By Chris Sellers, Lindsey Dillon, and Phil Brown 6 June 2018 (The Conversation) – The Environmental Protection Agency made news recently for excluding reporters from a “summit” meeting on chemical contamination in drinking water. Episodes like this are symptoms of a larger problem: an ongoing, broad-scale takeover of the agency by industries it regulates.We are […]
15 July 2018 (Desdemona Despair) – It’s well known that human population is increasing relentlessly, with no peak in sight for at least the next century. Various projections estimate that the population will be somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to twelve billion by the year 2100 (cf. New projection shows human population could reach […]
By Dr. Minqi Li 28 June 2018(Peak Oil Barrel) – This figure compares the historical world economic growth rates and the primary energy consumption growth rates from 1991 to 2017. The primary energy consumption growth rate has an intercept of -0.012 at zero economic growth rate and a slope of 0.914. That is, primary energy […]
By Natalie Stickel 13 June 2018 (Blue Ridge Outdoors) – The biggest energy project you’ve never heard of commonly goes by the acronym ASTH—the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. This massive petrochemical hub in West Virginia and Pennsylvania would be the largest infrastructure in the region’s history, consisting of hundreds of miles of pipelines, fracked […]
By Karen Savage 2 July 2018 (Climate Liability News) – Rhode Island is suing 21 oil and gas companies, state attorney general Peter Kilmartin announced on Monday, becoming the first U.S. state to attempt to hold the industry responsible for climate change-driven damages. “For a very long time, there has been this perception that ‘Big […]
By Spencer Dale 13 June 2018(BP) – At first blush, some of last year’s data might seem a little disappointing. Growth in overall energy demand is up; gains in energy intensity are down. Coal consumption grew for the first time in four years. And, perhaps most striking of all, carbon emissions are up after three […]
By Umair Irfan 23 June 2018 (Vox) – Trump’s executive order voids an Obama policy that aimed to prevent oil spills. The Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded on 20 April 2010, killing 11 workers. Gas erupted into a massive fireball, and then the rig gushed 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf […]
By Hiroko Tabuchi 19 June 2018 NASHVILLE, Tennessee (The New York Times) – A team of political activists huddled at a Hardee’s one rainy Saturday, wolfing down a breakfast of biscuits and gravy. Then they descended on Antioch, a quiet Nashville suburb, armed with iPads full of voter data and a fiery script. The group, […]
By Kasha Patel 31 May 2018 (NASA) – The air we breathe today in the United States is much cleaner than it was in the 1960s and 70s. But recent satellite data show that air quality is not improving as quickly as predicted by models.“Air quality is better than it was decades ago, but now […]
By Dipika Kadaba 21 May 2018 (The Revelator) – Humans increasingly live in a world of constant artificial lighting — so much so that it’s easy to forget about the environmental consequences of light pollution. “Light is a symbol of urbanity that changes the experience of any landscape from a human perspective,” says Travis Longcore, […]