Tag: Environment

Organizers In Appalachia Are Building A Green New Deal Blueprint For Themselves

With time quickly running out to prevent a greenhouse apocalypse, activists need to reorganize and unite efforts to build massive public support and political will for climate action. In this context, much is to be gained by looking at the work of ReImagine Appalachia, which is promoting a Green New Deal blueprint for the Ohio Valley region. This is the focus of the following exclusive interview for Truthout with Amanda Woodrum, senior researcher at Policy Matters Ohio and co-director of project ReImagine Appalachia.

A Journey From Incineration Toward Zero Waste

As you enter Chester, Pennsylvania, and drive by 10 Highland Ave, chances are you just took a breath of mercury, soot, and lead. You might have also seen a big smokestack as you drove by, and if you did, you would have seen the country’s largest trash incinerator run by a company called Covanta. This incinerator sits in a mostly Black neighborhood in which one-third of the residents live under the poverty line. The location of this incinerator, however, is far from a coincidence.

Forty-five percent of all incinerators in the country are in neighborhoods where people of color are a majority or a higher percentage than the national average. This is a striking example of environmental injustice.

Air Pollution Environment Incinerator Zero waste

Activists Target Public Relations Groups For Greenwashing Fossil Fuels

Duncan Meisel used to help climate activists tell their stories, as a communications adviser to environmentalists trying to convince the public that oil and gas companies must change to avert a climate crisis. Now he is putting pressure on consultants shaping those industries’ own messages.

Clean Creatives, the group Meisel helped found, is at the vanguard of a new tactic in the environmental movement: to target advisers who, activists claim, help fossil fuel companies continue polluting and slow government action by distorting climate debates.

Last September, Clean Creatives published an “F-List” of advertising and public relations groups it accused of spreading “climate misinformation” on their clients’ behalf.

Climate Change Environment Fossil Fuels Media

Big Problems With Proposals For Small Nuclear Reactors

Politicians and investor-owned utilities are now proposing small nuclear reactors in Montana to replace the old coal-fired power plants at Colstrip. For the last 44 years a successful Citizens’ Initiative banned nuclear power in Montana unless approved by the voters. But Republican majorities in the 2021 Montana legislature repealed the initiative and Republican Governor Gianforte signed the bill into law. There are similar proposals in Wyoming and Idaho.

But the rush to nukes suffered a major setback this month when the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied the application to build and operate the nation’s first small modular nuclear 720 megawatt reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory.

Energy Environment Montana Nuclear Energy

Climate Change In The American Empire

Here’s to 2022.

A new year to displace one of the twenty previous warmest years globally since records began: the last twenty apart from 1998 with its strong El Niño.

The summer of 2021 saw the Met Office in the UK issue what was its first-ever “extreme heat warning.” Over in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, flash floods left more than 120 people dead.

“You don’t expect people to die in a flood in Germany. Maybe in poorer countries, you could understand it, but not in Germany” was a comment that went viral.

Question: What’s the difference between climate change and COVID?

climate crisis Energy Environment Nationalization

Indigenous Farmworkers Hold The Key To Healing Our Burning Planet

Anayeli Guzman was born into a Mixtec-speaking Indigenous community in San Miguel Chicahua in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her family raised chickens on their land, and as a child she would help plant corn, squash and radishes. They ate handmade tortillas with beans, eggs and salsa. Her grandparents taught her to care for the land and to revere the rain. Few people worked for wages. Rather, families owned small plots and grew seasonal, drought-resistant crops, exchanged produce with nearby communities and helped each other with big projects.

After migrating to the United States to be with her husband, Anayeli (along with 11,000 other, mostly Indigenous, immigrant farmworkers) toils for meager wages in the $1.9 billion wine industry of Sonoma County, Calif. In the past several years, record-breaking wildfires have ravaged the area, often during harvest season.

climate crisis Environment Farmworkers Worker Rights and Jobs

Divestment Campaigns And Reinvestment Efforts Gain Strength

With over 80 percent of the world’s population experiencing extreme weather linked to climate change, university endowments have become a focal point for students, faculty, and community members eager to snuff out their schools’ support for the fossil fuel companies most responsible for fueling the climate crisis.

Major universities, including Boston University, the University of Minnesota, and Harvard University — which boasts the largest endowment of any school in the world — are among the latest to commit to pull billions from fossil fuel funds. In their wake, others are following suit. In July, Maine became the first U.S. state to legally require divestment of public funds from fossil fuel assets.

Climate Change Divestment Education Environment Fossil Fuels

Scientists Tell Advertising Industry To End ‘Complicity’ In Climate Crisis

On Wednesday, a group of more than 450 scientists called on advertising agencies to cut off their fossil fuel clients and to end their ties with an ongoing misinformation campaign that has time and again killed progress on addressing the climate crisis.

In a joint letter, the scientists say that they are “consistently faced with a major and needless challenge” of having to correct false information and rebut the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to downplay the severity of climate change. The expensive and glossy ad campaigns “represent one of the biggest barriers to the government action science shows is necessary to mitigate the ongoing climate emergency,” the letter stated.

