More oil trains expected in Wash. under proposals

October 28, 2013

SEATTLE (AP) — Hundreds of trains carrying crude oil could soon be chugging across the Northwest, bringing potential jobs and revenues but raising concerns about oil spills, increased train and vessel traffic and other issues.

With five refineries, Washington has long received crude oil from Alaska and elsewhere by ship, barges or pipelines. But ports and refiners are increasingly turning to trains to take advantage of a boom in oil from North Dakota's Bakken region.

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Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is

(Rolling Stone) If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

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EPA Awards $400,000 to Communities to Reduce Water Pollution, Build Resilience to Climate Change

October 28, 2013

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced $400,000 to help six communities expand their use of green infrastructure to reduce water pollution and boost resilience to the impacts of climate change. The funding is in support of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, which directs federal agencies to identify climate-resilient investments such as agency grants and technical assistance for communities across the country.

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Hantz gets approval to start urban woodlands project in Detroit

October 21, 2013

Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr has approved the sale of some 1,500 blighted parcels of land in the city to the Hantz Woodlands urban agriculture project.

The final approval will allow Hantz to begin razing blighted structures on the east-side parcels and to begin planting hardwood trees for eventual harvesting. The effort has been called the largest urban farming and reforestation project in the U.S.

The Michigan Department of Human Services and Hantz Farms celebrated the approval Friday by demolishing a blighted structure at 3050 Belvidere St. on Detroit’s east side.

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