El Diablo in Wine Country. In 1942 Alfred Hitchcock recruited the author of Our Town, Thornton Wilder, to write the screenplay for Shadow of a Doubt, an innocence-versus-evil thriller set in an ‘idyllic American town’.
After considering various candidates, Hitchcock and Wilder selected Santa Rosa, a picturesque agricultural community of 13,000 people, 55 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. Conservative Energy Policy: Let the Market Decide. Conservatives crave an energy-policy reset.
Timing is essential, and given last week’s decision by federal regulators to reject the Trump Energy Department’s proposal to subsidize old power plants, that time has arrived. California’s Housing Crisis And Long Commutes Are Slowing Its Progress On Climate. Jerry Brown, the governor of California, is not one to be cowed by federal backtracking on environmental regulations.
His promise back in December that California “will launch its own damn satellites” should Trump defund the NASA operations that track climate change has become something of a rallying cry for the environmental resistance. California should hold onto that stubbornness. Planetizen: The independent resource for people passionate about planning and related fields.
Why Congress just killed a rule restricting coal companies from dumping waste in streams. Super Bowl XLIX: Super bad for the environment? The Land of Mountaintop Removal. U.S. oil and gas boom behind rising ethane levels. A single oil and gas field centered in North Dakota spews 1 to 3 percent of all global ethane emissions, about 230,000 metric tons annually.
Based on that snapshot, researchers argue that the recent U.S. oil and gas boom is chiefly to blame for rising levels of ethane, a component of natural gas that can damage air quality and warm the climate. Flying air-sniffing planes over the Bakken shale in May 2014, atmospheric scientist Eric Kort of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and colleagues discovered that ethane emissions were 10 to 100 times larger than expected. The region has been a major contributor to a U-turn in ethane emissions, the researchers report online April 26 in Geophysical Research Letters. Global atmospheric ethane levels declined from 14.3 million tons in 1984 to around 11.3 million tons in 2010. In recent years, however, ethane levels have increased. Nimby Nation: The High Cost To America Of Saying No To Everything. Coal is having a terrible year. Is this the beginning of the end? 2015 is shaping up to be a fateful year for the coal industry.
After coal prices tumbled from their highs in 2011, the industry hit a rough patch. Calif. declares emergency after oil spill fouls sea and beaches near Santa Barbara. A man tries to rescue an oil soaked bird (Lara Cooper/Noozhawk.com via Reuters) California Gov.
Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for Santa Barbara County late Wednesday after an onshore pipeline burst, spewing thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean — blackening beaches and endangering West Coast wildlife. Arctic drilling for 'extreme oil' is risky - and letting Shell do the work is reckless. America’s Arctic Ocean belongs to all of us.
The Beaufort and Chukchi Seas provide habitat for countless species of wildlife. This is one of the most unique marine ecosystems in the world, home to the entire population of US polar bears. California Brewers Use an Estimated 651 Million Gallons of Water to Make Craft Beer. Craft beer has given a lot to California, but it has also taken away.
Last week, the California Craft Brewers Association announced just how much of a boon to the state the industry has been: Craft beer, it said, has contributed $6.5 billion to the state’s economy, an 18% increase since 2013. As of March 2015, there were 554 breweries in the state, making 3.4 million barrels of craft beer, or 105.4 million gallons. 13 things Californians are doing that waste more water than eating almonds. Duke Energy Coal Ash Ponds Contaminate Wells, Residents Told Not to Drink the Water. Get the Most Important EcoNews Right in Your Inbox Consequences of Duke Energy’s massive coal ash spill into North Carolina’s Dan River last February are still being felt, as dozens of residents near the site have been warned by state officials Tuesday not to drink or cook with the water from wells after tests results showed toxic contamination, according to a report from the Associated Press.
Eighty-seven private wells near eight of Duke’s plants showed results that failed to meet state groundwater standards, the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources said. In documents received by the AP, test results showed readings for vanadium—a possible carcinogenic to humans, and a chemical linked to neurological and developmental problems in lab animals—as high as 86 times the state groundwater standard of 0.3 parts per billion. This unsettling report comes after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Duke both announced the cleanup’s completion in July. California is letting oil companies dump their fluids and waste where the state gets its drinking water Read more:
West Virginia crude oil train derailment: Fires burned for hours, smoke. Federal government: average of 10 fuel trains may derail each year. The federal government predicts that trains hauling crude oil or ethanol will derail an average of 10 times a year over the next two decades, causing more than $4 billion in damage and possibly killing hundreds of people if an accident happens in a densely populated part of the U.S.
Scientists are more certain than ever that oil and gas drilling are causing hundreds of earthquakes. Exide’s troubled history: years of pollution violations but few penalties - Los Angeles Times. Man-made fracking earthquakes keep getting worse. Uk.businessinsider. How clean is our ‘dirty’ oil? You’d be surprised. Researchers for California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard have recently released new data measuring the carbon intensity of various crude oil blends, including diluted bitumen (a.k.a. ‘dilbit’) and upgraded synthetic crude oil (‘SCO’) from the Canadian oilsands. The Californian findings will not be well-received by anti-oilsands activists.
Among the findings that may surprise: • There are 13 oil fields in California, plus crude oil blends originating in at least six other countries, that generate a higher level of upstream greenhouse gas emissions than Canadian dilbit blends; • Crude oil from Alaska’s North Slope, which makes up about 12 per cent of California’s total crude slate, is actually “dirtier” than the Canadian dilbit known as “Access Western Blend”; • The “dirtiest oil in North America” is not produced in Canada, but just outside Los Angeles, where the Placerita oil field generates about twice the level of upstream emissions as Canadian oilsands production; and.
After the Spill: Life in West Virginia's Coal Country. One year after the Elk River chemical disaster, has the Mountain State's approach to mining changed? CHARLESTON, W. Va. Guinea Leads Worst Countries For Business. Race to Build on River Could Block Pacific Oil Route - NYTimes.com. Photo. How clean is our ‘dirty’ oil? You’d be surprised. Coal 'Is The Single Biggest Flaw Un US Climate Policy' California's Lax Policing of the Fracking Industry. Company West Virginia Chemical Spill Fined $11,000. AP Photo/Steve Helber. Robert Bryce - Author/Journalist/Public Speaker - The Ongoing War on Coal. June 3, 2014National Review Online On, the EPA unveiled a 645-page document detailing regulations aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity-generation sector by 30 percent by 2030 when compared with 2005 levels.