A cruise ship room tag from a Holland America vessel was found washed up with a concentrated amount of sewage and various plastic on Pond Beach in Nahant, Massachusetts last Saturday. The washed up waste was described as a “mass of rubber gloves, dental floss, contraceptive and personal hygiene items, and a urinal cake … huge masses of brownish foam … toilet paper and other debris ... within the foamy mass.” While the…
Today a bipartisan group of 26 senators urged EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to use her authority to reduce the corn ethanol mandate in the Renewable Fuel Standard.
With record droughts spreading across the country, corn harvests are shrinking and food prices are spiking. In 2012 the RFS requires the use of 13.2 billion gallons of corn ethanol as transportation fuel, meaning that almost half the corn in the U.S. will be used for…
My husband is a self-described Olympics junkie, and our television has been on nonstop since the opening ceremonies. As a result, I have been barraged by the full spectrum of TV commercials -- all of them attempts to bathe corporate logos in the warm flame of Olympic glory.
The irony of some of these corporate sponsorships isn’t lost on most people. McDonalds (home of the Angus bacon cheeseburger -- clocking in at 39 grams of…
If you haven't noticed from the frostbite-inducing air conditioning in your office yet, it's been hot this summer. Really really hot--and dry. In fact, more than half of the counties in the country have now been labeled "disaster areas" by the Department of Agriculture. James Hansen, a leading scientist for NASA, along with lots of other scientists, are saying these crazy temperatures and massive droughts are due to anthropogenic climate…
Last Tuesday marked the two-year anniversary of the start of the Kalamazoo River disaster where Canadian oil corporation Enbridge spilled over a million gallons of tar sands oil into waters near Marshall, Michigan. The following piece is cross-posted from the Huffington Post.
Since last week, another pipeline operated by Enbridge, Line 14, was shut down after it spilled more than 50,000 barrels of oil in Grand Marsh, Wisconsin, prompting ranking member…
As the drought continues to wreak havoc on our corn crops, the Renewable Fuel Standard – our federal mandate for corn ethanol and other biofuels – has come under fire. Due to the mandate, we’re currently using 40% of our corn in the U.S. for fuel instead of food. Today, the USDA designated more than half the counties in the country as natural disaster areas, and with corn yields plummeting, food…
This past Tuesday, Steven Colbert of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report discussed how the current drought -- the worst in 50 years-- will raise food prices around the country and destabilize the corn ethanol market. Colbert and his guest, Iowa State professor Bruce Babcock, highlighted that because corn is such a huge source of animal feed, when corn prices go up, so do the prices of dairy, eggs, meat, and poultry at…
World Bank Group loans for coal.
Subsidizes multinational industry on backs of the poor.
Devastates local livelihoods.
Degrades air, land and water.
Sound familiar?
You could be forgiven if you thought we were talking about the Medupi coal-fired power plant in South Africa, built and operated by the Eskom power utility.
You’d be mistaken, though it’s easy to understand why. The World Bank’s $3.75 billion loan to Eskom in 2010 for a 4800 MW…
Nearly two years after the International Maritime Organization approved an Emission Control Area for ships in the waters around North America, the first phase is finally set to begin on August 1. This ECA designation brings the ocean waters of North America into an international control program which controls the emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides and particulate matter from ships within 200 nautical miles of the coasts of the U.S. and Canada. The…
“There is little doubt that current WTO negotiations do not fully address the real problems confronting the world and the trading system itself. The threat of global climate change and the catastrophic consequences for the natural environment—and for the world's poorest citizens—ought to focus the minds of our leaders.”
C. Fred Bergsten, Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Lori Wallach, Public Citizen, Washington Post, Op-ed, November 13, 2009
In response to the climate…