Guardian UK – Companies across Europe are hoarding permits to produce greenhouse gas emissions worth hundreds of millions of pounds, the Guardian can reveal. The surplus credits have been amassed from over-allocation of permits to pollute from the European emissions trading scheme, and by buying cheap credits from carbon-cutting projects in developing countries and holding on to their more expensive official EU allowances. The saved permits can be used to meet future targets to cut the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming and climate change without actually reducing pollution, or sold for a profit in the future. Read Article
The Age – SCORES of starving and pain-ridden kangaroos have been culled after developing tooth and bone deformities from breathing and ingesting fluoride emissions. Many more are believed to be suffering from growths that will kill them. The affected kangaroos are living near the Alcoa aluminium smelter in Portland, in the state’s south-west, and the Austral Bricks factory at Craigieburn. Read Article
Ed. – The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) currently sees itself as a regulatory agency, so they hide behind already established levels for poisons in emissions (not the environment). It makes for a peaceful relationship with the manufacturing corporations poisoning the environment, which suits most governments. This makes the EPA pretty toothless instead of being the powerful and innovative agency that they purport themselves to be. The EPA, or the manufacturer, could have chosen to be pro-active; they might have prevented a lot of unnecessary animal-suffering, now and in the future. When environmental poisoning like this is allowed to happen government agencies have very much ‘lost the plot’ – certainly their ‘vision’. EPA ‘plans’vs. P.2 – stated objectives
WASHINGTON TIMES -A team of researchers from universities across the nation are urgently trying to develop a strain of “super” honeybees to ward off a mysterious malady that has been decimating U.S. colonies for the past three years.Scientists continue to search for the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a malady that has greatly reduced the U.S. bee population. “Over the past three years on average, our surveys have said that we’ve lost about 30 percent of the (2.4 million) colonies nationwide,” said Jeffery Pettis, a lead bee researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Of that figure, the government suspects 13 percent is because of CCD. Read Article
National Geographic – Billions of bits of plastic are accumulating in a massive garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean—a lesser known cousin to the Texas-size trash vortex in the Pacific, scientists say.”Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” said Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “But this issue has essentially been ignored in the Atlantic.” The newly described garbage patch sits hundreds of miles off the North American coast. Although its east-west span is unknown, the patch covers a region between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—roughly the distance from Cuba to Virginia Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Oceanographers have found that a vast floating island of rubbish in the Pacific has doubled over a decade and is now nearly six times the size of Britain. The giant waste collection, known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” lies between California and Hawaii and has been gradually growing for 60 years. It contains everything from plastic bags to shampoo bottles, flip-flops, children’s toys, tyres, drink cans, Frisbees and plastic swimming pools. The soupy water is heavy with toxic chemicals and the broken-down plastic particles are now turning up inside fish. Up to 26 pieces of plastic were recently found inside a single fish and researchers have warned that the chemicals will work their way into the human food chain. Read Article
Ed – As we have reported many times previously there are similar ‘islands’ of rubbish in all the other oceans too.
Wall Street Journal – Canada’s First Nations peoples chastised Royal Bank of Canada (RY) for not doing enough to prevent “an environmental holocaust,” at the bank’s annual meeting in Toronto Wednesday. Four aboriginal groups appealed to Canada’s biggest bank to use its corporate heft and political influence to stop Enbridge Inc. (ENB) from building a 725-mile pipeline to carry oil from Alberta’s tar sands through northern British Columbia to Kitimat, where it would be loaded on tankers for shipment to the U.S. west coast or Asia. Read Article
Science Daily — A nanoparticle growing in popularity as a bactericidal agent has been shown to be toxic to fish, according to a Purdue University study. Tested on fathead minnows — an organism often used to test the effects of toxicity on aquatic life — nanosilver suspended in solution proved toxic and even lethal to the minnows. When the nanosilver was allowed to settle, the solution became several times less toxic but still caused malformations in the minnows. Read Article
ScienceDaily — Poor air quality apparently affects the running times of women in marathons, according to a study by Virginia Tech civil and environmental engineer Linsey Marr. Marr’s findings come from a comprehensive study that evaluated marathon race results, weather data, and air pollutant concentrations in seven marathons over a period of eight to 28 years. The top three male and female finishing times were compared with the course record and contrasted with air pollutant levels, taking high temperatures that were detrimental to performance into consideration. Read Article
AFP – One of the most common weed-killers in the world, atrazine, causes chemical castration in frogs and could be killing off amphibian populations worldwide, a study published showed. Researchers compared 40 male control frogs with 40 male frogs reared from the moment they hatched from eggs until full sexual maturity in atrazine concentrations in the range that animals experience year-round in areas where the chemical herbicide is found. Read Article
BBC – Aboriginal groups are to gather at a public meeting to debate controversial plans to build Australia’s first nuclear waste dump on tribal land. The federal government has identified a remote cattle station north of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory as a likely site. The proposal has caused deep divisions within the indigenous community. Ministers have indicated that the nuclear dump would not be built if landowners opposed it. In the next six years nuclear waste that Australia sent to Europe for reprocessing will be returned. Read Article
Ed – First you steal their land; then you wipe out 90% of their population, mainly through diseases; then you steal their children; then you use their land for nuclear bomb testing; then you count them as “flora & forna” in censuses until 1967; and then you dump the world’s nuclear waste on the desert land that you recently and reluctantly gave back.
