Environment

Human beings are now waging war against life itself as we continue to
destroy not just individual lives, local populations and entire species
in vast numbers but also destroy the ecological systems that make life
on Earth possible.

By doing this we are now accelerating the sixth mass extinction event in
Earth's history and virtually eliminating any prospect of human
survival.

In a recently published scientific study 'Biological annihilation via
the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population
losses and declines'
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/05/1704949114 the authors
Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document the
accelerating nature of this problem.

'Earth's sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when

Today I listened to the audio book of Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationship With Animals by Lori Gruen while reading the hardcopy of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel Dennett. As a result I have been better able to empathize with Dennett’s obsession with the uniqueness of human consciousness, and I have been better able to marvel at the complex precision of Gruen’s theorizing. But I don’t seem to be any better off than I was before when it comes to knowing how to persuade or otherwise mobilize people to stop humanity from wrecking this planet or harming various life forms on it. In that and other senses, both books read/listen to me like eternal introductions that never get around to the tofu of the matter.

The federal government has secretly been working on a plan to transport highly radioactive liquid from Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, to the Savannah River Site in Aiken, SC — a distance of over 1,100 miles. A series of 250 truckloads are planned by the Department of Energy (DOE). Interstate 85 is one of the main routes.

Based on published data of the US Environmental Protection Agency, a few ounces of this liquid could destroy a whole city water supply.

http://warisacrime.org/2017/06/28/global-warming-in-a-nutshell/

Last week the 29th anniversary of James Hansen’s historic appearance before the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Health & Natural Resources passed by virtually unnoticed.  Hansen, a climate scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, testified back on June 23, 1988, that “Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”

Hansen added, ”It is already happening now.’’

Laughter is a wonderful thing. It’s hard to get too much of it. But there may be something even more valuable — something that you may be better able to grasp than some of your elders.

When you’re able to see a failure in others, it can be an opportunity to spot other similar failures — even those that you may be, in some measure, sharing in.

Why do climate deniers deny? No two are identical, but a major factor for many of them seems to be, not an analysis of evidence but loyalty to a worldview. In this worldview it simply cannot be the case that people are destroying the earth. That’s not in the sacred texts. There’s no place for it in many careers or lifestyles designed around extraction, consumption, destruction, and “development” of the world. Accepting the obvious would be harder than denying it. So it is denied, or — by far preferable — simply ignored and avoided.

Donald Trump and New York governor Andrew Cuomo have joined forces in destroying our economy and environment.

While Trump wages global war on the climate, Cuomo demands a statewide bailout meant to keep failed nuke reactors on line until they melt and/or explode, Fukushima-style. 

Trump and Cuomo are both apostles of radioactive obsolescence. 

The global climate treaty Trump wants to break has been signed by every nation on Earth except Syria and Nicaragua (which wants stronger terms). 

Trump is globalizing the US legacy of breaking 800 treaties with indigenous peoples.

Like America’s indigenous tribes, the nations of the world will never trust us again.

Trump has shredded our global standing, as Germany’s Angela Merkel (CEO of the world’s #4 economy) has pronounced us an unreliable trading partner and China (#2) moves to partner directly with the European Union. 

As Trump sabotages the dollar, watch him blame our economic death spiral on Muslims, commies, immigrants, and people of color.

Trump’s wedge between the US and Germany is a dream come true for Putin’s petro-mafia.

Tuesday's announcement that the Three Mile Island Unit One nuclear plant will close unless it gets massive subsidies has vastly strengthened the case for a totally renewable energy future.

That future is rising in Buffalo, and comes in the form of Tesla's massive job-producing solar shingle factory which will create hundreds of jobs and operate for decades to come.

Three Mile Island, by contrast, joins a wave of commercially dead reactors whose owners are begging state legislatures for huge bailouts. Exelon, the nation's largest nuke owner, recently got nearly $2.5 billion from the Illinois legislature to keep three uncompetitive nukes there on line.

The collapse of a tunnel at the massive nuclear waste dump at Hanford,

Washington, 200 miles east of Seattle, has sent shock waves through a nuclear power industry already in the process of a global collapse.

TAKOMA PARK, MD, May 2, 2017 --A raging wildfire in the Fukushima radiation zone not far from the March 2011 Japan nuclear power plant disaster, demonstrates that a nuclear accident has long-term and on-going effects that can worsen over time, says Beyond Nuclear, a leading national anti-nuclear advocacy group.

The fire, which began on April 21 in the mountains outside Namie in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, is in an area where human entry is barred “on principle” because of high radiation levels resulting from the Fukushima nuclear triple meltdowns and explosions. The fire is being fought from the air with helicopters spraying water.

“Just as high radiation levels barred rescuers from retrieving many earthquake and tsunami victims five years ago, today firefighters are being hampered from battling the blaze in the still contaminated area,” said Paul Gunter, Director of Reactor Oversight at Beyond Nuclear. “This makes extinguishing these radioactive fires more difficult which can have far reaching effects,” he said.

As a journalist, you can often find out more from looking into someone’s eyes than listening to the words out of their mouths.

It might sound corny, but on Tuesday night in Flint, Michigan, where I hosted a town hall discussion for The Young Turks, I learned of the utter disaster that never stopped being a disaster by simply looking into the eyes of fallen Americans.

These were citizens injured on the battlefields of war—only they never signed up for the army or traveled abroad. Instead, they were mere victims of the ongoing war on the poor, waged by a corrupt government innately more interested in making money and staying in power than making the right decisions for its citizens.

“These $20 filters don’t work,” Flint resident, Adam Murphy, said. Murphy, a 37-year-old father of five, has been poisoned to the point of having severe neurological problems that cause him seizures. His child was also born with high lead levels.

“I have to get on some expensive medications that Medicaid doesn’t cover,” he said, adding that the government is lying to citizens in telling them it’s safe to drink the Flint water with a filter.