The River Wanders...

more-commonsense:

mollyfamous:

WASHINGTON — Monsanto says its net income increased 22 percent in the second quarter on strong sales of its biotech seeds.

The agricultural products company boosted its full-year earnings guidance, citing its strong performance in the first two quarters.

The news of the profit boost comes as critics slam lawmakers for including in legislation a provision, dubbed the “Monsanto Protection Act,” that would shield the company from lawsuits over health risks related to genetically modified seeds, according to CBS News.

I think I’m gonna be sick… again.

Meanwhile we are still ignoring gun control and it’s going down in flames.  Congress is about to kill the one last part of it that was worth anything.

Just saying.

(via liberal-focus)

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass), has penned a letter to Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, looking for answers about a Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDS.A) containment dome that “crushed like a beer can” in tests earlier this Fall.

Markey, who is the Ranking Member of the US House Committee on Natural Resources, is referring to a story first broken by Seattle radio station KUOW investigator John Ryan, revealing that in September Shell performed tests on a containment dome that was to be deployed as part of the company’s controversial Arctic offshore oil drilling operations.

According to government reports obtained by KUOW, the dome “breached like a whale” and then sank to the bottom of Puget Sound off the coast of Washington State. When the dome was recovered a government official described the dome as “crushed like a beer can.”

The containment dome is a key piece of emergency spill equipment that is used to cap an oil well when a pipe burst occurs, like the one we saw in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster. Markey describes the failed test in his letter to Salazar:

“Remotely operated submersible robots became tangled in rigging lines, warning indicators were dismissed as defective, and divers were requested, even though using divers would likely not be possible during an actual disaster in the Arctic. The test was conducted in Puget Sound, far away from the actual Arctic environment.”

Markey goes on to ask the question that should be on everyone’s mind given this disturbing revelation:

“Shell’s unsuccessful test in Puget Sound raises new questions about the company’s ability to successfully drill offshore in the Arctic and, more generally, about the ability of containment devices to function properly in the harsh Arctic environment. The outcome of the containment dome test, the fact that Shell may have missed warning signals that something was wrong and Shell’s problems using ROVs, which could be required in an Arctic environment, raise troubling questions about whether Shell can drill safely in this harsh and sensitive area.”

 You can read the full text of Markey’s letter here: Markey Questions Interior on Failed Arctic Spill Containment Test.”

climateadaptation:

Guess what? They’re doing it. Students at over 100 colleges across the U.S. are petitioning, debating, writing letter campaigns, and giving speeches and presentations to force their colleges to dump oil stocks. The point is to make owning oil stocks the moral equivalent of investing in tobacco or other harmful products.

Thus, the clever idea is to hit oil companies where it hurts - their wallets. It’s called “divestment.” “Divestment” is the opposite of investment. It’s when an organization liquidates its stock and other investments in certain industries, in this case big oil.

A group of Swarthmore College students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.

But, the students are very organized with the help of Bill McKibben, a well known environmentalist and head of 350.org. They’ve had some success:

In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.

“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.

Divestment has worked before:

Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the 1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.

A small institution in Maine, Unity College, has already voted to get out of fossil fuels. Another, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, has adopted a broad investment policy that is ridding its portfolio of fossil fuel stocks.

A new chapter in activism is born. The full story makes for an exciting read, To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios.

(via dendroica)

wotfigo:

Asia faces water scarcity as coal-fired power generation expands

Inner Mongolia’s rivers are feeding China’s coal industry, turning grasslands into desert. In India, thousands of farmers have protested diverting water to coal-fired power plants, some committing suicide.

The struggle to control the world’s water is intensifying around energy supply. China and India alone plan to build $720 billion of coal-burning plants in two decades, more than twice today’s total power capacity in the U.S., International Energy Agency data show. Water will be boiled away in the new steam turbines to make electricity and flush coal residue at utilities from China Shenhua Energy Co. (1088) to India’s Tata Power Co. (TPWR) that are favoring coal over nuclear because it’s cheaper.

A paper published today in the science journal Nature reveals that the melting of Antarctica’s ice sheet is being driven by a warming ocean more than a warming atmosphere. Which means even though summer air temperatures have not yet warmed enough to substantially melt Antarctica’s surface snows, the oceans are undermining the frozen continent from below—fueling a recent, widespread, and intensifying glacier acceleration and its accompanying rise in sea levels.

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)