By James E. Hansen, September 2, 2011
Tar Sands Action organized a civil disobedience sit–in at The White House to oppose construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline that began on August 20 and will culminate in a big rally on September 3rd. On August 29 I joined 60 religious leaders and other fellow protestors. I was arrested that day. But before I was handcuffed, I addressed fellow activists who had gathered outside The White House with these words:
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By Subhankar Banerjee, August 15, 2011
One of the riskiest and most destructive extreme energy oil exploration projects on the planet is moving toward implementation without scientific understanding or technical preparedness — Shell’s oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean of Alaska.
News Update: An August 28 press release from PEER states, “A top federal Arctic scientist (Dr. Charles Monnett) is returning to work today after six weeks on administrative leave without any charges being leveled against him, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Meanwhile, the agency which suspended the scientist is itself under investigation for mishandling the matter. ... The leave was ordered by BOEM Director Michael Bromwich who reversed himself after the agency was informed that its top officials, including Bromwich, are now under investigation by Interior’s Scientific Integrity Officer for breaking new departmental scientific integrity rules designed to protect researchers from political interference as alleged in a PEER complaint filed on Dr. Monnett’s behalf.”
By Ananda Banerjee, July 28, 2011
Disappearing Sanctuaries: A pair of Sarus cranes at Bil Akbarpur. Photograph by Pradeep Gaur / MINT
The disappearance of commons and wetlands affects immediately the number of bird species recorded in a region. Delhi boasts a checklist of 500 species of birds, the second highest in the world in a city (after Nairobi), but in recent years, even during peak birding season, birders record a maximum of 271 species—the number was recorded during a bird count in March 2005—a whopping nearly 50% decline.
By Mariel Nanasi, July 25, 2011
PNM’s San Juan Generating Station. Photograph by Erika Blumenfeld
It’s time we secure a future without coal in New Mexico, across America, and around the world. It won’t be easy. Along the way, we will need a lot of help, creativity and inspiration.
News Update: In a July 28 front–page article “Enviros win voice in carbon battle,” in the Santa Fe New Mexican, the Associated Press writer Susan Montoya Bryan reports, “The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday (July 27) cleared the way for environmental groups to intervene in an ongoing legal battle over whether the state should regulate greenhouse–gas emissions.” You can read the full article here.
By Subhankar Banerjee, July 18, 2011
Bob told us, “The youthful Pajarito Fault System (PFS) is not a stable fault system that has been studied and the power is understood. The PFS is capable of great damage to LANL facilities at this time. LANL reports describe the PFS as growing and gaining linkages within and among different segments, and as that occurs, the size and power increases. The great power of the PFS for destructive earthquakes is not known and requires detailed field investigations.” Is anyone going to listen to Bob Gilkeson?
By Subhankar Banerjee, July 1, 2011
The Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico is still burning. It is rapidly growing by the day. On June 29, I did a phone interview with Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and his colleague Scott Kovac; and sit down conversation with Marian Naranjo, a prominent native American elder and activist from the Santa Clara Pueblo and Joni Arends, executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. As you’ll see, the Las Conchas Fire has woken us up. It is time we learn from this deadly fire and stop a proposed plutonium bomb factory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). I’ll tell you how your voice is crucial in this matter, but first here is an update on the fire that is also burning Santa Clara Pueblo lands.
Update (July 3): The Department of Energy will accept public comment by email for the proposed CMRR–Nuclear Facility project till close of business Tuesday July 5. You’ll find a sample public comment letter including where the letter needs to be emailed HERE. This letter was prepared by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety and is presented here by ClimateStoryTellers.org as a public service. Please update the sample letter as you see appropriate and email your comment to oppose building of this plutonium bomb factory.
By Subhankar Banerjee, June 16, 2011
Whatever happens with the sentencing on June 23rd, one thing has become clear to me is that Tim DeChristopher’s journey did not start with a single heroic act of disrupting an oil lease sale during the George W. Bush administration, nor will it end inside Barack Obama’s prison cell. Let us stay engaged.
By Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Aric McBay, May 5, 2011
A black tern weighs barely two ounces. On bodily reserves less than a bag of M&Ms and wings that stretch to cover twelve inches, she’ll fly thousands of miles, searching for the wetlands that will harbor her young. And every year the journey gets longer as the wetlands are desiccated for human demands. Every year the tern, desperate and hungry, loses, while civilization, endless and sanguineous, wins.
A polar bear should weigh 650 pounds. Her biological reserves may have to see her through nine long months of dark, denned gestation, and then lactation, giving up her dwindling stores to the needy mouths of her species’ future. In some areas, the female’s weight has dropped from 650 to 507 pounds.1 Meanwhile, the ice has evaporated like the wetlands. When she wakes, the waters will stretch impassably opened, and there is no Abrahamic god of bears to part them for her.
Presented by IfYouLoveThisPlanet.org, April 11, 2011
Dr. Caldicott provides an update on the perilous situation at Fukushima, Japan, where four reactors are compromised in an accident that will likely surpass the effects of Chernobyl. Next, Dr. Caldicott welcomes Subhankar Banerjee. In this interview with Dr. Caldicott, Banerjee discusses the effects of global warming on the Arctic region, his efforts to protect wildlife in the region, his photography, the corporate greed for oil, gas and coal that threatens the largest wildlife habitat in the world, and how to fight the economic and political forces ravaging the planet. In his writing, among many other topics, Banerjee has discussed the Arctic permafrost and the potential displacement of Alaskan communities due to the effects of global warming.
