January 4th, 2012

That Republican presidential aspirant Rick Santorum is a climate change denier will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been watching the GOP candidates these past months. Virtually the entire field has expressed doubt that climate change is occurring or that humans have anything to do with it — or both.
But the depth of Santorum’s disdain for climate change science — and for those who’re concerned about environmental risks posed by oil drilling and gas fracking — may ring alarm bells for moderates who think America should address carbon pollution.
Santorum secured a leading spot in the Republican presidential primary contest by finishing a close second to Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses Tuesday.
Known heretofore mainly as the “family values candidate,” he is an “out-and-out denier” of climate change, according to an article in Grist, “Santorum v. Romney: The climate is screwed either way”.

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February 24th, 2011

Activists at 350.org hope to expose the biggest financiers of lawmakers who are stalling on climate change.

Fed up with Congress, where many members deny that climate change exists and fight measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and switch to renewable energy, 350.org is targeting those officials biggest bankroller: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“For many years, everyone has assumed that if we simply manage to communicate the problem (of climate change), it will lead to action. It hasn’t, for one simple reason: there’s too much money in the way. A wall of money that separates politicians from the scientific truth that we’re in a desperate crisis,” said 350.org founder and noted environmentalist Bill McKibben said in a statement today.

Industry groups, McKibben explained, have been raising doubts about climate change, thwarting Congressional action to mitigate it, and now they’re also trying to stop the EPA from protecting the air, water and atmosphere from polluters.

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January 5th, 2011

This week brought news that Texas will likely be opening its nuclear waste dump in Andrews, near the New Mexico border, to radioactive waste from states across the nation.

Meanwhile, China announced that it has developed new technology to reprocess used fuel from nuclear power plants, potentially greatly extending the amount of power that existing nuclear plants can generate, according to an AP news report. The story noted that the U.S. stopped reprocessing nuclear fuel in the 1970s because of fears that freed plutonium would add to nuclear weapons proliferation. (That was a legitimate concern, but no end run around the problem was ever developed in the interest of keeping our nuclear power processes up to date.)

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