Read the following and join her and the Foundation to demand the Grand Canyon is not exploited for destructive Uranium mining. -

Save the Grand Canyon from Uranium Mining

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Suzanne Sparling.  While I am a co-founder of SEN4Earth.org and the Greenhouse Neutral Foundation’s Executive Director of Operations, USA, I’m also a simple person, someone who cares and has a passion to make a difference.

After moving to Arizona almost 7 years ago, I immediately fell in love with the beauty of the area. Shortly afterward, I began searching for avenues to be able to make a difference with regard to environmental issues. While working with the Greenhouse Neutral Foundation, I became the U.S. Executive Director. My work with the Foundation led to a joint inspiration of SEN4Earth.org, co-Founded by Gregory Hilbert and myself.  We created it with the vision to help others to not only be further educated about issues but to also arm them with information, encouragement, and the ability to take action. Though I care deeply about many causes, my primarily concern is with environmental issues. My love of Arizona and passion for environmental activism sparked the Worldwide Campaign to Save the Grand Canyon.

Simply put, I want to make a difference in the world and help others see that they can make a difference too. Every change we make toward sustainability, conservation, and environmental awareness and implementation of changes to achieve those goals – no matter how large or small – matters.

I’m writing to you today to request your organization’s support and promotion of the Worldwide Campaign to Save the Grand Canyon. We are in a critical time crunch. The deadline for public comment is May 4, 2011. At that time, it will be decided whether a new 20 year ban will be enacted or if the mining companies will be permitted to move forward with the toxic contamination and destruction of one of the most incredible places in the world.

When Change.org contacted me directly about the petition I have on their site, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. With their assistance and emailing of their members, signatures skyrocketed from approximately 1100 as of April 4, to over 40,000 as of the writing of this message.

Change.org News Release:
http://news.change.org/stories/razing-arizona-citizens-fight-to-protect-the-grand-canyon-from-uranium-mining

SEN4Earth.org Blog Update:
http://sen4earth.org/articles/2011/04/06/will-the-grand-canyon-survive/

I implore you, please help us succeed with this campaign. I’ve been canvasing the petitions for signatures since August 2010. You may find the petitions here:

http://www.change.org/petitions/worldwide-campaign-to-save-the-grand-canyon
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/worldwide-campaign-to-save-the-grand-canyon-take-action/

If your organization is able to assist us with a news, blog or any other post, publication, or email campaign to your members, please don’t hesitate to send me a link and/or information so that I can show others your support and link back to your site.

Please help us save the Grand Canyon and all the millions of lives dependent upon it.

Thank you,
Suzanne Sparling

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Chapter 6 – The Week Before – Who made all the choices?

Policy decisions are not made by politicians. Business decisions are not made by business. Both kinds of decisions are made by you and me.

Now personally I’m bipartisan on most things. That goes for politics, and for commercialism. In both cases I think we need to act in a fair and equitable way for all. I don’t mind for example business making a profit. I do mind them making a profit out of exploitation. That encompasses exploiting its workforce, exploiting its access to resources, exploiting its economic power, exploiting the shared and natural environment. I would return to the case put forward by Pigou in 1920. Had we followed such a principle of placing the onus on the producer to bear the full costs, a great many of the impacts of business exploitation would not now be an integral part of business and our daily lives.