Daily Telegraph – Australian aborigines and former servicemen are to sue the British Ministry of Defence over diseases and disabilities that they claim were caused by nuclear testing in the Outback more than 50 years ago. A group of 250 people, including 150 former servicemen, say they have suffered cancer, skin disease and deformities because of the fallout from blasts. Read Article
Science Daily — Scientists broadly agree that global warming may threaten the survival of many plant and animal species; but global warming did not kill the Monteverde golden toad, an often cited example of climate-triggered extinction, says a new study. The toad vanished from Costa Rica’s Pacific coastal-mountain cloud forest in the late 1980s, the apparent victim of a pathogen outbreak that has wiped out dozens of other amphibians in the Americas. Read Article
ABC – The Federal Government claims its plan to put Australia’s first nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory has the support of the Coalition. The Government is considering a site at Muckaty Station, north of Tennant Creek, that was nominated by the Northern Land Council more than two years ago in a deal with the Howard government. Read Article
Ed – Pollution that will stay for the next few thousand years. Lets hope that in that time no-one forgets where it is, or forgets to maintain its integrity from leakages.
Globe & Mail – Even Jerry Seinfeld knows bees are no laughing matter. When they are at risk, so is much of the world’s food supply – which is why recent colony collapses sent scientists rushing to their labs for answers. They ultimately blamed a rogue virus. But one Vancouver scientist says there’s a bigger problem. And the real crisis still lies ahead. Read Article
AP — Researchers say a high concentration of plastic debris is floating in the Atlantic Ocean north of the Caribbean. The study’s principal investigator said Tuesday the findings are based on more than 64,000 tiny bits of plastic collected over more than 22 years by Sea Education Association undergraduates. Researchers believe surface currents carry the debris to the area between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude. Similar currents also deliver trash to a spot between Hawaii and California known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Read Article
Ed – As the last two articles illustrate there are far, far bigger environmental issues for mankind to address than whether or not the global temperature may or may not rise back to the level it was in the Middle Ages, and whether or not that temperature rise is caused by human activity or the sun. You are part of the same food chain that the plastic is currently polluting.
AP – A study of plastic debris floating in the Pacific between Hawaii and California shows researchers have been sharply understating the amount of trash there, a researcher said Tuesday. Giora Proskurowski, an oceanography faculty scientist with the Sea Education Association, said winds push plastic from the ocean surface down into the upper ocean. This causes researchers collecting debris from the surface to miss a large share of the trash in the water when it’s windy. His group determined this by gathering debris in two nets towed behind a boat. On one day during a light breeze, the surface net gathered 431 pieces of plastic, while another net 16 feet below gathered 240 pieces. Read Article
Science Daily — Ships blowing off steam are helping researchers understand how human-made particles might be useful against global warming. New results from modeling clouds like those seen in shipping lanes reveal the complex interplay between aerosols, the prevailing weather and even the time of day the aerosol particles hit the air, according to research presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Diego. Read Article
Ed – As do airplane con-trails and their more toxic and long lasting chemtrails. Seeing as water vapour is a greenhouse gas, and many times more prevelant in the atmosphere than CO2, these atmospheric events are to be expected. Perhaps politicians and banks should be looking therefore to make money out of targeting water emissions and not CO2?
