Men - take note - not only are these gorgeous pieces, but they are also guilt-free: as in, the designers source conflict-free stones and recycled gold material when possible. Not to mention the company supports local communities in Africa that are usually affected by poor mining conditions and where most conflict diamonds are a source of funds for civil war. Not exactly the image that you want to conjure when you are admiring your custom designed ring glistening on your finger.

For a lot of years, I’ve respected and admired Arizona Senator John McCain, and even though he is a Republican, he seemed to be more moderate than his right-wing compatriots.

That changed today when I read that he has proposed construction of 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030.  Adding insult to injury, he told a Missouri State University audience that he’d pledge $2 billion a year in federal funds to make clean coal a reality.  All in the name of reducing dependence on foreign oil and fostering a cleaner environment.

Here we go again with the nuclear crap

He tells the worn out tale of reactors being clean and non-polluting.

Interestingly, and certainly not surprisingly, he didn’t mention anything about cleaning up the messes left by earlier uranium mining.  Nor did he propose on how to get rid of, store, neutralize or make safe, the huge stockpile of nuclear waste piling up every day.  And let’s not forget the environmental damage to be done by mining more uranium to feed those reactors.  He gave that subject the same brush-off every nuclear energy proponent does, with the statement that more needs to be done to safely transport and store spent materials.

Don’t let anyone try to tell you the in-situ leaching process is environmentally clean.  Being an underground process, it has, under certain conditions, the ability to contaminate ground water.

45 more reactors and “clean coal”, what a wonderful promise for our future.

Image:  www.scoop.co.nz

Source:

For all the minorities in this country who have raised pluperfect hell about their past or current situations, the American Indian has been the quietist, and I wonder why.

Before you write me nasty emails, I’m not minimizing the concerns of minorities in this country: they have their issues and the right to use their voices, and that’s good.

But think for a moment about the original settlers of this land, the American Indian.

They did just fine for centuries, sustaining their cultures with the fruits of the land, picking fights and having wars, just like we all do.

Then, came the white man (no emails please, because that’s what happened), who invaded the natives’ birthright, confiscated their tribal lands, transferred them to reservations and literally forgot about them. Many of those Native Americans to this very day are without electricity and running water, in some cases, living in dirt poor conditions, and they languish without raising their voices.

How incredibly sad.

To add insult to this incomprehensible indignity, mining companies in search of uranium invaded their tribal homes, gouged out huge amounts of topsoil, taking what uranium they could profitably retrieve and leaving open sores bleeding toxic radiation into the soil, air and water.

Their legacy? Still-born babies, children with birth defects, cancer for hundreds, maybe even thousands, livestock mutations and God only knows what else. Maybe to the nuclear industry and our federal government, these people are considered “collateral damage.”

The government that put these noble people onto these lands, quickly approved the mining claims and encouraged uranium miners to take what they can, and in many cases paid only lip service to the clean-up process.

Now, with the price of uranium soaring, those uranium people are at it again, boring test holes on federal lands, in our “protected” forests, and on Indian nation lands.

For the first time in the history of this country, the Navajo communities of Crownpoint and Church Rock, New Mexico are saying NO to the feds and uranium miners.

In an unprecedented move, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will be challenged in Federal appeals court for its approval of a source materials license for an in situ leach uranium mine on Navajo tribal lands.

The New Mexico Environmental Law Center (NMELC), will present oral arguments on May 12 to a panel of Federal judges in Denver, asking that the NRC decision to allow mining be set aside.

Eric Jantz, an attorney for the NMELC, said in a news release:

“The importance of our hearing on May 12 cannot be overstated. “We are talking about the land, water, air and health of two whole communities. There are people on this land grazing their cattle and hauling their daily drinking water.”

The company in question, Hydro Resources, is proposing mining operations in four areas in the Church Rock-Crownpoint region. The NRC approved the license in 2006, but the New Mexico Environmental Law Center filed a lawsuit in 2007, asking that the license application be overturned.

In it’s release, the NMELC states the NRC has violated the National Environmental Policy Act, the Atomic Energy Act, and it’s own regulations.

The NMELC’s clients are appealing the following points:

Hydro Resources failed to prove that it will protect groundwater from contamination by uranium and other toxic heavy metals. The company failed to ensure that the health of residents near the mines would be protected from damaging radioactive air emissions.

Hydro Resources’ proposed financial bond for the site is inadequate to ensure that the site(s) would be cleaned up in the event that the company is unable to undertake reclamation of the land and/or water impacted by the mining.

Three cheers for the Navajo Nation, for standing up to our big-brother government.

My stand on nuclear energy is well-stated, en toto: it’s a dirty, dangerous, toxic, life-threatening industry and until miners are held responsible for the mess they make, there should be no new mining of nuclear materials in America.

