Business & Finance

Mapping th Keystone XL Pipeline

Thomas Bachand is trying to get information to map the Keystone XL Pipeline:
Since December I’ve made close to two dozen calls to the friendly and professional staff at the Department of State in an effort to track down my FOIA request.
Early on, the Office of Environmental Quality and Transboundary Issues referred me to the Bureau [...]

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Recent Posts

USDA ERS report on Women

Agricultural Law Blog reviews the report:
While women have always been recognized as critically important to our food system, their leadership role in agricultural production is a more recent phenomenon.  Last month, the USDA ERS released a new report, Characteristics of Women Farm Operators and Their Farms by Robert Hoppe and Penni Korb.
According to this report, [...]

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The 1 Chart That Reveals Just How Grossly Unfair The U.S. Tax System Has Become

tax

Apple CEO Tim Cook waved a magic wand in front of America on Tuesday, vanishing our outrage over how shamelessly companies avoid paying taxes, leaving the rest of us to foot the bill. As a public service to you, here is a chart that should enrage you about corporate tax rates all over again!
What this shows is [...]

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Tesla Motors Pays Back Energy Department Loan 9 Years Early

tesla

Electric automaker Tesla Motors just announced that it has paid back the nearly half a billion dollars the Department of Energy lent it in 2010. According to a company press release, today’s wire transfer of $451.8 million dollars follows two other payments in the last year and a half. U.S. taxpayers could see a $12 million profit, [...]

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How the Media Help the Kochs & ExxonMobil Spread Climate Disinformation

koch

For several decades, Charles G. and David H. Koch — owners of the Wichita-based oil, gas and coal conglomerate, Koch Industries — surreptitiously financed political and policy organizations favoring “free enterprise” and opposing government regulation. At the same time, the billionaire brothers developed an unsavory reputation with at least one philanthropy watchdog.
In 2004, the National [...]

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Nutrients lost in modern foods

Robinson’s point, that modern fruits and vegetables have been developed without regard to nutritional value, is also true of modern supermarket chicken: In Modern organic and broiler chickens sold for human consumption provide more energy from fat than protein, published in Public Health Nutrition 13(3), 400-408, researchers at London Metropolitan University found modern chicken isn’t [...]

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Student science experiment finds plants won’t grow near Wi-Fi router | MNN – Mother Nature Network

Cress Collage

Well here’s some news: radiation emitted from wireless devices such as cell phones and routers prevents seeds from sprouting; i.e., life from living. Thanks to David Kofahl for passing this one along:
“The students placed six trays filled with Lepidium sativum, a type of garden cress into a room without radiation, and six trays of the [...]

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Free Range milk

An idea whose time has come from The Ecologist:
The Ecologist office is set in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty within a United Nations Biosphere Reserve. Hartland peninsular is dotted with steep, wooded valleys where bluebells, early purple orchids and woodpeckers abound.The hills afford breathtaking views across the Bristol channel to Lundy Island, itself a nature [...]

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Grassroots reject EDF on fracking

NEARLY 70 GROUPS: ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND DOES NOT SPEAK FOR US ON FRACKING
“Greenwashing” Called Out: No Confusion Should Arise About Views of Local Communities As a Result of Shale Gas Industry’s Coopting of EDF
WASHINGTON, D.C.///May 22, 2013///A total of 68 leading grassroots organizations focused on citizen and environmental issues today released a joint letter to [...]

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PG&E fine is appropriate, paper says

The Sacramento Bee weighs in with an editorial:
If it wins final approval, the eye-popping $2.25 billion penalty that the California Public Utility Commission’s Safety and Enforcement Division has recommended against Pacific Gas and Electric Co. will be the largest ever imposed against a utility in the United States.
PG&E officials predictably complained that it is excessive. [...]

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Rise Up or Die | Perspectives, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

Mountaintop Mining

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which [...]

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Insurers Stray From the Conservative Line on Climate Change

damage

If there were one American industry that would be particularly worried about climate change it would have to be insurance, right?

From Hurricane Sandy’s devastating blow to the Northeast to the protracted drought that hit the Midwest Corn Belt, natural catastrophes across the United States pounded insurers last year, generating$35 billion in privately insured property losses, $11 billion more than [...]

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Backyard Chickens in the Gas Patch

Fish Creek Monitor remembers a favorite chicken and reflects on life near a fracking well:
Rest in Peace Maisy
March 11, 2008 – May 14, 2013
 

Our first baby chicks.  (March 2008)
The chick on the left is a Buff Orpington.  After researching various chicken breeds, we selected her because we read that they have docile temperaments and are [...]

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Monsanto’s thumb on academic publishing

Independent Science News reports on how Monsanto is influencing peer-reviewed scientific journals:
by Claire Robinson and Jonathan Latham, PhD
Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, has jested that instead of scientific peer review, its rival The Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached [...]

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Chiefs walk out of Keystone XL meeting

Indian Country reports:
ICTMN Staff

May 17, 2013

Elders and chiefs of at least 10 sovereign nations walked out of a meeting with U.S. State Department officials in Rapid City, South Dakota, on Thursday May 16 in which the government was attempting to engage in tribal consultation over the Keystone XL pipeline.
Deeming the meeting “invalid,” leaders of the [...]

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EPA mentions bees in insecticide approval

Common Dreams posts:
Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New ‘Highly Toxic’ Pesticide
Green group: ‘The EPA continues to put industry interests first to exacerbate an already dire pollinator crisis.’
- Lauren McCauley, staff writer
Despite new findings that prove a heightened crisis in US bee populations and a recent ban in Europe on similar chemical applications, the Environmental Protection [...]

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Resource Strain Pushes Coca-Cola, Dow to Put Price Tags on Nature

cellpower

Companies are starting to consider the value of natural resources in making business decisions, a practice that will become increasingly important as those resources become further constrained, corporate representatives say.
The practice, called natural capital accounting, is a way for companies to accurately assess and manage risk, maintain their social license to operate, manage or lower [...]

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Copper industry re-writes NM pollution rules

By Laura Paskus for the Santa Fe Reporter
Close your eyes, and picture a radical.
Bill Olson is not that guy. With a neat brown beard and a fondness for western shirts and jackets, even the occasional bolo tie, he’s the quintessential water nerd. When asked, over coffee and a blueberry scone, to talk about groundwater, he [...]

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Follow the money in energy reporting

Union of Concerned Scientists
By Elliot Negin
[Editor's note: Elliott Negin, director of news and commentary at the Union of Concerned Scientists, shows how the U.S. news media routinely fail to inform the public about the fossil fuel industry funders behind climate change contrarian think tanks. Negin provides recommendations for how journalists can better serve the public [...]

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Asian workers need union protection

By Elizabeth Grossman, reporting from Bangkok, Thailand
As bodies of workers continued to be pulled from the wreckage of the collapsed Rana Plaza factory complex outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, pushing the death toll past 900, and news was breaking of at least seven deaths in a garment factory fire in Bangladesh on May 9, labor rights advocates [...]

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OMB: EPA regulations SAVE money

Living on Earth explores the cost of not regulating pollution”
Critics argue that EPA regulation is costly to business and the US economy. But a new report from OMB shows that the financial benefits of environmental regulation outweigh the costs ten-fold. Harvard Professor Joe Aldy talks with host Steve Curwood about benefits of EPA rules
Transcript
CURWOOD: From [...]

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