This woman really scares me. She is pro all the wrong things and anti all the right things. Her stance on abortion had me reeling yesterday. That, in itself, is enough to make me make this fight for the White House one I will fight fiercely. I’m loaded for bear. McCain made this choice without any thought. He met the woman once and talked to her on the phone once. Then he has the nerve to tell us that once we get to know her, we’ll love her. Gee asshole, YOU don’t even know her……. so how can you make a statement like that? I’ll write more about this later, but people DO get to know this woman and what she stands for. Because what she stands for is NOT what this country needs right now. I received an email from a girlfriend last night. This is an email she received from the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund:

A few hours ago, the news broke that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has been selected by Sen. John McCain as the vice presidential candidate for the Republican ticket.

As a Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund supporter, you are no doubt aware of Governor Palin’s dismal record, from her staunch support for special interests and Big Oil to her terrible assault on wolves and other wildlife.

As much of the nation wonders just who Sarah Palin is, I wanted to pass along my statement that I’ve just released.

Please read it and pass it along to everyone you know.
Thanks for your continued support,

Rodger
——————————————————————————–

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 29, 2008

Shocking Choice by John McCain
WASHINGTON– Senator John McCain just announced his choice for running mate: Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. To follow is a statement by Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund.

“Senator McCain’s choice for a running mate is beyond belief. By choosing Sarah Palin, McCain has clearly made a decision to continue the Bush legacy of destructive environmental policies.

“Sarah Palin, whose husband works for BP (formerly British Petroleum), has repeatedly put special interests first when it comes to the environment. In her scant two years as governor, she has lobbied aggressively to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, pushed for more drilling off of Alaska’s coasts, and put special interests above science. Ms. Palin has made it clear through her actions that she is unwilling to do even as much as the Bush administration to address the impacts of global warming. Her most recent effort has been to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the polar bear from the endangered species list, putting Big Oil before sound science. As unb elievable as this may sound, this actually puts her to the right of the Bush administration.

“This is Senator McCain’s first significant choice in building his executive team and it’s a bad one. It has to raise serious doubts in the minds of voters about John McCain’s commitment to conservation, to addressing the impacts of global warming and to ensuring our country ends its dependency on oil.”

…And wildlife suffers. The nerve this bastard has:

Ozone Rules Weakened at Bush’s Behest

The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA’s scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

“It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA’s expert scientific judgment,” said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

F*ck the polar bears, the walruses, the bowhead whales, the entire damned environment altogether… we’ve got big money to make!

The Interior Department yesterday announced $2.6 billion in winning bids from companies seeking to drill for oil and gas in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea despite protests from environmental groups and members of Congress that oil and gas exploration would endanger polar bears.

Companies made 667 bids for 448 tracts in the 29 million-acre area north of Point Barrow. The winning bids included a record-breaking $105.3 million offer by Shell Oil for one three-by-three-mile leasehold, almost twice as much as the previous high bid for a single offshore U.S. tract.

“This is a tremendous opportunity, and with that comes a tremendous responsibility to Alaska and the offshore area,” said Annell Bay, vice president of exploration for Shell in the Americas.

Environmental groups said, however, that they doubted the area, home to about one-tenth of the world’s polar bears, could be explored without high risks of a spill and damage to the habitat of the bears and other wildlife, such as walruses and bowhead whales.

A little common sense, please?! People, in general, do not want to pay more, (much more!), for something that produces the same results, even if it saves them money in the long run.

Writing a law and forcing it upon the masses is something we should all hate. It’s “slippery’slope” ideology, like high-taxation on cigarettes or the coming change in the way television is broadcasted.

Don’t get me wrong. The eventual outcomes of the above-mentioned are good! I object to the use of force in obtaining the results. Laws should be written to protect us, not bash us over the head. Remember ‘freedom’? Freedom to choose?

Our government could do a lot in the way of reducing the high price of the new bulb. They could also do a better job of informing the masses as to why they should be buying the new bulb. Handcuffing us is not the answer!

From light bulbs to clothes washers, the energy law passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in December will change many of the appliances in the average American home.

[...]If every American household replaced just one incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb, the country would conserve enough energy to light 3 million homes and save more than $600 million annually. It would be as if 800,000 cars were taken off the road, according to a Web site maintained by the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.
[...]

Homeowners’ reluctance prompted lawmakers to illuminate the path forward. The new energy law says that in 2012, any bulb emitting the amount of light a 100-watt bulb does today must use only 72 watts. In 2014, 40-, 60- and 75-watt bulbs will have to cut energy consumption by similar percentages.

By CHRIS KAHN
Associated Press

PHOENIX - It sounds like science fiction but it’s true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.

Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it’s killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future.

“This is definitely something we need to track,” said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better,” Beach said. “In future decades, as temperatures rise, we’d expect to see more cases.”

According to the CDC, the amoeba called Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL’-erh-eye) killed 23 people in the United States, from 1995 to 2004. This year health officials noticed a spike with six cases - three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona. The CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s.

In Arizona, David Evans said nobody knew his son, Aaron, was infected with the amoeba until after the 14-year-old died on Sept. 17. At first, the teen seemed to be suffering from nothing more than a headache.

read more HERE

By Gyles Beckford
Reuters

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - New Zealand said on Thursday it would bring in carbon trading over the next six years as part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, though admitted even these measures will not meet its Kyoto Protocol target.

A mandatory cap-and-trade emissions scheme and incentives for tree planting to reduce emissions, blamed for global warming, will progressively be introduced from next year, if the government can get the measures through a parliament that rejected a carbon tax two years ago.

“An emissions trading scheme will create an incentive for businesses and households to make decisions that are good for the environment, and will discourage actions that cause greenhouse gas emissions,” Finance Minister Michael Cullen and Climate Change Minister David Parker said in a joint statement.

The cap-and-trade scheme will restrict or cap groups or companies in the amount of a greenhouse gas they can emit. Those using less than their limit can sell excess credits.

The first stage of the scheme will start next year with a free allocation of carbon credits to foresters, with the aim of increasing commercial forest area by 250,000 hectares (618,000 acres) by 2020.

read more at REUTERS

BBC Online

A list of the world’s most polluted places has been published by a US-based independent environmental group.

The Blacksmith Institute’s top 10 towns and cities included sites in ex-Soviet republics, Russia, China and India. Peru and Zambia were also listed.

The report said an estimated 12 million people were affected by the severe pollution, which was mainly caused by chemical, metal and mining industries.

Chronic illness and premature deaths were listed as possible side-effects.

The annual review, which debuted in 2006, is listed alphabetically, and the sites are unranked “given the wide range of location sizes, populations and pollution dynamics”.

Among the new sites listed in 2007 were Tianying in China, where potentially 140,000 people were at risk from lead poisoning from a massive lead production base there.

The report also said that in the Indian town of Sukinda there were 12 mines operating without environmental controls, leaching dangerous chemicals into water supplies.

Sumgayit in Azerbaijan was also included in the report, which said the former Soviet industrial base was polluting the area with industrial chemicals and heavy metals.

Sumgayit, Azerbaijan; Potentially 275,000 affected
Linfen, China; Potentially 3m affected
Tianying, China; Potentially 140,000 affected
Sukinda, India; Potentially 2.6m affected
Vapi, India; Potentially 71,000 affected
La Oroya, Peru; Potentially 35,000 affected
Dzerzhinsk, Russia; Potentially 300,000 affected
Norilsk, Russia; Potentially 134,000 affected
Chernobyl, Ukraine; Potentially 5.5m affected
Kabwe, Zambia; Potentially 255,000 affected
Data: Blacksmith Institute

read more HERE

CNN

BOULDER, Colorado (CNN) — Ice cover in the Arctic Ocean, long held to be an early warning of a changing climate, has shattered the all-time low record this summer, according to scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder.

It is possible that Arctic sea ice could decline even further this year before the onset of winter.

Using satellite data and imagery, NSIDC now estimates the Arctic ice pack covers 4.24 million square kilometers (1.63 million square miles) — equal to just less than half the size of the United States. This figure is about 20 percent less than the previous all-time low record of 5.32 million square kilometers (2.05 million square miles) set in September 2005

Mark Serreze, senior research scientist at NSIDC, termed the decline “astounding.”

“It’s almost an exclamation point on the pronounced ice loss we’ve seen in the past 30 years,” he said.

Most researchers had anticipated that the complete disappearance of the Arctic ice pack during summer months would happen after the year 2070, he said, but now, “losing summer sea ice cover by 2030 is not unreasonable.”

Scores of peer-reviewed scientific studies have documented a steady, worldwide decline in ice cover, from the sea-bound ice covering the North Pole to the vast, land-based ice sheets that cover the Antarctic continent. Glaciers, from Greenland to the Alps to Mount Kilimanjaro near the equator, also have been vanishing.

The loss of land-based ice is predicted to lead to a future rise in sea levels. Most estimates predict a rise ranging from a few inches to a meter or more. A substantial rise in sea level could imperil low-lying areas from Bangladesh to Miami, Florida, to Lower Manhattan, and could magnify the damage from landfalling hurricanes and cyclones.

While the loss of sea ice, like the Arctic ice pack, would not contribute to sea level rise, wildlife experts say it could alter the Arctic ecology, threatening polar bears and other mammals and sea life.

Scientists add that an ice-free Arctic could also accelerate global warming, as white-colored ice tends to deflect heat, while darker-colored water would absorb more heat.

read more HERE

CNN

To understand more about honey bee colony collapse, we invite you to listen to the June 25th edition of “Blue Herald Radio”, available in our podcast archives. Dr. Dewey Caron explains what the collapse is all about and the mystery behind it.

A virus found in healthy Australian honey bees may be playing a role in the collapse of honey bee colonies across the United States, researchers reported Thursday.

Colony collapse disorder has killed millions of bees — up to 90 percent of colonies in some U.S. beekeeping operations — imperiling the crops largely dependent upon bees for pollination, such as oranges, blueberries, apples and almonds.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says honey bees are responsible for pollinating $15 billion worth of crops each year in the United States. More than 90 fruits and vegetables worldwide depend on them for pollination.

Signs of colony collapse disorder were first reported in the United States in 2004, the same year American beekeepers started importing bees from Australia.

The disorder is marked by hives left with a queen, a few newly hatched adults and plenty of food, but the worker bees responsible for pollination gone.

The virus identified in the healthy Australian bees is Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) — named that because it was discovered by Hebrew University researchers.

Although worker bees in colony collapse disorder vanish, bees infected with IAPV die close to the hive, after developing shivering wings and paralysis. For some reason, the Australian bees seem to be resistant to IAPV and do not come down with symptoms.

Scientists used genetic analyses of bees collected over the past three years and found that IAPV was present in bees that had come from colony collapse disorder hives 96 percent of the time.

read more HERE

By Deborah Zabarenko,
Environment Correspondent
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More beetles and fewer spruce trees in Alaska, whiter coral and fewer scuba-divers in Florida and more wildfires in Arizona already show the impact of climate change on U.S. lands and waters, a congressional watchdog agency reported on Thursday.

But the federal agencies that manage over 600 million acres of federal land — nearly 30 percent of the land area of the United States — and more than 150,000 square miles of protected waters have little guidance on how to deal with the effects of global warming, the Government Accountability Office said.

“Undertaking activities that address the effects of climate change is currently not a priority” for the five U.S. agencies that manage this territory, the report by the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress said.

These agencies are the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Interior Department, which includes three of the five agencies, ordered them in 2001 to analyze potential climate change effects on U.S.-managed lands, but has not yet provided direction to managers on how to plan for climate change, the report said.

read more HERE