Carbon Footprints

The UK’s The Guardian is reporting Blowing the whistle on climate change.
In a letter (pdf) made public this week, former EPA associate deputy administrator Jason Burnett indicated that both the office of the vice-president and the White House Council on Environmental Quality have directly attempted to censor discussions of the consequences that global warming poses [...]

It’s good to see right-wing commentators like Piers Ackerman in the Sunday Telegraph can keep their line consistent (google context) as the gap yawns between their reality, where burning fossil fuels actually helps the planet and oil companies are everyone’s friends, and everyone else’s realities. Here’s Ackerman on yesterday’s Garnaut release:
[Garnaut's] report is [...]

Here’s an alarmist piece of nonsense for you. Households may be worse off with carbon trading: report.
A report for the Climate Institute shows that five years into a carbon emissions trading scheme an average household could be $200 a year worse off.
What’s that $200 in 2013 worth in today’s money? About $150 or [...]

There’s a sobering article in the Washington Post called It Happened to Him. It’s Happening to You.
Now we face the possibility of mass extinction event No. 6. No big killer asteroid is in sight. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are not of the scale to cause mass extinction. Yet recent studies show that troubling earlier projections [...]

On 18 January this year the Australian consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission or simply the ACCC announced they were taking action against GM Holden over their Saab ‘green’ claims, alleging misleading and deceptive conduct and false representations concerning ‘green’ claims made in the advertising of Saab vehicles.
The ACCC alleges that the Saab [...]

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting California sues EPA over refusal to let state limit greenhouse gases.
The Environmental Protection Agency “has done nothing at the national level to curb greenhouse gases, and now it has wrongfully and illegally blocked California’s landmark tailpipe emissions standards,” Attorney General Jerry Brown said at a news conference announcing the [...]

AFT is reporting on the final tense negotiations during the final hours of the Bali COP13 conference that concluded this weekend. Global warming pact set for 2009 after US backs down.
World climate negotiators set a 2009 deadline Saturday for a landmark treaty to fight global warming after two weeks of intense haggling led to [...]

Canada’s Financial Post has a story, Carbon catastrophe, attacking the Kyoto protocol and the trading of carbon credits. Alas for the writer it’s simply wrong. I don’t usually respond to the rubbish I read in the press, knowing full well that most people just don’t buy the arguments used by climate change deniers. [...]

Burning rain forest in the Amazon, Para, Brazil. Photo by Julio Etchart, used with permission.
Almost one fifth of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed to date according to an article on Mongabay.com titled Fires rage in Amazon rainforest park.
In 2005 and 2006 the Amazon experienced the worst drought on record as thousands of square kilometers [...]

Fire in the Amazon as seen from Google Earth. Google Earth link
The Amazon, often described as ‘the lungs of the Earth’ is burning. The UK’s The Independent has this story; South America chokes as Amazon burns.
From Santa Cruz in the east of Bolivia, where flights have been grounded, to the Brazilian frontier city of [...]