Hopes rise for global warming deal after US-China carbon commitments inject much-needed momentum into Peru talks. Delegates attend the opening ceremony of the Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru. Martin Mejia/AP UN climate negotiations opening in Lima on Monday have the best chance in a generation of striking a deal on global warming, diplomats say. After a 20-year standoff, diplomats and longtime observers of the talks say there is rising optimism that negotiators will be able to secure a deal that will commit all countries to take action against climate change. The two weeks of talks in Peru are intended to deliver a draft text to be adopted in Paris next year that will commit countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions without compromising the economic development of poor countries. Diplomats and observers of the UN climate negotiations said recent actions by the US and China had injected much-needed momentum. Read the rest at the Guardian. Link – Lima Climate Change Talks Best Chance for a Generation, Say Upbeat Diplomats
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Lima Climate Change Talks Best Chance for a Generation, Say Upbeat Diplomats
This fall, Kashmir saw its worst floods in more than half a century. My family and I barely survived them. A Kashmiri Muslim man carries an electric transformer through floodwaters. Dar Yasin/AP When Kashmir’s uprising was at its peak in the late 1990s, I used to walk along the banks of the Jhelum River after school. Amid the fighting between India, which controls the part of Kashmir where I grew up, and armed groups battling for independence or union with Pakistan, the river was calm in a way that the rest of the region wasn’t. I moved away from my home in Srinagar, the summer capital of India-administered Kashmir, six years ago, but every time I come back, I try to walk on the bridge over the river, to watch the water flow with the same serenity that it had when I was a child. The same river submerged my family’s house this fall in Kashmir’s worst flooding in more than half a century, which ultimately killed more than 400 people on both the Indian and Pakistani sides of the region’s disputed border. But that river wasn’t the Jhelum of my childhood. It wasn’t the Jhelum I loved. When the river started to breach banks and burst levees on September 6, I was at my parents’ house in Srinagar, visiting my sister, who had just given birth to a daughter. By then, it had been raining for days. But that evening was almost completely ordinary. We heard the occasional sounds of cars rushing past. Loudspeakers in the nearby mosque broadcast periodic announcements that residents should move to higher floors of their houses in case of flooding, as well as requests for young men to help reinforce the river’s embankment with sandbags. Read the rest at The Atlantic. This article: “So Little Time Between Hope and Death”
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Planes, bikes, and pedestrians
By Sam Blisson 1 Dec 2014commentsShare
Have you ever tried to get to the airport without a motor vehicle? In most cities, it’s nearly impossible. Unsurprisingly, however, bike-besotted Portland is leading the way toward empowering travelers and terminal workers to cycle or saunter to the airport, rather than driving.
Michael Anderson of Bike Portland quips that “Portland International Airport’s new bike-pedestrian plan is probably thicker than the average city’s.” It’s 50 pages. He dishes the deets on the new Bicycle & Pedestrian Master Plan in a recent blog post:
Fifteen years after a rising bike-commute rate among airport workers led PDX to begin a strategic focus on its biking and walking connections, links to the airport keep getting better. Now, the airport is preparing to double outdoor bike parking, and, in the longer term, help the City of Portland pay for a multi-use path looping the entire airport plus three bike lanes that’ll greatly improve airport access from the city.
Portland International scored best in a 2013 survey of bicycle access at eight U.S. airports, in large part because the seven others didn’t have detailed plans. Most airports don’t invest much in people-powered transportation options because parking, ground transportation, and rental cars together make up over a quarter of their total revenue.
But lest Portlanders think that they can get off the hook for all that jet fuel they’ll burn on their next flight to New York, consider this: A round-trip ticket between Stump Town and the Big Apple puts a traveler on the hook for just over a metric ton of CO2 emissions, or 2,310 pounds of climate-cooking carbon dioxide. I got that number by averaging the results from online carbon calculators provided by Carbon Footprint Ltd, TerraPass, and ClimateCare, three companies that sell climate-conscious flyers (dubious) carbon offsets to assuage their green guilt.
To offset that by biking to your flight departure and back home instead of driving alone in your 2010 Ford Fusion, you’d better live over 1,000 miles from the airport, according to those same three emissions-counting tools.
Of course, there are other ways to make up for traveling’s carbon footprint. Just ask Grist’s Greenie Pig, who vowed to even out the impact of her trip to a friend’s wedding by going on a strict carbon diet, which proved much more difficult than foregoing flying in the first place.
All this is to say: Good on you Bikelandia for giving kombucha-powered pedalers some paths and bike parking. Now folks who work at the airport can bike to the office!
But for plane passengers who cycle to the airport for environmental reasons, remember that you’re about to partake in what is probably the most climate-damaging activity possible that doesn’t involve breaking the law.
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Don’t Be Fooled – Your Computer Really Isn’t Sleeping. 7 Ways to Green Your Computer Usage
14 Nov 2014 5:27 PM
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The Dark Lord of Coal Country could (finally) spend time behind bars
Where do we even start with Don Blankenship? The former CEO of Massey Energy — a coal mining company in the business of irreversibly disfiguring mountains — has been neglecting workers, environmental regulations, and countless West Virginians for decades; Forbes questioned whether he had any friends left way back in 2003. As Grist Staff Writer David Roberts has been insisting for years (since before it was hip to do so), Don Blankenship is an evil bastard.
On Thursday, a federal grand jury took a big step toward bringing Blankenship to something resembling justice: NPR reports that the coal magnate has been indicted for breaking just about every safety, transparency, and environmental rule he could at the Upper Big Branch mine. The damning indictment, which stems from a 2010 explosion that killed 29 of the mine’s 31 employees, includes four charges:
knowingly and purposefully committing thousands of violations of federal mine safety standards;
instructing underlings to obstruct regulators from monitoring the mine;
blatantly bullshitting the federal government about Massey’s safety practices (or lack thereof); and
lying and omitting important details about the company to investors and financial regulators.
Former Massey execs have been pleading guilty to similar conspiracy charges, one after another, in the years since the Upper Big Branch massacre. David Hughart, who was president of the company‘s Green Valley Resource Group, is currently locked up, while ex-superintendent of Upper Big Branch Gary May just finished his prison sentence a few months ago. But Blankenship remains a free man, thanks to a history of favorable judgments from courts polluted by his campaign contributions.
If convicted on all four counts, Blankenship could face as many as three decades behind bars. I’d prefer if he were sentenced to working alone underground at one of his toxic, unsound mines until his lungs turn black. In the meantime, we can all get a little bitter satisfaction out of watching Chris Hayes of MSNBC thoroughly destroy the Dark Lord of Coal Country:
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The Dark Lord of Coal Country could (finally) spend time behind bars
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