earthjustice.org - October 18, 2013 - Doug Pflugh

It is rewarding to successfully wrap-up a case. This can be especially true when our work protects special places, preserving them for future generations. It is a pleasure to be able to point at a map and say, “Those are the places that were saved.”

The U.S. Supreme Court took action last week that did just that—endorsing an earlier conservation victory and ending the long fight over proposed oil and gas development on the doorstep of beloved public lands in the west ...

A Chevron gas station sign is pictured at one of their retain gas stations in Cardiff, California October 9, 2013. 
Credit: Reuters/Mike Blake

reuters.com - by Bernard Vaughan - October 14, 2013

(Reuters) - Chevron Corp will try to convince a U.S. judge this week that a group of Ecuadorean villagers and their U.S. lawyer used bribery to win an $18 billion judgment against Chevron from a court in Ecuador, in the latest chapter in a long-running fight over pollution in the Amazon jungle.

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CLICK HERE - Wikipedia - History - Lago Agrio Oil Field

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submitted by Albert Gomez

greentechmedia.com - by Chet Lyons - October 10, 2013

Grid-Scale Energy Storage in North America 2013: Applications, Technologies and Suppliers

We are now entering the early growth stages of what will surely become a giant global industry - energy storage - which will both support and compete with conventional generation, transmission and distribution resources. The evolution of the industry will lead to new business models and the creation of new companies that make, apply and operate storage assets to help the grid work more reliably and cost-effectively, while decreasing unwanted environmental impacts.

cbsnews.com - by Rebecca Kaplan, Stephanie Condon - October 16, 2013

After 15 days of a government shutdown and on the eve of when the country was set to lose its borrowing authority, Congress passed legislation to fund the government and avert a default Wednesday night. President Obama later signed the bill, officially reopening the government and allowing federal employees to head back to work.

By a vote of 81 to 18 in the Senate and 285 to 144 in the House, the agreement, negotiated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, was approved. It will fund the government through Jan. 15 and lift the debt ceiling through Feb. 7.

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cnn.com - by Tom Cohen - October 16, 2013

Washington (CNN) -- Senate leaders on Wednesday announced a deal to end the partial government shutdown and avoid a possible U.S. default as soon as the end of this week, and a key GOP conservative said he wouldn't try to block the measure.

bloomberg.com - by John Glover - October 14, 2013

Reneging on its debt obligations would make the U.S. the first major Western government to default since Nazi Germany 80 years ago. . .

. . . “These are generally catastrophic economic events,” said Professor Eugene N. White, an economics historian at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “There is no happy ending.”

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Video: A video report on the predicted climate shifts.

huffingtonpost.com - October 9th, 2013 - Andrew Freedman

The mean annual climate of the average location on Earth will slip past the most extreme conditions experienced during the past 150 years and into new territory by between 2047 and 2069, depending on the amount of climate-warming greenhouse gases that are emitted during the next few decades, a new study found. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, used a new index to show for the first time when the climate — which has been warming during the past century in response to manmade pollution and natural variability — will be radically different from average conditions during the 1860-2005 period.

The study shows that tropical areas, which contain the richest diversity of species on the planet as well as some of the poorest countries, will be among the first to see the climate exceed historical limits — in as little as a decade from now — which spells trouble for rainforest ecosystems and nations that have a limited capacity to adapt to rapid climate change.

"While climate sceptics are attacking the IPCC report for being alarmist... environmentalists are complaining that the panel was too intimidated by the deniers, and understated the dangers," writes Elver [EPA]

Climate change deniers have been waging a PR war on scientists who promote a path towards a post carbon economy.

aljazeera.com - by Hilal Elver - October 10, 2013

After six years of work, a week-long final review session in Stockholm, invloving more than 200 scientists from 39 countries, the UN's influential scientific body IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which is investigating climate change, released a 36-page summary of their latest work.

Gradually, the IPCC will make public four volumes of additional reports and suggestions to policy makers. Somewhat surprisingly, the report was not treated as "breaking news" by the mainstream media. There are several reasons for this.

