Resilience Roundup – Nov 6

November 6, 2015

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

 Image Removed

A roundup of news, views and ideas from the main stream press and the blogosphere.  Click on the headline link to see the full article.


There Won’t Be a Keystone XL Pipeline

Krishnadev Calamur, The Atlantic
President Obama has rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, killing the long-stalled project to bring oil from the Canadian tar sands to Texas.

“The State Department has decided that the Keystone XL pipeline does not serve the national interest,” Obama said. “I agree.”

The announcement, during which the president was flanked by John Kerry, his secretary of state, and Vice President Joe Biden, is the culmination of years of debate—much of it rancorous—over the Canadian company TransCanada’s proposed 1,661-mile pipeline. On Thursday, the State Department rejected TransCanada’s request to put a review of the project on hold until a dispute in Nebraska over the project’s proposed route was resolved…


Exxon Mobil Investigated for Possible Climate Change Lies by New York Attorney General

Justin Gillis and Clifford Krauss, New York Times
The New York attorney general has begun an investigation of Exxon Mobil to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business.

According to people with knowledge of the investigation, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman issued a subpoena Wednesday evening to Exxon Mobil, demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents…


The Rising Cost of Resources and Global Indicators of Change

Carey W. King, New Scientist
The turn of this century saw the cheapest-ever energy and food combined, and here’s why we may never return to those historic low numbers….


Wisconsin locals fear dust from mines for fracking sand even as boom wanes

Ryan Schuessler, AlJazeera
There is little data on how dangerous frac sand mining is, and activists are calling for more research and regulation…

Victoria Trinko has spent nearly every day of her life in the slice of Western Wisconsin her father bought in 1936. For decades the view out her front window was unchanging.

Except for the mountainous pile of white sand sitting at the mine a quarter-mile down the road. That’s new.

“That particular mine started in July 2011,” Trinko, 69, said. “By April of the next year, I had developed a raspy voice. I was wheezing. Sore throat.” She said her doctor later diagnosed her with asthma resulting from her environment. Her cows have started coughing, too, she said…


Peak Coal In China and the World, by Jean Laherrère

Jean Laherrère, Edge of Time
I have been trying to follow the Coal story in China for more than two years, when a series of articles made me realise environmental impacts were creating serious obstacles to continued growth. Coal extraction in China peaked that same year, but is this new trend merely circumstantial or something more lasting? Earlier this year I postulated that fundamental changes were about.

Since then, news have multiplied on the rapid decline of Coal consumption and extraction in China. At first there were reports of an ongoing renewal of the blast furnace fleet, but more recently, it is becoming increasingly apparent that steel consumption has saturated – the law of diminishing returns is catching up with infrastructure deployment. Slowly, this declining trend is looking ever more terminal. ..


Oil and Gas Industry Publicly Supports Climate Action While Secretly Subverting Process, New Analysis Shows

Carol Linnitt, Bloomberg
A new report recently released by InfluenceMap shows a number of oil and gas companies publicly throwing their support behind climate initiatives are simultaneously obstructing those same efforts through lobbying activities.

The report, Big Oil and the Obstruction of Climate Regulations, comes on the heels of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, a list of climate measures released by the CEOs of 10 major oil and gas companies including BP, Shell, Statoil and Total.

According to InfluenceMap the initiative is an attempt by leading energy companies to “improve their image in the face of longstanding criticism of their business practices ahead of UN COP 21 climate talks in Paris.”…


Greenpeace loses Indian registration

Staff, BBC
Greenpeace says its charitable registration to operate in India has been revoked.

The environmental campaign group says that the decision effectively shuts it down in India.

The government of Narendra Modi has previously accused Greenpeace of flouting tax laws and having an anti-development agenda…


Human waste could provide power for millions in developing world, says UN

Newswires, AlJazeera
Gas produced by decaying human waste is a potentially major source of energy that could provide electricity for millions of homes while improving sanitary conditions in developing countries, according to a UN report.

Biogas is produced when bacteria break down human feces. And it would be worth the equivalent of $9.5 billion in non-renewable natural gas, the United Nations Institute for Water, Environment and Health said on Tuesday.

Residues from treated waste could yield two million tons a year of "solid" fuel worldwide that could reduce charcoal use and the number of trees being felled, which would help in global warming reduction efforts, the report added…


No longer top secret: The TPP trade deal is just as evil as you think it is

Heather Smith, Grist
Remember the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership (TPP)? That top-secret agreement between the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore — aka 40 percent of the world’s economy? It was top-secret for years (though due to be released any day now). New Zealand just jumped the gun and put the entire thing online.

