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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

31 Aug - A Climate of Change

Per capita anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissi...Image via Wikipedia

Proposition 23, Anti-Environment 'California Jobs Initiative', Is Funded By Big Polluters In Texas And The Midwest

Proposition 23, the so-called "California Jobs Initiative" threatening to suspend some of California's unprecedented clean air and renewable energy legislation, is raking in millions of dollars from Texas oil companies and special interest groups in the Midwest that stand to profit from rolled-back environmental regulation.
The initiative, which is to be voted on in California's upcoming November elections, aims to suspend clean air and energy laws under the "Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006" until California's unemployment rate falls below 5.5 percent for a full year. But this might take a while, considering that the state's recession-induced unemployment rate currently hovers around 12.3 percent.
While the proposition claims to be about creating jobs in California, its biggest financial backers are Texas oil companies, including Valero and Tesoro Corporations, who have donated $4 million and $525,000, respectively, to the initiative.

5 Ways Food Labels Try to Fool You

Here are five of the most common misleading food-labeling terms, and how you can outsmart the marketers:

1. “No added growth hormones.”
2. “Natural”
3. “Grass-fed”
4. “Antibiotic free”
5. Nutrition info

Misperceived Paths to Energy Savings

Serious deficiencies highlighted by  results estimation and ranking tasks suggest that well-designed efforts to improve the public’s understanding of energy use and savings could pay large dividends. The take-home conclusion is that if the United States is to harvest what some analysts have called a “behavioral wedge” of hundreds of millions of avoidable tons of greenhouse gas emissions (and wasted energy), a vital prerequisite is boosting energy literacy. 

 Weather forecasting 'degraded' 

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/cbc/100831/canada/canada_saskatchewan_sk_weather_report_environment_canada

Degradation in Environment Canada's Network, Quality Control and Data Storage Practices: A Call to Repair the Damage. It is dated June 2008.

An edited copy was obtained by the Pembina Institute and relayed to media outlets. According to the Alberta-based energy and climate-change policy institute, the 72-page document was written by officials in Environment Canada.

It details a number of deficiencies in the collection of weather data, and notes that automatic weather monitoring stations, of which there are thousands, can be unreliable. "A typical month saw over 100 stations whose data was missing and had to be recovered,"

 

Costa Rica: The lowest form of military aggression
http://www.voltairenet.org/article166851.html 

On 1 July 2010, Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly authorized the U.S. military to undertake policing duties in Costa Rica, based on an expired “Cooperation Agreement.” There is only one small problem: Costa Rica abolished its armed forces in 1949 and since then has had no standing army, national or foreign. Lawyer and Right to Peace advocate, Zamora Bolaños, analyses the repercussions of this overturn - officially to fight drug trafficking - for his country and its ramifications for the region. 

In 1949, after its last internal conflicts, Costa Rica established a new republic. The Constitution prohibited an army and delegated the power to “monitor and maintain public order” exclusively to civilian police forces. The country became a leader in promoting human rights and the American Convention on Human Rights was signed in San Jose, Costa Rica in 1969.

Later the Cold War turned hot in Central America and spread throughout the isthmus. In the middle of pressure from the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and the contras (counter-revolutionary forces) trained by the CIA, then-President Luis Alberto Monge proceeded in November of 1983 to declare the permanent, unarmed neutrality of Costa Rica vis a vis the violent conflicts of other nations. This enabled the country to maintain peace in the midst of the wars and conflicts of its neighbors, and to continue to develop within a region that was collapsing. 

The permission granted by the legislature to the United States military is based on an agreement for joint maritime patrols between the U.S. and Costa Rica that expired in October 2009. This permit that ended in 2009 only allow for Coast Guard patrols and never authorized the entry of the United States military personnel and only covered coast guard missions.

Despite the legal limitations in the country, and despite a constitutional obligation to invest only civilian police with the duties of monitoring and enforcing our public order, the submissive legislative assembly–dominated by the ruling parties–is allowing the U.S. military to play war games on our sovereign land as if it were a game of chess.

 

Translation: Verona Fonte
Source: Americas Program
Luis Roberto Zamora Bolaños is a Costa Rican trial lawyer. He has litigated in promoting the Right to Peace, achieving constitutional recognition in 2008. Prior to that, he successfully went to the Supreme Court to force his country to withdraw the support given to the coalition invasion of Iraq. Since 2005 he has participated in forums and conferences in promoting the Right to Peace.

 Florida Oil Spill Law

 The Rag Blog

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 Global Post

 

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