Fracking and a Radioactive Silvery-White Monster: Radium Must be Left in the Earth

Fracking for gas not only uses toxic chemicals that can contaminate drinking and groundwater -- it also releases substantial quantities of radioactive poison from the ground that will remain hot and deadly for thousands of years.

Issuing a report yesterday exposing major radioactive impacts of hydraulic fracturing known as fracking -- was Grassroots Environmental Education, an organization in New York, where extensive fracking is proposed.

The Marcellus Shale region which covers much of upstate New York is seen as loaded with gas that can be released through the fracking process. It involves injecting fluid and chemicals under high pressure to fracture shale formations and release the gas captured in them.

But also released, notes the report, is radioactive material in the shale including Radium-226 with a half-life of 1,600 years. A half-life is how long it takes for a radioactive substance to lose half its radiation. It is multiplied by between 10 and 20 to determine the “hazardous lifetime” of a radioactive material, how long it takes for it to lose its radioactivity. Thus Radium-226 remains radioactive for between 16,000 and 32,000 years.

“Horizontal hydrofracking for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale region of New York State has the potential to result in the production of large amounts of waste materials containing Radium-226 and Radium-228 in both solid and liquid mediums,” states the report by E. Ivan White. For 30 years he was a staff scientist for the Congressionally-chartered National Council on Radiation Protection.

“Importantly, the type of radioactive material found in the Marcellus Shale and brought to the surface by horizontal hydrofracking is the type that is particularly long-lived, and could easily bio-accumulate over time and deliver a dangerous radiation dose to potentially millions of people long after the drilling is over,” the report goes on.

“Radioactivity in the environment, especially the presence of the known carcinogen radium, poses a potentially significant threat to human health,” it says. “Therefore, any activity that has the potential to increase that exposure must be carefully analyzed prior to its commencement so that the risks can be fully understood.”

The report lays out “potential pathways of the radiation” through the air, water and soil. Through soil it would get into crops and animals eaten by people.

Examined in the report are a 1999 study done by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation “assisted by representatives from 16 oil and gas companies” on hydrofracking and radioactivity and a 2011 Environmental Impact Statement the agency did on the issue. It says both present a “cavalier attitude toward human exposure to radioactive material.”

Radium causes cancer in people largely because it is treated as calcium by the body and becomes deposited in bones. It can mutate bones cells causing cancer and also impact on bone marrow. It can cause aplastic anemia an inability of bone marrow to produce sufficient new cells to replenish blood cells. Marie Curie, who discovered radium in 1893 and felt comfortable physically handling it, died of aplastic anemia.

Once radium was used in self-luminous paint for watch dials and even as an additive in products such as toothpaste and hair creams for purported “curative powers.”

There are “no specific treatments for radium poisoning,” advises the Delaware Health and Social Services Division of Public Health in its information sheet on radium. When first discovered, “no one knew that it was dangerous,” it mentions.

White’s report, entitled “Consideration of Radiation in Hazardous Waste Produced from Horizontal Hydrofracking,” notes that “radioactive materials and chemical wastes do not just go away when they are released into the environment. They remain active and potentially lethal, and can show up years later in unexpected places. They bio-accumulate in the food chain, eventually reaching humans.”

Under the fracking plan for New York State, “there are insufficient precautions for monitoring potential pathways or to even know what is being released into the environment,” it states.

The Department of Environmental Conservation “has not proposed sufficient regulations for tracking radioactive waste from horizontal hydrofracking,” it says. “Neither New York State nor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would permit a nuclear power plant to handle radioactive material in this manner.”

Doug Wood, associate director of Grassroots Environmental Education, which is based in Port Washington, New York, and also editor of the report, commented as it was issued: “Once radioactive material comes out of the ground along with the gas, the problem is what to do with it. The radioactivity lasts for thousands of years, and it is virtually impossible to eliminate or mitigate. Sooner or later, it’s going to end up in our environment and eventually our food chain. It’s a problem with no good solution - and the DEC is unequipped to handle it.”

As for “various disposal methods…contemplated” by the agency “for the thousands of tons of radioactive waste expected to be produced by fracking,” Wood said that “none…adequately protect New Yorkers from eventual exposure to this radioactive material. Spread it on the ground and it will become airborne with dust or wash off into surface waters; dilute it before discharge into rivers and it will raise radiation levels in those rivers for everyone downstream; bury it underground and it will eventually find its way into someone’s drinking water. No matter how hard you try, you can’t put the radioactive genie back into the bottle.”

