- What a horrifying thought while we are still reeling from the massive Gulf spill! And I never knew there were “ice control companies”- did you? Creating jobs to manage disasters really doesn’t qualify as green jobs, but green jobs can help prevent the need to manage disasters.  - Editor

Greenland’s giant island of ice could pose threat to offshore platforms, shipping
It’s slowly drifting across Arctic waters, an iceberg four times the size of Manhattan that broke off from a glacier in Greenland over the weekend.
Potentially in the path of this unstoppable giant are oil platforms and shipping lanes- and any collision could do untold damage. “It’s so big that you can’t prevent it from drifting. You can’t stop it,” said Jon-Ove Methlie Hagen, a glaciologist at the University of Oslo. Few images can capture the world’s climate fears like a 100 square mile (260 sq. kilometre) chunk of ice breaking off Greenland’s vast ice sheet. One Massachusetts Congressman has suggested, with presumed sarcasm, that it serve as a home for climate skeptics. Large enough to threaten Canada’s offshore platforms in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Wohlleben said “iceberg control companies” can redirect smaller icebergs, by towing them or spraying them with water cannons. “I don’t think they could do with an iceberg that large,” she said. “They would have to physically move the rig.”
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/world/breakingnews/greenlands-giant-island-of-ice-could-pose-threat-to-offshore-platforms-shipping-100369689.html

- Since humans arrived on this planet, our weather has been relatively stable, allowing us to create systems that have defined our lives, our sustenance, our cultures, our habitats, all of which are dependent upon climate stability. If the foundational piece of all societies cracks, it will be, by far, the greatest human rights issue ever. When there is an emergency, it’s ALL HANDS ON DECK! - Editor

- Here is just one example of seemingly esoteric natural processes that are, in reality, fundamental to human life on this planet, but despite the seriousness and the total global impact, this destruction of plankton would not make even the top 50 human concerns. - Editor

Plankton, base of ocean food web, in big decline
Despite their tiny size, plant plankton found in the world’s oceans are crucial to much of life on Earth. They are the foundation of the bountiful marine food web, produce half the world’s oxygen and suck up harmful carbon dioxide.
And they are declining sharply. Worldwide phytoplankton levels are down 40 percent since the 1950s, according to a study in the journal Nature. The likely cause is global warming, which makes it hard for the plant plankton to get vital nutrients, researchers say.
The numbers are both staggering and disturbing, say the Canadian scientists who did the study. “It’s concerning because phytoplankton is the basic currency for everything going on in the ocean,” said Dalhousie University biology professor Boris Worm.
For the abstract (full article requires payment)-http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7306/full/nature09268.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100728/ap_on_sc/us_sci_declining_plankton

- While some are very depressed over the Senate’s failure, a minority longing for real action hope that this will open the door to a new approach that is free of the heavily biased giveaways in this bill. Let’s all unite on a simple carbon tax, an end to petroleum subsidies, and support for renewables and efficiency.  We are dreamers but we’re “not the only ones.”- Editor
We’re Gonna Be Sorry By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Senate Democrats abandoned the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil. I could blame Republicans for the fact that not one G.O.P. senator indicated a willingness to vote for a bill that would put the slightest price on carbon. I could blame the Democratic senators who were also waffling. I could blame President Obama for his disappearing act on energy and spending more time reading the polls than changing the polls. I could blame the Chamber of Commerce and the fossil-fuel lobby for spending bags of money to subvert this bill. But the truth is, the public, confused and stressed by the last two years, never got mobilized to press for this legislation. We will regret it.
We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature’s operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign - even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, and “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000,” says Watson. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we’re doing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25friedman.html

- We all have idols, and last week, I got to listen to one of mine. It was partly the ground-breaking Club of Rome work that influenced me away from my intended career and on to population, environment, and climate change. With such an important message, why weren’t all the City decision makers there at the talk? How do we get other cities to listen? Dr. Meadows had read our Sustainable Santa Fe Plan- great! - and while he congratulated us on its importance and value, he said that if population and consumption levels are not included in a climate plan, we can not become sustainable. It’s true. If we cut our emissions, for example 50%, but double the number of people, we have not become more sustainable.

For those of you who have been reading Climate Today for at least a year will not have had any surprises- his talk covered Peak Oil, population growth, the lag time of climate change, the need for local adaptation and relocalization, voluntary simplicity with reduced consumption, etc.

Here are a few gems from his talk that are worth remembering and sharing:
- 50% of all the oil consumed by humans has been consumed since 1984, creating a world we now view as normal, but this high energy usage can not continue.
- We are moving into the “Post Petroleum Age.”  In 2006, 9 billion barrels of oil were discovered, but we consumed 31 billion barrels that year. World consumption of oil is currently 5 to 6 times the amount that is being discovered, so we are using up our savings account, which can not continue.
- Prepare yourself for less available energy. It appears now that the government in the coming years will have to resort to some kind of rationing or quotas, similar to World War II. Just raising prices harms the poor.
- The “biocapacity” of the earth has been surpassed, and we are currently overshooting, which, if continues, is always followed by collapse. We are now consuming 140% of resources with demands accelerating against the world’s ecosystems. These trends include not only fossil fuels but also groundwater, greenhouse gases, the destruction of agricultural soils, the degradation of natural resources, the gap between the rich and the poor, the supply of fish, etc.
- Embodied energy is the energy used to create and ship the things that we import. We have to fully recognize the energy and resources used in other places like China if we are to reach sustainability.
- The world’s population will be going back down this century. It is only a matter of how.
- It is unlikely that waiting for the Federal government will work. Politicians want to get re-elected, and therefore fail to make the essential significant structural changes required to convert to sustainability.
Thank you Dr. Meadows for speaking so frankly. - Editor

