Friday, March 21, 2014

West Virginians Still Not Drinking Their Water/Duke Energy's Crimes On Display

UPDATE: 4-1-14: FREEDOM INDUSTRIES HEADS TO COURT AMID QUESTIONS ON ‘INSIDER’ PAYMENTS

But it doesn't end there:

President Of Company That Tainted West Virginia’s Water Wants To Be Paid During Bankruptcy

Typical, out of touch arrogance. No caring about the water poisoned, the fact that people still aren't drinking it, the lost wages and business of those effected by it, the sick children, etc. He so needs to go to prison. At least there he can get bread and water- hopefully from the tap.

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Non physical scarcity. They have water, but they can't drink it. The media is not reporting this story anymore. Yet, the people of West Virginia live it everyday.

As we recognize World Water Day on March 22, we not only need to recognize the plight of over one billion in our world who have no water access but also the plight of those who have water but through political and corporate corruption cannot use it. We need a true shift of priorities in our world in order to save ourselves. The fox has been in charge of the hen house for far too long. What is happening in West Virginia and in other states in the US where coal has killed the water is something that must be reported everyday.

We simply cannot survive in a world where dirty energy exists. If this area had solar/wind energy providing its electricity there would be no need for these toxic chemicals and no spill would have taken place. This is the price of dirty energy combined with political cronyism and privatization of our water and it is a price too great in order for a few to profit over the many while destroying this Earth!

Clean water is a human right for ALL OF US and our rivers are not sewers there for the use of those who care more about profits than people!

Also see:

Local Reporter Puts Smug Freedom Industries President In His Place/Updates on West Virginia Chemical Spill

West Virginia Chemical Spill Declared Federal Disaster

Keep fighting for clean water, West Virginia.

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Duke Energy also continues to break the law. Why are these companies still in business?



NC Says Duke Energy Illegally Pumped Water From Coal Ash Ponds Into Cape Fear River

This was no accident. People need to be doing prison time. Why are our waterways that are our life not considered as important as our lives?



WHY?

Also see:

Duke Energy Poisons More Water With Their Coal Ash

UPDATE 3-24-14:

DUKE ENERGY'S'SWEETHEART'POLLUTION DEAL UNDONE

North Carolina regulators said Friday that they have asked a judge to withdraw a proposed settlement that would have allowed Duke Energy to resolve multiple cases of environmental abuse by paying a $99,000 fine with no requirement that the $50 billion company clean up its pollution.

The consent order that the state's Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) scuttled had been meant to settle violations for groundwater contamination leeching from coal ash dumps near Charlotte and Asheville, N.C. Critics had called the deal too lenient.

The order had been reached in July 2013, well before a massive February 2014 spill in Eden, N.C., coated 70 miles of the Dan River in toxic sludge and focused attention on Duke's long history of polluting groundwater with its leaky, unlined, open air coal ash ponds.

The state only took legal action against Duke after a coalition of environmental groups represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) filed notice that they planned to sue Duke under the Clean Water Act for its pollution. The administration of North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory — who himself spent 29 years in the employ of Duke Energy and has benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the company, its employees and their spouses — used its authority under the act to file state violations against Duke and then quickly negotiated the consent order, a move environmentalists say was intended to shield the company from far-harsher penalties it might have faced in federal court.

But now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the DENR and the SELC, which had brought the original Clean Water Act suit against Duke last year, are joining a suit against the energy giant to get it to clean up some of its coal ash contamination.

Coal ash is the byproduct of burning coal for industrial power generation and contains concentrated amounts of toxic metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, as well as aluminum, barium, boron, and chlorine and varying amounts of radioactive uranium, thorium and potassium. The toxins have been linked to cancer, heart damage, lung disease, respiratory distress, kidney disease, reproductive problems, gastrointestinal illness, birth defects, impaired bone growth in children and behavioral problems, according to waste assessments done by the EPA (PDF).

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Again, we need to see some people going to prison. Government officials who benefited from these companies should be first to go. Also, this is not about political parties this is about corruption in the coal industry which effects as we can see all states and is endemic in both parties in those states.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

World Water Day- March 22, 2014



Water is our most precious resource. We cannot survive without it- yet over a billion people on our planet struggle daily to have it while many of us take it for granted. March 22nd yearly is a day set aside to remind the world of how precious and important this resource is to our lives. This year I will be walking for water and donating to an organization that works to dig wells in developing areas with a need for access to water.



