Learn in two minutes about how Spectra and ConEd plan to bring fracked gas, laced with radon, into New York via a new explosive, high pressure pipeline. This is bad for the environment and bad for New Yorkers.

To learn more, listen to what a former NYC environmental commissioner said about gas and radon.

We can do better, as described in this renewable energy plan for New York State.

"Radon in My Apartment?" was produced by Occupy the Pipeline.

Via BillMoyers.com:

After serving 10 days of her 15-day sentence for trespassing during a protest against fracking, activist Sandra Steingraber was released from the Schuyler County jail last week in Watkins Glen, N.Y. The day before she was imprisoned, she talked with Bill about her fight to stop fracking and the release of toxins contaminating our air, water and food.

Steingraber had been arrested along with nine other protesters on March 18 for blocking the entrance to the Inergy natural gas facility to protest “the industrialization of the Finger Lakes.” After refusing to pay a fine, Steingraber and two other members of the “Seneca Lake 12″ received 15-day sentences.

In this exclusive video, watch Steingraber’s supporters greet her with flowers, cheers and song as she is released from jail. An emotional Steingraber tells the crowd: “I would do it again in a minute. …Being new to civil disobedience, I’m still learning about its power and its limitations… But I know this: all I had to do is sit in a six-by-seven-foot steel box in an orange jumpsuit and be mildly miserable, but the real power of it is to be able to shine a spotlight on the problem.”

The Faulkner County Citizens Advisory Group conducted independent tests on the air and water from Lake Conway in response to the Exxon tar sands oil spill, and presented the findings during a Townhall gathering in Mayflower, Arkansas this week. Residents were alarmed by what they heard.

KTHV 11:

John Hammons lives near an area known as "The Cove," a body of water sitting across from Lake Conway in Mayflower.

"We can smell it. So I know it's there," Hammons said, who is concerned about his three children and wife, who is seven months pregnant.

"She's broken out in hives, had nose bleeds, (and) respiratory problems," he explained.

The Hammons were among a group of concerned people in the area who met for the town hall meeting.

Chemist Wilma Subra said ExxonMobil is being attentive to those inside the Northwoods subdivision, where thousands of gallons of heavy crude oil spilled nearly one month ago, but others in the area have suffered with little attention.

"There's a population all around that's been made very, very sick by the emissions," Subra said.

To evaluate the situation, Subra independently analyzed air and water data captured from the Lake Conway area, claiming the carcinogen Benzene is present in the region.

While Exxon denies the claims, State health officials are saying the same thing as Exxon -- that "all air quality tests returned safe levels for people in the area."

Yet Subra's claims were echoed by Scott Smith of OPFLEX Solutions, a company that offers solutions for absorbing oil. Smith's preliminary findings indicate the presence of tar sands oil in Lake Conway, both in "the cove" of Lake Conway and in the larger lake beyond the cove.

Also, InsideClimate News has reported that the oil spill probe has fallen to an understaffed governmental agency with close ties to the oil industry, including PHMSA administrator Cynthia Quarterman, for example, having served as legal counsel for Enbridge, the culprit in the Michigan spill, before moving to her current position at the federal agency.

You can view a series of recordings taken by an attendee of Mayflower's Town Hall meeting if you just click here.

In 2010, Pulitzer Prize-winning animator Mark Fiore created this humorous and poignant take on the BP oil spill.

Three years ago this week, a disastrous oil spill began in the Gulf of Mexico, eventually hemorrhaging 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude into the water. Now the media has moved on and public anger has cooled, but the full extent of the damage is finally coming out—and it’s clear that the spill was even worse than we thought.

Newsweek:

"It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, the workers were tracking the gunk inside on their boots. Griffin, as chief cook and maid, was trying to clean it. But even boiling water didn’t work.

“The BP representative said, ‘Jamie, just mop it like you’d mop any other dirty floor,’” Griffin recalls in her Louisiana drawl.
...

