Coffee Farmers Sue Monsanto for Hiding Cancer-Causing Impact of Glyphosate. Monsanto Co. is facing another lawsuit alleging that exposure to glyphosate, the primary ingredient in the company’s flagship product Roundup, causes cancer.
Christine and Kenneth Sheppard, the former owners of Dragon’s Lair Kona Coffee Farm in Honaunau, Hawaii, have accused the multinational agribusiness of falsely masking the carcinogenic risks of glyphosate and is responsible for causing the woman’s cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reported. The civil suit, Sheppard et al v. Monsanto Company, was filed Feb. 2 in U.S. District Court in Honolulu by the Miller Firm of Orange, Virgina and Honolulu attorney Brian K. The Fraudulent Science at COP21 Exposed. Before the ink had dried on the COP21 climate agreement, many from the food movement were reflecting on the process and plans worked on in Paris.
In their co-authored Washington Post op-ed piece, A Secret Weapon to Fight Climate Change: Dirt, Michael Pollan and Debbie Barker wrote, “Unfortunately, the world leaders who gathered in Paris this past week have paid little attention to the critical links between climate change and agriculture. That’s a huge mistake and a missed opportunity.” Before we explore the case of fraud in Paris, let’s first review the definitions of fraud: 1. Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain. Exxon Targets Journalists Who Exposed Massive Climate Cover Up. ExxonMobil has launched a full-throttled “bully” campaign against the graduate students who recently unmasked its scandalous climate change cover-up threatening to pull funds from the university that helped bring to light its dangerous and “most consequential” lies.
Governor Undermines Climate Action Plan in Colorado. Over the last few years, Colorado has been ravaged by near cataclysmic climate-change caused disasters—floods, wildlfires, and drought—and so you’d think that when the state unveiled its new “Climate Action Plan,” as it did last week, the plan would take a very aggressive approach to fighting and mitigating climate change.
But that’s not what the plan does, which was spearheaded by Colorado Democrat Gov. John Hickenlooper who used to work for the oil and gas industry. Gov. Hickenlooper is known far and wide for drinking Halliburton’s fracking fluid and suing local cities that banned fracking. Weighing in at 93 pages, Colorado’s new Climate Action Plan is a slick, glossy, amalgam of smooth rhetoric, pretty pictures and soft-ball recommendations. A draft of the Climate Action Plan was secretly sent out for review a few months ago to “selected stakeholders,” rather than opened up for broad public comment.
Takepart. The long-running war between the whales and the United States Navy is over.
Battle Continues in Fight to Save States' Renewable Energy Policies. There was a series of attempts in 2013 and 2014 to repeal or weaken state laws that set targets for increasing the use of renewable energy.
States across the country—including Wisconsin, Kansas, Texas and North Carolina, among others—faced campaigns against their renewable energy standards. All of those attempts were unsuccessful except in the case of Ohio. Passed in 2008 with nearly unanimous support from both Republican and Democratic legislators, Ohio’s energy standards required utilities to meet 12.5 percent of electricity demand with renewable energy and to decrease energy use by more than 22 percent by 2025, with interim targets each year beforehand.
The standards also required half of the renewable energy to come from in-state facilities. There have already been several new attempts in 2015 to repeal or weaken state-level energy standards, and further attempts—backed by aggressive lobbying campaigns—are certainly forthcoming. Teens Sue Government For Failing To Address Climate Change. “As a youth, and therefore someone on the front-lines of climate change chaos, I have everything to gain from taking action and everything to lose by not.”
This statement was stated by Kelsey Juliana, one of the young plaintiffs in the Oregon case that is asking her state government to bring down carbon emissions in compliance with what scientists say is ‘necessary’ in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. Like other young activists of her generation, Kelsey feels that there is too much at stake to wait for today’s political leaders to get their act together and take meaningful action on climate change.
NationofChange Alec Loorz, founder of the non-profit Kids vs. Global Warming, voiced similar: We need to demand our political leaders “govern as if our future matters.” Halliburton Got Away With Murder. This week, Halliburton, the contractor that worked on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig, has just gotten away with murder!
This rogue corporation has agreed to pay a mere $1.1 billion dollars to settle most of the lawsuits over its role in the Gulf of Mexico spill. The settlement is lower than the $1.3 billion dollars that the Houston company had set aside for the case. Justice still has not been done as Halliburton, BP, Goldman Sachs and Transocean got away manslaughter and illegally profiteering from the misery that these four corporations perpetrated on an entire region of the United States. Monsanto Ordered to Pay $93 Million to Small Town for Poisoning Citizens.
Christina Sarich | Naturalsociety | July 27th 2014 Big wins can happen in small places.
The West Virginia State Supreme Court finalized a big blow to the biotech giant Monsanto this month, finishing a settlement causing Monsanto to pay $93 million to the tiny town of Nitro, West Virginia for poisoning citizens with Agent Orange chemicals. Climate scientist’s defamation suit allowed to go forward. In July of 2012, the blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute compared one of the researchers at Penn State University to one of its football coaches.
