EcoJustice: The dam age is not yet done. Avatar needs help.

by citisven

The Brazilian government is about to decide whether to construct Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon, a massive project that would become the world's 3rd largest hydroelectric dam.

As any large scale engineering project that is going to alter the natural environment and uproot indigenous and riverbank communities en masse, there is a lot of controversy swirling around the proposition.

Last week, Avatar director James Cameron released his new film, "A Message from Pandora," a short film spotlighting the ecological, social and financial costs of this behemoth and the battle that is being waged to stop it. Here's a short preview:

direct link

Sign the petition to stop the Belo Monte dam and save the Amazon rainforest.

continued at Daily Kos....

Macca's Meatless Monday...Pie Baby Pie

by beach babe in fl

In this weekly series we have been discussing the many benefits of a vegetarian diet including: better health , food safety, animal rights (turkey) , global food crisis, frugal living and the immense contribution of meat production to climate change/resource depletion/public health

Join Dennis Kucinich for Thanksgiving Dinner

continued at Daily Kos....

Gulf Watchers Monday - Change in Oil Spill Fund Rules: Will BP Benefit? - BP Catastrophe AUV #430

by shanesnana

Bookmark this link to find the latest Gulf Watchers diaries.

Please RECOMMEND THIS DIARY, the motherships have been discontinued.

On Thanksgiving weekend there won't be a morning Friday Gulf Watchers AUV diary but there will be a Gulf Watchers Friday Block Party.

Gulf Watchers Diary Schedule
Monday - evening drive time
Wednesday - morning
Friday - morning
Friday Block Party - evening
Sunday - morning

Part one of the digest of diaries is here and part two is here.

Please be kind to kossacks with bandwidth issues. Please do not post images or videos. Again, many thanks for this.

continued at Daily Kos....

Rural Passenger Rail: Let a hundred Empire Builders bloom!

by RuralRoute

Yesterday we had freezing rain, this morning brought a dusting of snow. US Highway 14 received a bit of attention from MNDOT, resulting in a wet strip in the center in spots. The right hand ruts are iced up again though, and in spots the road is totally ice and snow covered. Thus on my 5 mile drive to get internet access at the Tyler library, 50 miles per hour was the fastest I drove. For the last couple days traffic along Minnesota Highway 23, viewable from my front window, has slowed to a crawl at times. The only drivers doing the 60 miles per hour speed limit are newbies to the frozen north and fools.The forecast for the next few days is for more snow... making the drive to visit the relatives for thanksgiving a frightening experience.

But the traffic on the parallel BNSF railway tracks has been moving at normal pace, in fact often outpacing the traffic on MN 23. A couple miles to the north, it's business as usual on CP's DM&E line as trainloads of grain, ethanol, and whatever move at a steady 40 MPH. But sadly, neither railroad carries authorized passengers on these lines... And those open coal and grain cars look like a pretty cold ride!

continued at Daily Kos....

Jobs should be blowing in the wind (and frying in the sun ...)

by A Siegel

Trends that go against 'common wisdom' are often hard for people to absorb and realize.  A journalist's job, however, should be to question (even challenge) common wisdom rather than simply parroting talking points that are, in fact, misleading if not outright false.  When it comes to energy and environmental reporting, sadly, such questioning often seems to fall by the wayside.

Part of the journalistic myth: fossil fuel (fossil foolish) policies are good on the jobs front.  Too many journalists seem to watch petroleum industry advertising rather than read serious reports that highlight how clean-energy investments outperform dirty energy in job creation per dollar of investment and per megawatt hour of electricity production. And, thus, those well-funded talking points get slipped into the mainstream consciousness and accepted as fact -- rather than assertions that might not stand up to scrutiny.

continued at Daily Kos....

Slouching Towards Ecotopia

by Dauphin

After reading Jerome a Paris' optimistic diary (the previous-to-last one) it got me thinking about social and economic processes which may ensure that, when all's said and done, we end up with sustainable economies, hopefully in time to avert the worst of global warming.

This may turn into a diary series, if there is interest. Since it's rattled around my head for a while, I'll address the oil issue in the first diary of the potential series.

continued at Daily Kos....

DailyCancun: Fossil Fuel Factual Fallacies: New York Times Called Out by Renowned Geoscientist

by todbrilliant

Enough is enough. Energy literacy is mandatory in 2010.

If the New York Times wants to continue to willfully position itself in the service of fossil fuel interests, so be it. But we're fighting back. Today's uppercut is thrown by geoscientist and PCI Fellow David Hughes.  

Read on for a detailed 'correction' of NY Times reporter Clifford Krauss' woefully misleading 17. Nov 2010 article, "There Will Be Fuel."

Full release with charts/graphs/data at http://www.postcarbon.org/...

continued at Daily Kos....

USA Today: Key climate denier report was plagiarism

by Keith Pickering

Back in 1998, climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes (hereafter MBH) published a famous paper on paleoclimate that showed that the Earth is warmer now than at any time in the past thousand years. This paper became known as the "Hockey Stick" because the graph of global temps looked roughly that shape: a long slow decline from 1000 AD, transitioning to a sudden warming during the 20th century.

The Hockey Stick became a shibboleth to the right-wing climate denier crowd: if MBH were right, that would mean we would actually have to do something about global warming. So the right set out to destroy the hockey stick. This attempt didn't start in academe. It started in the offices of certain Republican congressmen. They found a compliant statistician named Edward Wegman to write a report in 2006, and they fed him information from a congressional staffer. The result was an excoriation of MBH in the form of an official congressional report, read into the record at a subcommittee hearing.

One little problem: the information that the GOP staffer fed to Wegman was plagiarized. And the climate scientist whose textbook was ripped off was none other than Raymond Bradley, the B in MBH.

continued at Daily Kos....