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No One Knows How to Stop These Tar-Sands Oil Spills

      

Oil polluting the ground at Cold Lake in Alberta.  Photograph obtained by the Toronto Star

grist.org - by John Upton - July 22, 2013

Thousands of barrels of tar-sands oil have been burbling up into forest areas for at least six weeks in Cold Lake, Alberta, and it seems that nobody knows how to staunch the flow.

An underground oil blowout at a big tar-sands operation run by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. has caused spills at four different sites over the past few months. . .

Media and others have been blocked from visiting the sites, but the Toronto Star obtained documents and photographs about the ongoing disaster from a government scientist involved in the cleanup, who spoke to the reporter on condition of anonymity.

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Air Pollution Killing Over Two Million Annually, Study Says

      

New Delhi: Air pollution accounts for over 500,000 deaths in India annually, a new study says.

CLICK HERE FOR STUDY - Environmentsl Research Letters - Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change

cnn.com - by Matthew Knight - July 16, 2013

Article Highlights:

  • Air pollution responsible for more than two million premature deaths worldwide annually
  • Study assesses impact of fine particulates and ozone using atmospheric climate models
  • East Asia worst affected region with over a million deaths per year
  • Study also found that climate change hasn't had huge impact on effects of air pollution

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Big Oil Gets a Much Needed Reality Check

      

ecowatch.com - May 16, 2013

Launching today in Canada, Europe and the U.S., TarSandsRealityCheck.com presents up to date, accurate facts about Alberta’s tar sands to counter the high-level pro-oil sands lobbying ongoing in Canada, the U.S. and Europe around the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and Europe on the Fuel Quality Directive.

The digital campaign launches the same day Canadian Prime Minister Harper is expected in New York to address the Council of Foreign Relations and promote the tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline. It also comes just days after the Canadian government launched a new website as part of its massive pro-tar sands PR campaign.

For the first time, world renowned economists, scientists and academics, including Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon from the University of Waterloo and Dr. Danny Harvey from the University of Toronto, have come together to present peer-reviewed, easy to understand facts about the tar sands that counter misinformation spread by the oil industry’s glossy PR machine.

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Toxic waste spill in northern Alberta biggest of recent disasters in North America

CALGARY — The Globe and Mail

Full Article Here

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Patuca Reserve Resilience Network

Honduras' ecosystems are being destroyed at an incredible rate, taking with it the rich natural heritage of biodiversity that has required million of years to evolve.  In 20 years, human populations in Honduras will be be threatend from ecosystem collapses that are likely to create abect misery and population collapses at an extraordinatry level.  Already population crashes are happening in small scale collapses due to the degradation of social ecology.  

There is a need to build a Patuca Reserve Resilience Network to help preserve the remaining 30% of the Patuca Reserve that has not been destroyed by deforestation and gold mining in the rivers. Association Patuca and Dr. Perinjaquet are working on introducing Resilience Capacity Zone Assessments and Mapping in order to identify solution sets local communities would embrace for preserving their environments and livelihoods, considering that they are squating within a national preserve that to date has had no environmental enforcement. 

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Dow Chemical to Offset Olympics CO2

submitted by Albert Gomez

environmentalleader.com - March 15, 2012

Dow Chemical, which was named the Official Carbon Partner of the XXII Olympic Winter Games, plans to mitigate the carbon footprint of the Sochi 2014 Games using its energy-efficient technologies.

Dow will apply its technology to target areas, such as building infrastructure, industry and agriculture within Russia. Improvements may include adding Dow’s air-sealing technologies to buildings and insulation materials for energy efficient and affordable housing, the company said.

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China Admits Existence Of Cancer Villages In Report, As Pollution Concerns Mount

            

Retirees do Taichi during their morning exercise on a hazy day in Fuyang city, in central China's Anhui province, Monday, Jan. 14, 2013. Air pollution is a major problem in China due to the country's rapid pace of industrialization, reliance on coal power, explosive growth in car ownership and disregard for environmental laws. (AP Photo)

huffingtonpost.com - by Dominique Mosbergen - February 23, 2013

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The Limits to the Shale Oil Boom

The cleanest form of petrochemical energy is clearly past its peak and is causing significant damage to ecosystems all over the planet.  That is why risky and incredibly expensive resource extraction, such as Deep Water Horizon, is becoming the new reality of oil production.  The impacts of climate change are now escalating rapidly.  But the bigger problem lies in the extents to which the largest and most profitable businesses in the world in the petrochemical industry are willing to go to continue their profitability against all rationality in terms of the  mass extinction and the impact on health and human security. 

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Cleanup Crews Near Fukushima Plant Dump Waste in Rivers, Newspaper Reports

By ROBERT MACKEY According to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, cleanup crews working near the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, “dumped soil and leaves contaminated with radioactive fallout into rivers.”

Scene of "shoddy decontamination efforts" in Fukishima Prefecture

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The battle against Big Energy's rush to ruin our planet

One plume of oil from BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon well blowout produced a slick 22 miles long and a mile wide. Photograph: Ted Jackson/Times Picayune/AP

Image: One plume of oil from BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon well blowout produced a slick 22 miles long and a mile wide. Photograph: Ted Jackson/Times Picayune/AP

guardian.co.uk - October 31st, 2012 - Daryl Hannah

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.

"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.

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