Griffin did as she was told: “I tried Pine-Sol, bleach, I even tried Dawn on those floors.” As she scrubbed, the mix of cleanser and gunk occasionally splashed onto her arms and face.

Within days, the 32-year-old single mother was coughing up blood and suffering constant headaches. She lost her voice. “My throat felt like I’d swallowed razor blades,” she says.

Then things got much worse.

Like hundreds, possibly thousands, of workers on the cleanup, Griffin soon fell ill with a cluster of excruciating, bizarre, grotesque ailments. By July, unstoppable muscle spasms were twisting her hands into immovable claws. In August, she began losing her short-term memory. After cooking professionally for 10 years, she couldn’t remember the recipe for vegetable soup; one morning, she got in the car to go to work, only to discover she hadn’t put on pants. The right side, but only the right side, of her body “started acting crazy. It felt like the nerves were coming out of my skin. It was so painful. My right leg swelled—my ankle would get as wide as my calf—and my skin got incredibly itchy.”

We already knew that BP had lied about how much oil had gushed into the Gulf (210 million gallons, according to government estimates) , as lying to Congress was one of the 14 elonies to which BP pleaded guilty last year in a legal settlement with the DOJ. What is now finally coming to light thanks to an anonymous whistleblower, is how BP managed to hide such a massive amount of oil from the public, and the media.

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The fossil fuel industry is killing us.

They have five times the amount of coal, gas and oil that is safe to burn -- and they are planning on burning it all. Left to their own devices, they'll push us past the brink of cataclysmic disaster -- life as we know it will be irrevocably altered forever. Unless we rise up and fight back.

Do The Math chronicles follows the climate crusader Bill McKibben as he works with a rising global movement in a David-vs-Goliath fight to change the terrifying math of the climate crisis.

This growing groundswell of climate activists is going after the fossil fuel industry directly, energizing a movement like the ones that overturned the great immoral institutions of the past century, such as Apartheid in South Africa. The film follows people who are putting their bodies on the line the Keystone XL Pipeline and leading universities and institutions to divest in the corporate polluters hellbent on burning fossil fuels no matter the cost.

The film also features a veritable who's who of the climate movement including Dr. James Hansen (Director, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies), Naomi Klein (Author, The Shock Doctrine), Lester Brown (President, Earth Policy Institute), Michael Brune (Executive Director, Sierra Club), Majora Carter (Founder, Sustainable South Bronx), Jessy Tolkan (Co-Executive Director of Citizen Engagement Laboratory), Phil Radford (Executive Director of Greenpeace), James Gustave Speth (Co-Founder of Natural Resources Defense Council), Mike Tidwell (Executive Director, CCAN), Van Jones (CNN Correspondent & Author, The Green Collar Economy), Bobby Kennedy Jr. (President, Waterkeeper Alliance ), among others.

Join the Movement at http://www.350.org

The day before she left her family to go to jail, biologist, mother and activist Sandra Steingraber joined Bill Moyers to talk about the need to build awareness about toxins that contaminate our air, water and food — and threaten our children’s health. With government captured by the very industries it’s supposed to regulate, Steingraber said she’s lost patience with politicians and corporations, and the time for direct action is now.

Steingraber also talks to Bill about her arrest for illegally blocking the driveway of a natural gas company as part of a protest against the controversial energy extraction process known as fracking. Steingraber went to jail on April 17, and is currently serving a 15-day sentence.

“I believe, as do many of my colleagues in the sciences, that it’s not safe to compress explosive gases and store them underneath and beside a lake that serves as the drinking water for a hundred thousand people,” she tells Bill. “From my point of view as a biologist and a mother, this out-of-state company… is trespassing in our community.”

Steingraber returns often to the concept of “toxic trespass” — which “means that chemicals without our consent enter our body sometimes because we inhale them,” she explains to Bill. “You know, each of us breathes a pint of atmosphere with every breath. And so that’s one way in which toxic air pollutants then enter us, into our bloodstream.”

