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The EnvironmentaList
Choose Your Friends Wisely
Radical eco-activist imprisoned for “friending” Mike Roselle
For years, Rod Coronado was the unofficial bad boy of the radical environmental movement. As a teenager he cut his teeth with the now well known Sea Shepherd Society and, in 1986, participated in a risky act of eco-sabotage: taking aim at Iceland’s refusal to conform to an international ban on whaling, Coronado and a partner destroyed the Hvalfjordur whaling station and sank two of the country’s whaling vessels, causing some $2 million in damage. Coronado went on to wage an underground war against the fur industry, targeting research facilities and fur farms across North America. (His story, and the story of the modern American environmental movement, is told in Dean Kuipers recent book, Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness). Coronado was a divisive figure: his use of arson and increasingly radical stance alienated even those who sympathized with his views.
In 1995, Coronado was arrested for his role in an arson attack on research facilities at Michigan State University. Since then he has moved back and …more
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Big Banks Pull Away from Dirty Businesses
Good News Shows Potential for Progress Outside of Washington
Today’s New York Times has a front page story delivering some sorely needed good news: Many of the world’s biggest banks — including giants like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, and HSBC — are voluntarily reducing their investments in environmentally destructive practices such as mountaintop removal coal mining and tar sands extraction in Canada.
Times reporter Tom Zeller Jr. writes:
“ … The rise of murkier issues like global warming, along with increasing scrutiny by environmental groups of banks’ investments in many other industries — like oil and gas development, nuclear power, coal-fired electricity generation, oil sands, fuel pipeline construction, dam building, forestry and even certain types of agriculture — are nudging lenders into new territory.
‘We’re taking a much closer look at a much broader variety of issues, not all of which are captured under state and local laws,’ said Stephanie Rico, a spokeswoman for the environmental affairs group at Wells Fargo.”
Some of the banks that shifted their policies have …more
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Why Conservatives Are Bad on Energy
By Tom Rooney, CEO of SPG Solar
Conservatives, take a breath. Let’s talk about energy. And why so many conservatives are so wrong — so liberal, even — on wind and solar energy.
Let’s start with a recent editorial from the home of ‘free markets and free people,” the Wall Street Journal. Photovoltaic solar energy, quoth the mavens, is a “speculative and immature technology that costs far more than ordinary power.”
So few words, so many misconceptions. It pains me to say that because, like many business leaders, I grew up on the Wall Street Journal and still depend on it.
But I cannot figure out why people who call themselves “conservatives” would say solar or wind power is “speculative.” Conservatives know that word is usually reserved to criticize free-market activity that is not approved by well, you-know-who.
Today, around the world, more than a million people work in the wind and solar business. Many more receive their power from solar.
Solar is not a cause, it is …more
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In Russia, A Victory For Civil Society
Khimki Highway Construction On Hold
A long running battle over the construction of a highway through Moscow’s Khimki forest has taken a surprising turn. Earlier this week I wrote about the broad based campaign to save one of Moscow’s few remaining green belts and old growth oak forests.
Environmentalists and activists have been working since 2007 to halt the construction of a highway through the 2,500-acre forest, which many viewed as inevitable. Just a couple of weeks ago one of the organizers, Yevgenia Chirikova, told the Washington Post that, “The next step is probably that they will start building. We are ready. It is going to be very loud.”
For now, however, the construction of the highway has been put on hold. In a video blog posted Thursday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the government to, “halt the implementation” of the highway pending “further civic and expert discussions.” It is a rare victory for environmentalists or opposition activists of any kind in Russia. Perhaps not since Vladimir Putin’s 2006 decision to reroute an oil …more
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Where’s the Deepwater Horizon Oil?
Microbes are busy, and oil is dispersed but far from gone
The BP/Deepwater Horizon well is now capped but it will be sometime before we understand where the nearly 5 million barrels of oil that gushed from the ruptured well have gone. On August 2nd, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its "BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Budget," the agency's assessment of what's happened to the oil. But the report came under stiff questioning last week at the August 17th House Energy and Commerce, Energy and the Environment Subcommittee Hearing on "The BP Oil SPill: Accounting for the Spilled Oil and ensuring the Safety of Seafood From the Gulf." Since then two scientific studies of the underwater oil plume have been released that document the size and persistence of the plume and attest to how much has yet to be learned about the behavior of such a large quantity of oil released as such great depth.
According to NOAA, approximately 25 percent of the oil released was collected or destroyed through skimming and burning; 25 percent evaporated naturally …more
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Russia’s Forest Defenders
Campaign to save Moscow's Khimki forest heats up
This story first appeared at Waging Nonviolence.
As Russia’s forests go up in flames, a group of activists and environmentalists is struggling to protect one of Moscow’s few remaining green belts and stands of old growth oaks. This time the threat isn’t wildfires but rather a 10-lane super highway that would link Moscow and St. Petersburg. The campaign to prevent the road from passing through the 2,500-acre Khimki forest, a long protected reserve just outside of Moscow, began in 2007. Since then journalists and editors investigating the story have been attacked (one nearly beaten to death), environmental activists have been arrested, and European investors—including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Investment Bank (EIB)—have begun to question the viability of the project. Recently efforts to halt the construction of the highway and leveling of the forest have escalated.
In late July, Khimki’s administrative building was attacked by a group of anarchists and anti-fascists, while activists who had set up a camp in the forest were detained and …more
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The Lid Is Off Pandora’s Box
Genetically Modified Canola Is Loose in the Environment
Since the advent of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), critics have warned about the dangers of manipulating plants’ inherent makeup. Ecologists cautioned that genetically engineered (GE) crops could spread throughout the environment, creating new organisms that scientists never designed, forming “superweeds” that would be hard to eliminate, and threatening biodiversity — the cornerstone of any healthy ecosystem.
Biotech companies like Monstanto poo-pooed such concerns. Well, turns out the Cassandras were right.
According to a study by a team of researchers from the University of Arkansas, GE canola has gone feral across much of North Dakota. The researchers traveled 3,000 miles across the back roads of North Dakota taking canola samples outside of farm fields. They found thick populations of GM canola across the state, including plants “that were honestly in the middle of nowhere. And there’s a lot of nowhere in North Dakota,” in the words of researcher Cindy Sagers.
Bottom line: The GMOs have gone far beyond where they were originally planted.
This …more
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