Furthermore, said Wood in an interview, in releasing radioactive radium from the ground, “a terrible burden would be placed on everybody that comes after us. As a moral issue, we must not burden future generations with this. We must say no to fracking -- and implement the use of sustainable forms of energy that don’t kill.”

The prospects of unleashing, through fracking, radium, a silvery-white metal, has a parallel in the mining of uranium on the Navajo Nation.

The mining began on the Navajo Nation, which encompasses parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, during World War II as the Manhattan Project, the American crash program to build atomic weapons, sought uranium to fuel them. The Navajos weren’t told that mining the uranium, yellow in color, could lead to lung cancer. And lung cancer became epidemic among the miners and then spread across the Navajo Nation from piles of contaminated uranium tailings and other remnants of the mining.

The Navajos gave the uranium a name: Leetso or yellow monster.

Left in the ground, it would do no harm. But taken from the earth, it has caused disease. That is why the Navajo Nation outlawed uranium mining in 2005. “This legislation just chopped the legs off the uranium monster,” said Norman Brown, a Navajo leader.

Similarly, radium, a silvery-white monster, must be left in the earth, not unleashed, with fracking, to inflict disease on people today and many, many generations into the future.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/presidential-elections-powerful-special-interest-groups-won-again/5310972

Climate change, not the national debt, is the legacy we should care about

Imagine if in response to Japan attacking Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, our political leaders had debated the best way to deal with the deficits from war spending projected for 1960. This is pretty much the way in which Washington works these days.

The political leadership, including the Washington press corps and punditry, were already intently ignoring the economic downturn that is still wreaking havoc on the lives of tens of millions of people across the country. Now, in the wake of the destruction from Hurricane Sandy, they will intensify their efforts to ignore global warming. After all, they want the country to focus on the debt – an issue that no one other than the elites views as a problem.

The reality, of course, is straightforward. The large deficits of recent years are due to the economic downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. If the economy were back near its pre-recession level of unemployment, then the deficits would be close to 1% of GDP, a level that could be sustained indefinitely.

But the deficit scare-mongers are not interested in numbers and economics; they want to gut key government programs – most importantly, social security and Medicare. That is why they are pushing the fear stories about the debt and deficit. This is the rationale for the Campaign to "Fix" the Debt, a collection of 80 CEOs ostensibly focused on getting the budget in order.

What is perhaps most infuriating about this crew is the claim that their efforts are somehow designed to benefit our children and grandchildren. This is bizarre for a number of reasons. First, while they do want to cut social security and Medicare for current retirees and those expecting to benefit from these programs in the near future, the biggest cuts in their plans will hit today's young.

In effect, they are promising to "save" these programs for young workers by destroying them. Under most of the proposals designed to "fix" these programs, social security will provide a sharply-reduced benefit for retirees in 40 to 50 years' time, compared to the currently scheduled level. And Medicare will by no means ensure most seniors' access to decent healthcare.

However, what's even more bizarre regarding their generational equity logic is the idea that, somehow, the well-being of future generations can be measured in any way by the size of the government debt. This point should have been pounded home to even the thickest deficit hawk by Hurricane Sandy. What we do or don't do in the next decade will have a huge impact on the climate conditions that our children and grandchildren experience. Imagine that we listen to our Campaign to Fix the Debt friends and find a way to pay down the debt while neglecting any steps to curb global warming.

We'll be able to tell our children and grandchildren that they don't have to pay interest on government bonds (they also won't be receiving interest on government bonds, but let's not complicate matters with logic), even as they evacuate their homes ahead of flood waters. Undoubtedly, they will be very thankful for this great benefit that we will have bestowed on them, courtesy of the public-minded CEOs of the Campaign to Fix the Debt.

In reality, the campaigners are spewing utter nonsense when they imply that the well-being of future generations will be in any way determined by the size of the government debt that we pass on to them. We hand down to future generations a whole society and a planet that will be damaged to varying degrees, depending on our current actions. Neglecting the steps necessary to fix the planet out of a desire to reduce the deficit is incredibly irresponsible if we care about future generations.

Of course, global warming is far from the only non-budgetary cost that we are imposing on future generations. When we fill our jails with young people, many of whom will spend much of their lives in the criminal justice system, we are imposing large costs on future generations. We just are not honest enough to enter them in the budget books. The same is true when we make enemies internationally with aggressive military actions that could lead to enduring hostility.

