Unwilling to debate opponents like Senator Elizabeth Warren on the substance of trade deals, President Obama has reduced his push to get trade promotion authority to morally righteous declarations and to flying members of Congress around on Air Force One. Critics, he laments, are quite simply "wrong." When explaining his rationale, the president resorts to platitudes about negotiating the “most progressive trade deals in history.” These “21st century trade deals,” the president insists,…
Pro Publica’s “Cruise Control” reveals crimes, deaths and emerging infectious diseases
Friends of the Earth issues an annual report card, grading the environmental aspects of cruise ships including sewage treatment, air pollution reduction, and water quality compliance. Pro Publica addresses a different facet of the cruise industry, which is just as disturbing. “Cruise Control,” an illustrative and interactive publication, opens with a “tour” of an archetypal cruise ship.
The tour commences in the…
The below blog post, by Friends of the Earth International Forests and Biodiversity program coordinator Isaac Rojas, was originally posted on foei.org.
Friends of the Earth International has celebrated World Environment Day on June 5 every year since 1973. This year we celebrate it by recalling the importance of community management of biodiversity.
When we talk about biodiversity, we are talking about biological diversity, that's to say the multitude of plants, animals and ecosystems…
A dirty fuel is quietly creeping over the Canadian border and invading the Midwest. In the more than six years that we have stopped the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from being built, numerous other tar sands pipelines have been proposed, with some already constructed. The production and extraction of tar sands emits three times as much carbon dioxide as does the production of conventional oil. We cannot encourage the proliferation of this dirty…
Shell Oil has spent many years and billions of dollars in the reckless pursuit of oil in the American Arctic Ocean. All that is standing in their way from starting exploratory drilling this summer is a few remaining permits from the federal government. Shell could not have gotten this far, however, without the help of the federal government, specifically, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management within the Department of the Interior. Despite the scientific unknowns…
In February 2008, the Department of the Interior offered nearly 30 million acres of pristine, sensitive Arctic ecosystem in the Chukchi Sea for oil and gas leasing, known as Lease Sale 193. The agency’s environmental impact analysis failed to properly evaluate basic scientific information about the Chukchi Sea and the effects of oil and gas activities, and was challenged in the United States District Court for the District of Alaska by Earthjustice on…
It’s not enough that the cruise ship industry happens to be one of the largest ocean polluters, but Carnival Cruise Lines avoids most taxes due to a loophole in the tax code, reports David Leonhardt at the New York Times. Carnival only pays taxes equal to 1.1 percent of its cumulative $11.3 billion in profits.
Humanity is at a climate tipping point and faces an urgent challenge: the phase-out of fossil fuels. Despite some progress with improving energy efficiency and advancing renewable energy, we’re running out of time. In March, the world surpassed 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, well above the “safe” level of 350 parts per million. In order to have a fighting chance of stabilizing the climate, we need to…
This weekend, Indonesian activist Jopi Peranginangin, a tireless campaigner against unbridled oil palm expansion, was killed outside a nightclub in Jakarta.
Originally posted on Reuters Many governments and financial institutions support the deployment of “less dirty” fossil fuels to fight climate change both domestically and internationally, and claim this is a sane, sensible approach. Let’s try applying this logic to smoking. A heavy smoker walks into her doctor’s office hacking up a lung. The doctor tells her patient that it’s fine to smoke, as long as the cigarettes are filtered. The competence - let alone…