basic ocean physics explains why the plastic accumulates in this region so far from shore."
Surprisingly, despite a great increase in the disposal of plastics over the 22 years of the study, the concentration has not increased.
The whereabouts of the "missing plastic" is unknown.
This is disturbing on many levels, and the report itself offers some seemingly possible explanations, although measurably improved efforts at preventing or recapturing spilled industrial resin pellets is not considered likely, as such residue constitutes but a small fraction of the overall material; and dispersal through anomalous currents and eddies is not considered capable of having offset the fourfold increase in input over the course of the study.
Possible sinks for floating plastic debris include: fragmentation, sedimentation, shore deposition, and ingestion by marine organisms.
It's unlikely that enough plastics could have broken down that much over the study's timeframe, and there's no evidence suggesting much of it sinks.
Because the cohort of pelagic organisms that ingest plastic, their ingestion rates, and the fate of ingested plastics are unknown, it is impossible to estimate the size of this sink.
In other words, we just don't know. The remaining accumulation is massive, but even more is missing, and there are no good explanations. Not that any truly plausible explanations could be defined as "good," anyway.
Further, the model indicates that the minimum time for surface tracer (i.e. drifter or plastic) to reach the collection center from the U.S. eastern seaboard is less than 60 days, at least half the time required to travel from Europe or Africa. The influence of the Gulf Stream is particularly evident in some of the fastest propagation times – 40 days from Washington, DC and Miami, FL, for example – in which tracer traveled along the coast before entering the gyre interior. While not indicative of the size or location of landbased sources, or of the age of debris, these estimates demonstrate how quickly plastic entering the ocean near major U.S. population centers could impact an area more than 1000 km offshore.
Just another contribution of our fossil fuel economy to the world's ecosystems.
If you need a reason, to get out there, and get Democrats re-elected, here ya go ...
Solar Power: Brighter Long-Term Investment Outlook
Energy standards requiring U.S. utilities to use solar power could drive growth for companies ranging from inverter makers to installation financiers
David Bogoslaw, Bloomberg Businessweek, msnbc.com -- 8/25/2010
With U.S. installed capacity growing at a faster pace than that of the international market, the country may be on track to become a more dominant market by 2014, according to Larry Sherwood, an analyst at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC).
Some 23Gw of solar capacity are under development in the U.S., enough to provide electricity for 4.4 million households, according to the Solar Energy Industries Assn. (SEIA). Solar demand in the U.S. is expected to grow 75 percent in 2011, compared with 2010.
Sounds Great! What's the catch?
Please rec the new Mothership #94 here. This one has expired.
The current ROV DIARY: Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #337 - Perpetual fishin' - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Gulf Watchers Overnight/peraspera
Rules of the Road
PLEASE visit Pam LaPier's diary to find out how you can help the Gulf now and in the future. We don't have to be idle! And thanks to Crashing Vor and Pam LaPier for working on this!
Fascinating. I'd be more impressed by people in the USA, not only if we'd figure out how to engage in these sorts of protests...but even dance this well.
h/t to Melvin at Free Speech Zone.
Here we are standing on the brink of a crisis greater than any war, and in itself may be the cause of the greatest conflict ever to be seen by man.
We are turning our oceans into a plastic soup and yet some still insist this is only a physical pollution yet they are also wrong.
We flood our oceans with oil every year let alone merely with the outrageous accidents in the Gulf of Mexico and the slow strangulation of the Niger Delta.
We continue to pollute the very water we drink and then spend billions of dollars and create additional pollution in cleaning it sufficiently for human consumption.
We pump green house gases into the air with unabated ferocity as if our own doom was something to look forward too, yet some still insist on burying their heads in the burning sand.
Perhaps it's just me, but I perceive a lot of negativity lately on this site. It's understandable given our situation. I wanted to highlight a new development that should make a lot of people smile.
Last year, near Christmas, a good friend of mine from BC arrived here in Ontario with one sockeye, telling me that this might be the end. Last years catch was abysmal and the fishery was crashing hard.
The Canadian government was concerned enough to establish a commission to investigate the fishing collapse. The Cohen commission began it's work August 18th.