The TPP seems to have one overarching purpose — to stop China from becoming an unstoppable economic superpower, now that it’s gone and surpassed the United States to become the biggest trading nation. China could join the TPP, except that it doesn’t seem to want to or, particularly, need to. President Obama has made passing it one of his top priorities before leaving office. He managed to get fast-track approval, which means that Congress — whose approval is needed for the TPP — can only vote yes or no on the whole deal, rather than keep some parts and jettison the others. Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) joked that the president had offered to let him do “everything except let me fly Air Force One” in exchange for a yes vote on fast track. The secrecy around the TPP also made people nervous. People who are against it say that it’s going to put a lot of rules on technology and trade that don’t need to be there…


Think you’ve got good energy policy ideas? This tool lets you see if they’d work.

David Roberts, Vox
Energy Innovation, a San Francisco–based think tank, has created what may be the coolest tool for energy nerds I’ve ever seen. It’s called the Energy Policy Simulator, and it lets anyone see the impacts of their energy policy choices on a whole range of outputs, including US greenhouse gas emissions…


The secret poisoning of Britain’s hedgerows

Peter Melchett, Countryfile
Our hedges are special. For a start, those we have left have survived an unprecedented massacre. Just after the end of World War II there were over 800,000 kilometres of hedges in Britain, but by 1990 there were only 171,000 kilometres left, a loss of almost 80%. The destruction continued until very recently – between 1984 and 1990 alone hedgerow length in England declined by 20%.

After years of campaigning, it seemed that in recent years our remaining hedges were safer. Many hedges were planted when fields were enclosed in the 1700 and 1800s but many more, the most varied, interesting and productive, date back much further, for a thousand years or more, and have far greater value to people and wildlife…

So much for the dream. New scientific research by Professor Dave Goulson at Sussex University has shattered this key remaining consolation left to those who care for wildlife and the health of our countryside.

Professor Goulson has found that the widely criticised insect-killing chemicals, neonicotinoids, are present in hedgerow flowers, sometimes at a far higher level than they are in the crop they were originally used in. Wild flowers on the banks of hedges were found to have neonicotinoid concentrations up to 86 parts per billion, almost eight times as much as the highest level of the chemical found in the nearby crop. Although farmers have often defended crops like oilseed rape on the basis that ‘bees love them’ in fact honey bees feeding around oilseed rape crops got 97% of the chemical insecticide they collected in pollen from margins and hedges at the edge of the oilseed rape field, and only 3% from the oilseed rape itself…


The invisible sheep

Berb Baker, Mindful Pie
When you look at a field of sheep it’s usually easy to see the sheep isn’t it? Acres of green grass. Hundreds of white sheep, heads down low, grazing. Part of the quintessential pastoral landscape right?

Welcome to the new quintessential. I’m at Village Farm in East Portlemouth, in the South Hams, Devon, in the UK, farmed by Rebecca Hosking and her business partner and friend Tim Green. Gaze across one of their fields and you have to look hard to see their flock of 765 sheep. That’s because they’re almost invisible in the incredibly dense pasture chock-full of over 75 different varieties of herbs and weeds, from chicory, wild carrot and knotweed to chervil, salad burnet and clover, many of which grow taller than the sheep. You squint a bit, then you see them, but they’re not heads-down, scraping around on the ground for tufts of boring old grass. They’re stretching their necks high to reach the tastiest top leaves of the most delectable plants. It’s truly an extraordinary sight and makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about what sheep in a field are supposed to look like.

Pasture for Life logoRebecca, a former BBC camerawoman who worked on wildlife programmes, and Tim (former BBC producer) farm organically (Village Farm is Soil Association certified), but there’s an added extra ingredient – their whole way of farming is centred on the philosophy of the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association, a relatively new organisation (2009) who feed their animals only pasture (meat reared under this system is sold under the ‘Pasture For Life’ logo). It’s a million miles from how most large livestock farms operate. As Rebecca puts it: ‘The system is best explained not by what we do, but by what we don’t do. We don’t put our animals in a barn during the winter – they stay outside year-round, apart from the one day of the year when they’re sheared. We don’t give them bought-in feed or feed we’ve harvested ourselves. So there’s no corn, no maize and no sheep nuts (dried food). We don’t put anything on the land, so there are no inputs, we don’t plough it, we don’t put pesticides on it, we don’t cut it, we don’t spread muck on it, and we definitely don’t have a bit of a field margin or buffer strip round the edges of the fields for wildlife, as some conventional farmers do, because the entire farm is for nature and wildlife, not just the edgy bits! Everything we do keeps the fertility of the land as good as it can be, and ensure it retains sufficient water to help the fertility, which in turn makes it possible to feed our sheep pasture only, year-round.’…

News clippings image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.

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