The explosive new documentary short Cyanide Beach has been released on Youtube. The 25-minute film, which premiered in Tucson, was made by longtime investigative journalist John Dougherty. Frances Causey, Co-Director of Heist: Who Stole the American Dream was a consulting producer on the project.

Cyanide Beach connects Vancouver, BC mining executives who want to build the controversial Rosemont open pit copper mine on the outskirts of Tucson, to a defunct Italian gold mining operation in Sardinia, Italy. Many of the same executives who want to build the Rosemont mine, directly contributed to an unfolding environmental and financial disaster in Sardinia.

“Cyanide Beach” provides insight on what could happen in Southern Arizona if the proposed Rosemont Copper mine is allowed to go forward.

Rosemont Copper Company intends to dump billions of tons of mine waste laced with mercury, lead, arsenic and other poisons on more than 3,000 acres of the Coronado National Forest. American taxpayers would receive no royalties for the five billion pounds of copper that would be mined over two decades. Rosemont intends to export all of the copper to overseas markets, where it will be refined and re-imported into the U.S.

Extensive supporting documentation for the film, including a timeline of the business history of the top officers in Augusta Resource, supported by thousands of pages of corporate disclosures, is posted at Dougherty’s InvestigativeMedia.com.

Watch the video to see how We Love Our Land came up with their idea on how to fight the Enbridge pipeline. It's quite clever, and the native American Indian music is beautiful.

#RLblockade Nizhawendaamin Inaakiminaan (We Love Our Land) is a group of Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, joined by blockaders and solidarity activists. The encampment is located in Northern Minnesota near the town of Leonard. Tom Poorbear, vice president of the Ogalala Sioux Nation declared, "We fully support the Red Lake Nation and its members who are opposing the Enbridge pipeline to stop the flow and remove the illegal pipeline from their land." The occupation of the Red Lake Ceded Land began Thursday, February 28. Similar action camps around the United States have been fighting the fossil fuel industry to stop the destruction of sacred lands. Red Lake tribal members demand the immediate shutdown of the flow through the pipes and intend to remain on the land until their demand is met. "I imagine everyone involved in the planetwide resistance to fossil fuel is watching them with thanks," said Bill McKibben founder of 350.org and leader of the recent Forward on Climate Rally. Chief Bill Erasmus of the Dene First Nation stated, "We fully support and are inspired by the Red Lake members and their resistance as it is stated in the Mother Earth Accord; affirming our responsibility to protect and preserve for our descendents, the inherent sovereign rights of our indigenous nations, the rights of property owners, and all inherent human rights." Most band members were unaware of Enbridge's illegal activity until the encampment started. "When I was informed about the illegal trespassing of the company Enbridge on my homeland, I knew there was something I could do. I started calling as many Red Lakers as I could to try and make them aware," said Angie Palacio who initiated the encampment with the support of the Indigenous Environmental Network.

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica, Jan. 25, 2013

Mexico City plans to draw drinking water from a mile-deep aquifer, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. The Mexican effort challenges a key tenet of U.S. clean water policy: that water far underground can be intentionally polluted because it will never be used.

U.S. environmental regulators have long assumed that reservoirs located thousands of feet underground will be too expensive to tap. So even as population increases, temperatures rise, and traditional water supplies dry up, American scientists and policy-makers often exempt these deep aquifers from clean water protections and allow energy and mining companies to inject pollutants directly into them.

As ProPublica has reported in an ongoing investigation about America's management of its underground water, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has issued more than 1,500 permits for companies to pollute such aquifers in some of the driest regions. Frequently, the reason was that the water lies too deep to be worth protecting.

But Mexico City's plans to tap its newly discovered aquifer suggest that America is poisoning wells it might need in the future.

Indeed, by the standard often applied in the U.S., American regulators could have allowed companies to pump pollutants into the aquifer beneath Mexico City.

