Tonight's Climate Change News Roundup is brought to you courtesy of the letters B and P and the number 0.
As in "British Petroleum" and "Zero workable ideas for how to actually stop the disaster in the Gulf".
(And by our guest for tonight, rfall, who thanks PDNC for the opportunity and Oke for the help and relishes the chance to strut his climate stuff html skills.)
OIL SPILL NEWS
As oil continues to gush into the Gulf, Mississippi offers $75 gas cards to tourists.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) has been an outlier amongst Gulf Coast governors, downplaying the BP oil spill instead of working to mitigate the disaster and rethinking the wisdom of offshore drilling. TP has the story in this twin repost.
- Mississippi officials are encouraging tourists to use more oil, offering people gas cards if they come to the region....
- Barbour told radio host Bill Bennett last week that if the spill comes ashore, "it will have some effect," but that "it isn’t anything like Exxon Valdez."....
Quest for oil leaves trail of damage across the globe
Like many of her neighbors, Celina Harpe is angry about the oil pollution at her doorstep. No longer can she eat the silvery fish that dart along the shore near her home. Even the wind that hurries over the water reeks of oil waste.
"I get so mad," she said. "I feel very sad."
Harpe, 70, isn't a casualty of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She lives in a remote corner of Alberta, Canada, where another oil field that's vital to the United States is damaging one of the world's most important ecosystems: Canada's northern forest.
Workers in the Gulf Succeed in Effort to Funnel Some Oil to Tanker
Workers struggling to contain the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill succeeded Sunday in connecting a mile-long tube to the gushing deepwater well and were funneling the escaping crude to a tanker on the surface, according to the Associated Press.
While the tube is extracting only some of the oil and gas, BP, which was leasing the oil rig that drilled the well, called it an "important step" in reducing the amount of oil spreading in the Gulf.
It was a rare bit of good news in the weeks-long effort to contain the spill, especially coming a day after scientists said they had detected huge underwater plumes as much as 10 miles long. That discovery indicated that the much more oil is gushing from the deepwater well than previously estimated and raising the specter of an even greater threat to sea life.
Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
"There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water," said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. "There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column."
Gulf oil spill could result in biggest environmental and maritime litigation case in U.S.
Most of the litigation won't crank up in earnest until after July 29, when a panel of federal judges meets in Boise, Idaho, to consider whether the cases should be consolidated into one big case in New Orleans, as most people harmed by the spill want, or in Houston, as BP has requested.
Bird rescuers in a race to save oiled wildlife
Although U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials are on the lookout for oily birds and volunteers are combing coastal marshes, the birds' chances of survival are not good even if they are found.
According to a press release from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, 21 birds have made it to Fort Jackson. Fifteen were dead on arrival, died after admittance or had to be euthanized.
Oil spill imperils an unseen world at the bottom of the gulf
In total darkness at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico lives a creature with many scuttling legs and two wiggling antennae that jut from a pinched, space-alien face. It is the isopod, Bathynomus giganteus, a scavenger of dead and rotten flesh on the mud floor of the gulf.
"If you think of a giant roach, put it on steroids," said Thomas Shirley, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University. "They can be scary big."
Gulf oil spill: Obama administration warns BP it's on the hook for all damages, not the taxpayers
The Obama administration warned BP in a strongly worded letter Saturday that the federal government expects the oil giant -- and not taxpayers -- to pay all damages associated with the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil leak, even if they exceed the $75-million liability cap under federal law.
Two Cabinet secretaries, Ken Salazar of Interior and Janet Napolitano of Homeland Security, wrote to BP chief executive Tony Hayward to reiterate the administration's position that "BP is accountable to the American public for the full clean up of this spill and all the economic loss caused by the spill and related events."
Less Toxic Dispersants Lose Out in BP Oil Spill Cleanup
BP PLC continues to stockpile and deploy oil-dispersing chemicals manufactured by a company with which it shares close ties, even though other U.S. EPA-approved alternatives have been shown to be far less toxic and, in some cases, nearly twice as effective.