There are also even simpler cases of dishonest accounting: if the government imposed a $250bn annual tax on prescription drugs (roughly $3tn over the ten-year budgetary horizon), everyone would understand this as a large burden on consumers. However, when the government grants patent monopolies on prescription drugs that allow drug companies to charge $250bn more than the free-market price, no one enters this additional cost on the ledgers.

The Campaign to Fix the Debt types like to pretend such costs don't exist. They just want us to shut up and gut social security and Medicare. But the public is not likely to be as stupid as they want us to be.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/08/climate-change-national-debt-legacy

An Open Letter to Obama from the World's Poorest Countries

Dear President Obama,

As the lead negotiator for the world's 48 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in the United Nations climate change negotiations, I congratulate you on your re-election. I also want to express my admiration for your response to superstorm Sandy: without the preparations that you made, the impacts to those hit by the storm would have been even more devastating. As communities in the north-east work to rebuild and recover, the world has an opportunity to begin a new, reality-based conversation about climate change

I write with a simple request: as this discussion continues in the world's most developed countries, remember those who live in its poorest regions. Remember that as a result of climate change, this kind of fatal weather event has become commonplace for us while we lack the infrastructure and resources to adequately protect our citizens.

As researchers at Brown University's climate and development lab have shown, climate-related disasters such as droughts, extreme temperatures, floods, and hurricanes have caused an estimated 1.3 million deaths since 1980. Two-thirds of these deaths (over 909,000) occurred in the least developed countries. We are only 12% of the world's population, but we suffer the effects of climate-related disasters more than five times as much as the world as a whole.

Given this reality and your early commitment to leading a science-directed discussion about the changing climate, I was surprised that you only mentioned climate change in your re-election campaign a few times, and not once in your three debates with Mitt Romney. We know that 70% of US citizens now recognise the reality of human-caused climate change. As the world's largest economy, the US has a unique opportunity and responsibility to take bold action on this issue. Indeed, the wellbeing of the citizens of your nation and mine depends on your ability to lead at this critical juncture. It is time to end the climate silence.

Later this month, representatives of the world's nations will meet in Doha, Qatar, for the annual negotiations on the UN climate change treaty. When you were first elected president, your words gave us hope that you would become an international leader on climate change. But you have not lived up to this promise. The framework that you put in place sets the planet on course to warm dangerously, and delays action until 2020 – this will be too late. This year's meeting in Qatar may be our last chance to put forward a new vision and plan to reverse this course. Your legacy, and the future of our children and grandchildren depend on it. We ask you to lead in two ways.

First, join with the European Union, the LDCs and the Alliance of Small Island States in taking on ambitious national commitments to reduce climate pollution. Go beyond the commitments that you made in Copenhagen in 2009. The climate is changing faster than we thought, and we must respond with increased ambition.

Second, provide adequate funding to help the LDCs and other vulnerable nations to adapt to this new climate reality. In 2010, the wealthiest countries directed about $1.5bn to help developing countries adapt to a changing climate. Over the same period, they spent over $400bn subsidising fossil fuel industries. They gave the main contributors to human-caused climate change more than 250 times the support they offered those whom it harms most.

Countries from Gambia and Haiti, to Malawi and Bangladesh need the "predictable and adequate" funding promised in Copenhagen so that they can take simple steps to protect their citizens. This means moving drinking water and irrigation wells away from coasts, where saltwater is intruding into aquifers; it includes developing drought-resistant crops and helping small farmers in fragile, semi-arid regions survive. We have to prepare roads and cities, villages and farms for floods, hurricanes and heat waves. We need to equip people with the weather prediction, early warning systems and emergency response that citizens of the developed countries take for granted.

With 20 years of international climate change negotiations behind us, there is simply no longer time or cause for wealthy countries to continue to stall in taking real action to fulfil the promises they have made. Having the wealthy nations reduce their greenhouse gas emissions steeply is fundamental, but helping the poorest of us cope with its impacts is an immediate necessity.

Mr President, remind the world that the devastation of climate change is shared by all its citizens. Remember that this reality is changeable. Make changing it your legacy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/nov/08/obama-climate-change-poorest-countries

Study: Predicted 6ºC Rise by 2100 Should End "Business as Usual"

A new report by a global accounting firm announced Monday that businesses around the world are ill-prepared to meet the challenges of climate change and issued a warning, citing their extensive analyses of world economies, that global temperatures could rise by as much as 6ºC by the end of the century.