Photo: LA Times

“The Grand Canyon is too important for the Forest Service to give short shrift to the possible and significant negative impacts of uranium mining exploration,” said Sandy Bahr, conservation outreach director for the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter. “The Forest Service should take a hard look at the impacts and the public should have an opportunity to review and comment on this mining exploration,” added Bahr.

The Forest Service approved the drilling in December, using a so-called categorical exclusion, a decision which required only minimal environmental review. In issuing the recent injunction, Judge Murguia essentially rejected the use of the categorical exclusion by the Forest Service.

The Sierra Club, along with the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Grand Canyon Trust banded together last month to sue the Forest Service for not conducting a thorough review of the environmental impacts of the uranium mining. The groups were able to sue under the Administrative Procedure Act that governs proper bureaucratic protocol, as in cases that involve the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) [read more about the essentials of NEPA].
All signs indicate that there will most likely be an appeal.

Associated Press

Photo: James Gordon

By recommending the increasing use of Mountaintop Removal Mining. I’ve written about this terrible practice here before, but for those who missed it- MRM involves literally cutting an entire mountain down and dumping the rubble in the valleys nearby. It’s incredibly destructive and leaves a terribly blight on the land afterwards. I mean, they are chopping down the WHOLE mountain. From the International Herald Tribune…

WASHINGTON: The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would extend the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.

It has been used in Appalachian coal country for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion.

The new rule would allow the practice to continue and expand, providing only that mine operators minimize the debris and cause the least environmental harm, although those terms are not clearly defined and to some extent merely restate existing law.

The Office of Surface Mining in the Interior Department drafted the rule, which will be subject to a 60-day comment period and could be revised, although officials indicated that it was not likely to be changed substantially.

The regulation is the culmination of six and a half years of work by the administration to make it easier for mining companies to dig more coal to meet growing energy demands and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

This is where I wish I believed in the concept of Hell, because if anyone deserves to be in such a place, it’s President Bush and his band of evil cronies who put power and wealth ahead of any other consideration. What kind of jerkass chops an entire mountain down just to get at the coal?

Enjoy!

• Africa wages war on scourge of plastic bags

• Crab fishing in the North Sea is a dangerous profession

• Bush thinks the main lesson to be learned from the Vietnam War was that we withdrew too early

• Dirty Coal Boss gets a free pass from CNN on Utah Coal Mine disaster

• North Carolina’s seawall ban

• Mountaintop removal mining: No respect for the hollow

• Global Warming: Still Happening

• Japan To Use Disposable Chopsticks For Biofuel

• Opening up the American lawbooks

• Reality: America Isn’t Conservative

• New Study: 87% of Americans “seriously concerned about the environment”

• Life Before Air Conditioning

• Canada is our biggest trade partner, not China

• Man Exchanges Missile Launcher for Shoes

• Alaskan hunters experience global warming first hand

• NH farmers savor bumper harvest

• Can a Fractional Be Green?

• AboutMyPlanet.com luanches “GROW” User News Service

• The $40 hidden inside a 12V battery

• US Transportation Secretary: “Bikes Not Transportation”

• Harry Reid Says No New Coal

• Skateboarding Mogul Pierre André Senizergues Backs DiCaprio, Green Lifestyle

• The truth about recycling

• Comedy Central Launches “Address the Mess” Green Campaign

• Green Options Presents Carnival of the Green #91

We’ve seen it before- a few years ago in Texas, wind credit customers- people who signed up to pay MORE money every month for wind credits- were actually paying LESS on their monthly bill. The high price of natural gas forced everyone else’s electricity bill up except for the good green folks who signed up for wind. When the news first broke there was extra capacity within the wind credits program, but it sold out within a day of the story hitting the newspapers and airwaves. People like saving money.

The easiest way to green someone up is to make it cheaper to make the switch. If New Coal power is X times more expensive than wind and solar then the markets will do their jobs and Coal power will die the horrible death is so rightfully deserves.

Here’s a snip from the Grist article, but swing over for the full read, it’s a good one.

Today, we don’t deploy as much [fill in your favorite clean technology here] as we might like to, in no small part because the price of electricity is so low. Of course, that’s because we subsidize the dirty stuff. And we don’t price in externalities. And maybe we’d still need some government mandates. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we can all agree that we would make more ecologically sensible choices if electricity wasn’t so cheap.

And why is power so cheap? In no small part, because so much of it comes from coal. Fifty-eight percent in the U.S. at last count. And Ol’ Dirty Coal is cheap.

