With the recent midterm elections resulting in a divided Congress next year, Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s bipartisan approach will be critical in moving climate solutions forward. CCL’s volunteers will gather for a virtual conference early in December to prepare for the advocacy work that lies ahead. By Steve Valk Citizens’ Climate Lobby Who: Citizens’ Climate Lobby volunteers […]
After months of predicting a landslide, the Democrats at best appear to have barely won a contested presidency, lost seats in the House and failed to decisively take back the Senate. Even if Trump loses, his brand of Far Right populist politics has won. November 3rd was a rebuke to the idea that a vast swath […]
It was supposed to be the middle-of-the-road answer to the “global warming sensationalism” of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”. But “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg’s un-scary climate change documentary, “Cool It”, appears to be anything but sensational. It opened this weekend to the rousing reception of a tree falling in the forest with nobody there. It took […]
[social_buttons] Yesterday I drove 28 miles to attend the San Diego version of the “Rally to Restore Sanity.” I’m glad I did. Even in this Southern California bastion of political conservatism, there were at least 200 people meeting at Dick’s Last Resort to watch the DC event and to encourage each other that we are […]
As we approach this hyper-partisan 2010 election, the “environment” has become just one more point of polarization, particularly around the question of Global Climate Change. All but one Republican Senate candidate candidate today passively or actively opposes the idea that human activity is responsible for greenhouse gas effects on climate. It is hard to find […]
By Bill McKibben Amid the heated rhetoric about the administration that’s dominating the site at the moment, here’s a potential chance to help with a very concrete project. Today we’re headed down the East Coast with a solar panel—it used to be on the White House, installed by Jimmy Carter in 1979. The Reagan administration took […]
BY Bill McKibben, Philip Radford, Rebecca Tarbotton (Cross-posted from Grist) Dear Friends, God, what a summer. Federal scientists have concluded that we’ve just come through the warmest six months, the warmest year, and the warmest decade in human history. Nineteen nations have set new all-time temperature records; the mercury in Pakistan reached 129 degrees, the […]
(From FailDrill.com) A group of coast scientists – experts who teach at universities from Maine to Hawaii – have drafted a letter to Incident Commander Thad Allen, calling on him to cancel the sand berms and other “massive re-engineering” projects. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal had championed the sand berms as a way of keeping oil […]
For the first time in over 50 years Arctic waters will be the subject of a mapping expedition. What I want to know is, why? Arctic ice has been receding at a rapid and alarming rate over the past decade. We’ve seen the Northwest Passage open for the first time in recorded and memorable history, […]
A new exploratory study out of George Mason University has found that people will care more about climate change if it is framed as a public health problem. The authors of the study interviewed 70 Americans and had the respondents read a public health framed essay on climate change. Their results found that, on the […]
(From DrillFail.com) Late Sunday, Incident Commander Thad Allen notified BP that seepage had been detected in the ocean floor near the well. It could be a leak from the sub-surface portion of the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo well, which would mean the cap – currently in a testing phase – would not be able to keep holding pressure. […]
BP concluded 48 hours of testing on the new cap over their busted well, and the results are good. The oil flow has stopped, pressure is stable, and there’s no evidence – so far – that the cap has blown a new leak in the underground well. “As we continue to see success in the […]
(From RGB’s sister blog, FailDrill.com) Despite the glowing headlines proclaiming “Gulf Oil Stops Flowing”, we’re not out of the woods yet. In a conference call this afternoon, retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen announced that pressure levels have NOT risen high enough in the recently-capped well. This could mean one of two things: The oil […]
After a day of waiting, the word came from the Gulf late Tuesday – BP will NOT be testing the new cap on the Deepwater Horizon well today. This comes as a major disappointment, and feeds fears that the well is in such bad shape that the capping process won’t work. “We decided that the […]
(From Important Media’s newest blog: FailDrill, covering the Gulf Oil Disaster.)
So much for the First Amendment.
Corporations spending money to influence elections… that’s free speech, protected by the First Amendement, according to our Supreme Court.
But reporters talking to oilfield workers? Or taking pictures of booms? Sorry, that’s a felony.
Yobie Benjamin of the SF Gate is outraged:
…Allen has issued a blanket order that bans anyone from getting close to any spill clean up site, boom site, areas where there are clean up workers or any other oil disaster related area or persons effectively shutting down the first amendment rights of the media. The zone of exclusion is 65 feet. There was rumor that Coast Guard bosses wanted to impose a 300 feet exclusion zone but later relented to a 65 feet no trespass and exclusion zone.
This is despite assurances from Thad Allen that there will be full transparency on all clean-up operations. Allen claims local officials were asking the Coast Guard to create a media-free buffer zone. However no media outlet — television, print, Internet or radio could find a single local official who requested the Coast Guard to ban media access to oil sludge sites on land or water. Since no local official requesting a no media zone can be found, it can only be assumed that the ban was requested by BP.