For example, in eastern Wyoming, an analysis showed that it would cost half a million dollars to construct a water well into deep, but high-quality aquifer reserves. That, plus an untested assumption that all the deep layers below it could only contain poor-quality water, led regulators to allow a uranium mine to inject more than 200,000 gallons of toxic and radioactive waste every day into the underground reservoirs.

But south of the border, worsening water shortages have forced authorities to look ever deeper for drinking water.

Today in Mexico City, the world's third-largest metropolis, the depletion of shallow reservoirs is causing the ground to sink in, iconic buildings to teeter, and underground infrastructure to crumble. The discovery of the previously unmapped deep reservoir could mean that water won't have to be rationed or piped into Mexico City from hundreds of miles away.

According to the Times report, Mexican authorities have already drilled an exploratory well into the aquifer and are working to determine the exact size of the reservoir. They are prepared to spend as much as $40 million to pump and treat the deeper water, which they say could supply some of Mexico City's 20 million people for as long as a century.

Scientists point to what's happening in Mexico City as a harbinger of a world in which people will pay more and dig deeper to tap reserves of the one natural resource human beings simply cannot survive without.

"Around the world people are increasingly doing things that 50 years ago nobody would have said they'd do," said Mike Wireman, a hydrogeologist with the EPA who also works with the World Bank on global water supply issues.

Wireman points to new research in Europe finding water reservoirs several miles beneath the surface — far deeper than even the aquifer beneath Mexico City — and says U.S. policy has been slow to adapt to this new understanding.

"Depth in and of itself does not guarantee anything — it does not guarantee you won't use it in the future, and it does not guarantee that that it is not" a source of drinking water, he said.

If Mexico City's search for water seems extreme, it is not unusual. In aquifers Denver relies on, drinking water levels have dropped more than 300 feet. Texas rationed some water use last summer in the midst of a record-breaking drought. And Nevada — realizing that the water levels in one of the nation's largest reservoirs may soon drop below the intake pipes — is building a drain hole to sap every last drop from the bottom.

"Water is limited, so they are really hustling to find other types of water," said Mark Williams, a hydrologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It's kind of a grim future, there's no two ways about it."

In a parched world, Mexico City is sending a message: Deep, unknown potential sources of drinking water matter, and the U.S. pollutes them at its peril.

Fractured Land Demo from Fractured Land on Vimeo.

Caleb Behn is a young, indigenous warrior fighting to save his people's land and culture. Deep in the exquisite wilderness of northeastern British Columbia, the ancestral home of Caleb's Dene people, the multi-billion-dollar oil and gas industry emits chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects, the killing of brain and blood cells, and environmental harm. Caleb himself was born with a birth defect and spent long, painful years under the surgeons' knives, face cut, lips sewn. He cannot show that emissions from the industry caused his condition; still, it made him tough, gave him a deep aversion to gambling with children's health, and helped drive him to action.

Though adept with a high-powered rifle and throwing knife for hunting, a vital part of his culture, Caleb needs stronger weapons to battle Big Oil and Gas, so he decided to get his law degree. Now, with his Mohawk, tattoos, and three-piece suit, Caleb is equally comfortable hunting moose on his land as he is fighting the oil and gas industry in corporate boardrooms and the courts.

Filmmakers Fiona Rayher and Damien Gillis have been documenting Caleb's journey, including following him to New Zealand. There he learned from the Maori, shared his experiences dealing with Big Oil and Gas, and explored common strategies. Both Maori and Canadian First Nations are facing the ravages of this industry, and are now raising powerful new Indigenous leaders. They are forging alliances using ancient knowledge and the modern weapon of the law.

All Caleb ever wanted to do was to live off the land and teach his future children the traditional ways of the Dene. But before he can do that, he and his allies must first do battle with the Goliath industry that threatens to destroy everything he holds dear. The industry is powerful; but, like many great leaders, Caleb was born with natural talent, eloquence, and passion, tempered by hard work and hard challenges. And he has arrived at a moment in history when his people and territory need him.

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