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CLICK HERE - IPCC - Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis

huffingtonpost.com - October 1, 2013

The government shutdown is underway, as a dispute about President Obama's Affordable Care Act led to a partisan stalemate over a funding bill. The ACA will go forward, with health exchanges opening today, but that doesn't mean the shutdown won't have an impact on the health of Americans.

Here are nine ways the shutdown could affect your health, a reminder of just how crucial government resources can be in protecting and improving our health and well-being.

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The devastating Rim Fire threatened Yosemite in August.  Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

This year has been a bloody one for firefighters on the front lines against wildfires. With climate change intensifying fires, it may be time to change the way we fight them.

time.com - by Bryan Walsh - October 4, 2013

We usually measure wildfires in acres burnt or the number of homes destroyed. But there’s a human toll to fires as well. So far this year 32 people have lost their lives fighting fires, the highest number in nearly 20 years—and the fire season isn’t done yet. More than half of those deaths occurred in a single incident, when all but one of a 20-man firefighting crew were killed during the Yarnell Hill fire in Arizona in June.

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cfr.org - Council on Foreign Relations - June 2013

Overview

This CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force warns that "escalating attacks on countries, companies, and individuals, as well as pervasive criminal activity, threaten the security and safety of the Internet." The number of "state-backed operations continues to rise, and future attacks will become more sophisticated and disruptive," argues the Task Force report, Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet.

With the ideal vision of an open and secure Internet increasingly at risk, the Task Force urges the United States, with its friends and allies, "to act quickly to encourage a global cyberspace that reflects shared values of free expression and free markets."

(CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, AND TO DOWNLOAD THE REPORT)

FILE- In this July 11, 2010, file photo, provided by BP, workers onboard the Transocean Discoverer Inspiration deploy the 3 Ram Capping Stack to the Deepwater Horizon BOP in the Gulf of Mexico. Experts for BP and the federal government used the data from the gauges in calculating how much how much oil spilled into the Gulf during the 87 days it took to plug the well. But they will provide a judge with widely different estimates when the second phase of a trial resumes Monday, Oct. 7, 2013, for litigation spawned by the spill. (AP Photo/BP, Marc Morrison, File)

ap.org - abcnews.com - by Michael Kunzelman
September 30, 2013

The focus of a trial over BP's massive 2010 oil spill has shifted from the causes of the deadly disaster to the company's struggle to plug its blown-out well while millions of gallons of crude gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months.

The trial's second phase opened Monday with claims that BP could have capped the well much sooner if it hadn't ignored decades of warnings about the risks of a deep-water blowout or withheld crucial information about the size of the spill from federal officials.

REPORT - Fracking by the Numbers - Key Impacts of Dirty Drilling at the State and National Level (47 page .PDF report)

CLICK HERE - Fracking by the Numbers - Key Impacts of Dirty Drilling at the State and National Level

CLICK HERE - Fracking by the Numbers - New Report First to Quantify Damage Done by Gas Drilling

Growing concerns over radiation risks as report finds widespread environmental damage on an unimaginable scale in the US

theguardian.com - by Suzanne Goldenberg
October 4, 2013

Fracking in America generated 280bn US gallons of toxic waste water last year – enough to flood all of Washington DC beneath a 22ft deep toxic lagoon, a new report out on Thursday found.

On July 18, 2013, Frank Nutter, President of the Reinsurance Association of America, testified before the Senate Committee on Environment Protection and Public Works as to the RAAs perspective on weather and climate-related impacts in the United States.

Following are excerpts from his report:

"In the 1980’s, the average number of natural catastrophes globally was 400 events per year. In recent years, the average is 1000. Munich Re’s analysis suggests the increase is driven almost entirely by weather-related events. North America has seen a fivefold increase in the number of such events since 1980. In comparison, Europe has seen a twofold increase.

newscientist.com - by Fred Pearce - October 4, 2013

CLICK HERE - State of the Ocean Report 2013

We know the oceans are warming. We know they are acidifying. And now, to cap it all, it turns out they are suffocating, too. A new health check on the state of the oceans warns that they will have lost as much as 7 per cent of their oxygen by the end of the century.

The cascade of chemical and biological changes now under way could see coral reefs irreversibly destroyed in 50 to 100 years, with marine ecosystems increasingly taken over by jellyfish and toxic algal blooms.

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(CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION)