Welcome to the first edition of the eKos Earthship, your one-stop-shop for great environmental diaries and series. We're hoping that this will turn into a hub of activity for the DK eco-community.
Beneath the fold you will find today's table of eco-diaries, a letter from WarrenS (he has many), our environmental pic of the day, a couple of news items, and some more details about this new series. Be sure to check in with us throughout the day as we update the lists. Enjoy!
Today's editor: patrickz
Today's eco-diaries:
Yesterday's eco-diaries:
Also, don't forget to check out these eco-series:
(All times Eastern!)
Note: We will be keeping an archive of the listed diaries. You can access it here.
News Items
Climate Bill Before Immigration? from ABC News
Perhaps we will get climate legislation this year after all:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday he is willing to bring up climate change legislation ahead of an immigration bill, a possible first step toward resolving a dispute with Senate Republicans that threatens to derail a bipartisan effort months in the making.
But Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, still angry that Reid considered putting off the climate bill, said nothing has changed. The majority leader appears not to be serious about either the climate bill or the immigration measure, said Graham. He has threatened to withhold support for the climate bill if Reid pushes ahead first on immigration.
Meanwhile, Lieberman and Kerry try to bring Graham back into the fold from The Hill:
Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) said Tuesday afternoon that they are focused on bringing Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) back on board their stalled climate and energy bill, and are not currently planning to move ahead without him.
Their comments came hours after Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said it might be possible to move forward on a climate change measure without Graham.
“Right now Senator Kerry and I are not even thinking about that,” Lieberman said late Tuesday afternoon when asked about pushing the measure without Graham. “We are just focused on getting him back, because he wants to come back.”
Disappearing Beaches from Wired Science
EPA scientist Jim Titus speaks out about sea-level rise on the east coast:
Like his occasional collaborator, NASA climatologist James Hansen, Titus has decided to speak out. He’s crisscrossed the country to meet with state and local officials in coastal areas, urging them to start planning now for the slow-motion flood. Yet his warnings have mostly fallen on deaf ears. “We were often told by midlevel officials that their bosses did not want to plan for anything past the next election,” he says.
Neither, it seems, does the federal government. Over the past decade, Titus and a team of contractors combined reams of data to construct a remarkably detailed model of how sea-level rise will impact the eastern seaboard.
It was the largest such study ever undertaken, and its findings were alarming: Over the next 90 years, 1,000 square miles of inhabited land on the east coast could be flooded, and most of the wetlands between Massachusetts and Florida could be lost.
Scientists Discover Massive Current in the Southern Ocean from Science Daily
Ocean currents transfer heat and carbon dioxide, and are thus an integral part of the global climate system:
"It was a real surprise to see how strong the flow was at this location. With two-year average speeds of more than 20cm per second, these are the strongest mean currents ever measured at depths three kilometres below the sea surface.
"Mapping the deep current systems is an important step in understanding the global network of ocean currents that influence climate, now and in the future. Our results show that the deep currents near the Kerguelen Plateau make a large contribution to this global ocean circulation," Dr Rintoul said.
Antarctic waters carried northward by the deep currents eventually fill the deep layers of eastern Indian and Pacific Oceans.
A Letter from WarrenS
WarrenS made a New Year's Resolution to write a letter advocating climate action every day. The result is over one hundred letters to congresspeople, newspapers, President Obama, and more. Warren has even had letters published in the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
We got permission from Warren to post some of his letters in this space. This particular example was a note to the Office of Management and Budget urging the OMB and EPA to move forward on regulations concerning coal combustion waste. You can send a note using this link.
I write to urge that the Environmental Protection Agency move forward in regulating coal ash as hazardous waste.
There can be no doubt that coal combustion waste is incredibly dangerous. The scientific evidence is incontrovertible. Among the sources is the EPA itself, which recently found that pollution from coal ash dumps significantly increases both cancer and non-cancer health risks and degrades water quality in groundwater supplies. After examining almost two hundred sites throughout the country, the report found that unlined coal ash waste ponds pose a cancer risk 900 times above what is defined as ‘acceptable.’ The report also found releases of toxic chemicals and metals such as arsenic, lead, boron, selenium, cadmium, thallium, and other pollutants at levels that pose both environmental and human health risks.
This information alone should be enough to move coal ash waste into the “hazardous materials” category. But there’s more.
Coal contains trace amounts of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. In “whole” coal they’re not a problem, but when coal is burned, the fly ash contains uranium and thorium concentrated to up to ten times their original levels.
In a 1978 paper, J. P. McBride and his colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) estimated fly ash radiation exposure around Tennessee and Alabama coal plants and compared it with exposure levels around nuclear power plants — and they found that people living close to coal plants got significantly higher dosages of radiation than those living around nuclear facilities. Depending on local factors, radiation doses were anywhere from three to two hundred times higher.
State regulatory agencies have utterly failed to protect the public against spills and contamination. When coal ash waste dams collapse, the effects are absolutely devastating, leaving behind barren, grotesque landscapes from which all life has been eradicated.
The notion that any controversy exists at all about the hazardous qualities of coal ash is bizarre. If Don Blankenship and the Board of Directors at Massey Coal think it’s such benign stuff, perhaps they could store it in the basements of their mansions — but somehow I don’t think they’d go along.
Please ensure that coal ash is designated a Hazardous Material, and likewise ensure that its storage is strictly regulated, with significant penalties levied for violations. If coal companies actually had to pay fines appropriate to the damage their waste products do, the myth of coal as “cheap energy” would vanish overnight.
WarrenS
Environmental Pic of the Day
Today's graphic comes from NASA and NOAA, and concerns the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. British Petroleum, the owner of the well, has failed to stop the leak, which could become the worst in US history. The US Coast Guard is considering burning the oil in order to prevent it from reaching sensitive ecological areas. The oil patch is now only 20 miles off of the Louisiana coastline. Yet another nasty side effect of our addiction to fossil fuels.
About eKos
The Idea
This project was inspired by the Earth Day @ DKos Blogathon. In case you missed it, we had 31 participating environmental diaries, all of which were linked to in the Mothership. During the event we had several requests for an eco-mothership diary series in the mould of the Earth Day effort.
The Mission
eKos is all about promoting community eco-diaries. Daily Kos already showcases several series, but sometimes the work of dedicated green diarists pass off the recent diary list hardly noticed. Our goal is to make these diaries more accessible. In the process we hope to build community and bring in a broader audience to the exceptional environmental writing here at DK.
eKos Schedule
Ideally, we would like to post a mothership diary every day. Considering most of us have busy schedules, this may be an unattainable goal. For now, we'll post as often as we can. Mothership diaries will be posted in the morning (exact time TBD) and updated throughout the day. Eventually, we may reserve one day a week to post an edited environmental diary with the eKos handle.
How eKos Works
If you want a diary included in the list, please let us know by leaving a comment. We'll do our best to search out green diaries, but are bound to miss a few. For eKos to live up to it's full potential, eco-diarists will need to post a link to the mothership at the end of their diary. This will provide readers with easy access to other recent environmental diaries.
Requirements
eKos is meant to be inclusive, but we will have standards for quality and content of listed diaries. (As long as you don't violate site rules and have a modicum of relevant, original content, you should be fine.)
'eKos' tag
If your diary gets listed, we'll ask you to add the eKos tag to your diary.
Name
Please help us pick the name of the eKos mothership diary series by responding to the poll or leaving a comment! (We may or may not heed the results ;-)
Contact
You can follow us on Twitter
If you are interested in becoming an eco-ranger for eKos, or just want some more info, e-mail ekos350atgmaildotcom