This project would have powered over a million homes and made a huge dent in New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions. It is not happening now because of a group of NIMBY activists and the Environment Court’s ruling.

This is a huge blow, in itself, to renewable and wind energy proponents, but it also brings concerns for future wind energy projects.

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Where is the mainstream media when you need them? Probably off chasing another Micheal Jackson’s baby’s daddy. But they could do a lot more use into investigating the court case of Paice LLC vs. Toyota. In the lawsuit filed by Paice against Toyota, Paice claims that several of Toyota’s popular hybrid models infringe on patents held by Paice. Having won a similar case back in 2005, Paice is now seeking an exclusion that would keep Toyota hybrid imports from entering the U.S.

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Power plants play a huge role in emitting pollutants that make up the ozone. This pollution browns and blackens our horizons. We call it smog. Smog has been linked to premature deaths, thousands of emergency room visits, and tens of thousands of asthma attacks each year. Pollution in the ozone is particularly dangerous to small children and the elderly, who are often warned to stay indoors on days with poor air quality due to pollutants.

Not only are the pollutants spewed out by power plants bad for our health, but they contain greenhouse gases that have been linked with climate change; thus they are killing the world as we know it as well.

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Fishing nets often inadvertantly become entangled around whales, and while that is a crime under the Endangered Species Act, hardly anyone ever faces charges. But one unlucky fisherman has been caught in the act.

Robert J. Eldridge Jr. faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine if convicted of three felony charges.

The district attorney says he “did knowingly and unlawfully take a marine mammal, to wit, a humpback whale in waters under the jurisdiction of the United States by acts of pursuit, torment, and annoyance which had the potential to injure said marine mammal in the wild.”

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The jury of nine men and three women at Maidstone crown court cleared the six by a majority verdict. Five of the protesters had scaled a 200-metre chimney at Kingsnorth power station, Hoo, Kent, in October last year.

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While I’ve noticed this phenomenon quite a few times before, yesterday’s sentencing of three Earth First! activists in Maine reminded me of the amazing backwards-notion that forcing activists into community service somehow amounts to a punishment.

Activists who engage in civil disobedience aren’t hoodlums running around the streets or menaces to society — these are people who risk arrest and jail time to make a difference in their communities. A judge need-not assign community service because it’s almost guaranteed that these people already do more than most.

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In a ruling that could impact thousands of similar cases, a Florida jury has ordered Philip Morris, the largest tobacco company in the US, to pay the family of a lung cancer victim $8 million in damages.

Elaine Hess presented evidence to the jury showing that her husband Stuart had smoked three packs of cigarettes every day before dying of lung cancer at only 55. Philip Morris’ attorney argued that Hess had the free will to quit at any time, but the jury didn’t buy it.

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During the eight environmentally dismal years of the Bush administration, environmental advocates learned how to effectively use the U.S. court system to aid their cause.  We saw this with a number of lawsuits including the Supreme Court’s ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Now Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and 4 cities, including my very own hometown of Santa Monica, California, have settled a suit of almost 7 years (Friends of the Earth, Inc., et al. v. Spinelli, et al.) that will force two U.S. government run financing agencies, Export-Import Bank of the United States and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, to take into account the effects of their overseas projects on climate change.

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A man who stabbed an Emu to death ‘because he wanted to eat it for Christmas lunch’ has been fined almost A$4,000 (US$2,500) for animal cruelty.

An Australian court heard that, two days before Christmas, Patrick James Andrews, 23, crept into the Emu enclosure at Alexandra zoo in south-east Queensland, where he repeatedly stabbed a 30-year-old Emu named Mary, before cutting its legs off. Zoo staff later found the animal dead in its enclosure.

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The US Environmental Protection Agency has imposed a record fine on a toxic ship dealer for attempting to export a ship containing deadly polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to the infamous shipbreaking beaches of South Asia.

Toxic Trade pressure group Basel Action Network claimed victory after Global Shipping LLC and Global Marketing Systems, Inc. were ordered to pay $518,500 for the alleged illegal distribution and export of a ship containing PCBs in violation of the Toxic Substances Control Act.

