This Is NOT From The Onion: Undercover Activist Who Exposed Animal Cruelty Is Cited For Animal Cruelty

Worthy of the most absurd of  The Onion headlines, one that would even set Orwell’s head spinning, reads Undercover Activist Who Exposed Animal Cruelty Is Cited For Animal Cruelty. The undercover activist, Taylor Radig, went undercover to document animal abuse at the Quanah Cattle Company in Kersey, Colorado. The videos she took showed employees kicking, throwing, and performing other abusive acts on young calves. After the activist group she was working with, Compassion Over Killing, released the video, employees at the cattle facility were fired.

            As the Weld County Sheriff’s Office cited three employees of the Quanah Cattle Company with misdemeanor animal cruelty, the office went on to charge Radig with the same charge. According to Lindsay Abrams in Slate:

“Radig’s failure to report the alleged abuse of the animals in a timely manner adheres to the definition of acting with negligence and substantiates the charge Animal Cruelty,” a statement signed by the sheriff explained. They’re also accusing her of having participated in the abuse. If convicted, she faces up to 18 months in jail.

This sort of reasoning on the part of the Weld County sheriff’s department would seem to indict just about any whistleblower reporting any sort of corporate criminality. The sheriff could go so far as to indict police or FBI agents that infiltrate terrorist groups or organized crime.

Colorado, where a great deal of today’s meat packing occurs, currently has no “ag-gag” laws, legal restrictions on activists or reporters that make it difficult or impossible to report animal cruelty, unsafe working conditions, or unsanitary conditions or practices at slaughterhouses and meat pacing facilities. With sheriff departments like the one in Weld County, however, it seems that the big agricultural interests don’t need them. They can just charge the whistleblowers with the crimes that they report.

From Coal Tattoo: EPA Approves Industry-Backed Selenium Rule For Kentucky

EPA approves industry-backed selenium rule for Ky.

Another blog from Ken Ward and his Coal Tattoo. Apparently bowing to pressure from the coal industry, the EPA is allowing Kentucky to lower the standards of how selenium is measured in streams.

            Surface mining for coal, particularly mountaintop removal, raises the level of selenium in nearby streams, and this can harm ecosystems. West Virginia wants weaker standards. We'll see if the same thing happens there.

UPDATE 12/13/13: Today the Sierra Club, along with other community and environmental groups sued the EPA to keep these weaker standards in Kentucky from going forward. The text of the full complaint can be found here.

From Coal Tattoo: Coal’s ‘Bad Arguments’ On Climate Change Rules

Coal’s ‘bad arguments’ on climate change rules

It may seem like a stretch to connect the dots between the destruction of the mountains in West Virginia with the deadly havoc unleashed upon the Philippines by Typhoon Haiyan. But those billions of tons of coal that have been removed from the Appalachians have been turned into CO2 and make up a portion of the greenhouse gasses that are warming our planet. And a warmer planet makes way for more unstable and destructive weather.

Less that a year after Typhoon Bopha, which killed 1,900, and faced with the deaths and destruction of Haiyan and the possibility of ever more destruction from future extreme weather events, the Filipinos are calling for action. Naderev “Yeb” Sano, the Philippines’ representative to the United Nations’ current round of climate change talks is quoted in U.S. News & World Report as saying:

To anyone who continues to deny the reality that is climate change, I dare you to get off your ivory tower and away from the comfort of your armchair. I dare you to go to the islands of the Pacific, the islands of the Caribbean and the islands of the Indian ocean and see the impacts of rising sea levels; to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and the Andes to see communities confronting glacial floods, to the Arctic where communities grapple with the fast dwindling polar ice caps, to the large deltas of the Mekong, the Ganges, the Amazon, and the Nile where lives and livelihoods are drowned, to the hills of Central America that confronts similar monstrous hurricanes, to the vast savannas of Africa where climate change has likewise become a matter of life and death as food and water becomes scarce. Not to forget the massive hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard of North America.

And if that is not enough, you may want to pay a visit to the Philippines right now.

Sano added, “What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness. We can stop this madness.”

As Ken Ward in his Coal Tattoo blog points out in the above link, Sano will not be able to count on Joe Manchin and the other politicians in West Virginia, who continue to deny or ignore climate change. The powers that be in the Mountain State keep on wanting to dig up all the coal and turn it into carbon dioxide no matter what.

This kind of destruction, Appalachian mountaintop removal

Gives you this kind of destruction, Typhoon Haiyan image from theaustralian.com

The Mountaintop Removal Word For the Day: Thwart

Thwart is the word for the day, when it comes to mountaintop removal.

According to this story from The Hill, the GOP in the House of Representatives is set to thwart efforts by the Interior Department to reset environmental standards that protect Appalachian streams from the harmful effects of mountaintop mining.

Under president George W. Bush, the Interior Department rewrote a section of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act to do away with the 100-foot buffer zone rule. That rule restricted mining companies from dumping mining waste and overburden to areas 100 feet or more from rivers and streams. The proposed legislation, H.R. 2824, would keep the present administration from reinstating that rule and returning the regulation to what it was before George W. Bush entered the White House. The Hill says that the bill, called “Preventing Government Waste and Protecting Coal Mining Jobs in America,” will likely pass the House Natural Resources Committee. If it becomes law, regulating the areas where mining companies can dump their waste would be given over to the individual states, with their tradition of more lax regulation and oversight giving way to the federal rule.

The second example of thwarting comes from my old college town of Huntington. According to Huntington’s Herald Dispatch newspaper, an Energy and Natural Resource Symposium, sponsored by the Huntington Regional Chamber of Commerce, is to be held at a conference center at Huntington’s Saint Mary’s Hospital. Robert M. (Mike) Duncan, president and CEO for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an organization set up by the coal industry to promote coal and coal mining, is to give the keynote address.