"This isn't about shock tactics, it's simple maths," said Leo Johnson, a partner at Pricewaterhouse Cooper (PwC), which conducted the economic study. "We're heading into uncharted territory for the scale of transformation and technical innovations required. Whatever the scenario, or the response, business as usual is not an option."

"It's time to plan for a warmer world … We have passed a critical threshold."

In 2007, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that a rise in global temperatures of more than 2ºC would lead to catastrophic changes for planetary systems. Though binding agreements remain elusive, most of the world's nations have agreed—at least in principle—that preventing a more than 2ºC rise should be a key target to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.

The PwC report, however, says that limiting global warming to 2ºC would now mean reducing global carbon intensity by an average of 5.1% a year – a performance never achieved since 1950, when these records began. The report warns that "governments and businesses can no longer assume that a 2ºC warming world is the default scenario."

"While we've reversed the increase in emissions intensity reported last year we're still seeing results that are simply too little too late," said Johnson. "We've now got to achieve, for the next 39 years running, a target we've never achieved before."

"It's time to plan for a warmer world… We have passed a critical threshold," he said.

Words like resilience, decarbonization and sustainability have long been key words among environmental campaigners and scientists warning about the current and coming impacts of human-induced global warming and climate change. The PwC report, now, puts some of those same words into the vocabularies of some of the the world's largest financial planners.

"The risk to business is that it faces more unpredictable and extreme weather, and disruptions to market and supply chains," said Jonathan Grant, director of the PwC's sustainability and climate change program. "Resilience will become a watch word in the boardroom - to policy responses as well as to the climate. More radical and disruptive policy reactions in the medium term could lead to high carbon assets being stranded."

"The new reality is a much more challenging future in terms of planning, financing and predictability. Even doubling our current annual rates of decarbonization globally every year to 2050, would still lead to 6ºC, making governments' ambitions to limit warming to 2ºC appear highly unrealistic."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/11/05-2

Obama and Romney remain silent on climate change, the biggest issue of all

Here's a remarkable thing. Neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama – with the exception of one throwaway line each – have mentioned climate change in the wake of hurricane Sandy.

They are struck dumb. During a Romney rally in Virginia on Thursday, a protester held up a banner and shouted "What about climate? That's what caused this monster storm". The candidate stood grinning and nodding as the crowd drowned out the heckler by chanting "USA! USA!". Romney paused, then resumed his speech as if nothing had happened. The poster the man held up? It said "End climate silence".

While other Democrats expound the urgent need to act, the man they support will not take up the call. Barack Obama, responding to his endorsement by the mayor of New York, mentioned climate change last week as "a threat to our children's future". Otherwise, I have been able to find nothing; nor have the many people I have asked on Twitter. Something has gone horribly wrong.

There are several ways in which the impact of hurricane Sandy is likely to have been exacerbated by climate breakdown. Warmer oceans make hurricanes more likely and more severe. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, increasing the maximum rainfall. Higher sea levels aggravate storm surges. Sandy might not have hit the United States at all, had it not been for a blocking ridge of high pressure over Greenland, which diverted the storm westwards. The blocking high – rare there at this time of year – could be the result of the record ice melt in the Arctic this autumn.

This might sound like the wisdom of hindsight. But in February the journal Nature Climate Change published an article warning that global warming is likely to "increase the surge risk for New York City". As storms intensify and the sea level rises, it predicted that storm surges previously described as 100-year events would become between five and 30 times as frequent.

Four years ago, Obama pledged that "my presidency will mark a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change". He promised a federal cap and trade system and "strong annual targets" to reduce carbon pollution. But he ran into a ridge of high pressure. His cap and trade bill was killed in the Senate in 2010.

At a meeting in the White House in 2009, his strategists decided that climate change was a banned topic: it caused too much trouble. From then onwards, Obama would talk about clean energy and green jobs and improvements in fuel economy, but would seldom explain why these shifts were necessary. The problem with this approach is that you cannot engineer a sustained reduction of greenhouse gas emissions only by getting into clean energy: you also have to get out of dirty energy. And that requires statesmanship: active and persuasive engagement with the public.

In April, Obama said that global warming "will become part of the campaign" and that he would be "very clear" about how he would deal with it. It hasn't happened. There were a couple of noncommittal paragraphs in his speech to the national convention, during which he also boasted that "we've opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years, and we'll open more." There was more of the same in the Democratic platform (the party's manifesto). Otherwise, this remains the issue that dare not speak its name. For the first time since 1984, climate change wasn't mentioned in any of the presidential debates.