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By Subhankar Banerjee, March 7, 2011
India must unconditionally release Binayak Sen immediately and put an end to the great suffering that he and his wife have already endured since May 2007. Binayak Sen deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, not lifetime imprisonment as an enemy of India.
News Update: On April 15, 2011 the Supreme Court of India granted bail to Dr. Binayak Sen and dropped charges of sedition against him.
By Dr. Vandana Shiva, February 23, 2011
Industrial globalised agriculture is heavily implicated in climate change. It contributes to the three major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (CO2) from the use of fossil fuels, nitrogen oxide (N2O) from the use of chemical fertilizers and methane (CH4) from factory farming. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased from a pre–industrial concentration of about 280 parts per million to 379 parts per million in 2005. The global atmospheric concentration of CH4 has increased from pre–industrial concentration of 715 parts per billion to 1774 parts per billion in 2005. The global atmospheric concentration of N2O, largely due to use of chemical fertilizers in agriculture, increased from about 270 parts per billion to 319 parts per billion in 2005.
Industrial agriculture is also more vulnerable to climate change which is intensifying droughts and floods. Monocultures lead to more frequent crop failure when rainfall does not come in time, or is too much or too little. Chemically fertilized soils have no capacity to withstand a drought. And cyclones and hurricanes make a food system dependent on long distance transport highly vulnerable to disruption.
By Christine Shearer, December 1, 2010
In 2008, a small Inupiat village in Alaska sued ExxonMobil and 23 other fossil fuel companies including Peabody Energy and BP for contributing to the destruction of their homeland, and charged a smaller subset with deliberately creating a false debate around climate change science. You might have heard of the lawsuit—Kivalina v. ExxonMobil et al.
By Subhankar Banerjee, November 29, 2010
Is this the time to tinker with trading carbons by taking away the forests from the indigenous inhabitants and then selling the credits to the polluters—or is it possible to develop a common global vision of moving away from fossil fuel altogether and working with forest dwellers on sustainable solutions? It is a moral question that we must answer. And that I’d call trust–and–partnership.
By Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, November 23, 2010
This week families across the country will be celebrating Thanksgiving—sharing food and telling stories. Here is my story about our food and culture that would be destroyed if Shell Oil gets the permit to drill for oil in our homeland—the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
By Subhankar Banerjee, November 15, 2010
PROTECT: CARIBOU AND SALMON, Gwich'in Human Aerial-Art, Fort Yukon, Alaska, 2010. Courtesy Gwich'in Steering Committee
Soon I’ll will tell you about five Godzilla–scale fossil–digging projects in North America that if approved will set us on a course to repeat our past with grave implications for the future of our planet. You may have already heard about some of these projects individually, but the urgency to stop them collectively is more than ever before.
By Dr. Terry Gosliner, October 16, 2010
For almost three decades I’ve been studying nudibranchs in the tropical Indian and Pacific Oceans. Nudibranchs are beautiful and brightly colored sea slugs that thrive on healthy coral reefs. While that has been exhilarating, it is the changes that I’ve seen on these reefs that make me sit upright in bed in the middle of the night. Climate change is seriously endangering these richest reservoirs of marine biodiversity. Here is my story of some of these alarming changes.
By Subhankar Banerjee, October 4, 2010
I recently urged young people to start a climate revolution in a post titled “Letter to Young Americans.” Here are some of the comments that were posted in the blogosphere1 | 2 in response to that post: “Your letter will be thrown into the marginalized bin and be lost forever. You’re asking for honesty and sincerity in the land of hypocrisy;” and “American college kids (and others their age) have other things on their minds –– like sports, drinking, i–pods, text–messaging, video games, TV, etc;” and “I’m a college freshman, and I, along with most other Americans, disagree with almost every tired idea you bring up in this article;” and “I’m not a ‘young American’, and, I don’t even go to college. But, I’ll go ahead and sink this stinky diatribe to the bottom of the briny depths.”
Not an auspicious beginning for a revolution, wouldn’t you say?
But the post also resulted in several emails in my inbox. Here are three stories from those emails about young people with a different perspective –– a teen rock band called One Eyed Rhyno from Sacramento, California; climate students from the North Cascades Institute in Sedrow–Woolley, Washington; and a bicyclist from the Yukon province in Canada.
By Subhankar Banerjee, August 26, 2010
Imagine you live in New York City, and one fine morning you awake to the realization that 90 percent of all the buildings that were more than five stories tall have been destroyed. You will hardly have the words to talk about this devastation, but I’m sure you will walk around the rubble to make sense of it all.
Something similar has happened in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I currently live. Between 2001 and 2005, aerial surveys were conducted over 6.4 million acres of the state. Some 816,000 affected acres were mapped and it was found that during this short period Ips confusus, a tiny bark beetle, had killed 54.5 million of New Mexico’s state tree, the piñon. In many areas of northern New Mexico, including Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Española, and Taos, 90 percent of mature piñons are now dead.