            The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OHVEC), a nonprofit that has worked for decades to end or mitigate mountaintop removal, has planned a rally in opposition to the hospital hosting the event. The hospital is seeking an injunction to thwart the efforts of the environmental group. The hospital says that it seeks the injunction to prevent disruption to its normal functions. The environmental group says, however, that disrupting the hospital is not their goal, as reported in the Herald Dispatch:

Janet Keating, OHVEC's executive director, said the rally is based on the principle that it's inappropriate for a facility meant to heal to host an event promoting coal mining, which numerous medical studies have linked to health problems.

“There's been a lot of silence from our state leaders about these health studies and the impacts on communities around coal,” Keating said. “It's a mystery to me why a hospital would want to host this. Our whole thing is, ‘Let's not have it at a hospital, where you're supposed to be helping people.’”

She said the organization has a reputation for peaceful protests and those who join the rally will be asked to remain on the sidewalks outside the property, which is located near the corner of 5th Avenue and 29th Street.

“We had no intention to be on their property or at the hospital,” she said.

As Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette, who gets a big hat tip for leading me onto this story from Huntington, points out in his blog, Coal Tattoo, there is something a little funny about a hospital hosting a function for an industry whose mining practices have been shown in a larger and larger body of studies to contribute to the ill health of the residents who live among the mines.

UPDATE 11/12/13: The judge in this case, Paul T. Farrell has denied the restraining order sought by the hospital. I guess you can only thwart so much.

UPDATE 11/14/13: The House Natural Resources Committee approved H.R. 2824. 

Yes, Virginia, There Is Global Warming: Reality-Based Democrat Defeats Science Denying GOP Candidate

This is an interesting take on the governor’s race in Virginia, in which Democrat Terry McAuliffe defeated the GOP tea party candidate Ken Cuccinelli in a narrow race. In this piece from the Guardian the British newspaper considers the role that global warming, and in particular, climate change denial had on the election results.

            While McAuliffe has acknowledged global warming and even made it a central part of his campaign, Cuccinelli has done all he could to stymie effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. As Virginia’s Attorney General he joined a lawsuit in Texas that claimed that the EPA lacked the authority to regulate tailpipe emissions. He also used his position of Attorney General in a strategy of harassment demanding all the personal emails of Michael Mann, a well-known physicist and climatologist, during his six-year tenure at the University of Virginia. Mann claims, I think rightly, that the effort to grab all those emails was simply an attempt to find something, even if it were only one teensy-weensy thing, to embarrass Mann.

            The piece in the Guardian acknowledges that this was not a single-issue election, but I believe that they are tapping into something that the domestic press has yet to delve into. Much about the tea party and Obamacare was mentioned on NPR this morning when they reported this story, but there was nothing about global warming or Cuccinelli’s harassment of Mann. And I haven't found anything else in the U.S. press that mentions global warming in relation to this story.

Big Surprise: Tea Partiers Don't Believe in Global Warming

This is more unsurprising news. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, it turns out that folks who identify themselves with the tea party are more likely to deny or question the existence of global warming, with only 25 percent of this faction of the GOP saying that global warming is a reality. That stands in stark contrast to the 67 percent of Americans (including 61 percent of Republicans) who say they believe that the world is warming.

            My guess about this is that tea party folks are twofold: First, it seems to me that many in the tea party are prone to believing fantastical unreal things. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, despite evidence to the contrary; Barack Obama is a Socialist, despite evidence to the contrary; Barack Obama is a Muslim, despite evidence to the contrary. Many in the tea party believe this stuff. Second, the folks who say they are in the tea party are more likely to get their “news” from Fox News, which has done really questionable reporting on climate change, as well as from talk radio, which can be even worse when it comes to global warming and mendacity.

            Given their disproportionate influence on the GOP, as well as the rest of our politics—remember these folks brought you the partial government shutdown—the misinformation and ignorance on the climate that the tea party embraces is even more destructive and dangerous than their partial government shutdown.

On Global Warming Australia Gets Plenty of Bad Press

Sorry to have let the blog posts drop off during October. I’ve been pretty busy working on some restoration projects (more about this in later blogs).

            Anyway, I noticed this story yesterday in the Guardian. An analysis of Australia’s press coverage of global warming reveals that one third of that nation’s news media rejects the science of climate change. This is head spinningly astounding. The Australians have always impressed me as being particularly reasonable folks. But the Guardian explains that:

A study of 602 articles in 10 newspapers found that 32% dismissed or questioned whether human activity was causing the climate to change. The articles were analyzed between February and April in 2011 and again in the same period in 2012.Significantly, newspapers based a small fraction of their coverage on peer-reviewed science, instead relying heavily on comment pieces penned by writers without a scientific background.

If there is someone or something blameworthy here, the Guardian lays it squarely with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which has increasingly treated the subject of global warming in opinion pieces rather than straightforward news coverage. The report, which was conducted by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, a non-profit organization based at the University of Technology in Sydney, said that, “By turning climate science into a debate, skepticism occupies space in Australian non-skeptic media that might otherwise be given to articles covering climate science.” Murdoch also owns Fox News in this country, which is pretty infamous for their questionable coverage of global warming.

Of course, things like this have consequences. Perhaps this had something to do with Australia’s last elections, in which the electorate voted out the Labor Party and replaced them with a two-party center-right coalition, whose leader, Tony Abbott, voiced as one of his objectives the end to Australia’s carbon tax.

Knowing this about the press coverage in Australia, the election starts to makes sense. If enough folks read in their newspapers that global warming is at best an iffy proposition, they will vote to rid themselves of a carbon tax. There is much more to the election than this one tax issue, but I’m certain that it played some part in the outcome.