Hey y’all. It’s been a big day in the enviro news world. Despite recent tumult, the EF!J Collective is on tryin’ to stay on top of everything.
The UK EF! Action Update was released today! Don’t miss it! (OH, and a little birdie told me that Kingsnorth is the word of the week up in Scotland.)
In Direct Action news from all the way over in London, England, a tent city called Democracy Village is still holdin’ it down in Parliament Square. In this little Court of Miracles, actions have spanned radical assemblies to guerilla gardening. Tomorrow, the London Mob, itself, is opening Parliament rabble-wise. The REAL State Opening of Parliament is poppin’ at 11AM sharp in olde Parliament Square, London, England. Check out democracyvillage.blogspot.com for more.
Back in the US, a beautiful urban farm tour has commenced from Eugene, Oregan. Pulling out of metropolitan despair today, the Breaking Through Concrete collective is touring their biodiesel powered bus around 14 different urban gardening sites. Check out their website at http://www.breakingthroughconcrete.com/
The reputation of Clean Coal just keeps gettin’ dirtier, as a Waste-Coal-burning coal plant in Western Pennsylvania has been charged with committing 12,000 environmental violations in the last five years. RRI Energy’s Seward Generating Station has been polluting the nearby Conemaugh River, and coalition of environmentalists including the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and PennEnvironment demand change. However, when RRI (then Reliant Energy) was sued a few years ago in Texas, the judge threw the case out, proclaiming that even though the company admitted to the pollution, there was no way that one could tell whether the specific pollution environmentalists were pointing out was actually caused by the company. RRI’s history of dirty practice all over the country, and the complicity of the law in furthering their business points to only one answer, and it aint just a lawsuit all by itself.
File the latest UN study under “Compromise” — This report, researched and published by top scientific brass, insists that economic changes must lead the charge against environmental destruction. . . economic changes such as penalties and fines against polluting corporations. Wait a second, won’t corporations compensate for fines levied against them by keeping wages low(er)? Won’t this just increase the kind of graft and bribery already inherent in the bureaucratic structure of global politics? Doesn’t this just sound like a bribe in the first place, keeping governments from nationalizing industry, essentially maintaining the status quo? OK, well that last one might be a little bit overly analytical, but whatever.
Keeping y’all updated on the BP oil spill is really hard, because this tragedy just seems to play itself out along ever-increasing levels of cover-ups and white washing. BP (more aptly named BS) just released new info explaining that the siphon hose they just set up is probably sucking up less oil than they had originally declared. Still, they’re saying that the siphon is working to catch about 2,000 of the estimated 5,000 gallons of oil spilled every day. However, that 5,000 gallons estimate is BP’s, and loads of scientists are saying BP’s estimates are grossly underestimated. Yikes!