- With natural gas being touted as the “bridge fuel,”  we need to look seriously at what this really means. We strongly recommend you watch and share with everyone the video “Split Estate”  (http://www.splitestate.com/buy_dvd.html) and now you can add an East Coast version with the 11 minute Vanity Fair video “Know the Drill.” We think that we know the costs of natural gas or petroleum, yet these new expansions right in people’s yards and using new technologies are revealing themselves to be horribly expensive, both in dollars IF we did full-cost accounting, and to life itself. Real estate prices are dropping along the Gulf as well- see Gulf property sales slide further on oil fears-  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100623/ap_on_bi_ge/us_oil_spill_real_estate . Shall we make our planet worthless bit by bit? Aren’t those solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars looking more and more beautiful? And more and more affordable when we total the true costs of fossil fuels? - Editor

A Colossal Fracking Mess 
As drillers seek to commence (natural gas) fracking operations in the Delaware River basin watershed and in other key watersheds in New York State -all of which sit atop large repositories of natural gas trapped in shale rock deep underground- concerned residents, activists, and government officials are pointing to Dimock as an example of what can go wrong when this form of drilling is allowed to take place without proper regulation. Some are pointing to a wave of groundwater-contamination incidents and mysterious health problems out West, in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming, where hydraulic fracturing has been going on for years as part of a massive oil-and-gas boom, and saying that fracking should not be allowed at all in delicate ecosystems like the Delaware River basin.
 
The Sautners (who have drilling right next to their house) now rely on water delivered to them every week. The value of their land has been decimated. Their children no longer take showers at home. They desperately want to move but cannot afford to buy a new house on top of their current mortgage.
“Our land is worthless,” says Craig. “Who is going to buy this house?”

The people who have been burned badly by their firsthand experience with what you might call the New Natural Gas, and who have not gone silent, are spreading their message of acute disillusionment, ecological destruction, land-value decimation, and serious health concerns. As I sit and talk with the members of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, news reports from the tragic Deepwater Horizonleak in the Gulf pop up from time to time on their computers. The disaster serves as a grim backdrop to our conversation, reinforcing the hazards of pushing forward with experimental forms of drilling whose risks are not well understood.
For the video- Know the Drill
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/06/fracking-in-pennsylvania-20100

Water- Growing food needs water. Some experts predict that by 2015, two-thirds of the world’s people will live in water-stressed countries.* Even if only half of this prediction were true, it’s a serious global issue. Since life does not go on without plants, an

The spill may finally spur Americans, who make up 5 per cent of the world’s population but guzzle 25 per cent of the oil supply, to get serious about cutting their consumption. America has always been an obstacle to international progress on climate change, but the problem is no longer the country’s leadership, as it was under President Bush, but popular opinion. In a poll taken after Climategate, almost half of all Americans said they believe there is no scientific consensus around climate change or that it is not happening. But the images of the devastation caused by the slick may finally force them to confront the real costs of their own way of life – the more so when dolphins begin to be washed up on Florida beaches – if President Obama can frame the debate correctly.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/david-strahan-americans-should-be-thanking-bp-1988049.html

“Wasting away again in Petroleumville, hoping for my addiction to halt.
Some people claim that there’s an oil rig to blame and I know it’s my own damn fault!”
http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/24/luckovich-cartoon-bp-oil-spill/

The real causes of the disaster go much deeper. Having consumed most of the world’s readily accessible oil, we are now compelled to look for fuel in ever more remote places, and to extract it in ever riskier and more damaging ways. The Deepwater Horizon well was being drilled in five thousand feet of water, to a total depth of eighteen thousand feet.  This year, the United States’ largest single source of imported oil is expected to be the Canadian tar sands. Oil from the tar sands comes in what is essentially a solid form: it has to be either strip-mined, a process that leaves behind a devastated landscape, or melted out of the earth using vast quantities of natural gas.

Meanwhile, as everyone knows, no matter where oil comes from or how it has been extracted, burning it is destructive: oil combustion accounts for nearly a third of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States. A report issued last week by the National Academy of Sciences called on Congress to enact legislation to dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, by, among other things, “reducing oil use.”

The President needs to set higher standards - or his Administration, for Congress, and for the country. Earlier this month, an energy bill was finally unveiled in the Senate. It is deeply flawed: for a start, it would increase the incentives for offshore drilling, and preempt the E.P.A.’s ability to enforce parts of the Clean Air Act. Obama should return to the Gulf and, against the backdrop of the grotesque orange slick, explain to the public why he wants more ambitious legislation. Then he should spend the summer working to get an energy bill passed. He’s not going to get a better opportunity—or so, at least, we have to hope.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/05/31/100531taco_talk_kolbert