ENVIRONMENT — REP. MARKEY SAYS GREENLAND ICEBERG HAS MADE ROOM ‘FOR GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS TO START THEIR OWN COUNTRY’: Last week, NASA satellite data showed that a giant ice shelf four times the size of Manhattan broke off from a glacier in northwest Greenland. “The new ice island has an area of at least 100 square miles,” noted University of Delaware climate researcher Andreas Muenchow, “and a thickness up to half the height of the Empire State Building.” Over the weekend, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), who has been leading the legislative effort to confront climate change, blasted his obstructionist colleagues in a statement about the news. “An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan has broken off Greenland, creating plenty of room for global warming deniers to start their own country,” Markey said. “So far, 2010 has been the hottest year on record, and scientists agree arctic ice is a canary in a coal mine that provides clear warnings on climate.” He added that it was “unclear how many giant blocks of ice it will take to break the block of Republican climate deniers in the US Senate who continue hold this critical clean energy and climate legislation hostage.” His urgency is warranted: a paper published in Science magazine last year found evidence “that the most recent 10-year interval (1999–2008) was the warmest of the past 200 decades” for the Arctic. And a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report found that 2010 Arctic sea ice extent was the lowest on record for the month of June. The startling decline in Arctic sea ice has been shown by numerous climate studies based on expert analysis to be a direct result of human activity.
Tag Archives: Senate
Update: Tell Google: Don’t be evil
The FCC can’t wait any longer to protect consumers
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Google and Verizon just jointly announced a proposed policy framework for net neutrality, and it’s worse than we expected.
The Google-Verizon plan would end the Internet as we know it. Right now there is only one Internet that treats everybody and all content equally. But the proposal would change all of that. And insidiously, it would effectively dismantle net neutrality while claiming to protect it.
Still, the fact of the matter is that it’s not Google’s place to write regulations — that’s the job of the FCC, which has failed to act quickly to protect American consumers.
Our friends at MoveOn described the Google-Verizon proposal well when they said it would “create two separate, unequal sections of the Internet — one for big business that would be high-speed and exclusive, and then the inferior, slow ‘public Internet’ that would be available to you and me.”
While it was unexpected that Google, formerly an advocate of net neutrality, would associate itself with such a bad policy, it’s not surprising that the proposal shortchanges the interests of consumers and the public at large. This proposal is just the latest example of giant corporations trying to write the very regulations that govern their behavior.
Frankly, it’s just another indication that the FCC has waited too long to put appropriate protections in place for Internet consumers.
Earlier this year, the FCC looked like it was on track to ensure we could all enjoy strong net neutrality provisions. But a federal lawsuit forced the FCC to change its plans.
The FCC can still enforce net neutrality, but it first must revisit a Bush-era decision to deregulate broadband. By revisiting this decision and reclassifying broadband, the FCC can do everything it needs to do to protect American consumers. And in fact, the Chair of the FCC, Julius Genachowski, announced his intentions to do this.
But he has backed away from this plan under intense pressure from telecommunications industry.
Our federal regulators need to stop caving to big business and take a stand for us. The FCC has all the tools it needs to protect our interests and ensure the Internet remains a vital engine of information exchange and innovation, but it seems to lack the political will to live up to its mandate.
CREDO is working with our allies at MoveOn, PCCC, Free Press and ColorOfChange.org to put pressure on Google, the White House and the FCC. This is a crucial moment for our campaign. And your actions will be part of a broader effort to stop the FCC, Congress and the White House from standing by idly while we let corporations destroy the Internet.
We should not let BP decide the legislative framework for offshore drilling. We cannot let Goldman Sachs decide who chairs the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. And we must not let Google or Verizon decide how we can use the Internet.
Speak up and sign our petition to the FCC today. Just click here to automatically add your name. Thank you for working for a better world.
Matt Lockshin, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets
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Today’s Best of the Web …livecheap.com
- How to Tame College Costs
- Social Security in the Red
- Dealing With Deflation
- 7 Great Coupon Resources
Social Security Now in the Red
It was just a matter of time. Social Security
will pay out more this year than it takes in. As we mentioned before, the consequence of this, is that Social Security, the #1 investor in U.S. treasuries is now a net seller.
While tuition is getting out of hand at many colleges, the non-tuition costs can pile up too. This article looks at 5 non-tuition expenses and how to reduce them. Let us shortcut this one for you, get a lot of roomates in a 4 bedroom place that won’t impress the parents and make sure one of them knows how to cook. It has worked for decades.
What to do with your money in a deflationary environment> The dreaded “D” word is making its rounds and here are what investors are doing.
A good list from GenXFinance. There are many other sources, but a some new good ones on this list.
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Sunrise on the Gulf …
Help us kick-off the Arctic Sunrise’s expedition of the Gulf by telling Congress “No New Drilling!” |
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White House energy adviser Carol Browner has recently been making the talk show rounds and telling the public about a new government assessment that shows that 75% of the oil from BP’s drilling disaster has either been captured, burned off, evaporated or broken down in the Gulf. As she puts it, “Mother Nature did her part….”
You’re not alone if you think that sounds too good to be true.
That’s why we’ve sailed the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise to the Gulf and are embarking tomorrow on a three-month expedition to provide independent scientific analysis of the impacts of both the oil and chemical dispersants on the Gulf ecosystem. We have to know the truth about the damage that was done.
Relying on BP and federal officials to do that job for us would be foolish at this point. From day one, BP was doing everything in its power to hide the true extent of the disaster and they often had the help of a federal government who seemed more concerned with maintaining its public image than addressing the problem. The Gulf deserves better. We deserve better.
But we don’t have to run a single test to prove that oil drilling is dangerous and deadly. BP has done that work for us. And we don’t need any elaborate solutions to solve the problem either. What we need is to put an end to all new drilling and to transition to clean, renewable sources of energy.
Over the course of the next three months we’ll be telling you all about what we find in the Gulf on our website, in our blogs, through videos and photos and more. We’ll also be giving you opportunities to help make the clean energy future we all know is possible a reality by stopping upcoming drilling projects, confronting the fossil fuel industry in your community and joining with people globally for a day of action. You can start right now by telling Congress “No New Drilling!”
Sincerely,
Dan Howells
Greenpeace Deputy Campaign Director
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From Gallup.Com: Americans’ Confidence in the Medical System on the Rebound …
Forty percent of Americans now express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the U.S. medical system, the third consecutive year confidence has increased since the all-time low of 31% in 2007. Americans’ confidence in HMOs is higher than in recent years but still low, at 19%. Read more at GALLUP.com.
Be a Seed for Change 
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