This, remember, is after a year of climate disasters: the droughts and wildfires that devastated much of the continental interior of the United States, the Arctic meltdown, the superstorm that ripped through the Caribbean before piercing the financial and spiritual heart of the nation. You wonder what it takes.

As for Romney, his contribution has been confined to mockery. Even as hurricane Isaac cut short the Republican national convention, he ridiculed Obama, to the delight of the delegates, for wanting to stop the sea level from rising. It was a revolting spectacle, which, in the aftermath of Sandy, would have become a major liability, had climate change not been taboo.

In the Republican party platform, "climate change" – yes, in quotes – is mentioned only once, to attack Obama for taking it seriously. The platform commits the party to blocking all effective measures to curb it, and to developing new coal (which Romney now professes to "love"), the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and oil drilling on the outer continental shelf and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Planetary ruin, for the Republicans, seems no longer to be an unfortunate side-effect of development: now it looks almost like a desirable end in itself; a test of manhood and corporate muscle.

Successive polls show that an effective response to climate breakdown will not lose votes. Votes are not the problem: the problem is money and traction. Anyone who tries to address this subject encounters a storm surge of attack ads, obstruction and manufactured fury.

During the crucial year – 2009 – in which the cap and trade bill was struggling through Congress and governments were preparing for the summit in Copenhagen, environmental groups threw everything they had at climate change. After massive fundraising efforts, a coalition of green NGOs managed to find $22m for federal lobbying. But Exxon alone outspent them with a casual flick of the wallet. The $27m it dropped into the counter-campaign represented half of a day's profits. The other fossil fuel companies threw in a further $150m. Without a major reform of both lobbying and campaign finance, the big money will keep winning. Protecting the planet and its people is impossible in a plutocracy.

The Republicans in Congress have no choice but to keep obstructing or filibustering every means of addressing our foremost global crisis, for to alter their position would be to jeopardise their political funding. As David Roberts of grist.org points out, Obama has little incentive to talk about climate change when he knows that any promise he makes will be thwarted. All he can do is to "fight for gridlock because gridlock is better than the alternative".

So the two candidates remain struck dumb. Speech fails them, action is abominable, they will not even raise their hands in self-defence. The world's most pressing crisis, now breaking down the doors of the world's most powerful nation, cannot be discussed.

• This article was amended on 6 November 2012, to say that for the first time since 1984, climate change wasn't mentioned in any of the presidential debates. The original article said 1988.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/05/obama-romney-remain-silent-climate-change

Why Sea Level Is Rising Faster Than Predicted

Sea levels are rising faster than expected from global warming. The last official IPCC report in 2007 projected a global sea level rise between 0.2 and 0.5 meters by the year 2100. But current sea-level rise measurements meet or exceed the high end of that range and suggest a rise of one meter or more by the end of the century. Its, faster rise than estimate, reason is baffling scientists.

University of Colorado geologist Bill Hay has a good idea regarding the why*. 

"What's missing from the models used to forecast sea-level rise are critical feedbacks that speed everything up," says Hay. He will be presenting some of these feedbacks in a talk on Nov. 4, at the meeting of The Geological Society of America in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.

One of those feedbacks involves Arctic sea ice, another the Greenland ice cap, and another soil moisture and groundwater mining.

"There is an Arctic sea ice connection," says Hay, despite the fact that melting sea ice -- which is already in the ocean -- does not itself raise sea level. Instead, it plays a role in the overall warming of the Arctic, which leads to ice losses in nearby Greenland and northern Canada. When sea ice melts, Hay explains, there is an oceanographic effect of releasing more fresh water from the Arctic, which is then replaced by inflows of brinier, warmer water from the south.
"So it's a big heat pump that brings heat to the Arctic," says Hay. "That's not in any of the models." That warmer water pushes the Arctic toward more ice-free waters, which absorb sunlight rather than reflect it back into space like sea ice does. The more open water there is, the more heat is trapped in the Arctic waters, and the warmer things can get.

Then there are those gigantic stores of ice in Greenland and Antarctica. During the last interglacial period, sea level rose 10 meters due to the melting of all that ice -- without any help from humans. New data suggests that the sea-level rise in the oceans took place over a few centuries, according to Hay.