Huge BP spill means a high-stakes hurricane season
NEW YORK (Reuters) – BP's oil spill could make for one of the highest-stakes U.S. Gulf hurricane seasons on record.
Storms may scuttle clean-up efforts, force containment vessels to retreat, or propel spilled crude and tar balls over vast expanses of sea and beach, scientists said.
Meteorologists say that climate conditions are ripe for an unusually destructive hurricane season, the storm-prone period that runs from June 1 to the end of November in the Gulf. Oceanographers say that could hurt the clean-up.
CLIMATE CHANGE NEWS
Climate health costs: bug-borne ills, killer heat
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health.
These pests and others are expanding their ranges in a warming world, which means people who never had to worry about them will have to start. And they are hardly the only health threats from global warming.
The Lancet medical journal declared in a May 16 commentary: "Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century."
For Wildebeests, Danger Ahead
When the grass turns brittle and the streams run dry, the wildebeests grow restless. Milling in uneasy circles, scanning the horizon, sniffing the air for distant scents, the shaggy animals move slowly north, looking for the rains that bring new grass—and the promise of life for a population numbering some 1.2 million animals.
"It’s amazing how keyed in they are to the rains," says Suzi Eszterhas, an American photographer who has lived among the wildebeests for years to document their perilous annual journey, which covers about a thousand looping miles. From the broad Serengeti grasslands on the plains of Tanzania, the wildebeests trudge west through low hills toward Lake Victoria, then northeast to the Masai Mara National Reserve in southern Kenya, a crucial refuge for water and grass in the July to November dry season.
You can blame climate change for that pesky runny nose
Much of the country is wheezing and sneezing through a bumper crop of pollen that started early in the spring and is likely to go deep into the fall.
Not only have flowers and trees been budding and blossoming earlier in recent springs, but in much of the country, more species likely to produce allergic misery are cropping up with warmer temperatures.
Climate scientists have plotted the earlier onset of spring-like temperatures for some 20 years, with the average onset of plant bursting coming 10-14 days earlier.
Eliminating tax subsidies for oil companies
President Obama’s 2011 budget proposes to eliminate nine different tax expenditures that primarily benefit oil and gas companies. Cutting these special tax deductions, preferences, and credits would save the government about $45 billion over the next 10 years. CAP’s Sima Gandhi has the story in this repost:
CAP has previously argued for eliminating tax expenditures for multibillion-dollar oil companies such as BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron that would be profitable even without government subsidies. Here are the tax expenditures that the Obama administration has targeted for elimination.
GENERAL ECO NEWS
Demand for ivory soars in Asia, leads to death of African elephants
PUTIAN, China (AP) — Carefully, the Chinese ivory dealer pulled out an elephant tusk cloaked in bubble wrap and hidden in a bag of flour. Its price: $17,000.
"Do you have any idea how many years I could get locked away in prison for having this?" said the dealer, a short man in his 40s, who gave his name as Chen.
A surge in demand for ivory in Asia is fuelling an illicit trade in elephant tusks, especially from Africa. Over the past eight years, the price of ivory has gone up from about $100 per kilogram ($100 per 2.2 pounds) to $1,800, creating a lucrative black market.
A Natural Gas Rush in the Northeast Is Forcing Farmers to Choose Between Income and Land
When Joyce Stone and her husband moved to Dimock, Pennsylvania 34 years ago, they found themselves in the middle of what would be the first of many environmental battles. It was not long after the oil shock of 1973 and there were plans to build a massive energy park in nearby Ararat consisting of ten nuclear and ten coal-fired power plants.
Stone and her husband opposed the idea, and together with a small group of local residents they were able to defeat the proposal. One of the organizers described it as "an amazing example of the ‘power of the people,’ and even more amazing that it happened in Susquehanna County."