environment

In a bold move, the young plaintiffs trying to force the US government to take action on climate change are petitioning the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to halt the development of new sources of fossil fuels. As they wait for a court date, they charge, climate change continues to jeopardize the planet.

Are Colorado teenagers, who are suing the government to take action on climate change, being denied justice by the words of a racist judge? It certainly seems that way.

Climate change is so impossibly, depressingly big, so out of control, that most of us feel powerless to do anything about it. Thus we turn away and do nothing. That’s human nature.

Fortunately, there are people who are willing to step up and speak out for the tough choices that must be made…now.

This Saturday, January 26, will be the first national day of action for Extinction Rebellion in America. This grassroots social movement, which began last fall in the UK, believes that climate breakdown poses an imminent and existential threat to what Noam Chomsky calls “organized human life” on Earth.

Unless immediate action is taken, climate change–related food shortages will account for more than half a million adult deaths by 2050, predicted epidemiologist Andy Haines. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Haines laid out the future in stark terms: Millions more will be subjected to flooding; 250,000 will die annually between 2030 and 2050 from heat stroke, disease, and coastal flooding; and global poverty will increase.

As the partial government shutdown lurches into its fourth week, there is a lot of collateral damage to go around, affecting everyone from communities waiting for cleanups of toxic Superfund sites, to new parents buying baby toys and even some victims of sexual assault.

Indeed, when the public interest group Public Citizen analyzed government records, it found shockingly few cops on the regulatory beat.  

Here’s an interesting way in which a problem is helping to solve itself.

Algal bloom — toxic plants that grow in water in hot weather — feed off of nutrients contained in runoff from farm fertilizers or town wastewater.

The recent UN report on climate change indicated that we could be facing existential risks — ever more extreme weather events and rising sea levels — within 20 years. So what is the world to do?

Seattle — best known for the Space Needle, the Seahawks, and Starbucks — has added a more dubious claim to fame this week: as one of the world’s most polluted cities. Canadian wildfire smoke is sweeping over the northern border, suffocating Puget Sound, Washington State, and beyond. As many readers will know firsthand, smoke is billowing over vast swathes of the western United States.

As wildfire smoke clouded the skies of Seattle, a Washington judge ruled Tuesday to dismiss a lawsuit against the State of Washington filed by a group of young climate change activists — who range in age from 8 to 18.

The Supreme Court has upheld the right of a group of young Americans to sue the federal government over its treatment of the environment. After much stalling by both the Obama and the Trump administrations, the court date is confirmed for the last week in October.

Most Americans have heard of Flint, Michigan, and its ongoing lead water contamination disaster. But the small 2.1-square-mile neighborhood of Watts, located in South Central Los Angeles, might be the latest iteration in a countrywide infrastructure crisis that is primarily affecting minorities and poverty-stricken communities.

The whole world knows the story of Flint by now. The famously depressed city in Michigan, where the majority of residents are African American, shifted its drinking-water source to a local river in 2014 in order to save money. Residents’ complaints about the terrible-smelling murky water that began spewing from their taps were largely ignored. As it turned out, they were being poisoned by lead contamination from years of industrial-waste dumping. Eventually, a state of emergency was declared.  

Forget his use of a staffer to secure a used Trump hotel mattress, his taxpayer-funded secure phone booth, his insistence on flying first class, or his special rental deal with a lobbyist. Those scandals will go away when Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt is no longer in charge of the agency.

For years communities trying to fight pollution from factory farms kept running into a legal roadblock. Until recently, the courts ruled that these farms were exempt from environmental regulations because their animal waste could be returned to the ground as fertilizer. No longer.

Puerto Rico suffered another island-wide power outage this week — seven months after it was hit by Hurricane Maria. This new setback highlights a trap the island finds itself in: forced to repair an antiquated power grid dependent upon imported fossil fuels, with no real hope of adopting new technologies that Americans on the mainland take for granted.

Related: After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico Faces Indifference

Far away from the media spotlight, a crucial two-day hearing in a landmark court case could set the stage for giving stakeholders in developing nations a powerful tool to hold multinational corporations to account for violating labor and environmental standards.

Palestinians burn tires along Gaza boundary to protect themselves from snipers ordered to shoot civilians.

And the winner of the 2018 Black Hole Award is … the Trump White House. Since 2011, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has yearly bestowed what it terms its “dishonor” on a government agency or institution that shows “outright contempt for the public’s right to know.” This is the first time a president and his administration have received the award.

When British diver Rich Horner plunged into the sea at Manta Point, an ocean-cleaning station near the Indonesian resort island of Bali, he was welcomed not by exotic wildlife but by a squirming mass of plastic.

In a video shared Tuesday by leading UK papers, Horner documented his submarine sojourn amid a cluster of trash so dense it could have been mistaken for a seaweed colony.

A three-judge panel in California unanimously ruled that the lawsuit of 21 young people, who want to force the government to take action on climate change, can proceed.

When masked gunmen killed renowned Honduran environmentalist Berta Cáceres in her home two years ago, many believed the murder was connected to her protests against the construction of a dam on a river sacred to an indigenous tribe.

The arrest last week of Roberto David Castillo was a major break in the investigation of the crime. At the time of the murder, Castillo was the CEO of Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA), the construction company that initiated the dam project.

President Donald Trump made good on his “America First” promise last Monday by slapping a hefty 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels. Combined with a duty on imported washing machines, the move is the first of what could be many protectionist shifts in America’s global trade policies.

As we humans are so busy abusing each other, the constant din of battle seems to drown out an even bigger one: over the survival of life on this planet. 

In 2017, Mother Nature took another beating. However, as people in Houston, Puerto Rico, Florida, and — currently — in California can attest, nature also hit back.

In the foreseeable future, the weight of plastic trash in the ocean will be greater than the weight of all fish.

Already it’s been estimated by researchers that virtually all shellfish, and one-quarter of all fish, contain traces of plastic.

Conservationists in Mexico have front-row seats as yet another species is on the verge of extinction. They can watch, but it looks as though there is little they can do to prevent it.

This time, the species in question is the vaquita porpoise. Experts believe there are only about 30 vaquita left in the warm waters of Mexico’s Gulf of California, the only area in the world where the small porpoises are known to live.

Headlines from hurricane stricken Puerto Rico are familiar to Palestinians living under Israeli siege.

A picture says more than a thousand words — and sometimes it speaks volumes. That was the case when photographers captured Donald Trump looking at the sun without protective glasses during the recent solar eclipse. It pretty much sums up the president’s expressed dismissive attitude about science.

We Are Change

The Year of the Red Monkey, also known as the Fire Monkey, starts next month in China. According to Chinese astrologers, the year will be a real rollercoaster ride, filled with surprise and mischief. And, they say, it bodes well for individual initiative, as opposed to collective effort.

Will these predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies?

Corinne Silva’s photographic exhibition illustrates how Zionists have tried to erase Palestine’s identity and culture.

Four years ago, an anonymous package was sent to Amazon Watch, an environmental activist group. It contained videos that seem to show something truly odd: Employees of a major oil company trying not to find oil—and having a chuckle about how hard that proves to be. Forty-five years since the first Earth Day environmentalism apparently remains a joke to some people.

What’s so funny?

We Are Change

Ecological groups in Italy confirm they have no partnership with group linked to Israeli military.

We Are Change

SOURCE: Yahoo News