On April 1, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced strong new guidance on mountaintop removal permits, which, if applied rigorously, could prohibit most MTR operations and the resulting toxic dumping into streams and valleys.

However, two weeks ago Lisa Jackson’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave the Army Corps of Engineers a green light for the Pine Creek mine permit, a mountaintop removal (MTR) mining site in Logan County, W.Va. This is the first permit decision the EPA has issued under the new mountaintop mining guidelines, which came out last April and were anticipated to provide tougher oversight of mountaintop removal coal mining.

The new MTR guidelines were understood to provide greater protection for headwater streams by curbing the practice of dumping waste in neighboring valleys to create what is known as valley fills. The Pine Creek permit is the first test of these guidelines, and green lights three new valley fills (each over 40 acres large). It was anticipated that these guidelines, by requiring mining operators to control levels of toxins in nearby streams, would significantly reduce the dumping of mining waste in valleys, which the EPA said was scientifically proven to contaminate drinking water and wreck ecosystems.

Read the rest here and learn what action you might take.

Plankton, base of ocean food web, in big decline

Worldwide phytoplankton levels are down 40 percent since the 1950s, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The likely cause is global warming, which makes it hard for the plant plankton to get vital nutrients, researchers say.

Continue reading Really sucky environmental news →

Earlier this week, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman warned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a letter that approving the Keystone XL pipeline would be “a step in the wrong direction” and criticized the State Department’s limited environmental impact statement about the pipeline.

The proposed pipeline would transport 900,000 barrels of oil a day nearly 2,000 miles from Alberta, Canada to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. The project is currently undergoing the State Department’s review process since all transnational pipelines must be approved by the State Department as coinciding with “national interests.” The pipeline seemed like a done deal, but recently environmental groups, citizens across the country, and 50 members of Congress have been speaking up about the horrible environmental impacts of the pipeline.

Keystone XL would transport oil from oil sands, also called tar sands, the dirtiest fuel that we use. The extraction of oil from tar sands is inherently more energy intensive, using three times more energy to produce than pumping oil from wells. Increasing our use of tar sands oil from this pipeline would increase our greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to adding 18 million cars to the roads. Extracting the oil from Canadian tar sands is also an extremely water-intensive process and destroys large areas of forests.

In addition to highlighting these concerns in his letter, Waxman also criticized the environmental impact statement released by the State Department about the Keystone XL project. As part of their review process, the State Department is required to release this statement weighing the environmental consequences of the project, but Waxman writes that the Department’s statement “makes little sense” since it never discusses the pipeline’s significant impact on global warming, “the most significant environmental problem associated with the project”.

It is unthinkable that at this crucial moment in history we could approve a multi-billion dollar project that increases our dependence on fossil fuels, let alone an investment in one of the dirtiest fuels out there. As Waxman and other public figures are standing up to fight for a clean energy future, we hope that Secretary Clinton hears their voices and refuses to approve a project that would drastically increase our greenhouse gas emissions.

LET THE STATE DEPARTMENT KNOW WHAT YOU THINK

Source of press release

Apropos this discussion, for your weekend entertainment:

Continue reading “You had me at tentacle” →

The following video relates to this.

So far, my new experimental Skeptical Search Engine has been used hundreds of times, and the top searchers are:

• deepak chopra
• homeopath
• ghost
• high fructose corn syrup
• god
• evolution
• zecharia sitchin
• creationism
• ghosts
• global warming
• ancient astronauts
• ufo
• pyramids egypt
• love
• vaccines
• methane bubble
• climate change
• pyramids
• fossil sirenia
• carbohydrates
• easter island
• acupuncture
• vaccine
• Gmos
• bigfoot

This is excellent. One suggestion: Use GMO rather than GMOs and ghost instead of ghosts in order to avoid limiting the search.

… or not.

Desiree Schell of Skeptically Speaking diabolically matched The Culture of Fear author Barry Glassner for a live interview, and a fear-riddled edition of “Everything you know is sort of wrong” (on how poor people are breeding so fast they will take over the earth) by yours truly for TONIGHT’s Skeptically Speaking show.

Can a fly’s eye(s) be used for solar cells? Apparently so. Speaking of which, I have a gripe. Nuclear power supporters have always ignored the fact that Nuclear power (a.k.a. “unlimited safe free energy”) is more expensive than other traditional forms of energy. In the mean time, anti “alternative” energy, often the same people, have touted that Solar is too expensive to be worth it. Well, guess what. A recent study seems to have shown that Solar power is cheaper than nuclear. So, there you go.

Berry Go Round # 30, the Plant Carnival, is up and running at Brainripples. This is your window to amazing plant photography (and some insects too) as well as discussions of plant evolutionary biology.

There is now a fast hybrid car, and it’s a porsche.

And: Apparently, they’ve cracked the mystery of how rubber bands work!