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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Thousands dead in Pakistan floods; Temperature records shattered around the world; Plankton levels plummet around the world (and why it matters to you and me); Alarm bells ignored in the MI oil spill... PLUS: It’s official! The BP oil disaster in the Gulf is now the WORST accidental oil spill in the history of mankind... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Fossil Fuel Subsidies Are 12 Times Support for Renewables; Can regulation beget innovation?; China oil spill far bigger than stated: expert; Rand Paul: Congress has no business protecting miners; Garbage islands threaten China's Three Gorges dam; US inaction threatens international climate negotiations; Why We'll See $300 Oil by 2020; 2010 Gulf 'Dead Zone' One of Largest Ever; 5-yr Restoration Plan for Gulf Coast ...PLUS: Slimeburger in paradise?: Avoiding pink slime in your ground beef ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

• Death Toll Rises in Pakistan Flooding, Extreme Temperatures Break Records Around the World
• Pakistani flood survivors salvage little they have (AP)
• Air Force, Army Help With Pakistan Flood Relief (Wired)
• Australia: Hottest dry on record: The average maximum temperature for last month was 32.6C. That is two degrees above the average maximum for July of 30.5C. (Northern Territory News)
• Masters: “2010 is now tied with 2007 as the year with the most national extreme heat records–fifteen”: As nation, Russia, and world swelter under record heat, NY Times' Tom Zeller publishes dreadful he-said/she-said, quote-mining piece (Climate Progress)
• A remarkable year for extreme heat: Moscow hits 102°F; hottest day ever in Finland; 90L a long-range threat: Fourteen extreme national high temperature records have been set in 2010. Keep in mind that the matter of determining extreme records is very difficult. (Dr. Jeff Master's Weather Underground)
• July could be hottest month on record (USA Today)
• Really Not Good News: Scientific Data Indicates Rising Signs of Global Warming:
• The Week In Doom: Plankton Edition (Plus, A Reply To Megan McArdle): Maybe this phytoplankton stuff is just a blip. Or maybe it's part of an ominous trend that's going to rearrange the face of the oceans as we know it—oceans we've come to rely on for our survival. That doesn't strike me as a gamble worth taking. (TNR's The Vine)
• The dead sea: Global warming blamed for 40 per cent decline in the ocean's phytoplankton: Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic (The Independent UK)
• Plankton decline across oceans as waters warm (BBC)
• Nature Stunner: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton”: "Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic." (Climate Progress)
• Washington Post: The truth about global warming (Washington Post):
  
  IN A DEPRESSING case of irony by juxtaposition, the death of climate change legislation in the Senate has been followed by the appearance of two government reports in the past week that underscore the overwhelming scientific case for global warming --- and go out of the way to repudiate skeptics.
• NOAA Annual Climate Report Shows We Live in a Warming World: Global temperatures continued to increase in 2009, and atmospheric greenhouse gas levels also rose, according to a new “State of the Climate Report” from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (Climate Central)
• Without carbon emissions cuts, the 'Anthropocene' looms as an ugly epoch --- study (Climatewire):
  
  Humans have already changed climate to the point that Earth has entered a new geologic epoch, which the analysis dubs the "Anthropocene."

  Choices the world makes about whether to cut man-made carbon dioxide emissions will determine the severity of climate change over the next thousand years --- or longer, according to a new report by the country's leading scientific advisory body, the National Academy of Sciences.

  That's because the greenhouse gas lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years.

  "The bottom line is that because CO2 is so long-lived in our atmosphere, it could effectively lock the Earth and future generations into warming --- not just for decades or centuries, but literally for thousands of years," said committee chairwoman Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• Some Like It Warm (If They’re Marmots): Marmots in the Rockies have been emerging out of hibernation earlier every spring. (NY Times)
• Trapped in an age of false plenty: Remember the parable about the ant and the grasshopper? How about six to eight billion grasshoppers, and no ants to mooch off? That's where we're heading sometime in the next few years. (Langley Advance)
• The LATEST in the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf:
• On Gulf, crews hope kill attempt will do the trick: The static kill is meant as insurance for the crews that have spent months fighting the spill. The only thing keeping oil from blowing into the Gulf at the moment is an experimental cap that has held for more than two weeks but was never meant to be permanent. (AP)
• Bottom of the barrel: At 4.9 million barrels, Gulf gusher declared the biggest oil spill ever (Grist/AFP)
• Surface of Gulf of Mexico looks better, but millions of gallons of oil remain below (NOLA.com):
  
