Mercury contaminating bird eggs in oilsands region: Environment Canada

By Mike De Souza, Postmedia News 31 May 2012 OTTAWA – Environment Canada scientists have observed evidence of toxic contamination of wildlife upstream from Alberta’s natural bitumen deposits that coincides with the oilsands industry’s expansion, Environment Minister Peter Kent was told last summer. According to internal documents obtained by Postmedia News, the government was urged […]

Science out of context: BP’s demand for e-mail will erode the scientific deliberative process

By Christopher Reddy and Richard Camilli, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution3 June 2012 Late last week, we reluctantly handed over more than 3,000 confidential e-mails to BP, as part of a subpoena from the oil company demanding access to them because of the Deepwater Horizon disaster lawsuit brought by the US government. We are accused of […]

Video: In Louisiana, rising seas threaten Native American lands

By Hari Sreenivasan1 June 2012 MARGARET WARNER: Now: Coping With Climate Change. In this edition of our series, Hari Sreenivasan reports from the Louisiana Gulf Coast, where rising seawater is claiming the land people have lived on for centuries. Louisiana Public Broadcasting was our partner in this report. HARI SREENIVASAN: It used to be a […]

Sickness spreads in Great Barrier Reef wildlife – Pollution and freshwater outflows from record 2011 floods blamed

GLADSTONE, Australia, 2 June 2012 (The Economist) – SOME locals in the port town of Gladstone recall swimming and catching mud crabs off Curtis Island in the city’s harbour. The harbour is now undergoing the biggest dredging operation ever approved in Australia. From 2014, huge ships are due to load liquefied natural gas (LNG) from […]

Growing pains: Scenes from the North Dakota drilling boom

By Keith Schneider21 May 2012 To understand the magnitude of the current oil and gas boom in North Dakota, you need only stand alongside U.S. Route 85 anywhere just north or south of Williston at night. The area’s 200 drilling rigs are lit up like carnival rides: towers of floodlights make up a luminous vertical […]

Photo gallery: The Canada oil sand mines refused us access, so we rented this plane to see what they were up to

By Robert Johnson18 May 2012 When reaching out to Alberta oil sands companies before a trip to Canada last month, I thought all of them mined oil the same way — they don’t. The open mining most people think of when they picture the oil sands is just one way of extracting crude from the […]

Door to 2 degree temperature limit is closing: IEA

By Nina Chestney and Oleg Vukmanovic; Editing by Keiron Henderson16 May 2012 (Reuters) – The chance of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius this century is getting slimmer and slimmer, the head of the International Energy Agency warned on Wednesday. “What I see now with existing investments for plants under construction […]

Heartland Institute’s annual conference against climate science much diminished this year

By Suzanne Goldenberg in Chicago, www.guardian.co.uk22 May 2012 It was an odd choice of icon for the ultra-conservative Heartland Institute. But there he was in round glasses, beard, and halo of curls staring out from T-shirts and coffee mugs at their gathering of climate change contrarians this week, the scientist whose internet sting set Heartland […]

The age of extreme oil: ‘This used to be a forest?'

By Arno Kopecky 19 May 2012 One grey Thursday at the end of April, a plane touched down in Fort McMurray, Alta., carrying four Achuar Indians from the Peruvian Amazon. They had flown 8,000 kilometres from the rain forest to beseech Talisman Energy Inc., the Calgary-based oil and gas conglomerate, to stop drilling in their […]

Dead dolphins and birds are causing alarm in Peru

By DAVID JOLLY and ANDREA ZARATE7 May 2012 Late last year, fishermen began finding dead dolphins, hundreds of them, washed up on Peru’s northern coast. Now, seabirds have begun dying, too, and the government has yet to conclusively pinpoint a cause. Officials insist that the two die-offs are unrelated. The dolphins are succumbing to a […]

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