I remember back some years ago in my capacity as a management consultant specializing in the recruitment of senior executives, I had the opportunity to take a brief from the Chairman and CEO of a multinational corporation. In doing so, I inquired about the career prospects for advancement within the organization for the person he was seeking to recruit. He told me he hadn’t given it any thought. (This organization had a history of being somewhat of a corporate raider, the type of company who would think nothing of taking over a company and stripping it of its assets, then rationalizing the operations without regard to the outcome for employees.) I pressed him on the issue of career prospects, and after some time he offered an explanation as to why he had no concern about where this person might end up. To me it was a bit of a revelation and an eye opener to the soul of the corporation. He said he offered no prospects to his personnel above demanding their total and single-minded commitment to his only responsibility, which was as Chairman, to increase the economic return for the shareholders of the corporation. I refused further assignments from this corporation. You see, this and other corporations have a basic moral flaw. They are legally required to put the interests of shareholders above all other concerns. Without exception, that is their only responsibility. To this end they will make any and all decisions. If it is more profitable on the bottom line for shareholders to cause environmental damage, and if caught pay the legally inflicted penalty, then that is the decision they will make. If their decisions as directors will disadvantage others that are not their shareholders, so be it. If their employees suffer hardship for the decisions made that increase returns to shareholders, so be it. Another example: this corporation wished to acquire the operations of a local weekly newspaper. The newspaper company share price, at the time, was higher than the corporation wished to pay. The corporations financial and management team came to the conclusion that starting a similar local paper from scratch, to compete with what would then be a rival, would be the best commercial option. By stripping/hiring the takeover target’s editorial and sales staff and then giving away free advertising for twelve months, they planned to cripple the other long-established business. It worked. After twelve months the rival was taken over at a fraction of the previous share value. As the now newly acquired paper had a long-established name in the market and the one they had established had a short history of giving advertising away for free, the new paper was closed and all its employees dismissed. As the takeover target paper had retained its senior management staff throughout the process, those fired from the now closed new paper, who were seen by these executives at least in part, as the cause of their woes, were not offered employment. So be it. Any externalized harm caused? The corporation had done its job for the shareholders. These were simple and disquieting personal lessons for me as an onlooker. Lessons that to my morality, sense of decency and fair play, were abhorrent. But business will tell you, that is their job. While the corporation has this as its legal obligation they are duty bound to continue with the business as usual model. Just as in this case, they exploited the local workforce, they are duty bound to the same exploitation as they expand their demands for ever increasing profit and returns to shareholders globally.

How to stop it? Simply, change the charter of the corporation. Remove their single responsibility. We don’t need to deny profit, but to demand profit with no harm, no environmental degradation, no exploitation of the work force, no obviating responsibility for external business impacts in the pursuit of profit. Internalize all operational impacts whether intended or inadvertently caused. If whatever adverse outcome occurs from conducting the business to generate a financial return, make it the responsibility of those profiting from the activity to be fully accountable for the costs of doing so, with no cost to society, to nature, and to our collectively shared precious and finite environment.

I know it sounds simplistic, even unrealistically idealistic, but does the current process of industrial economic growth without regard to negative outcomes work? It’s broken and needs fixing or scrapping altogether. If I were to deliberately set fire to my neighbor’s home, would it be his fault for putting it there? If I were to pollute my neighbor’s water supply, would it be his fault for drinking the water? If I were to choose to exploit my neighbor’s son or daughter, would it be their fault for putting up with my exploitation? If I were to dump the waste that my business creates in the pursuit of the highest profit possible onto his property and ask him to clean it up, would that be a fair distribution of responsibility and financial burden? If I were to take my neighbor’s livelihood, resources, or food for my own, just because I had more money, or more power, or more political clout, does that make me right and him wrong and should he have cause to protest? Should the polluter pay? If like me you answer yes, then let’s get to it . . . .

Get the book and let’s all get started! $9.99 in e-book format

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S. Tompkins from Charlotte, NC, asks “How does the global warming pollution from cars compare to other major sources such as a coal power plant?” and is answered by Clean Vehicles Senior Engineer Jim Kliesch.

Looking at the big picture, about a third of U.S. global warming pollution comes from moving vehicles: passenger cars and trucks, big rigs, airplanes, trains, waterborne shipping, etc. Passenger cars and trucks are the biggest slice of that pie just because of the sheer number of them we have on the road.

In broad terms, the environmental impact of a vehicle is affected by three things:

* the emissions from producing the vehicle

* the emissions from operating the vehicle

* the emissions associated with the vehicle’s fuel (see below)

Typically, the production of a vehicle accounts for only about 20 percent of its overall environmental impact, so for our purposes, I’m going to focus on emissions from the vehicle and fuel.

