PIED TYPE
Environment
What would be an appropriate punishment?
Colorado’s Hewlett Gulch Fire, subject of a previous PT post, has grown to 7,600 acres and is about 45% contained this evening. Several evacuation orders have been lifted and several other areas remain on evacuation standby, but so far there have been no injuries and no homes destroyed. What would be a fair penalty for … Continue reading
BP Oil: First criminal charges filed
The story hasn’t garnered a lot of headlines, but the first criminal charges have finally been filed in the case of the BP oil spill two years ago. According to a federal affidavit and as reported by the Huffington Post, Kurt Mix, 50, a senior BP drilling engineer, allegedly destroyed hundreds of text messages sent … Continue reading
Just a matter of time
It’s been almost two years since BP oil’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig burned and sank into the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to human error, corporate negligence, and political cronyism. The oil spewed into gulf waters for three months while an ill-prepared, ill-equipped oil company struggled to find a way to cap a well so deep … Continue reading
Keystone pipeline: Not dead yet
From the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC): Just two weeks after President Obama killed a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, Republican leaders in Congress are trying to force its approval by attaching it to the payroll tax bill and other unrelated legislation.
I’m number 2,331,808,246 … approximately
Big in the media this week: The world population will reach an estimated 7 billion on October 31. I’m not sure why that’s such big news, other than 7 billion being a nice round number. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect only statisticians to get excited about. Except … except that the rate of … Continue reading
Cantaloupe packing house likely source of listeria outbreak
Today, finally, I’m seeing the FDA explanation of how those Jensen Farms cantaloupes from Holly, Colo., were contaminated with listeria. Had the contamination occurred in the fields, I was prepared to consider the farm not directly responsible. However, it appears the cantaloupes were infected in the packing house, under conditions that should not have existed. … Continue reading
The red baby carriage
Extraordinarily effective ad, I think — the American Lung Association ad about asthma and the Clean Air Act. The one with the red baby carriage and the sound of a coughing, asthmatic infant. Every time it runs I end up short of breath and reaching for that baby …
The Morganza Spillway: Denying the river
The Morganza Spillway. It seems to get mentioned in every story about the flooding along the Mississippi River. So I finally went to Wikipedia to find out what it is, exactly, and why it’s so important. By the time I finished following links and reading, I’d learned quite a bit about the actual flow of … Continue reading
Earth Day 2011
««« ♦ »»» Teach your children what we have taught our children – that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know. The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the … Continue reading
About that California radiation thing
Count on the media to keep stirring the pot. They report on radiation from Japan; people on the West Coast get concerned. They report that people on the West Coast are concerned; everyone gets more concerned. The more the media talk about it and try to explain it, the more people get worked up about … Continue reading
Colorado wolf count back to zero
In February 2009 I wrote excitedly that one of Yellowstone’s wolves had, according to her tracking collar, made her way through five states and finally into Colorado. I began dreaming of someday seeing wolves reestablished in Rocky Mountain National Park. Of course, I should have known better. Today I learned the wandering wolf was found … Continue reading
Surprise, the oil isn’t gone
Remember that little “oops” of an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico over the summer? That wee little incident that BP and the U.S. government kept insisting wasn’t as bad as we all knew it was? The one they assured us was all better now? Of course we didn’t believe the whole mess was … Continue reading
Western wolves mean water
Restoring wolves to Yellowstone National Park has brought an unexpected benefit — wetlands. When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, naturalists hoped to get more wolves. And they did. The number of wolves grew from the original 66 to an estimated 1,700 today. But what no one anticipated was that the wolves would, in … Continue reading
You can’t fool all the people all the time
Of course it isn’t all gone, like BP and our government have said. You didn’t believe, and neither did I, that several months’ worth of gooey BP oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico just disappeared — miraculously vanished — a day or two after the well was capped. Sure enough, scientists are saying that … Continue reading
Who do you trust?
This week BP finally got its oil-spewing hole in the Gulf of Mexico shut down. The final cementing via a relief well is still to come, but the flow has been stopped. And, miraculously, most of the three or four months’ worth of oil is suddenly gone! BP, who couldn’t seem to get anything right … Continue reading
Great news for wolves
I just received an email from Defenders of Wildlife, although I am not a member. It states, in part: As a result of a lawsuit brought in federal court by Defenders of Wildlife and other conservation groups, wolves in Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies are again protected under the Endangered Species Act. A federal … Continue reading
Ding dong, the witch is dead
BP CEO Tony Hayward is out. Fired, resigned, reassigned. Small comfort to those injured, perhaps irreparably, by BP’s gulf oil spill. Small comfort to Americans outraged by his pompous, arrogant, defiant attitude about the whole mess. Nor is there any comfort in knowing his replacement, Robert Dudley, is a rather easy-going, low-key American. I’ve no … Continue reading
Summer news snooze
The Mosque at Ground Zero The “mosque at Ground Zero” isn’t. It isn’t a mosque and it isn’t at Ground Zero. Or at least that’s what I’ve heard. Whether it’s a mosque or a Muslim cultural center or whatever, a map in one report clearly showed the proposed structure is three blocks from Ground Zero. … Continue reading
BP installing a new cap today … big whoop
Flash! BP is installing a wondrous new containment cap on their leaking well today. This cap is expected to contain most, if not all, of the spewing oil. Really? They want a medal or something? They should have been prepared to do this the day after the well blew out.
Wave power is here
Wave power. An endless supply of energy surging across our oceans. If only we could harness it … A company called Aquamarine Power has done just that with a device they call Oyster. Oyster 1 is already in place, generating power on the coast of Scotland, and Oyster 2 is being built this year. This … Continue reading
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