Big timber lackey Salazar claiming more logging is the solution to too much logging. Ecological, restoration logging? Kinder, gentler logging? Destroy the village to save it? What a Crock! They’re just getting the cut out and destroying even more of already overcut forests. 95% are clearcut and gone already. It’s time to stop! Not another tree! Let the forests recover!
A new study by Dr. Zoe Lindo, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at McGill University, and Jonathan Whiteley, a doctoral student in the same department, shows that large, ancient trees may be very important in helping forests grow.
Shasta County officials have issued a third draft of an environmental impact report for a proposed cogeneration plant in Anderson, once again changing their stance on greenhouse gases.
The report says the proposed Sierra Pacific Industries’ $40 million plant would not have a significant environmental impact, even though it will release about 330,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually from burning wood to generate electricity.
The first version of the report, released in August 2010, concluded the plant’s greenhouse gases would have a significant impact on the environment. The second report, released in September 2011, reversed the earlier opinion and concluded the 330,000 tons of gases would not have a significant impact on the environment.
A study published in the prestigious journal American Economic Review estimates that the costs imposed on society by air pollution from coal-fired power plants are greater than the value added to the economy by the industry. The study concluded that coal may be “underregulated” since the price we pay for coal-fired power doesn’t account for its costs.
According to a Nexis search, not a single major newspaper or television network has covered the study. By contrast, an industry-funded report on the cost of EPA regulations of these air pollutants has received considerable media attention.
A NASA-led science team has created an accurate, high-resolution map of the height of Earth’s forests. The map will help scientists better understand the role forests play in climate change and how their heights influence wildlife habitats within them, while also helping them quantify the carbon stored in Earth’s vegetation.
NOTE: Western Welfare Counties that let the dishonest and destructive, asset-stripping timber industry pay little or no taxes, overcut the forests, and export most of the trees minimally-processed and exporting their workers’ mill jobs as well.. They should ever shape up, stop acting like door mats and make things right or shut up. Stripping the state of even more of its already overcut forests is not the answer. What’s the true cost of our trees, soil, air and water they produce? Does anyone know? Has anyone tried to calculate their full replacement cost of goods sold? They claim it’s all ZERO, the one thing we know it’s not.
You don’t hear much about it, but Bush-Cheney in 2005 endorsed a plan to bail us out of this mess and we’re still following their script. Back then, the G8 nations, led by the U.S., formally adopted a “Plan of Action.” In it, the G8 (Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the U.S.) committed to building a global infrastructure for “carbon capture and storage” (CCS), which means burying carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ground. Now, seven years later, that infrastructure is being built worldwide. The centerpiece is the Global CCS Institute created in 2009. (The “S” in CCS can stand for “sequestration” or “storage” but it’s the same thing — burying pressurized CO2 in liquid form about a mile below ground.)
CCS is by no means the only strategy in the 2005 Plan of Action — there’s plenty about efficiency (doing more with less) and renewable energy (solar, wind, and so forth). But the U.S. is playing down efficiency and renewables in favor of fracking for natural gas and mountaintop removal mining for coal, both of which produce CO2. Therefore the plan says we’ll develop CCS, which is a get-out-of-jail-free card for fossil fuel corporations. With CCS, we could continue burning fossil fuels as long as they last and pass the CO2 on to our grandchildren’s grandchildren to worry about, manage, and pay for.
But, he told the room, there was another strategy that we could follow: attack the banking industry with the fine print of real estate law. For a bank to foreclose on a homeowner, the law requires the bank to show it owns the loan secured by the mortgage against a house. To do that, the lender needs to produce a chain of title as documentary proof that it has legally acquired the loan. This, said Mantor, is where opportunity beckoned. In the frenzied mortgage markets of the past decade, the chains of titles on the loans of tens of millions of homeowners had been “clouded.” If homeowners sued to quiet the title — demanding proof of who really owned their loan — there was a chance they could get their house back. They could even separate their house from the debt against it. The debt then would be unsecured, non-collateralized, and the bank could not take the house even if the homeowners never repaid the money. “And why should we pay it? What are they gonna do?” Mantor struck a defiant pose, his chin out, and rocked for a moment on the heels of his boots. “The fight going forward is about the title,” he went on. “We need to do it together or it won’t work. Pack the courtrooms with quiet-title actions.”
It is no coincidence that so many state legislatures have spent the last year taking the same destructive actions: making it harder for minorities and other groups that support Democrats to vote, obstructing health care reform, weakening environmental regulations and breaking the spines of public- and private-sector unions. All of these efforts are being backed — in some cases, orchestrated — by a little-known conservative organization financed by millions of corporate dollars.
NOTE: I increasingly believe we will continue to compromise, collaborate, capitulate and talk these issues to death unto our death and ultimate human extinction. Makes one wish for the good old days of six guns at high noon in the middle of the street. Fiercely independent Public Citizens banding together against the wealthy crooks’ hired gunslingers. To let corporations terrorize our country, control our news, politics, education and everything else while we behave like easily distracted and frightened lemmings is immoral, unethical and wrong. UNLESS we stop them, repeal corporate personhood, end money as speech, and take back our Country then the failure and our extinction is our fault. This moral insanity must stop, in all its many aspects. What kind of people are we? We’re certainly better than this. We have the power.
The massive Ogallala Aquifer, an ancient underground fresh water lake that made the Plains cornucopia possible after the 1930s Dust Bowl, is located below 8 states in the High Plains, including Kansas. It stretches, at depths ranging from a few feet to 1000 feet, from Texas to South Dakota, and covers roughly 175,000 square miles. Widely exploited only since the 1940s, it has been depleted at an alarming rate since, almost entirely for farming. The problem is causing increasing concern in a number of states including Oklahoma and Texas.
The water in the Ogallala dates back 2 to 6 million years and, like oil, is an ancient and non-renewable resource. As millions of gallons are used annually, the water level declines about 2.7 feet a year. It is replenished at an estimated rate of 1/2 inch per year and has an expected life of only 25 more years.
In a disturbing trend, anti-evolution campaigners are combining with climate change deniers to undermine public education
The truth is, our stories about causation are shadowed by all sorts of mental shortcuts. Most of the time, these shortcuts work well enough. They allow us to hit fastballs, discover the law of gravity, and design wondrous technologies. However, when it comes to reasoning about complex systems — say, the human body — these shortcuts go from being slickly efficient to outright misleading.
The blue economy is based on the idea that whatever human beings have as challenges, natural systems have found solutions for them. We only need to examine closely. Once we understand how nature does it, we need to transpose its solution into our modern world and redesign everything. If we embrace nature’s innovations and emulate ecosystem solutions, we’re going to be sustainable with whatever we do.
Please enjoy the following recent report compiled to help separate fact from fiction and the Orwellian doublespeak used by the timber industry to confuse the public into serving up their public forest treasure:
“Corporations are people, my friend.” Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair
Corporations are obviously not people. But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations. This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations. We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work. People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.
