Category: RT Newswire

Published on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 by McClatchy Newspapers

EPA To Gut Mountaintop Mining Rule That Protects Streams
by Renee Schoof and Bill Estep

WASHINGTON-The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday approved a last-minute rule change by the Bush administration that will allow coal companies to bury streams under the rocks leftover from mining.

The 11th hour change before President George W. Bush leaves office would eliminate a tool that citizens groups have used in lawsuits to keep mining waste out of streams. Mining companies had been pushing for the change for years.

It also means that President-elect Barack Obama’s administration will have to decide whether to try to restore and enforce the rule, a process that could take many months of new rulemaking. Obama’s transition team declined to comment on its plans on Tuesday.

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The report, “The Climate Crisis and the Adaptation Myth,” is
published by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and
is available at
www.environment.yale.edu/publication-series/climate_change/.

Public release date: 2-Dec-2008
Yale University

Contact: David DeFusco
david.defusco@yale.edu
203-436-4842

Most US organizations not adapting to climate change

New Haven, Conn.-Organizations in the United States that are at the
highest risk of sustaining damage from climate change are not
adapting enough to the dangers posed by rising temperatures,
according to a Yale report.

“Despite a half century of climate change that has already
significantly affected temperature and precipitation patterns and has
already had widespread ecological and hydrological impacts, and
despite a near certainty that the United States will experience at
least as much climate change in the coming decades just as a result
of current atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, little
adaptation has occurred,” says Robert Repetto, author of “The Climate
Crisis and the Adaptation Myth” and a senior fellow of the United
Nations Foundation.

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Damn! These egghead are really on to something!! And whaddya know: Dine’ on Black Mesa have asserted for years that Peabody Coal’s draining of the aquifer was impacting precipitation there in a negative way. Maybe more eggheads need to go to Pauline Whitesinger’s & herd sheep for awhile!!

Such implications are particularly critical in desert ecosystems-or anywhere some corporate scum want to plunder locals’ groundwater supplies…

ASW

I have the Nature Geoscience article as pdf.  Here’s how ES&T reported on it.
Lance
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“You could safely say [that] if subsurface water is heavily
impacted”-whether by agricultural pumping, sea level rise, or massive
parking lots that prevent groundwater recharge-“you literally could
be affecting the weather.”
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Environmental Science & Technology
Publication Date (Web): October 22, 2008

Water belowground affects climate above

New modeling results show that groundwater conditions feed back into
climate by impacting energy transactions at the earth’s surface.
<http://pubs.acs.org/action/showStoryContent?doi=10.1021%2Fon.2008.010.28.134176>
Naomi Lubick

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Dow Jones is the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s–and Market Watch. The Market Watch story below shows that the financial community knows damned well that turning forests into fuel is lame at best.
Lance

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“It’s even worse on peatlands, which contain so much carbon that it
would be 600 years before we see any benefits whatsoever.”

“”This is not only an issue in South East Asia …”
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MARKET WATCH
WASHINGTON, Dec 01, 2008

Biofuel Plantations on Tropical Forestlands Are Bad for the Climate and Biodiversity, Study Finds

(BUSINESS WIRE)–Keeping tropical rain forests intact is a better way to combat climate change than replacing them with biofuel plantations, a study in the journal Conservation Biology finds.

The study reveals that it would take at least 75 years for the carbon emissions saved through the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon lost through forest conversion. And if the original habitat was carbon-rich peatland, the carbon balance would take more than 600 years. On the other hand, planting biofuels on degraded Imperata grasslands instead of tropical rain forests would lead to a net removal of carbon in 10 years, the authors found.

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