While your question is focused on global warming pollution, it’s important to note that there are key differences between smog-forming pollutants and global warming pollutants when it comes to cars. The amount of smog forming pollution your car produces depends on a device called a catalytic converter, which is essentially a washing machine that cleans your exhaust before it exits the tailpipe. There’s no corresponding device to clean global warming emissions, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), from your car.

So the global warming pollution from passenger cars and trucks is therefore largely related to how much fuel they burn. There are direct emissions, which come from combusting fuel in the engine, that create about 19 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gasoline burned. And there are “upstream” emissions, which come from the extraction, refining, and transport of the fuel from the well head to the gas station pump, that create another 5-6 pounds of CO2 per gallon. Before you even start your car, you’re already responsible for the emissions produced by transforming that fuel from crude oil to the gas in your tank.  So, when you add up the direct emissions with the upstream emissions, a gallon of gasoline is responsible for close to 25 pounds of CO2.

With this in mind, a passenger car or truck today is typically responsible for around 7.4 tons of CO2 a year. If you compare that to a typical, existing 600 megawatt coal plant, producing 5.2 million tons of CO2 pollution a year, then, in one year, that plant is producing as much global warming pollution as around 700,000 cars. (This assumes the plant does not use carbon capture and storage technology, which has yet to be demonstrated in the form of commercial-scale, fully integrated projects at coal-fired power plants.)

But be sure to note the reference to “in one year.” Often, when people talk about something that emits a lot of pollution, they’ll say “if we manage to stop it, it would be like taking X cars off the road,” and that’s all it says. There’s a big difference between taking those cars off the road completely and taking them off the road for one year. A new vehicle is driven about 15,000 miles per year and burns the corresponding amount of fuel. On the other hand, if you take a vehicle off the road entirely, 150,000 miles of travel – or more – would be avoided.

But what’s clear from all of this is that we are producing way too much global warming pollution in both the transportation and the energy sectors. At the end of the day, it’s going to take a diversified effort—including efficiency improvements, a shift to clean energy, and development of clean fuels and advanced vehicle technologies, among others—if we are to reach the kind of global warming emissions reductions that scientists say are needed to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Jim Kliesch is an engineer with expertise in clean and efficient vehicle technologies. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Ohio University, and a master’s degree in environmental and energy policy from the University of Delaware.

Source Union of Concerned Scientists

A new study led by the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute in Australia has ranked most of the world’s countries for their environmental impact.

The research uses seven indicators of environmental degradation to form two rankings — a proportional environmental impact index, where impact is measured against total resource availability, and an absolute environmental impact index measuring total environmental degradation at a global scale.

Led by the Environment Institute’s Director of Ecological Modelling Professor Corey Bradshaw, the study has been published in the on-line, peer-reviewed science journal PLoS ONE.

The world’s 10 worst environmental performers according to the proportional environmental impact index (relative to resource availability) are: Singapore, Korea, Qatar, Kuwait, Japan, Thailand, Bahrain, Malaysia, Philippines and Netherlands.

In absolute global terms, the 10 countries with the worst environmental impact are (in order, worst first): Brazil, USA, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, India, Russia, Australia and Peru.

The indicators used were natural forest loss, habitat conversion, fisheries and other marine captures, fertiliser use, water pollution, carbon emissions from land use and species threat.

“The environmental crises currently gripping the planet are the corollary of excessive human consumption of natural resources,” said Professor Bradshaw. “There is considerable and mounting evidence that elevated degradation and loss of habitats and species are compromising ecosystems that sustain the quality of life for billions of people worldwide.”

Professor Bradshaw said these indices were robust and comprehensive and, unlike existing rankings, deliberately avoided including human health and economic data – measuring environmental impact only.

The study, in collaboration with the National University of Singapore and Princeton University, found that the total wealth of a country (measured by gross national income) was the most important driver of environmental impact.

“We correlated rankings against three socio-economic variables (human population size, gross national income and governance quality) and found that total wealth was the most important explanatory variable – the richer a country, the greater its average environmental impact,” Professor Bradshaw said.

There was no evidence to support the popular idea that environmental degradation plateaus or declines past a certain threshold of per capital wealth (known as the Kuznets curve hypothesis).

“There is a theory that as wealth increases, nations have more access to clean technology and become more environmentally aware so that the environmental impact starts to decline. This wasn’t supported,” he said.

Source Science Daily

Led by Shell Oil, the project has not been formally halted and could still begin exploratory drilling as early as this summer in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

In a letter late Thursday, the director of the United States Minerals Management Service asked the president of Shell, Marvin E. Odum, to provide more information about safety precautions for the project while the agency, part of the Interior Department, conducts an “expanded review” of permit applications “based on the Deepwater Horizon disaster.”

“We request that Shell provide detailed information with respect to additional safety procedures that the company is proposing to undertake in light of the Deepwater Horizon disaster,” wrote S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, the director of the Minerals Management Service.

Ms. Birnbaum asked Shell to provide the information by May 18.

In a separate statement, the Interior Department said a decision on the Alaska project and others would not be made until after the White House reviews a report on offshore drilling safety that the department is to file by May 28. Projects in California and Virginia have already been delayed.

A spokesman for Shell said the company would comply with the administration’s request and try to “find new barriers and contingencies we can add to our existing plan.” The spokesman, Curtis Smith, said the company still hoped to be able to drill this summer. Sue Libenson, who was executive director of the Alaska Center for the Environment during the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, and has been part of a coordinated push to stop the Shell project, expressed concerned that Shell would still be able to drill this summer.

“Suspending Arctic offshore drilling is the first real test if this administration is going to be serious about taking a step back and learning something,” Ms. Libenson wrote in an e-mail message.

Since the gulf spill, dozens of environmental groups and several native Alaskan groups that have opposed the project for years have stepped up their efforts, writing to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and arguing against the project in federal appeals court this week in a long-scheduled hearing. The prospect of a disastrous spill in the forbidding Arctic has been at the core of their argument.

The sites in the Beaufort and Chukchi would be dozens of miles offshore in seas that experience some of roughest storms and waves in North America. Groups opposed to the project have cited the region’s constant winter darkness, ice and sheer remoteness. Native villages on the coast also worry about effects on the whale populations they hunt.

Shell fought back this week, saying that the opponents were deliberately misrepresenting the risks of the project to exploit public outrage over the gulf spill.

“Clearly no one wants to see oil in an ice environment,” Pete Slaiby, vice president for Shell Alaska, said in an interview before the government raised new questions about the project. “But to suggest that it’s an unworkable situation or game over is just not correct.”

Shell has planned to begin exploratory drilling this summer using a ship-based drill that could begin making its way from the Philippines this month. It would be the first exploratory drilling in the area in many years. Actual oil production might not begin for another decade.

Shell and supporters of the project say it will have strict safeguards and pose fewer challenges than deep-water drilling in the gulf. Mr. Slaiby said that the sea floor was less than 150 feet deep in most of the Alaska projects, compared with 5,000 for the Deepwater Horizon, and that the shallower wells would be under less pressure.

Mr. Slaiby said a 300-foot response ship outfitted with spill-fighting tools, including booms, skimmers and dispersants, would be stationed within a one-hour trip of the drill rig. Smaller boats would also be on constant call.

The Minerals Management Service has said that nearly 27 billion barrels of oil could be produced off the Alaska coast, potentially one of the largest remaining sources of oil in the nation. Mr. Slaiby said Shell would not rush to develop the site.

“We are patient capitalists,” he said. “This is a company that’s willing to take bets on energy. We like what we see out there.”

Source New York Times

At best 20% of the oil spill may be recoverable. Though we don’t yet know the full extent of the disaster, one thing is for sure: regulatory failures paved the way.

When it comes to British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, questions about the extent of the damage — and how to quell it — are spreading as quickly as the oil slick

No one is quite sure just how many gallons of crude oil have been flowing freely into the Gulf since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers and allowing for an entirely indefinite amount of oil to gush from a damaged well as well as from the rig itself. (Is it any wonder that Halliburton was involved?)