Time – It’s hard to get too worked up about dust. Yes, it’s a nuisance, but it’s hardly one that causes us much anxiety — and our language itself suggests as much. We call those clumps of the stuff under the bed dust bunnies after all, not, say, dust vermin. But there’s a higher ick factor to dust than you might think. And there’s a science to how it gets around — a science that David Layton and Paloma Beamer, professors of environmental policy at the University of Arizona, are exploring. Read Article
Ed. – Since Morgellons appears to be ubiquitous in the environment, it looks as though some form of Morgellons fibre/organism would also be in dust. I have noticed that leaves of plants that accumulate dust on in supermarkets react as if there is a fungus there. Also, when dust gets into a spiders web, it often goes wispy, as in it keeps it’s structure, but wisps grow OFF the web strands, not something I’ve EVER noticed a spider web do before – and once a spider was in the centre of the web – dead. And what about the GMO’s that make up bioinsecticides? And nanoparticles?
De Spiegel – This week the United Nations released a report on the problems surrounding the recycling of electronic scrap, known as e-waste. Millions of tons of old computers and phones on the scrap heaps of the world contain more gold and silver than the average mine. What is needed is better and safer recycling. Mankind goes to an immense effort to extract metal from out of the ground. We dig holes thousands of meters deep into the earth, blow up mountains and dig laboriously in sand dunes. But in fact, there are much easier ways to find precious metals. There is a treasure trove of gold and silver stored in household and industrial trash — in discarded electrical devices, to be more exact. According to a report by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) around 40 million tons worth of electronics end up in the trash annually. Read Article
AP _ Mountaintop mining has obliterated flowering trees and plants that honeybees need for food in the central Appalachians, and some Kentucky lawmakers are asking coal companies to plant pollen-producing vegetation when they finish digging. A nonbinding measure passed Thursday in a House committee. Before the vote, Tammy Horn, a bee researcher at Eastern Kentucky University’s Environmental Research Institute, exhorted lawmakers to approve the measure that would “encourage” coal companies to plant a variety of nectar- and pollen-producers on mountains that have been deforested by mining. Read Article
ABC – The Queensland Government says a high lead level reading in Mount Isa in the state’s north-west was wrong. Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability Kate Jones says a new laboratory hired by mine owner Xstrata made a mistake in interpreting the figures. She says she is now satisfied there was no breach of environmental regulations. Read Article
Ed – And therein lies the rub with self regulation on environmental issues. A quick phone call to a laboratory company that had recently won the contract from a corporation and they “discover their mistake” and the problem solved (for the corporation).
Daily Telegraph – Fundamental steps must be taken to protect pupils and teachers from deadly asbestos in schools, a new study urged. The report by the Asbestos Testing and Consultancy Association, entitled Assessment of Asbestos Management in Schools, claimed the majority of schools are ”not managing their asbestos effectively or safely”. The findings were based on an initial sample of 16 schools which agreed to be inspected on a voluntary basis after being contacted by their respective authorities. Read Article
Washington Post – I keep reading about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that floating island of trash between California and Hawaii. Can we ever clean it up? And should we even bother? The Lantern always thought the Garbage Patch was a huge, waterborne landfill — sort of like a massive hair clog in a big drain. In reality, it’s not so much an island of trash as a thin, soupy area of litter, mostly in the form of tiny flecks of plastic, studded here and there with old fishing gear and children’s toys. Even if you were to sail right through the Patch, the water probably wouldn’t look too remarkable, unless you scooped some up and looked at it closely. So cleaning this part of the ocean isn’t as simple as you might imagine. Read Article
PhysOrg.com – US experts called Friday for toxicity tests on chemicals they suspect play a role in the development of breast cancer, a leading cause of death in American women. “We’re currently not identifying chemicals that could be contributing to the risk of breast cancer,” said Megan Schwarzman, a physician and environmental health researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. Read Article
“For too long our society has been left to fend for itself to judge the safety of environments. Corporations churn out thousands of new products and chemicals each year, advertising their functionality, convenience, efficiency, aesthetic and health promoting effects. Rarely do we hear about their ingredients, or eventual fate as waste. Public discourse, too, is dominated by the private sector, which has effectively shaped our values, our consumer behaviour, and how we assess risk. The effect has been the creation of more chemicals, pollution, and waste than ever before in human history, which in turn has accelerated the chemical transformation of the planet and our bodies, as well as the growing incidence of human illness associated with degraded environments”
- Prof. John Wargo, Green Intelligence
