February 8: MEP Godfrey Bloom apologises; Britain could save £12bn of public spending over four years - report by WWF, the The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Greenpeace; Australia is launching research flagship for sustainable agriculture
This is part of a trial series
British Member of the European Parliament, Godfrey Bloom, was filmed at the climate change summit in Copenhagen congratulating the French for bombing the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior. Later Mr Bloom said he had forgotten that one man was killed and French secret service agents were convicted of manslaughter after the bombing, reports The Australian. Greenpeace, that demanded an apology to the crew of the Rainbow Warrior and the Pereira family, got the reply from Bloom "We can disagree about climate change without celebrating the killing of a man." He also told Radio New Zealand "I am very very sorry, my belated deep condolences to him and his family. I think it's a great shame that you lose any innocent lives in something like this, I deeply regret that," Mr Bloom said.
Ministers in Britain could save £12bn of public spending over four years by clamping down on tax breaks and support for polluting oil exploration, cement, aluminium and transport, according to a report from WWF, the The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Greenpeace. Doug Parr, Greenpeace's chief scientist, said: "Britain can be a world leader in renewable technologies and low-carbon transport but only if we stop bailing out the dirty industries of the 20th century."
Executive director of Greenpeace in Argentina, Martin Prieto, was featured in an article about the pollution, sanitation and waste management problems, as well as electronic waste in the La Matanza-Rachuela region saying "We should not be surprised to know the figures for the health of the population of the basin. The bodies of people living in it, badly deteriorated as a result of lacking basic sanitation (safe water and sewers) are easy targets for industrial pollution to which they are exposed daily. ". The Environment Secretary Chairman thinks it will be a difficult task to tackle as many social actors will need to contribute.
Greenpeace is present at the European Competitiveness Council in San Sebastian, Spain, from February 7 to 9, stressing that having more electric cars in the future wont make any difference if the electricity to charge them comes from not renewable energy sources.
In general environmental news The Associated Press reports, a plant under construction powered by natural gas blew apart yesterday in Middleton Pennsylvania killing at least five people.
Today, Iran plans to notify the International Atomic Energy Agency of plans to enrich its stockpile of uranium to power a medical reactor, a senior Iranian official said, accelerating the brinkmanship over its nuclear program by moving the country closer to producing weapons-grade fuel.
Brazilian officials and environmentalists agree that cattle ranching is the biggest cause of deforestation of the nation's Amazon, an area the size of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River, about 20 percent of which has been destroyed.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) faces new challenges following a call for an investigation of its conduct and for its chairman to resign amid continuing criticism of the scientific basis of its reports, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Sea Shepherd activists and Japanese harpoonists have blamed each other for a collision between their ships in Antarctic waters, as the environmentalists warned yesterday of more clashes to come. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has accused the harpoon ship Yushin Maru No 3 of intentionally slamming into its vessel the Bob Barker on Saturday. The Japanese say they were rammed as they tried to avoid a collision.
Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has set its sights on increasing the nation's agricultural productivity by 50 per cent, while cutting carbon emissions by the same amount. Australia's leading scientific organisation on Monday launched its newest research flagship program into sustainable agriculture. Its goal is to work out how to secure the nation's agriculture and forest industries by increasing productivity by 50 per cent, while also reducing carbon emissions intensity by at least that much between now and 2030.
Reuters reports, Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $2.4 trillion to $24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday."Everybody around the world is going to bear these costs," said Eban Goodstein, a resource economist at Bard College in New York state who co-authored the report which was reviewed by more than a dozen scientists and economists and funded by the Pew Environment Group, an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts, provides a first attempt to monitor the cost of the loss of one of the world's great weather makers.
Severely opposing the entry of Bt brinjal into the Indian market, an all-party roundtable conducted by the Krishna District Rythu Sangham on Sunday passed a resolution demanding that a decision on the GE brinjal must be taken only after a thorough research by the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR).
The whales have been making the headlines, singing the same old tune, but the pitch of the blues is mysteriously lower - especially off the coast of California where, local researchers say, the whales' voices have dropped by more than half an octave since the 1960s. They are also being blamed for the herring population crash in Alaska. One hypothesis is that humpbacks, traditionally summer residents in the sound, are taking a big bite out of vast herring schools that form in the deep water of the sound's fjords each autumn, but this is also merely a snapshot and the biologists say that more research is needed.
(Picture credit: Copyright Greenpeace/Rainbow Warrior, sunk by two underwater mines placed by agents of the French Government in Marsden Wharf, New Zealand)
Follow Greenpeace »
