GlobalWarmingisReal
contributor Anders Hellum-Alexander wraps-up and comments on the climate and
environmental news headlines for the past week:
Charles Krauthammer Washington Post op-ed belies his understanding
of climate science and misrepresents Obama’s climate plan. The whole article is misleading and
riddled with pseudo-scientific arguments.
Obama has started his environmental campaign with 3 years left in office. A necessary focus of his campaign is
coal which is drawing strong opposition from such a wealthy interest group. But,
he does not need their re-election money so whine they will while Obama tries
to reduce the environmental impact of such a dirty industry. While the coal
industry will use its puppets to spread the fear-based propaganda that the
economy will crumble from this much-needed regulation, environmentalists are slowly winning this fight.
In Nigeria 10 percent of the oil is stolen from pipelines to be sold on the black market. This has created a dirty illegal industry of
poor polluters. This is the real affect of “dirty energy,” oil is always being
stolen, spilled and regular people feel the consequences. A train in Canada
carrying crude oil got out of control and spilled in a small town
causing a large explosion that killed several and incinerated part of the
downtown area.
We need energy
sources that can’t easily explode and cause massive death when spilled. If
accidents happened like this in the renewable energy industry conservative
politicians would be demanding the end of all clean energy, but since the blood
is on the hands of the dirty energy industry then the suffering of this town is
just part of the cost of cheap energy.
As we use up the easily accessible, high quality sources of
oil, we are increasingly forced to dig deeper, both on land and underneath the oceans. The cost and environmental impact of
this is huge. If companies invested billions of dollars of exploration money
into research and development of renewable energy we would be much better off.
The US farm bill entrenches in our economy large agricultural
companies pumping out lots of cheap
corn, cotton, wheat and soy. The “farm bill” has passed in the US congress every year for
decades, but this year it did not pass and now some groups are scrambling to
upkeep the status quo.
People need to be healthy to make healthy environmental decisions. That means we need a society that grows and
eats healthy food – that means real food, not processed
food. No matter how much
we engineer our food, nothing will beat the bounty that is naturally provided
by mother nature. Eat real food.