BP has publicly admitted that 5,000 barrels are likely being injected into ocean waters each day — but at a closed-doors congressional hearing on Tuesday, executives admitted that as many as 60,000 barrels may be contaminating the Gulf daily. If the last big spill — Exxon Valdez in 1989 — is any indication, experts say the best clean-up scenario is to recover 20 percent of the spilled oil. (Only 8 percent of the crude oil deposited in the ocean and coastlines off Alaska were recovered in the 1989 spill clean-up.)

On Wednesday afternoon, BP touted its having capped one of the three leaks in the pipe from the mangled oil well as a great success. But a Coast Guard spokesman told the Washington Post that having stopped that leak would not reduce the rate of oil spillage, it would merely make the oil come out stronger from the other two.

BP is also hyping up three giant steel containment domes that will be used to collect oil streaming into the Gulf and transfer it to a waiting tanker. But the domes look rather flimsy in the face of what may very well end up being the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. And then there’s the question of whether the domes could make things worse — some experts fear that they may further damage the underwater oil pipes.

Tyson Slocum, the energy program director at Public Citizen, is worried about the chemicals being used to try and remedy the damage. “We’re injecting a whole suite of chemical mixtures in an effort to neutralize the oil spill,” he says. “This has the potential to make an ecological disaster worse.”

Environmentally speaking, the worst effects of the BP spill have yet to be felt. Most of the known damage wreaked by Exxon Valdez came when the spill contaminated 1,300 miles of shoreline. But the extent of the damage it caused to marine life is not totally known, even 20 years out. Indeed, each day will give us a clearer picture of what short-term ecological destruction Deepwater Horizon has wrought — on- and off-shore — but environmental experts believe the damage made to the Gulf of Mexico will be very long-term.

On the economic side of things, estimated damages are slightly easier to tally. According to the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, approximately $1.6 billion in annual economic activity and services are at risk. Compare this number to the current cap on BP’s liability for economic damages like lost wages and tourist dollars, which is $75 million. And compare that further to the first-quarter profit BP posted just one week after the explosion: $6 billion.

BP: Unregulated billionaire perpetrator

BP has a long record of oil-related disasters in the United States. In 2005, BP’s Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 workers and injuring another 170. The next year, one of its Alaska pipelines leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil. According to Slocum of Public Citizen, BP has paid $550 million in fines. BP seems to particularly enjoy violating the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and has paid the two largest fines in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s history.

Fines are the primary mechanism for punishing corporations found of violating laws in our country, Slocum says. “The problem is that that the amount of the fine is generally miniscule when compared to the profitability [of breaking the law].” In other words: “A felony becomes a cost of doing business.”

Undeterred by fines that pale in comparison to its ghastly profits, BP has also learned to avoid stringent regulation of its business practices.

A recent Center for Responsive Politics study shows that BP is one of the top donors to political campaigns over the last two decades — having shelled out $6 million to fund congressional and presidential campaigns. Naturally, a good amount of their targeted lobbying has been directed at the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, the very legislative group slated to begin hearings on Deepwater Horizon this week.

That same study also shows that President Obama is actually the biggest recipient of BP money. (Interestingly, Obama is also the largest recipient of dollars from Goldman Sachs, another under-regulated behemoth.)

Though Obama may have been specially targeted, BP has made sure to spread its money all over Capitol Hill, donating just as much money to Democrats as to Republicans in the 2008 election cycle. Through what is essentially legalized bribery, they have a lot of influence, which explains a lot of the reports of special passes on regulation that have begun to surface since Deepwater Horizon exploded.

The most striking one involves the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service giving Deepwater Horizon a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act, almost exactly a year before it exploded.

This doesn’t mean no one was watching, though. This January, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Bart Stupak (D-MI) wrote a letter to BP that raised concerns that the company’s efforts to cut costs could imperil the safety of BP operations. As Abrahm Lustgarten notes at ProPublica, this indicates that policy-makers were concerned about the safety of BP’s facilities as recently as January, just a few months before the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico left 11 people dead.

Trying to reverse governmental failure

While BP has certainly spent a lot of money so as to exert influence on decision-makers in Washington, it’s clear the regulatory system had a few holes of its own.

Ten years ago, there were already warnings that the backup systems on oil rigs that failed on Deepwater Horizon would be a problem. The Interior Department issued a “safety alert” but then left it up to oil companies to decide what kind of backup system to use. And in 2007, a government regulator from the same department downplayed the chances and impact of a spill like the one that occurred last month: “[B]lowouts are rare events and of short duration, potential impact to marine water quality are not expected to be significant.”

The White House is trying hard to fend off accusations of inefficacy and comparisons to the last disaster in the Gulf — Hurricane Katrina. On Wednesday, the administration released a 7,000-word document detailing the government’s response to the BP oil spill, and Obama has publicly stated that all the clean-up costs would be covered by BP, which is estimated to be spending $6 million a day on those efforts.

But there’s still the issue of the $75 million cap on BP’s liability for economic damages. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) has introduced a bill that would raise the liability limit to $10 billion, and he wants to make it retroactive so that it will apply to the April 20 spill. The measure has the White House’s support.

And then there’s the pressing question of how to prevent this from happening again. There seem to be two good options.

One is to ban off-shore drilling, an environmentally invasive and hazardous practice long despised by environmental activists. Earlier this year, Obama reversed his campaign position on off-shore drilling and called for expanding such drilling far beyond the levels of even George W. Bush. (Take a look at these terrifying maps that show what the Gulf oil spill would look like in parts of the country Obama opened to off-shore drilling.)

But this week Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary, said it was “premature” to change positions on off-shore drilling. (Ominously, the same Interior Department that failed so completely on regulating Deepwater Horizon will be preparing a report on this question, Gibbs said.)

The other option is to hit corporations like BP where it hurts, because fines obviously haven’t made much of a difference.

“Habitual violators like BP must be hit with something that really gets at the value of the company,” says Slocum. “We should revoke BP’s existing leases or even revoke its corporate charter and kick it out of the United States. We do that for people — our laws for individuals are much more strict than those for corporations. They’ve been found guilty of crimes that have resulted in death.”

And if the Supreme Court’s shameful Citizens United ruling established corporate personhood, then it follows that we ought to start punishing corporations like people, too.

BP is ignoring the most effective and safest means of locking up the oil in zones around the fragile coastal zones of the Gulf Coast. Here’s a quick demonstration of how MOP (Maximum Oil Pickup) sorbent works and can be deployed using the MOP Cannon. It can be introduced above the surface or blown in from below the surface to grab the oil as it rises to the surface. It is 100% recycled material and 100% biodegradable and safe for the environment, animals and people. Tell BP to USE MOP. Pass this on please. Help us spread the word, this will help and it works.

BP has known about the effectiveness of the MOP Product for more than a decade but repeatedly has refused to acknowledge a letter written by their own employee.

Which states –

BP Oil Company
1150 South Metcalf St.
Lima, Ohio 45804-1199

October 25, 1994
To Whom It May Concern:
SUBJECT: MOP Absorbent Product
During four separate occasions we have had the opportunity to observe the MOP absorbent product’s performance. Three were hard surface spills of various hydrocarbon products (i.e. 30w oil, transmission fluid, heavy naphtha, diesel oil, and other blended heavy sop oils). On each occasion the absorbents picked up all of the products leaving no apparent residue. We mixed water at some sights and the hydrophobic properties allowed the absorbent to hold the products while allowing the water to run free and clean of oil.
The other test was with booms and pillows in shore line fresh water. The booms and pillows performed above the standards established by other booms (i.e.polypropylene). The booms had excellent penetrations and adequately contained the product spill. The material is light weight and more economical than the competitive brands we have used.
We are extremely pleased with its performance and cost, and would recommend serious consideration of this product before using an alternative.

Sincerely,
Randal S. Fletcher
Safety Specialist