My backyard

The Greenpeace Coal Plant Protest

It's important to understand why Greenpeace did this today, and targeted the Bridgeport coal plant --


Bridgeport Harbor is an aging, inefficient plant -- it's 40 years old -- and it isn't necessary to provide power to Connecticut's grid. Yet it emits 3 million tons of carbon emissions every year, as well as 2,800 tons of toxic sulfur dioxide, 2,200 tons of nitrous oxide, and 50 lbs of mercury. The coal plant literally casts a shadow upon a low-income section of Bridgeport, where 1 in 4 residents have asthma. Health experts estimate that at least one death a year in the city can be attributed to the coal plant's noxious emissions.


Furthermore, all the coal that the 400 MW plant burns is imported from Indonesia, where it is mined by workers who enjoy low wages and few human rights, at an estimated cost of $79 million per shipment. Essentially, the plant epitomizes all that's wrong with coal-power in modern America -- it spews copious amounts of carbon emissions, poses an immediate risk to public health, is inefficient, expensive, and old

Not the kind of news Bridgeport would like to be recogbnized for - but a very important issue that has been around too long.

Polar Bears Endangered

No not those guys who jump into frigid waters.  The REAL polar bears.

W.H.: Polar bears not 'endangered'

The Obama administration is sticking with a George W. Bush-era decision to deny polar bears endangered species status.


In a court filing Wednesday, the Fish and Wildlife Service defended the previous administration’s decision to give the polar bear the less-protective “threatened” species designation, a move that will frustrate environmentalists who hoped for stronger protections under the Endangered Species Act.

Boy this admin has been backing off on a little too much lately. But why back off on this topic?

Listing the polar bear as “endangered” as a result of global warming could open the door to using the Endangered Species Act to regulate greenhouse gases, an outcome the Obama administration has opposed.

Sounds like "wallets" and special interest to me.

Climate Hawks: To Arms

What advocates can learn from the American Revolution.

What's the path forward for those who support a robust response to the danger of rising greenhouse emissions? It's always fun to toss ideas around, and I look forward to reading my fellow participants' contributions. To be more than an intellectual exercise, though, policy development must issue from a clear understanding of power dynamics. Climate hawks' fatal weakness has always been their attitude toward power, which has wavered between naiveté, diffidence, and disdain.
Conservatives have successfully demonized cap-and-trade, rendering it politically toxic for at least the next several years. In response, the new vogue in energy circles is to campaign for massive public investment in cleantech R&D. And who could oppose that? It sounds reasonable and bipartisan. Then again, so did cap-and-trade in the 1990s, when centrist environmentalists and Republicans developed it as a market-based alternative to command-and-control regulations. Will public investment meet the same sorry fate?
A resilient movement will conduct guerrilla warfare. Diverse groups and coalitions must defend the EPA, develop innovative clean energy financing mechanisms or smarter market rules, go directly after the nation's biggest polluters in boardrooms and courtrooms, work to raise gas taxes or roll back fossil fuel subsidies, defend and expand state climate programs like California's or smart-growth plans like Portland's, start or fund cleantech businesses, and advocate for feed-in tariffs, a national smart grid, electric vehicles, and new building efficiency standards.
The effects of a distributed, networked insurgency are impossible to predict and difficult to discern even as they unfold. It's impossible to know in advance where resistance might give way or ground might be gained, so profligacy and opportunism—not parsimony and efficiency—are the watchwords.
There may come a time to muster back together behind a single, dramatic, sweeping plan for change, but not until the coalition has built considerably more bottom-up power. What climate hawks need most now is a nimble, networked pragmatism, focused ruthlessly on wrenching power from the hands of fossil fuel incumbents and deploying it on behalf of a healthier, more democratic energy regime.

It is a war - a just war for Mother Earth!

CO2 is back on the rise

Concentration in Atmosphere Reaches New Highs in 2010

Well, that didn't take long. After global emissions stalled following the worldwide recession around 2008--even falling in some otherwise heavily polluting nations like the US of A--it looks like everyone can rest assured: we're back on track with CO2 concentrations steadily a-risin' in the atmosphere.

According to a report from Reuters,

Levels of the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere have risen to new highs in 2010 despite an economic slowdown in many nations that braked industrial output, data showed on Monday. Carbon dioxide, measured at Norway's Zeppelin station on the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, rose to a median 393.71 parts per million of the atmosphere in the first two weeks of March from 393.17 in the same period of 2009, extending years of gains.
Which means that despite the recession throwing a wrench in the worldwide greenhouse gas-spewing machinery, carbon emissions burning industry is back online. It's still below the pre-recession levels of rise, which had been 2 parts per million a year, but it nonetheless signals that economies reliant on fossil fuel burning have resumed expansion.

So where are the deniers?

Kudos to Wal-Mart?

Wal-Mart to push suppliers to cut emissions

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. wants its suppliers to reduce 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by the end of 2015.
The world's largest retailer's push goes beyond its efforts to date to reduce its own emissions by designing more energy-efficient stores and pursuing alternative fuels for its fleet of trucks.
The goal is equivalent to taking 3.8 million cars off the road for a year, the company said.
Wal-Mart is collaborating with the Environmental Defense Fund and other environmental experts to measure reduction. It said it won't force suppliers to make changes but will work with them on projects that will reduce both emissions and costs.
In the past few years, the company has been working with suppliers to reduce packaging, which has translated into such changes as more concentrated detergent products and toothpaste that's no longer in a box.

Sure, nice step in the right direction, but of course we all realize that...