  Charter captain Mike Frenette has been wondering whether the news media are living in a parallel universe. The Internet and mainstream media this week are filled with reports that the BP oil disaster is over, that the Gulf is now devoid of the slicks and sheen, and the marshes are no longer being bathed in crude.
  ....
  Scientists and oil spill experts agree with Frenette. They say the Gulf might look cleaner on the surface right now, but there is probably hundreds of millions of gallons of BP's oil in tiny, hard-to-see droplets below the surface. And slicks like the one Frenette saw this week will still be floating to the surface for weeks and months to come.
  ....
  "But oil is composed of many, many more components than the black stuff you see. And when that black stuff is gone, there's still plenty of those components --- many of which are extremely toxic --- still in the water."
• “Missing” the Point: Absence of evident oil is not evidence of absent oil (Columbia Journalism Review)
• BP "Carpet Bombed" Gulf With Dispersants: Congressional investigators want to know why the Coast Guard consistently greenlighted BP's requests to apply more dispersant chemicals to the Gulf spill than the company had been authorized to use. (Mother Jones):
  
  In one example, the subcommittee staff found that Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, stated in a June 12 letter to the Coast Guard that the maximum daily application of dispersants on the surface in the days before June 16, 2010 was 3,360 gallons. But according to the dispersant totals BP provided to Markey's committee, the company applied 14,305 gallons of dispersant on June 11 alone. The company reported using another 36,000 gallons on June 13 and 10,706 gallons June 14.
• BP, Coast Guard criticized for dispersant use (AP)
• Scientists: BP dispersants have made spill more toxic (MSNBC)
• Gulf oil spill: Not as bad as we first thought?: Signs of recovery from the Gulf oil spill are already appearing, but scientists caution that many unknowns exist – including the effect of millions of gallons of oil dispersants: Oil spills and blowouts "are horrible. There is carnage everywhere during the event," he says. Because so much of the oil, methane, and dispersants has remained deep in the ocean during the Gulf blowout, "there is damage that you and I can't see, and it won't be obvious for several years, maybe a decade or two." (CS Monitor)
• Although some shrimping waters reopen, fishermen dubious after oil spill (Mobile Press-Register)
• Thousands of rig workers eligible for grants (NOLA.com)
• BP offers one-off payouts to stem Gulf oil spill lawsuits: Lump-sum compensation offered in return for waiving the right to sue, but uncertainty remains for those indirectly affected (Guardian UK)
• Oil Spills Everywhere (The Vine)
• Listen: Parish Presidents with Some Words for BP (NOLA411.com)

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• This Year's Gulf 'Dead Zone' One of Largest Ever:
• The Other Gulf Stain: 2010 Dead Zone One of the Largest Ever (NYT Dot Earth)
• Dead zone as big as Massachusetts along coast of Louisiana and Texas, scientists say (NOLA.com)
• Gulf of Mexico Has Long Been Dumping Site (NY Times):
  
  But like no other American body of water, the gulf bears the environmental consequences of the country’s economic pursuits and appetites, including oil and corn.
  ...
  Runoff and waste from cornfields, sewage plants, golf courses and oil-stained parking lots drain into the Mississippi River from vast swaths of the United States, and then flow down to the gulf, creating a zone of lifeless water the size of Lake Ontario just off the coast of Louisiana.