Why is Ol’ Dirty Coal cheap? A couple reasons, but the most important one is that, as a practical matter, we haven’t built any new coal plants since the Clean Air Act was passed. Much better to run those old grandfathered ones which have (a) already paid off all their capital, and (b) don’t have all the parasitic loads to run the scrubbers and baghouses mandated by the Clean Air Act. So as a practical matter, that cheap baseload power price is set just by the price of the fuel and a little bit for maintenance.

But here’s the rub. The coal fleet is just about maxed out. (See here, click on “Trends in US Energy Markets”). We’re running all those grandfathered plants about as hard as we can. So as load grows, we’ll now need to build new coal.

And new coal is expensive. Really expensive. North of $2500/kW expensive. Er, as much as $3000/kW expensive. Want carbon sequestration put on the back end? Then add another $2000-$3000/kW (PDF) worth of expensive. The kind of expensive that makes wind look cheap, and solar look competitive. The kind of expensive that makes natural-gas fired power plants, even at today’s gas prices, look like really good investments. The kind of expensive that makes you quit your job because of all the money you’re suddenly saving on your new CFLs.

Is it me, or does Amanda seem to linger, just a bit, when my name is on the screen. She’s obviously researched who I am and wants to know more.

Amanda, I’m sorry to say that I’m married, and while you are quite fetching, you didn’t make it on my “List“, so any kind of Entourage like hookup is out of the question. Please stop calling.

for

To a lot of people, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would actually be against renewable energy. It’s a little bit like being against puppies. Yet these opponents exist, and I’m sorry to say some are warming seats in the United States Senate.

Take Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, for example. Sen. Alexander hails from a part of the country that is home to “six of the nation’s 10 largest carbon-dioxide-emitting coal-fired power plants,” according to Tennessean.com. You might think that Alexander is somehow beholden to the coal industry because of this, or that his Martha’s Vineyard property and the debate over the Cape Wind project might influence him, or that the campaign contributions that flow his way from the most carbon-dioxide producing utility in the country are the source of his clean energy antipathy. Not so, says the Senator. He doesn’t like wind power, he claims, for aesthetic reasons. “I think they absolutely destroy the landscape.”

Let’s look at some photos and see how his opinion stands up. First, we’ll start with coal. Here is a picture of a mountain top removal:

There used to be a mountain there, but coal miners have torn the WHOLE THING down to get at the coal. One could make the argument that removing an entire mountain and leaving behind a big scar of a hole could be considered “destroying the landscape.” (Photo credit: OVEC) But with coal our journey doesn’t end here- once it’s ripped out of the ground you’ve got to transport it by train and then burn it up. Here’s a photo of a coal

fueled power plant.

Not very pretty.

Which brings us to a wind farm. Here’s a photo of an industrial wind farm.

You can see a road and a small platform for each turbine. There’s a lot of green grass and trees and I don’t see anything that could be considered a destroyed landscape (by any rational person, Lamar is clearly not). There’s no smoke choking up the air and you don’t have to rip up whole mountains to get at the wind. I took an extensive tour of a wind farm in Wyoming a few years ago and can attest to how peaceful and quiet they are. Only someone who is crazy or in the pocket of the coal industry (or both) could possibly try to run with the argument that wind “destroys the landscape”.

Lamar Alexander, you sir, are a delusional jerkass.

To learn more about Mountaintop Removal mining and the great work being done to fight this stupidly moronic mining practice, head to the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

JEFFREY LEE is not interested in the soaring price of uranium, which could make him one of the world’s richest men.

“This is my country. Look, it’s beautiful and I fear somebody will disturb it,” he says, waving his arm across a view of rocky land surrounded by Kakadu National Park, where the French energy giant Areva wants to extract 14,000 tonnes of uranium worth more than $5 billion.

Mr Lee, the shy 36-year-old sole member of the Djok clan and the senior custodian of the Koongarra uranium deposit, has decided never to allow the ecologically sensitive land to be mined.

“There are sacred sites, there are burial sites and there are other special places out there which are my responsibility to look after,” Mr Lee told the Herald.

“I’m not interested in white people offering me this or that … it doesn’t mean a thing.

“I’m not interested in money. I’ve got a job; I can buy tucker; I can go fishing and hunting. That’s all that matters to me.”

I would love to say that I would make the same decision, but damn- that’s a lot zeros coming after that ‘5′. Wowwowweewa. Big props and much respect to Jeffrey Lee.

The past couple years have been difficult, with efforts to fight legislation that allows the mining to proceed so recklessly quickly brushed aside in court. Remediation projects in the past have proven to do very little to return these areas to safe and viable landscapes. Awareness of these practices, however, and onus for managing their environmental pollution is finally being scrutinized and punished. This past Friday, a federal judge in West Virginia passed a decision stating "that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the law by issuing mountaintop removal mining permits that allowed vital headwater streams to be permanently buried." In other words, the days of easy permits may be coming to an end.