Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Finding innovative solutions to supplying efficient, clean, safe, renewable and reliable energy for electrical power, transportation, heating and cooling. We look at problems created from the addiction to dirty fossil fuel energy, mountaintop removal and ecosystem disruption, global climate change, severe air and water pollution, and community dislocation and pollution, Extreme methods such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), tar sands, hydroelectric dams and other damaging methods and sources are examined.
While activists in Los Angeles and across the US spoke out against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, Dave Pruett writes on its threatened environmental triple-whammy, poorly documented in the latest State Department environmental report heading toward the President’s desk. Protests are planned March 1-2 in Washington DC as part of “XL Dissent” and March 1 in Los Angeles with the Great March for Climate Action.
The latest target of the unconventional oil craze is California hydraulic fracturing (fracking) the Monterey Shale in the central and southern parts of the state. With wildly optimistic predictions of an economic bonanza, the oil is carbon-intensive, requires massive amounts of fresh water, creates industrial pollution and seismic risk, and is impossible to regulate effectively because of significant scientific unknowns.
The time for climate action is now! On Saturday, March 1, the SoCal Climate Action Coalition 350 and its regional partners will rally in the shadow of a Port of Los Angeles oil refinery, sending marchers off on a 17.5-mile trek through the streets until they reach downtown Los Angeles. Hundreds of marchers will then continue their journey for 3,000 miles towards Washington D.C., reaching out to everyday citizens along the way on how they can fight climate change in their daily lives.
Peter Nichols: My generation is being condemned to a planet beyond fixing because political science takes precedence over science science. If world governments don’t come together and act in concert to do something to stabilize the climate, and soon, we will make sure they are no longer governments.
Dr. Herbert Eidt used basic training learned as an Army doctor to help people survive in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan and to deliver hope to communities in the Philippines.
Dahr Jamail’s essay illustrates how scientists are starting to acknowledge that the startling environmental changes happening worldwide, including massive ice melts, extreme weather such as super typhoons, wildfire, heat waves, and droughts, as well as the growing acidification of ocean waters, could result in massive species extinctions, including us.
Since June of 2013 the Elsipogtog First Nation community, in New Brunswick, Canada, has gathered on Highway 11 to protest the seismic testing being conducted by a subsidiary of Houston-based Southwestern Energy Co. Since that time, several violent clashes between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and First Nation people have erupted. AlJazeera’s “Fault Lines” went to Mi’kmaq territory, to find out what happens when a First Nation says no to fracking.