Water has never been more at risk globally than it is now. The proliferation of pollution, privatization, dams, scarcity both physical and non-physical added to the effects climate destruction are bringing due to more severe droughts and floods tells us that we must now work to conserve and to also speak out for renewable energy sources that do not waste water. Our energy structure as it stands now is simply unsustainable in a world where population increases in concert with increasing resource depletion place us in a very urgent situation for our future.

This World Water Day, make a pledge to conserve, donate, or spread the important truth about how precious our water resources are to our survival.

WATER IS LIFE-EVERYDAY.

Other entries on World Water Day here:

World Water Day 2013

World Water Day 2012

World Water Day 2011

World Water Day 2010

World Water Day 2009

World Water Day 2008

World Water Day 2007

This entry will have information and links about World Water Day 2014 added to it through Saturday, March 22nd.

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2014 Theme: Water and Energy

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Water Is Life supports this initiative:

100K World Water Day



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World Water Day 2014: The World's Thirstiest Places

Take action on World Water Day:

Tell Congress to Demand the World Bank Stop Funding Global Water Privatizers and Keep Public Water in Public Hands

Global Thirst For Energy Threatens Water Supplies



March 22 is World Water Day: Pray For the Healing of Our Waters

Water is sacred.

World Water Day 2014: When Water Is Death

The quality of our water is a statement about the quality of humanity.

World Must Use Renewables To Avoid/Water/Energy Crisis

To differ a bit personally from the title of this article- we ALREADY have a water/energy crisis. The LAST THING we need is more tarsands excavation!



We need to see more smiles of children having access to clean water. We can see that if we get off the fossil fuel/chemical merry go round and do what is morally right for civilization!

Clean water is worth more than all the gold in the world when it comes to preserving our planet and our lives!

Fossil Fuel Giants Guzzling World's Water as Poor Go Thirsty: UN 'Great political clout' of energy industry trumps those in need of drinking water

Where the rubber meets the road on the nexus of energy and water.

Water In The Anthropocene

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Scientists Sound Alarm On Climate

UPDATE: April 6, 2014 is one for the climate history books. 402 ppm of CO2 was recorded at Mauna Loa. This is the highest-ever daily reading posted by Scripps at Keeling Curve. Carry on...

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Typhoon Haiyan from space. NEW NORMAL? What is normal about this? About hundreds of millions of refugees with no homes, no food, no water, no way to grow food? What is normal about perpetual war? Do people really see how SERIOUS this all is?

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Scientists Sound Alarm on Climate

By Justin Gillis

"Early in his career, a scientist named Mario J. Molina was pulled into seemingly obscure research about strange chemicals being spewed into the atmosphere. Within a year, he had helped discover a global environmental emergency, work that would ultimately win a Nobel Prize.

Now, at 70, Dr. Molina is trying to awaken the public to an even bigger risk. He spearheaded a committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, which released a stark report Tuesday on global warming.

The report warns that the effects of human emissions of heat-trapping gases are already being felt, that the ultimate consequences could be dire, and that the window to do something about it is closing.

“The evidence is overwhelming: Levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rising,” says the report. “Temperatures are going up. Springs are arriving earlier. Ice sheets are melting. Sea level is rising. The patterns of rainfall and drought are changing. Heat waves are getting worse, as is extreme precipitation. The oceans are acidifying.”

In a sense, this is just one more report about global warming in a string going back decades. For anybody who was already paying attention, the report contains no new science. But the language in the 18-page report, called “What We Know,” is sharper, clearer and more accessible than perhaps anything the scientific community has put out to date.

And the association does not plan to stop with the report. The group, with a membership of 121,200 scientists and science supporters around the world, plans a broad outreach campaign to put forward accurate information in simple language.

The scientists are essentially trying to use their powers of persuasion to cut through public confusion over this issue.

Polls show that most Americans are at least somewhat worried about global warming. But people generally do not understand that the problem is urgent — that the fate of future generations (not necessarily that far in the future) is being determined by emission levels now. Moreover, the average citizen tends to think there is more scientific debate about the basics than there really is.

The report emphasizes that the experts have come to a consensus, with only a few dissenters. “Based on well-established evidence, about 97 percent of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening,” it says.

That is not the same as claiming that all questions about climate change have been answered. In fact, enormous questions remain, and the science of global warming entails a robust, evolving discussion.

The new report walks through a series of potential consequences of planetary warming, without asserting that any is sure to happen. They are possibilities, not certainties, and the distinction is crucial for an intelligent public debate about what to do. The worst-case forecasts include severe food shortages as warming makes it harder to grow crops; an accelerating rise of the sea that would inundate coastlines too rapidly for humanity to adjust; extreme heat waves, droughts and floods; and a large-scale extinction of plants and animals.

