Top climate scientists in the top scientific journal Nature recently stated that we have exceeded crucial planetary boundaries beyond which we are at high risk of unacceptable environmental change. These and other top climate scientists and biologists are stating clearly that the atmospheric CO2 concentration must be urgently returned to 300-350 ppm for planetary safety. Unfortunately, World governments are ignoring the science and are committed to increasing CO2, evidently not understanding that there can be no negotiation with the laws of Physics and Chemistry.
An Australian husband and wife with homeopathic beliefs were recently jailed for the manslaughter of their horribly neglected child. Accountability must also apply to all people who are ignoring scientific advice and international law and are complicit in the carnage of US wars (9-11 million excess deaths in US wars, 1990-2009, including 4 million infants) and in the worsening climate genocide (that will kill 10 billion people, including 6 billion infants). This inescapable legal, business, political and electoral Accountability for war crimes and climate crimes is detailed in a Letter being transmitted to all Federal MPs in climate criminal Australia (a world leader in annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution) and indeed to everyone so that, unlike many Germans in 1945, they cannot say “we didn’t know”.
I often hear people saying that overpopulation is the main problem to our environmental and ecological problems. Some people even claim that it’s responsible for global warming. I also agreed with this idea before. But after reading more about the subject over the years I have changed my mind.
The rich countries in the “North”, i.e. the West, have a “rapidly decreasing” population which is “expected to decline over the next forty years.” Developing countries such as India, China and most of Africa on the other hand is where we will see future population numbers increasing.
And yes. It seems so easy to blame countries with an overwhelming rising population for being responsible for wrecking our planet, climate and environment. Because surely more people must mean more pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Right?
Not really. The West is responsible for about 80% of the worlds CO2 increase. An average person living in Great Britain will in only 11 days emit as much CO2 as an average person in Bangladesh will during a whole year. And just a single power plant in West Yorkshire in Great Britain will produce more CO2 every year than all the 139 million people combined living in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique.
As Fred Pearce from the Yale Environment 360 blog notes, only a small portion of the world’s people are using most of the planets resources as well as producing the most of the greenhouse gases. And those are living in the West:
The Inter Press Service has an interesting interview with James Lovelock, known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, about everything from the IPCC to geo-engineering and climate tipping points.
Lovelock has earlier said that he believes that climate change is now irreversible. He predicts that the major part of the humans, more than six billion people, will get wiped out of the face of the earth due to wars, starvation, epidemics and chaos during the rest of the century due to the effects of a changing climate. Lovelock estimates that by year 2100 there will only be around 500 millions people left who struggles to survive on the few remaining liveable places on earth: Scandinavia, Canada and Iceland.
In the IPS interview Lovelock says he hopes that once climate disaster strikes “we will stay civilised and those in the North will give refuge to the unimaginably large numbers of climate refugees”:
“TIERRAMÉRICA: What will this new climate be like?
JL: The tropical and subtropical zones of the Earth will be too hot and dry to grow food or support human life. People will be forced to migrate towards the poles to places like Canada. There will be less than one billion people by the end of the century. My hope is that we will stay civilised and those in the North will give refuge to the unimaginably large numbers of climate refugees.”
As early as 1998, the dangers of genetically modified food (GMOs) have been recognized by numerous scientific studies. Yet, no mainstream media included stories warning of these studies. Even today, the general North American public remains ignorant of their daily food’s dangers due to the mainstream press’s continual disregard of the topic.
The media research group Project Censored brought this issue to light by admitting it in its 2007 database. Annually, the American media research organization Project Censored records the twenty-five most underreported stories of the year, in hopes of exposing significant (and ignored) stories to the public and informing them on key issues that would not otherwise be brought to their attention. Underreported stories submitted must be reliable and of major significance to the population.
This article tracks the coverage GM food’s dangers since its induction into Project Censored’s database, searching in American mainstream press, Canadian and foreign mainstream press.
