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.
Daily Archives: July 31, 2010
Walking around the lakes
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time at lakes, but the idea of walking around a lake hardly every occurred to me or anyone else. This might be because the lakes were either really big (like the Great Sacandaga Reservoir) or nestled into deep sided rock canyons carved out by glaciers, and thus, not walk-aroundable. Lakes were central places, termini of inland pathways, points along long distance hikes, not things you walked around.
Coming Soon to an OpenSource Platform Near You
Item 1:
Linux has perfectly good fonts these days, and they are getting better.
Patents held by Apple Corporation did not allow basic technology (the Bytecode Interpreter)to be implemented in Linux fonts (without paying). FreeType (the Linux font system) worked around this and things were workable, but still, having the Apple technology would have been better. But now….
As of May 2010, those patents have expired and as of July 12 with version 2.4.0, Freetype ships with the Bytecode Interpreter enabled. Version 2.4.1 was released July 18 to address a small bug found in 2.4.0. Freetype is released under a BSD-style FreeType License and the GPL.
Bwahahaha!!! The patents always expire, the dam always breaks, the grip always loosens. Bwhahahaha!!!
Item 2:
Continue reading Coming Soon to an OpenSource Platform Near You
Really sucky environmental news
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.
Stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline
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.
“You had me at tentacle”
Apropos this discussion, for your weekend entertainment: