from KXLY in Pullman/Moscow:
“….Charlie is the oldest living red-tail hawk in the entire world as defined in the longevity records by falconers. His home is Washington State University with the Raptor Club. Calculations have estimated his age to equal about 234 human years….”
the rest of the article is here, including a link to a video….
E. Fudd
Amen, Code Green! E. Fudd
As if we needed any more? STOP KEYSTONE XL! E. Fudd
From Care2:
Less than two weeks after President Barack Obama rightly rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, a bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate that would allow Congress to approve the pipeline.
There are plenty of good reasons to reject the pipeline; here are five of them:
1. It will spill. The State Department’s review of the project clearly says Keystone XL will spill oil. Not may, but will. The existing Keystone pipeline has already leaked 14 times since it began operating in June 2010, including one leak that dumped 21,000 gallons of tar-sands crude. Keystone XL would carry up to 35 million gallons of oil every day — so any leak has the potential to be massive.
2. It won’t be a major job producer. The State Department estimates that Keystone XL will result in only 20 permanent, operational jobs in the U.S and 2,500 to 4,650 temporary jobs. What’s more, after Keystone XL oil makes it to Texas, much of it will be exported beyond U.S. borders without paying U.S. taxes – never benefitting our economy or slacking our thirst for oil.
3. It will threaten vast pristine landscapes, rivers and wildlife. Running between Alberta, Canada and the Gulf Coast of Texas, Keystone XL will cross nearly 1,750 water bodies, like rivers and steams, and risk contaminating the Ogallala Aquifer (the drinking water source for millions of people). It would also cut through the heart of prime wildlife habitat, including homes for at least 20 imperiled species.
4. It will expand the destruction of Canada’s boreal forests. Tar sands oil is the dirtiest oil on Earth. Producing oil from sand has terrible impacts on the environment, including the destruction of tens of thousands of acres of boreal forest, pollution of hundreds of millions of gallons of water — each barrel of oil from tar sands requires three barrels of water to produce.
5. It will dramatically deepen our addiction to climate-killing fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas emissions from tar-sands development are two to three times higher than those from conventional oil and gas operations. That’s exactly the wrong direction for reversing global warming. Scientists tell us we must reduce atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million or less. Today, it’s 391 ppm, and Keystone XL would certainly drive that up and worsen the devastating effects of global warming — from rising oceans to melting glaciers to extreme and dangerous weather events – that we’re already seeing around the world.
Simply put, it’s not in our interest to court oil spills, worsen climate change and jeopardize rivers, streams, drinking water, people and wildlife. It’s time to tell Congress to stand up to Big Oil and Gas and reject Keystone XL, permanently.
Help fight our climate-changing oil addiction by signing the Center for Biological Diversity’s petition.
The Harper govt. has to GO! – E. Fudd
From Care2:
Canadian Minister Promotes Tar Sands At A Climate Summit
Showing remarkable gall, Canadian environmental minister Peter Kent took time from a climate change summit with the United States to promote the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. At the summit, Kent and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a coalition to reduce short-lived climate pollutants. Kent called the deal, to which Canada has pledged $3 million, a “critical step forward” in the fight against climate change. Kent also pushed Clinton to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, which alone would add five billion tons of greenhouse pollution to the atmosphere over its lifetime:
Environment Minister Peter Kent on Thursday pressed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the merits of the Keystone XL pipeline and affirmed the Harper government’s belief the Obama administration’s rejection of the $7-billion project had “nothing to do with the merit of the application.”
But Kent, in Washington for a summit on climate change, pointedly declined to weigh in on current efforts by congressional Republicans to strip the U.S. State Department of its authority to approve a new application for the 2,700-kilometre [1700 mile] oilsands pipeline.
Kent’s promotion of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline made a mockery of the climate pollution deal covering methane, hydrofluorocarbons, and black carbon, to which the United States has pledged $12 million and Canada $3 million. The Keystone XL pipeline is a $7000 million project.
“Action on short-lived climate pollutants will have clear benefits for particularly vulnerable regions like the Canadian Arctic,” Kent said. “The fragile Arctic environment is susceptible to the impacts of short-lived climate pollutants which may be partly responsible for the accelerated warming trend that we are recording there.”
The worst thing Canada can do to the “fragile Arctic environment” would be to mine and burn the “carbon bomb” of the tar sands.
If the short-lived pollution deal is a “critical step forward” in the fight against global warming, then investing billions in the exploitation of Canada’s tar sands is a giant leap backward.
Go Go GO!
E. Fudd
From Care2:
Shark Fin Sales Could Soon Be Banned in New York
New York legislators introduced a bill on Tuesday that would ban the sale, trading, distribution and possession of shark fins in the state by as early as 2013. Similar laws have been passed in California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington; Florida, Illinois, Maryland and Virginia have pending legislation.
Among the sponsors of the bill in the New York Assembly is Grace Meng, who represents Flushing in Queens where the population is heavily Asian. Meng’s immigrant parents both owned and worked in restaurants. While stating her liking for shark fin soup and saying that it would be a “huge adjustment for the community,” Meng also noted that “it’s important to be responsible citizens.”
Others interviewed in a New York Times article about the new bill expressed similar sentiments:
While many restaurants in Chinatown said that a ban would hurt their business, managers predicted that most clients would be only too happy to have it off the menu.
“It’s only the elderly who want it: when their grandkids get married, they want the most expensive stuff, like an emperor,” said Vincent Yu, a waiter at Grand Harmony Palace, where the soup sells for $30 to more than $100 a bowl, depending on whether the meat it contains is pure shark fin or mixed with shrimp or chicken. Alluding to the famously tasteless nature of the fins, he added, “Guests offer me a bowl all the time, but I like won-ton soup.”
