Last week, people converged in Nebraska to speak out about the Keystone XL Pipeline at the State Department's only public comment period. Farmers, ranchers, climate activists, and people of all stripes and colors spoke out in opposition to the pipeline.
Click here for videos covering the entire hearing, it was a really great crowd of passionate people who stood up to speak against the proposed tar sands pipeline. There were even families who were victims of the Exxon Pegasus pipeline rupture in Arkansas who traveled to the hearing to remind and warn others what happened to their community.
Six activists from the environmental group Greenpeace boarded a coal carrier bound for South Korea on the outskirts of Australia's Great Barrier Reef Wednesday calling for an end to exports of the fuel:
The activists boarded the ship from inflatable boats at sunrise and had previously been on board the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace's own purpose-built ship. They presented a letter to the captain explaining the action and have set up camp at the bow of the ship.
A spokesman for Greenpeace on the Rainbow Warrior said: "We are calling on the rest of Australia to take whatever action is possible to ensure that we do not double our coal exports. We cannot deal with the climate change that will result from that."
According to research commissioned by Greenpeace, Australia's coal export expansion is the second-largest of 14 proposed fossil fuel enterprises. "We cannot pretend Australia is playing its part to avoid dangerous climate change if these shipments continue," said Greenpeace senior climate campaigner Dr. Georgina Woods.
"Australia's coal exports are the nation's greatest contribution to climate change and plans are under way to roughly double the volume of coal we export," Greenpeace said in a statement.
"Yet every tonne of coal that is exported will return to us as climate change: bushfires, heatwaves and drought."
Ports on the Barrier Reef coast currently export 156 million tons of coal each year, and there are plans to expand that to 953 tons within the next decade. By 2020 an estimated 7,000 ships will traverse the reef every year, up from 5,000 in 2010.
"We have no idea how it's going to play out at this stage," said protester Emma Giles from on board the Panama-flagged ship.
"Either the coastguard will come and get us, or we end up in Korea."
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.
The "Do the Math" Movie is being screened at house-parties and screenings across the country on April 21st. At 42 minutes, it tells the story of the rising movement to change the terrifying math of the climate crisis and fight the fossil fuel industry.
Two panel discussions featuring Bill McKibben, Dr. James Hansen, and movement allies and leaders will be live-streamed at 8 p.m. ET and then at 8 p.m. PT.
The documentary follows 350.org founder Bill McKibben on last November's Do the Math tour that reached over 25,000 people at sold-out shows in 21 cities across the country (and tens of thousands more online). Part TEDTalk, part revival meeting, the Do the Math show built off of an article called "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" that Bill had published in Rolling Stone earlier in the summer. The piece became one of the most viral stories ever published by the magazine, garnering over 125,000 likes on Facebook and millions of page views.
In the article, and onstage throughout the tour, Bill laid out three numbers that explain our current crisis: In order to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, scientists say we can emit only 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but the fossil fuel industry has roughly 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide just in their reserves, over five times too much. In other words, the fossil fuel industry is a rogue industry, outlaws not against the laws of the United States -- for the most part they get to write those laws but against the laws of physics and chemistry.
You can find out more information about the livestream and organize your own screening at: 350.org/math.
The esteemed Dr. Ingraffea, the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, summarizes the best available science on the intersection between hydraulic fracturing and climate change.
Dr. Ingraffea has taught structural mechanics, finite element methods, and fracture mechanics at Cornell for 37 years. Dr. Ingraffea's research concentrates on computer simulation and physical testing of complex fracturing processes. He and his students have performed pioneering research in using interactive computer graphics in computational mechanics, and together they have authored more than 250 papers in these areas. He has been a principal investigator on more than $35 million in R&D projects from the NSF, NASA, Nichols Research, AFOSR, FAA, Kodak, U. S. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station, U.S. Dept. of Transportation, IBM, Schlumberger, EXXON, the Gas Research Institute, Sandia National Laboratories, the Association of Iron and Steel Engineers, General Dynamics, Boeing, Caterpillar Tractor, and Northrop Grumman Aerospace. For his research achievements he has won the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics "1994 Significant Paper Award" for one of the five most significant papers in the category of Computational/Analytical Applications, twice won the National Research Council/U.S. National Committee for Rock Mechanics Award for Research in Rock Mechanics (1978, 1991), and the George Irwin Medal form the American Society for Testing and Materials (2006). He was named a Fellow of the International Congress on Fracture in 2009. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the premier journal in his field, Engineering Fracture Mechanics.
Recently, we wrote about former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell's connections to the natural gas industry after he published a pro-fracking op-ed in The New York Daily News.
Following our story, Rendell's column — which called on New York officials to lift a ban on the drilling technique — was updated to disclose that he is a paid consultant to a private equity firm with natural gas investments.
Rendell assured us in an interview before the first story that despite his role with the private equity firm, he had no "pecuniary interest in the natural gas industry doing well."
But the story doesn't end there. One entity that indisputably has an interest in the industry is Rendell's longtime home outside of politics: the law firm Ballard Spahr of Philadelphia.
The firm touts its work "on the forefront" of the development of the Marcellus Shale, the formation under Pennsylvania and other states from which a vast quantity of natural gas is now being extracted.
From our friends at NASA comes this amazing 13-second animation that depicts how temperatures around the globe have warmed since 1950. You’ll note an acceleration of the temperature trend in the late 1970s as greenhouse gas emissions from energy production increased worldwide and clean air laws reduced emissions of pollutants that had a cooling effect on the climate, and thus were masking some of the global warming signal.
The data come from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York (GISS), which monitors global surface temperatures. As NASA notes, “All 10 of the warmest years in the GISS analysis have occurred since 1998, continuing a trend of temperatures well above the mid-20th century average."
When Uranium Energy Corp. sought permission to launch a large-scale mining project in Goliad County, Texas, it seemed as if the Environmental Protection Agency would stand in its way.
To get the ore out of the ground, the company needed a permit to pollute a pristine supply of underground drinking water in an area already parched by drought.
Further, EPA scientists feared that radioactive contaminants would flow from the mining site into water wells used by nearby homes. Uranium Energy said the pollution would remain contained, but resisted doing the advanced scientific testing and modeling the government asked for to prove it.
The plan appeared to be dead on arrival until late 2011, when Uranium Energy hired Heather Podesta, a lobbyist and prolific Democratic fundraiser whose pull with the Obama administration prompted The Washington Post to name her the Capitol's latest "It girl."
Podesta -- the sister-in-law of John Podesta, who co-chaired President Obama's transition team -- appealed directly to the EPA's second in command, Bob Perciasepe, pressing the agency's highest-level administrators to get directly involved and bring the agency's local staff in Texas back to the table to reconsider their position, according to emails obtained by ProPublica through the Freedom of Information Act.
By the end of 2012, the EPA reversed its position in Goliad, approving an exemption allowing Uranium Energy to pollute the aquifer, though in a somewhat smaller area than was originally proposed.
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.
Here's some new video footage of the protest at TransCanada's Massachusetts office that I wrote about on Monday. It captures the full mock funeral that the demonstrators held before the arrests begin.
They were there to hold TransCanada accountable for the degradation of our planet and the impoverishment of the future of the world's youth.
They were there to amplify the cries of the people in frontline communities, from indigenous peoples at the point of tar sands extraction, to the black and latina communities who live fence-line to the refineries where these toxic tar sands will be refined in the Gulf Coast.
They were there to pledge resistance to the Keystone XL Pipeline and all tar sands development.