  The gulf’s floor is littered with bombs, chemical weapons and other ordnance dumped in the middle of last century, even in areas busy with drilling, and miles outside of designated dumping zones, according to experts who work on deepwater hazard surveys.
• How the Gulf of Mexico became the nation's 'toilet bowl' (CNN)
• Oceans in Peril: Primed for Mass Extinction?: When it comes to the oceans, research shows a parallel to the Permian-Triassic extinction - also known as the Great Dying - which eradicated 95 percent of marine species when the oceans lost their oxygen about 250 million years ago. (Live Science)
• Gulf Restoration Plan:
• After the Spill: BP $5 Billion Down Payment Among Recommendations to Restore Coastal Louisiana: How President Obama Can Fulfill Pledge to Make Coastal Louisiana Better Than It Was Before Spill (Nat'l Audobon Society):
  
  Among other steps, the report recommends:

  1. Immediately negotiate with BP a $5 billion down payment on what they will ultimately be assessed for natural resource damages from the spill and create a separate escrow account for that money.
  2. Amend the Oil Pollution Act to create a separate fund for Gulf Coast and Mississippi River Delta restoration...
  3. Seek a supplemental appropriation of $500 million from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund for LCA projects and raise the amount available under the trust fund for this disaster to include at least $155 million for the LCA construction program in Fiscal Year 2012.
  4. Complete construction on LCA projects within five years.

  "The path to restoring [the Mississippi River's] precious delta begins with reestablishing the river'...

• READ IT: Louisiana Coastal Restoration Initiative [.pdf] (Nat'l Audobon Society, Environmental Defense Fund, Nat'l Wildlife Federation)
• Fossil Fuel Subsidies Are 12 Times Support for Renewables, Study Shows (Bloomberg):
  
  Governments last year gave $43 billion to $46 billion of support to renewable energy through tax credits, guaranteed electricity prices known as feed-in tariffs and alternative energy credits, the London-based research group said today in a statement. That compares with the $557 billion that the International Energy Agency last month said was spent to subsidize fossil fuels in 2008.
  ...
  “This analysis shows that the global direct subsidy for fossil fuels is around ten times the subsidy for renewables.”
• Can regulation beget innovation? (Steve Pearlstein, Washington Post):
  
  US expert: China oil spill far bigger than stated: China's worst known oil spill is dozens of times larger than the government has reported — bigger than the famous Exxon Valdez spill two decades ago — and some of the oil was dumped deliberately to avoid further disaster, an American expert said. (AP)
• Rand Paul: Congress has no business protecting miners: On the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster that killed 29: "I know that doesn't sound … I want to be compassionate, and I'm sorry for what happened, but I wonder: Was it just an accident?" (The Hill)
• Garbage islands threaten China's Three Gorges dam: Thousands of tons of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China's massive Three Gorges Dam, and is in places so thick people can stand on it, state media said on Monday. (Reuters)
• US inaction on climate troubles global talks: The failure of a climate bill in the U.S. Senate is likely to weigh heavily on international negotiations that begin Monday on a new agreement to control global warming. (AP)
• Why We'll See $300 Oil by 2020 (Seeking Alpha):
  
  For decades, the theory of peak oil-or the idea that the world either has or will soon exhaust its ability to produce more oil-was derided as a doomsday scenario too unbelievable to ever come to pass. But $147 oil and one commodity crash later, and suddenly peak oil doesn't sound so strange after all.

  In fact, mounting scientific evidence suggests that peak oil will not only be a reality, but may soon be upon us, says Charles Maxwell, senior energy analyst for Weeden & Co.

• Slimeburger in paradise?: Avoiding pink slime in ground beef:
  
  Let's start with a definition. "Pink slime" is the nickname earned by a formerly inedible byproduct of the beef industry. Once used in pet food, it's now a cheap additive in ground beef.
  ...
  [I]f you've had a hamburger from a fast food chain, or bought ground beef from a grocery store, you've consumed the stuff.

  What's more, the slime business is growing all the time. BPI's "ultimate goal is to have our products incorporated in all ground beef and other further processed meats produced in the United States. Our products can also be found in Canada, Mexico, and Japan with expansion plans for Central America, Europe, and Pacific Rim countries." (Keep those expansion plans in mind if you want to avoid getting slimed when you travel.)
  ...
  [K]eep in mind that pink slime is not just in hamburgers, Anne. BPI also slimes retail ground beef, low-fat hotdogs, taco meats, lunch meats, chili, beef stick snacks, sausages, pepperoni, and other encased meats, retail frozen entrees, meatballs, fabricated roast beef, and canned foods. Pink slime, it seems, is everywhere.

  Here are some tips to help you make sure the beef in your burger is the kind you actually want to eat...

                 

Article Categories: Environment, Green News, BP Oil Disaster