Commenting on the judgement, Jim Puckett, Executive Director of Basel Action Network said, “”While half a million dollars is not much of a financial deterrent for such actors when a single ship can be worth well over $5 million in scrap steel, they are now on notice - another such export would be a “knowing and willful” criminal violation, and they could find themselves behind bars.”

The action was brought after Basel Action Network and the Save the Classic Liners Campaign informed the EPA when they discovered that Global Marketing Systems, Inc. had bought the SS Oceanic, a cruise ship formerly known as the SS Independence.

The company towed the toxic ship out of San Francisco Bay intending to scrap the vessel on the beaches of India and Bangladesh in South Asia.

“While the Oceanic wasn’t recalled to the U.S., we’re very happy that EPA took their job seriously and that one of the world’s leading exporters and exploiters of the infamous shipbreaking beaches of South Asia has finally been held to account,” said Puckett.

Around 700 toxic ships are exported to the once pristine beaches of Asia for scrapping. The coastline is now strewn with a cocktail of polluting material including, machinery parts, oil rags and leaking barrels. The local air is poisoned by open fires, the land and surrounding water are contaminated by asbestos, heavy metals, dioxins and other persistent organic pollutants and the workers are unprotected from toxic substances, explosions and falling steel.

Image Credit - misserion via flickr on a Creative Commons license

A federal jury ruled yesterday that Chevron had done nothing wrong a decade ago when it called the Nigerian military to control protesters who had taken control of an oil platform, demanding better treatment and jobs.

In the end, the military killed two protesters. Accounts of the incident vary drastically: Chevron says the protesters were violent, armed, and had taken workers hostage, while the protesters and their lawyers claim they had been entirely peaceful and engaged in civil disobedience.

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In a landmark case, the US Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the US Navy can carry out sonar training exercises off the southern California coast, without safeguards designed to protect whales, dolphins and other marine mammals.

The decision is a major setback for environmentalists, who had hoped the Court would uphold an earlier injunction by a federal judge requiring the navy to take precautions while undertaking submarine-hunting exercises. Environmental groups originally launched the lawsuit claiming that the use of sonar can injure or even kill a wide range of marine species, including sea-lions and endangered blue whales.

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Now comes North Dakota State University, with a current student body of around 12,000, filing an amicus brief in support of the two farmers. And NDSU has its own bone to pick with the DEA: an almost unbelievable snub of the small school.

In 1999, according to a news release from Vote Hemp, the university applied for permission to grow non-drug industrial hemp to create varieties best suited for the North Dakota climate and soil conditions. The DEA, according to the release, has chosen to ignore completely the 8 year old request. How’s that for big brother arrogance?

The DEA still holds that industrial hemp, almost completely bereft of the hallucinogenic compound that produces a "high," can be used as a drug. I read somewhere that smoking industrial hemp would produce nothing more than a bad headache.

According to the news release,

Gold can hypothetically and has in some instances been extracted from seawater, but the minimal concentration makes it technically and economically inefficient and commercially non-viable to do so. There are trace opiates in poppy seeds consumed on bagels, that could also be hypothetically be concentrated; but just as with industrial hemp is not a practical source of drugs for the illicit market

So what’s the big deal, DEA?

The farmers’ case will be heard in federal court on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, in Bismark, North Dakota. A press conference will follow, and I’ll have an article and hopefully an interview that same day.

In any case, let’s hear it loud and clear for the "Davids" of this world who aren’t afraid to stand up and cry "foul." It’s time someone put the DEA’s feet to the fire. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California could have set up the same scenario by signing a bill that passed through the state legislature, asking for approval to grow industrial hemp in four California counties. Arnold obviously didn’t have the stomach for a possible showdown with the DEA, and vetoed the publicly supported legislation. Strange, too, because Schwarzenegger has been a big proponent of environmentalism, but, on the other hand had the temerity to tell a columnist that "marijuana is not a drug, it’s a leaf."