“What’s extremely clear is that there’s a risk, a very significant risk,” Dr. Molina said by telephone from Mexico, where he spends part of his time. “You don’t need 100 percent certainty for society to act.”

End of excerpt

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“You don’t need 100 percent certainty for society to act.”

Truth. 97% certainty is more than enough and it cannot be said too many times that the public's continued reliance on getting their information about this from mass media and politicians bought by the fossil fuel industry and those only using it to gain political points will only delay that action and make those possibilities certainties.

There is absolutely no doubt that the effects of our forcing upon this planet over the last century and a half are now manifesting themselves in ways that are not only threatening our survival and ability to live sustainably but already effecting it now.

This is the current intiative put forth by the AAAS to clear up the confusion in the public that there is still scientific debate regarding anthropogenic climate change:

What We Know

Excerpt:

"The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest non-government general science membership organization and the executive publisher of Science, a leading scientific journal.

Its mission is “advance science for the benefit of all people.” Its goals include providing a voice for science on societal issues and promoting the responsible use of science in public policy. There may be no more pressing issue intersecting science and society than climate change and the What We Know initiative was born in response to that reality.

The What We Know initiative is dedicated to ensuring that three “R’s” of climate change communicated to the public.

The first is Reality — 97% of climate experts have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.

The second is Risk — that the reality of climate change means that there are climate change impacts we can expect, but we also must consider what might happen, especially the small, but real, chance that we may face abrupt changes with massively disruptive impacts.

The third R is Response — that there is much we can do and that the sooner we respond, the better off we will be.

The What We Know initiative will include outreach to scientists, economists, community leaders, policy makers and the public at large over the following months via meetings and media outreach.

To guide the What We Know initiative, AAAS convened a group of prominent experts in climate science to address the fact that many Americans still erroneously believe that the scientific community is divided on the issue and that Americans are largely unaware of the full spectrum of climate risks – both what is likely to happen and what might happen — that human-caused climate change presents to Americans now and in the future."



Week ending March 17, 2014

Keeling Curve

The public perception that science is still divided on this is erroneous. The fact that humans are now altering the climate system of our planet thus producing more extreme events across a wider area of our planet is fact. There is no disputation that CO2 is a heat trapping gas and that the burning of fossil fuels is the fingerprint along with deforestation, land use changes and agricultural practices. Our rapacious rate of consumption of fossil fuels, water, forests and all resources is now catapulting us into a new epoch of history where our actions are already affecting our ability to live and will see devastating consequences taking place in future generations.

We are already seeing this come to pass in the Arctic where as I have reported previously, methane feedbacks are now occurring. There is no more time to waste on political bickering and using this urgent planetary crisis as a football just to gain votes with no substance. Without a habitable world nothing else matters. Unless we all join together as one human species to see the truth and see our part in telling it and taking action the ecosystems that are our life support will fail us.

I am grateful that this initiative has been implemented especially in regards to alerting the public to this most urgent reality apart from the political, ideological and economic factors that seek to inhibit solutions in a timeframe expedient enough to forestall catastrophe. Make no mistake, we are playing with fire when it comes to moving slowly regarding the effect our consumption has had and will continue to have on our only home if we do not act now. This then means heeding the warnings of scientists and those who see the danger and the effects taking place that the continued excavation and burning of fossil fuels presents.

As also will the continued rapacious consumption, pollution and disregard for our global water sources, especially in light of increased populations in correlation with more severe and frequent effects of droughts, floods, storms, ocean acidification, sea level rise and glacial melt that have been amplified as a result of the greenhouse effect.

The picture above shows that we have now surpassed 400PPM of CO2 in our atmosphere. 450 is game over as far as reversing effects. You do the math and try to understand that our current trajectory is not in the right direction. It will take unparalleled moral courage to go in the direction we need to go. This is why listening to the scientists instead of politicians with an agenda is absolutely imperative at this point in time in order to see our children with a world they can inhabit. I truly don't know how much more plain this can be.

Our Carbon Debt Our Moral Duty

This is a debt our children will hate us for leaving them. They also have every right to do so if we fail them.



Response of AGW deniers, politicians, those who think they don't need to change, those who make $$$$$$ by exploiting this Earth and basically anyone who thinks this information is put here just to take up space. Guess what- doing and or thinking that changes nothing about REALITY.

Another World Water Day Gone

We see another World Water Day pass us by. The theme, Water For All, signifies that though some progress has been made we are woefully behin...