The letter was sent to advertising companies WPP, Edelman, and IPG, as well as some of their clients, including Unilever, Amazon and Microsoft, which all have announced various climate and sustainability pledges.

Capitalism climate crisis Environment Media

#StopCopCity Resistance Continues As Bulldozing Ensues

Atlanta, GA — On Tues., Jan. 18, around 2 p.m., The Mainline received community reports of heavy machinery and tree cutting taking place in the Old Atlanta Prison Farm land located in the South River Forest. The land was originally inhabited by Muscogee (Creek) indigenous peoples before their forced removal in the 1800s. Tribal leaders and members, now based in Eastern Oklahoma, joined with Atlanta organizers in the #StopCopCity coalition in a historic migration and stomp dance ceremony in the forest last November.

Local residents gathered in the forest in response to the apparent bulldozing. The construction continues in the face of ongoing dissent against the city’s plans to build a massive $90 police militarization facility known as “Cop City.”

#StopCopCity Atlanta Environment Police

Scientists Say Chemical Pollution Has Passed The Safe Limit For Humanity

The Earth has remained remarkably stable since the dawn of civilisation 10,000 years ago. In 2009, experts outlined nine boundaries that keep us within the limits of this steady state. They include greenhouse gas emissions, forests, biodiversity, fresh water and the ozone layer.

While we have already estimated the limits for global warming or CO2 levels, scientists have not looked at chemical pollution. The wide range of different polluting sources means that, before now, experts have not been able to reach a conclusion on the state of this particular boundary.

There are reportedly around 350,000 different types of manufactured chemicals – or “novel entities” as they are known – on the global market.

climate crisis Environment Plastics pollution

Governor’s Claim That He Is Powerless To Stop F-35 Just Got Shown Up

A leak of thousands of gallons of fuel from the US Navy’s aging underground storage tanks at Pearl Harbor contaminated drinking water and poisoned and sickened thousands of people, including children, driving 3,500 families from their homes, as reported by The Washington Post, January 10, 2022. The fuel-storage facility sits 100 feet above Oahu’s main freshwater aquifer.

Did Hawaii follow in the footsteps of Vermont’s Governor Phil Scott and foist wrongful actions by the military or the military-industrial complex on civilians while claiming to be powerless? Just the opposite. Health authorities in Hawaii promptly stepped up to require the Navy to stop the abuse. The state issued an emergency order. Then, when the Navy at first contested, the state held a public hearing.

Environment F35s Hawaii Vermont

The Indigenous Grandmothers Who Stopped A Pipeline

Cheryl Maloney’s eyes glossed over with tears as she stood near the bank of the Stewiacke River in the middle of Nova Scotia. The news was finally sinking in. Behind her, about 100 people filled plates with spaghetti and fried chicken; the crowd included her 11-year-old grandson, Drake Nevin, one of many children who’d spent most of their childhoods fighting alongside Elders to protect this river system. She saw the drift netters—white fishers who catch shad in these waters—reminiscing, and amber leaves floating on the water like confetti.

Two weeks earlier, Alton Gas, a subsidiary of Calgary-based AltaGas, had abandoned a project that would have pumped 10,000 cubic metres of brine into the mouth of this river each day for as long as a decade, leaving behind subterranean caverns where the company planned to store natural gas.

Energy Environment Indigenous Rights Pipelines

Plans For Mass Shipments Of Radioactive Waste Quietly Disclosed

How far is your house or apartment from a major highway, or railroad line? Do you want to play Russian roulette with radioactive waste in transit for 40 years?

Last month US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff quietly reported preparing for tens of thousands of cross-country shipments of high-level radioactive waste from nuclear reactors to the desert Southwest. The oft-disparaged US infrastructure of decrepit of roads, faulty bridges, rickety rails, and rusty barges may not be ready for such an onrush of immensely heavy rad waste casks.

Diane D’Arrigo, of Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Maryland, and Leona Morgan, with Nuclear Issues Study Group in New Mexico, report for NIRS that the transports would carry “the hottest, most concentrated atomic waste from the nuclear fuel chain, misleadingly dubbed “spent nuclear fuel.

Environment Nuclear Waste Radiation

Water Protectors Lead A Movement To Close Navy Fuel Site After Leak

Upwards of 100 water protectors rallied outside the Hawaii State Capitol in Honolulu on Dec. 10. Their greatest fears had just come true. The U.S. Navy had kept decaying fuel storage tanks just 100 feet above a water aquifer that functioned as the main source of drinking water on the island of O’ahu. Those tanks recently leaked jet fuel into the aquifer, poisoning thousands of people and creating irreparable damage to O’ahu’s water supply.

Environment Hawaii Water Pollution Water Protectors

A Tour Guide To Hell On Earth, Small Town-Style

“Dixie did far more than take out entire forests. It razed Greenville, my hometown since 1975. It reduced house after house to rubble, leaving only chimneys where children once had hung Christmas stockings, and dead century-old oaks where families, spanning four generations, had not so long ago built tree forts. The fire left our downtown with scorched, bent-over lampposts touching debris-strewn sidewalks. The historic sheriff’s office is just a series of naked half-round windows eerily showcasing devastation. Like natural disasters everywhere, this fire has upended entire communities.”

Climate Change Environment Natural Disasters

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