Planetsave

“We all remember this time last year,” said Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Monday. “We were in the midst of an energy crisis, paying $4 for a gallon of gasoline, and Americans were seeing their utility bills skyrocketing.” Since then, he went on to say, the energy problems haven’t disappeared and no changes in policy have been made. He warned that, though the prices have gone down, if we do not make any changes, we will fall into the same hole in which we found ourselves last summer.

His solution? Nuclear. Stating that “the cornerstone of any real solution to the American energy problem needs to involve offshore resources and nuclear power…which generates electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions and has a minimal impact on the environment.”  The first step to escaping America’s current energy crisis according to Wicker is to build more nuclear power plants.

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I recently wrote a post concerning a report on climate change issued by the U.S. Government stating that “climate change has immediate and local impacts – it literally affects people in their backyards.” Well, as it turns out, there’s more to the story.

With the recent introduction of H.R. 2454 – the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 – there has been an increased push for climate change awareness. The purpose of the bill is to create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence, reduce global warming pollution and transition to a clean energy economy.

This all sounds great, right? Well, not to everyone seems to agree. Not everyone believes in climate change. With such a debate raging, it may be difficult to see through the haze of words and opinions that is filling the air.

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Editor’s Note: This was a multi-party contribution involving Kim Komenich (photos) Kwan Booth (text) NewsDesk.org (editing) Spot.Us (financial support). This is part of a series that we’ll be posting over the next week.

Tuesday night saw the end of two years of negotiations between the Port of Oakland, environmentalists, truckers and West Oakland residents, with a vote to reduce toxic emissions from trucks serving the busy shipping center.

The Comprehensive Truck Management Plan aims to reduce the levels of diesel particulates in the air around the port, by banning diesel trucks built before 1994 — as well as newer trucks that lack air filters.

The plan also authorized a registration system for all trucks doing business with the port, and $3 million for independent truckers who need to upgrade their vehicles.

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Editor’s Note: This was a multi-party contribution involving Kim Komenich (photos) Kwan Booth (text) NewsDesk.org (editing) Spot.Us (financial support). This is part of a series that we’ll be posting over the next week.

While much of the debate on reducing emissions from the Port of Oakland has revolved around trucks, diesel pollution from the trucks is estimated to make up only 4 percent of West Oakland’s overall toxic burden.

A much larger percentage has been attributed to the international shipping companies that rent the ports — yet attempts to impose fees to pay for pollution controls have been sidetracked by global trade regulations and opposition by the state of California and even special interest groups in Oakland and the Bay Area.

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San Ramon, CA – Much will be said at the Chevron Corporation’s shareholder conference this week; the agenda is full.  However, there will be little said about Chevron’s involvement in controversial projects concerning tar sand.  Despite the requests of shareholders owning $31.4 billion dollars, Chevron will remain quiet, keeping the Alberta tar sand projects off the agenda.

Tar sand, a source of non-conventional oil, consists of bitumen, a sticky, tar-like form of petroleum which is so thick and heavy that it must be heated or diluted before it will flow. Harvesting tar sand requires huge amounts of energy and water.

In addition to heavy water use, extraction of Alberta’s Athabasca oil sands also involves clear-cutting of the Boreal Forest, formation of toxic “tailings” lakes, habitat destruction of iconic species such as the woodland caribou, and up to five times higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil extraction. All of these factors lead Canada’s Environmental Defence to label tar sand development “the most destructive project on Earth.”

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Utah’s Book Cliffs exist as one of the largest expanses of land in the lower 48 states without a paved highway.  The BLM, however, is considering a project that would change that. Uintah County’s Seep Ridge Road Paving Project proposes paving over an existing road, which would allow greater recreational (and other, including hunting and oil and gas exploration) access.  The proposal states that:

“the road is currently composed of dirt or native material and several segments of the existing road do not meet current federal and state road design standards for public safety. All projections indicate a continued substantial increase in light and heavy vehicle traffic on the road, primarily associated with energy development in the Book Cliffs area.” (UT-080-08-0238 section 1.2)

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Just Born — the makers of Marshmallow Peeps — says they’ll be producing whale-shaped, and whale-sized, Marshmallow Peeps in an effort to end Japanese whaling.

The Peep-maker said the joint effort is between Darryl Hannah, The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Greenpeace, and that they are uniting under the moniker PEEP: People for Everything and Everyone on the Planet.

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Just days after news leaked that Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency will designate CO2 as a pollutant, the EPA has announced that hundreds of mountaintop removal coal mining permits will be put on hold while their impact on streams and waterways is evaluated.

Mountaintop removal is a controversial method of extracting coal that literally blows the tops off mountains to access the coal underneath. The waste is then dumped in streams and wetlands, which has alarmed environmentalists and community activists.

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The United States Supreme Court ruled today that environmental groups do not have legal standing to sue against the logging or environmental destruction of federal land.

“Broad concerns shared by all citizens, like an interest in ‘good government’ or in the ‘health of the forests,’ are not sufficient to establish standing,” Justice Antonin Scalia noted, writing for the court’s 5-4 majority vote.

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Virginia will cut its air pollution inspectors by more than 20% due to a budget shortfall. The Department of  Environmental Quality reported that 14 of the 54 inspector positions had been eliminated as part of Governor Timothy Kaine’s proposed $12 million in cuts to the state secretary of natural resources.

“If [polluters] are out of compliance, we may or may not find it as quickly or easily as we once did,” said State Secretary of Natural Resources L. Preston Bryant Jr.

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