‘Green News Report’ – January 16, 2014

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Unprecedented drought & wildfires in California; Unprecedented heat shuts down Australian Open; EPA smacks down Alaska’s proposed Pebble Mine; Putting all the sh*t in Washington DC to good use!; PLUS: The impacts of the toxic chemical spill in West Virginia still flowing … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!

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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): World may have to suck gases from air to meet climate goals; TPP: WikiLeaks exposes what Obama’s secret trade deal would do to the environment; Italy’s government agrees to send in Army against mafia dumps; Floods and landslides in Southeast Asia; Keystone XL: TX high court gives hope to landowners in eminent domain fight; Massive Antarctic glacier has entered ‘irreversible’ melt … PLUS: D. R. Tucker: Resentment Rules the Right –
‘there are plenty of permanently ignorant people who actually want to be misinformed and lied to’ … and much, MUCH more! …

STORIES DISCUSSED ON TODAY’S ‘GREEN NEWS REPORT’…

• WVToxic Chemical Spill: Tap Water Ban Lifted But Contamination Still Flows:
• AUDIO: Drinking in WV’s Toxic ‘Freedom’ Disaster: KPFK ‘BradCast’ [@ about 47 mins] (The BRAD BLOG):
  Bob has been fighting the coal industry for years in WV and offers key insights that only an on-the-ground WV native can…and in the way that only Bob can!
• Extreme Red Flag Fire Warnings Across Southern California, As Drought And Wind Fuel Fire (Climate Progress)
• VIDEO: Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) Says ‘No New Regulation Needed’ After Toxic Chemical Spill (The Rachel Maddow Show)
• “Watchdog Reporting at its Finest”: Follow Ken Ward Jr. on Twitter
• West Virginia Residents Sickened After Exposure To ‘Safe’ Water: (Aljazeera America
• Potential ‘loophole’ in chemical spill reporting law (Charleston Daily Mail)
• DEP inspectors describe early scene at Freedom leak site (Charleston Gazette) [emphasis added]:
  Freedom Industries had set up one cinder block and used one 50-pound bag of some sort of safety absorbent powder to try to block the chemical flow, state Department of Environmental Protection inspectors say. “This was a Band-Aid approach,” said DEP air quality inspector Mike Kolb. “It was apparent that this was not an event that had just happened.”
• Failed Toxic Substances Control Act collides with the real world in West Virginia chemical spill this week (Environmental Defense Fund) [emphasis added]:
  What is particularly maddening and outrageous is that no one – not local or state officials, not the company that owns the storage tank, not the federal government – can say anything even close to definitive about what risk the chemical poses to people, even in the short-term, let alone over time. And that’s where the failures of TSCA come into sharp focus.
• California: ‘Unprecedented’ Drought Fueling January Wildfires:
• Weather Service: Red Flag warning first ever in month of January (KERO Bakersfield)
• Gov. Brown To Officially Declare Drought In California (KCBS-San Francisco)
• What ‘Global Cooling’?: Record Heat, Drought, Wildfires, Continue in Western U.S., Australia (The BRAD BLOG)
• What Californians Can Expect from the Drought (Peter Gleick, ScienceBlogs) [emphasis added]:
  It is now early 2014 and the rains have not come, for the third year in a row. While the definition of “drought” varies from place to place, it is safe to say that California is currently suffering from a severe – and by some measures, unprecedented – drought.
• Southern California Wildfire Risk Remains High as Santa Ana Winds Continue (The Weather Channel)
• Global warming already having dramatic impacts in California, new report says (Inside Bay Area News) [emphasis added]:
  Climate change is “an immediate and growing threat” affecting the state’s water supplies, farm industry, forests, wildlife and public health, the report says.
• Australia: ‘Unprecedented’ Heat Wave Melts Roads, Pro Tennis Players:
• Australia heatwave prompts fire alerts (BBC)
• Australian Open Slammed For ‘Inhumane’ Conditions As Temperatures Reach Triple Digits (Think Progress)
• Heatwave halts Australian Open tennis matches (BBC)
• Heatwave: Bushfire threat continues as Australia’s south-east suffers soaring temperatures (Australian Broadcasting Co.)
• Alaska: EPA Smacks Down Proposed Pebble Mine:
• An Assessment of Potential Mining Impacts on Salmon Ecosystems of Bristol Bay, Alaska (Final Report) (EPA.gov)
• EPA: Pebble Mine means “long-term risk to salmon, wildlife, and native Alaska cultures” (Climate Progress)
• EPA: Pebble mine poses significant risk to salmon (Anchorage Daily News):
  A long-awaited federal report released Wednesday concludes that a large gold and copper mine in the Bristol Bay area poses significant risks to the region’s thriving sockeye salmon runs and its people — an assessment praised by environmental, fishing and Native groups as sound science and sharply criticized by the group trying to develop the proposed Pebble mine as rushed and flawed.
• Washington DC: Putting S**t In The Capitol To Good Use:
• How D.C.’s Sewage Will Soon Generate Electricity (Climate Progress) [emphasis added]:
  Biosolids once sent to surrounding farms for use as fertilizers, will now stay on site and be processed by 4 anaerobic digesters…. When organic waste goes into the digester tanks, the bacteria devour it and produce a biogas, which is mostly methane. … D.C. Water estimates that it will save $10 million each year on its electricity bill after the system is completed this summer. The digesters will also help reduce the overall carbon footprint of the facility.
• What is Anaerobic Digestion? (American Biogas Council)

‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (Stuff we didn’t have time for in today’s audio report)…

• D. R. Tucker: Resentment Rules the Right (Climate Crocks) [emphasis added]:
  While The Guardian’s Dana Nuccitelli is right to note the consequences of conservative callousness towards the climate, I thought he missed an obvious point about such callousness: the fact there are plenty of permanently ignorant people who actually want to be misinformed and lied to.
• World May Have To Suck Gases From Air To Meet Climate Goals (Reuters):
  A 29-page summary for policymakers, seen by Reuters, says most scenarios show that rising world emissions will have to plunge by 40 to 70 percent between 2010 and 2050 to give a good chance of restricting warming to U.N. targets.
• WikiLeaks Exposes What Obama’s Secret Trade Deal Would Do To The Environment (Huffington Post)
• Italy’s Government Agrees to Send In Army Against Mafia Dumps: (AFP):
  The Italian government agreed Tuesday to send in the army to fight the mafia which it blames for illegally dumping tonnes of toxic garbage around Naples, in an area dubbed the ‘Triangle of Death’.
• Extreme Weather: Floods And Landslides In Southeast Asia Displace Hundreds Of Thousands (Climate Progress)
• Keystone XL: Canada’s Baird Calls for U.S. to End Keystone Pipeline Limbo (BusinessWeek) [emphasis added]:
  “The time for Keystone is now,” Baird said today in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. “I’ll go further — the time for a decision on Keystone is now, even if it’s not the right one. We can’t continue in this state of limbo.”
• Keystone XL: Texas High Court Gives Hope to Landowners In Eminent Domain Fight: (InsideClimate News)
TransCanada, the energy company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, was ordered by the Texas State Supreme Court last week to submit information on its use of eminent domain — an action that keeps a key landowner lawsuit alive.
• Massive Antarctic Glacier Has Entered Irreversible Melt, Could Add Up To 1 Centimeter To Sea Level (Climate Progress)
• Beijing Hit With First Off-The-Charts Air Pollution Day Of The Year (Climate Progress)
• STUDY: How Broadcast News Covered Climate Change In The Last Five Years (Media Matters): The Sunday shows continued to rely largely on media figures and Republicans to dictate the conversation around global warming.
• ANALYSIS: Fox Only Talks About Climate Change When It’s Cold (Media Matters)
• The seven deadly sinners driving global warming (New Scientist):
  It’s a chart that no one wants to top, but global warming’s worst offenders, in absolute terms, are the US, China, Russia, Brazil, India, Germany and the UK. New calculations suggest that these nations are responsible for more than 60 per cent of the global warming between 1906 and 2005.
• Breakthrough: Cheap Liquid Battery Provides Large-Scale Energy Storage for a Rainy Day (Scientific American)
• Nature Bombshell: Observations Point To 10°F Warming by 2100 (Climate Progress):
  A major new study in Nature finds “our climate is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than most previous estimates.” … [O]n our current emissions path we are headed toward a “most-likely warming of roughly 5°C [9°F] above modern [i.e. current] temperatures or 6°C [11°F] above preindustrial” temperatures this century.
• VIDEO: Colbert Calls Out Fox’s Hollow Climate Change Attack: (Media Matters): Colbert: “Well Done. All The Best News Reports End With ‘I Don’t Know Where We Got This'”

FOR MORE on Climate Science and Climate Change, go to our Green News Report: Essential Background Page

• Video Proof That Global Warming is a ‘Hoax’!: NASA Temperature Data 1888-2011 (The BRAD BLOG):



• NASA climate change video: This is the U.S. in 2100 (NASA).