Indeed, restaurants are already seeking substitutes for shark fin such as other kinds of fish, abalone or tofu, while businesses are preparing to stop selling shark fin altogether. Before California’s ban became law, a number of people emphasized how integral shark’s fin soup is to Chinese culture. But Patrick Kwan, the New York director of the Humane Society of the United States, downplayed such claims, saying that the soup is “nothing more than a status symbol — a ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ ”
New York is the biggest market for shark’s fin on the east coast so a state-wide ban could lead to similar laws in other states.
73 million sharks — which are an endangered species — are killed annually to satisfy demand for the soup with many of the sharks killed by the horrific practice of finning in which the fin is hacked off a live shark, which is then left to die as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
Code Green speaks the truth – amen!!!!
E. Fudd
and none deserve it more! To their (tiny) credit, they at least published the letter…..
E. Fudd
From the WSJ:
This movie is the WORST kind of Hollywood BS!
sign the petition to BOYCOTT this stupid movie here:
From Care2:
Why We Will Boycott “The Grey”
Liam Neeson’s latest movie, The Grey, arrives in theatres everywhere today. No, this isn’t a film preview, review, or other free advertising for the flick. In fact, our goal is to have you not watch it. And if you care about protecting and respecting the long-mistreated canid, the grey wolf, maybe you’ll take our proscription to heart.
The film’s set-up is simple enough. A group of men are stranded in the Alaskan wilderness following a plane crash. They must use their wits to survive until they are either rescued, or able to find their way back to civilization. However, they soon find themselves in trouble, as a pack of wolves is apparently stalking them.
There are a number of reasons we’ve organized a boycott of The Grey (which you can sign here). It’s not just because Liam Neeson and cast members dined on wolf meat as a bizarre sort of method acting. Or that real dead wolves were used as props in the film itself. Though we feel for the four dead wolves who served as either props or the main course of an adventurous eating club, the danger posed to our four-footed friends by this film is more widespread than that.
The Grey has the potential to act as a $35 million propaganda campaign against wolves, at the very same time that they have just been removed from the Endangered Species lists of several western states. Hunting wolves just became legal again, and it was the propagation of horror stories and myths (along with some tempting bounties) that caused the near eradication of the grey wolf in North America in the first place.
Wolf extermination (it went beyond normal hunting) began in earnest in the early 1800s, and by 1926, wolves were completely extirpated from Yellowstone National Park. By the 1970s, less than a thousand wolves remained in the lower 48 of the United States. All along, as the animals became more rare, people had less and less actual experience to contradict the false rumors they were hearing. A “shoot first, ask questions never” policy prevailed.
The reality is that wolves generally avoid both humans and human settlements, and play an important role in parkland ecosystems. Though they’ve been caricatured throughout history as cunning, yellow-eyed monsters out to steal children, we know better now. Thus it’s all the more perplexing that a 2012 movie would portray them so dishonestly if it expects to be taken seriously.
The wolves of The Grey more closely resemble werewolves or demons than any kind of living creature in nature. One character opines that they’re not trying to kill the men out of hunger, but because “we don’t belong here.” Ascribing such human motives to wolves is laughable, at best.
If I can switch gears, and put on my film critic hat for a moment, there’s at least one more reason not to watch this movie. There’s such a thing as artistic license when it comes to some of the smaller details in a narrative. But there needs to be an emotional truth that the story holds to.
I believe that art, ethics and truth are all closely related. It frankly doesn’t matter how carefully a stark atmosphere is created, how cleverly the barren wastes mirror a broken man’s soul, if your core premise rings false. Wolves are beautiful, ultimately cautious creatures. They aren’t supernatural, evil or a metaphor for any human concept. They aren’t the hand-that-strikes of a pantheistic conception of nature. Whatever they are, the creatures depicted in this film are not wolves.
Give this one a pass, and tell your friends to avoid it as well.
E. Fudd
From Care2:
Bulgaria Becomes the Second European Country To Ban Fracking
A few weeks ago the Bulgarian parliament voted to ban Chevron from using hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, to drill for natural gas in the country’s northeast. The parliament voted to amend the exploration license, awarded to Chevron in June 2010, for five years by limiting Chevron to conventional drilling methods. The parliament granted the license for shale gas exploration at the 4,400 square kilometer Novi Pazar field. Reuters reports that the estimates for Novi Pazar are between 300 billion and one trillion cubic meters of shale gas. Bulgaria hopes that shale gas production will reduce gas imports from Russia.
Concern for water and leaking gas
Public concern over possible contamination of the drinking water supply with chemicals and leaking gas prompted the vote. Three days before the vote on January 14, several thousand people, calling for a ban on fracking, protested in rallies across Bulgaria. Bulgaria is the second nation to ban the use of fracking. France banned the use of fracking last summer.
Economy and Energy Minister Traicho Traikov told reporters after a cabinet meeting, “The idea is that they can still have the right to test for oil and gas, but without using the controversial technology hydraulic fracturing.
“It was a mistake that the necessary wide public debate on this topic has not happened, so that it is explained to people what fracking means,” Prime Minister Boiko Borissov said during the Cabinet discussion before the decision to change Chevron’s exploration permit. “If people are not convinced that this is the right thing, my reasoning is that we should stop [fracking] and start the public debate now,” Borissov said.
However, Borissov added that potential investors need to persuade the Bulgarian people that exploring shale is both safe and profitable, which sounds like the door is open to approve fracking down the road. To make matters worse, Traikov said that Bulgaria could allow fracking if found to have no environmental risks.
Some EU nations have issued shale gas exploration permits. The English language news site, SofiaEcho.com reports that Bulgaria will return to the issue once it is on the EU agenda. Hopefully, the EU will take a strong stand against fracking.