"You can lose most of the Greenland ice cap in a few hundred years, not thousands, just under natural conditions," says Hay. "There's no telling how fast it can go with this spike of carbon dioxide we are adding to the atmosphere."

This possibility was brought home this last summer as Greenland underwent a stunning, record-setting melt. The ice streams, lubricated by water at their base, are speeding up.

Hay notes, "Ten years ago we didn't know much about water under the Antarctic ice cap." But it is there, and it allows the ice to move -- in some places even uphill due to the weight of the ice above it.

"It's being squeezed like toothpaste out of a tube," explains Hay. The one thing that's holding all that ice back from emptying into the sea is the grounded ice shelves acting like plugs on bottles at the ends of the coastal glaciers. "Nobody has any idea how fast that ice will flow into the oceans once the ice shelves are gone."

Another missing feedback is the groundwater being mined all over the world to mitigate droughts. That water is ultimately added to the oceans (a recent visualization of this effect in the U.S. was posted by NASA's Earth Observatory: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=79228).

All of these are positive feedbacks speeding up the changes in climate and sea-level rise.

"You would expect negative feedbacks to creep in at some point," says Hay. "But in climate change, every feedback seems to go positive." The reason is that Earth's climate seems to have certain stable states. Between those states things are unstable and can change quickly. "Under human prodding, the system wants to go into a new climate state."

* ScienceDaily, “Why Seas Are Rising Ahead of Predictions: Estimates of Rate of Future Sea-Level Rise May Be Too Low”, Nov. 1, 2012,

Why Sea Level Is Rising Faster Than Predicted http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121101153549.htm

http://www.countercurrents.org/cc031112.htm

Matt Taibbi - Hurricane Sandy and the Myth of the Big Government-vs.-Small-Government Debate

Quite a shock the other day to look out my window in Jersey City, and see the Hudson River rushing over what used to be the street in front of my building. For nearly three days my dog and I played Robinson Crusoe and Friday, sleepily watching from our little apartment-island while we waited for hot water, cell service, the internet, even elevators to come back on line.President Barack Obama speaks as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie looks on as they visit a shelter for Hurricane Sandy victims in Brigantine, New Jersey, on October 31th, 2012.

When I finally got back on the internet and was able to read the news again, I saw that Hurricane Sandy, in addition to being the rare storm to live up to its televised hype, had turned into the last-minute curveball plot twist that always seems to pop up in presidential races.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/01-6

Daryl Hannah - The Battle Against Big Energy's Rush to Ruin Our Planet

Extreme killer superstorms, historic drought, vanishing sea ice, an increase in ocean acidity by 30%, the hottest decade on record and mega forest fires have increasingly become our new reality.One plume of oil from BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon well blowout produced a slick 22 miles long and a mile wide. 

"That's all happened when you raise the temperature of the earth one degree," says author Bill McKibben, "[t]he temperature will go up four degrees, maybe five, unless we get off coal and gas and oil very quickly." Additional temperature rises could compromise our safety and cause incalculable damage from a large number of billion-dollar disasters in coming years – if we don't address our emissions, insist upon an appropriate climate policy and curtail the rogue fossil fuel industry.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/01-1

Bill McKibben - Sandy Forces Climate Change on US Election Despite Fossil Fuel Lobby

Here's a sentence I wish I hadn't written – it rolled out of my Macbook in May, part of an article for Rolling Stone that quickly went viral:Currie Wagner looks over the debris from his grandmother Betty Wagner's house, destroyed by Sandy, in New Jersey. (Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP)

"Say something so big finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon."

I wish I hadn't written it because the first half gives me entirely undeserved credit for prescience: I had no idea both would, in fact, happen in the next six months. And I wish I hadn't written it because now that my bluff's been called, I'm doubting that even Sandy, the largest storm ever, will be enough to make our political class serious about climate change.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/31-2

Lizz Winstead - Hey Super PACs, Superstorm Sandy Just Gave You a Great Cause for Your Millions

We are a week out from the presidential election. We have just had 60 million Americans affected by a hurricane. Super Pacs have billions of dollars just sitting lying around.

So, I have an idea.

Super Pacs, how about you force the candidates to spend the next week campaigning on their own and spend some of your limitless funds on the relief effort? It's a win-win for you any way you look at it.

First, for the Republican super pacs, you make Mitt Romney look good. Hell, you fulfill his dream! Remember, how he waxed on about dissolving the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), and even said:

"If we can send it back to the private sector, that's even better."

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/31-3