“The legislation follows lobbying by animal welfare groups, which have long argued that the clubbing of seal pups by hunters is barbaric.
Canada kills about 300,000 seals annually off its east coast – the biggest such hunt in the world.”
Stavros Dimas, European Commissioner for the Environment, welcomed the new ban and said that the new legislation “addresses EU citizens’ concerns with regard to the cruel hunting methods of seals.”
Caroline Lucas, MEP for the Greens in the UK, said that “today, nearly one million seals are slaughtered annually in commercial seal kills around the world”, and that this new legislation will help end “one of the most vile examples of animal cruelty.”
However an Ontario, Canada Government commissioned analysis has revealed that when you take environmental and human mortality impacts into account the “true cost” of coal burning-based power was 4-5 times greater than the “market cost” – this making the best renewables and geothermal much cheaper than the “true cost” of coal burning-based power (see “Ontario study identifies social costs of coal-fired power plants”).
Another way of seeing this is that it can be estimated (from arithmetic projection from the Canada study) that about 5,000 Australians die every year from the effects of deadly pollutants from coal burning (heavy metals, carbon monoxide, radioactivity, soot, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide) i.e. Australia sacrifices 5,000 lives each year on the altar of heavily-subsidized coal burning-based power (see “How many people die from Carbon Burning and Climate Change each year?”).
The annual seal massacre in Canada has started. This year the Canadian government has set a target of over 280000 baby seals to be clubbed to death and skinned to provide coats, hats, handbags and other accessories for the fashion market.
This seal hunt is the largest commercial hunt for marine mammals in the world and has been met with protests from around the world for years now. And this year is no different. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) says the hunt should be stopped because it’s cruel, unsustainable and lacks proper monitoring from federal agencies. The European Union is currently being pushed to introduce a ban on commercial trading with seal skin in a few weeks. And just recently Russia decided to close down their seal hunt in the White Sea indefinitely.
CBS News reports that the Canadian Coast Guard is confirming “that in a major first, a commercial ship travelled through the Northwest Passage this fall to deliver supplies to communities in western Nunavut”.
“We did have a commercial cargo vessel that did the first scheduled run from Montreal, up through the eastern Arctic, through the Northwest Passage to deliver cargo to communities in the west,” Brian LeBlanc of the Canadian Coast Guard told CBC News.
“That was the first — that I’m aware of anyway — commercial cargo delivery from the east through the Northwest Passage.”
[…]Rayes, who was on the vessel during its trip through the Northwest Passage, said the company informed the coast guard, which put an icebreaker on standby.
“They were ready to be there for us if we called them, but I didn’t see one cube of ice,” he said.
“They were informed about our presence [and] they were ready to give us the support needed. However, since there was no ice whatsoever, the service was not needed, we didn’t call for it.”
A new environmental study ranks Canada as one of the worst developed countries in the world. The study has been done by the Conference Board of Canada, an independent and not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada.
According to the study Canada performed poorly and received D grades in the areas of waste generation, water usage, and greenhouse gas emissions. But the study still gave Canada an overall C grade because the country performed “better than average on other measures of environmental performance”. The study notes that “Canada is not taking the necessary steps toward environmental sustainability”, and that Canada “stands almost at the bottom of the pack” alongside with USA and Australia.
As most of the political spotlight is on the presidential election in USA you might have missed the election in Canada last week. Unfortunately not much changed there. Stephen Harper and his Conservative party remained in power, the Liberals lost 19 seats and the Greens failed to even win a seat.
The outcome of the election was a blow to the environment and anyone who wants tough actions against climate change. Mitchell Anderson, from the DeSmogBlog, said that “the Canadian election saw little talk of dealing with climate change since stock markets tanked in the final week of the campaign.”
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The Inter Press Service has an interesting 
Today the European Parliament voted 
As most of the political spotlight is on the presidential election in USA you might have missed the 
