Happy Day of the Dead!

If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections are correct, there will be many more dead to celebrate in the near future, because the people of this planet are not doing nearly enough to solve our global emissions problems. Failure to reduce emissions, the group of scientists and other experts found, could threaten society with …

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Oh man, these guys are dumb

We all know that state legislatures are often the stepping stones for ambitious pols who want to go work at the Capitol Building in DC (3 of 7 Democrats running this year for US District One in Honolulu are State Senators or Representatives; another 3 are City Councilmembers). It’s often useful to point out how …

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Another candidate slips on climate change banana peel

Senator Marco Rubio is either a damned fool or a panderer to his party’s more rabid base. I’m voting for the former. ABC’s Jonathan Karl pressed Rubio on his belief that humans don’t have anything to do with global warming. “But let me get this straight, you do not think that human activity, its production …

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How Wolves Changed An Entire Ecosystem

Link to the video: How Wolves Changed An Entire Ecosystem. The reintroduction of wolves changed many many things in Yellowstone, as the video shows. Yet the National Fish and Wildlife Service wants to remove gray wolves from the Endangered Species list. They initially put the new rule up for public comment last year and from …

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Keystone Pipeline follies

Today the US Department of State issued its final Environmental Impact Statement on the construction of this “death funnel,” as Charlie Pierce calls it. “Approval or denial of any one crude oil transport project, including the proposed Project, is unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands or the continued demand …

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Chemical pollution in West Va.

Is anyone really surprised that part of the reason the chemical spill occurred in West Virginia was that the state is very lax in regulating or inspecting industry? It’s the same reason that fertilizer plant in Texas blew up back in April of last year. There are too few Federal inspectors for the workload they’ve …

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Molasses answer

It turns out that the molasses currently killing marine life in Honolulu Harbor is a product of Maui’s sugar harvest. HC&S — which operates Hawaii’s last sugar plantation — produces the molasses as a by-product of sugar and Matson brings [it] from Maui to Honolulu Harbor by barge. “We’ve been pumping molasses for thirty years,” …

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Fish (and crab, and eel, and . . . ) kill

This is sickening, and it’s also puzzling. Apparently some 1600-2000 tons of molasses is shipped from Honolulu to Oakland every week. A pipeline broke under the harbor and spilled 233,000 gallons into the water. The stuff is so viscous it sank immediately to the bottom and sucked all the oxygen out of the water, resulting …

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