TAKE ACTION! Oil shale deposits across 17,000 square miles of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming hold an estimated 800 billion barrels of oil, more than three times Saudi Arabia's stated reserves. Both mining and processing of oil shale involve a variety of environmental impacts. The process produces four times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions compared to normal oil production. Vast amounts of water are required in the mining process, up to 4 barrels of water for every barrel of oil.
It would be a reckless and short-sighted to allow full-scale commercial production of synthetic crude oils from oil shale and other non-conventional sources. Wide scale use of such oil will result in decades of further carbon emissions from dependence upon fossil fuels, making it impossible to stop climate change. Please send a message today to the U.S. Department of Energy noting that a sustainable energy future does not include oil shale. TAKE ACTION!
January 2008 Archives
Despite 80% growth in carbon trading [ark] in the past year, including windfall profits [ark] for some, carbon markets have yet to lead to actual emission reductions. Indeed, carbon and other emissions continue to soar [ark | search].
As I have written previously, while profiting from efforts to reduce emissions may be useful to some degree, the cap and trade approach is by no means sufficient [ark]. At some point emissions need to be reduced at a cost to society because it is necessary and the right thing to do.
A much more suitable and less complex market based approach to reducing emissions quickly is a global carbon tax [search]. Such an approach need not be onerous, as Climate Ark's Lincoln Plan demonstrates. If is far preferable in terms of rapidly and clearly setting a price on carbon [search] to tax energy sources according to their carbon content than to expect carbon markets to do so. While carbon markets may have a role, we simply do not have time for them to develop to bring about necessary major emission reductions. We know a carbon tax will reduce emissions.
New research indicates annual loss from the Antarctic ice sheet has surged [ark | more\ark] by 75 percent in a decade as a result of global warming. The study by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory [ark] appears in the Journal "Nature Geoscience" and is described as the most comprehensive to date on the status of Antarctic ice sheets. Using extensive measurements by radar they found in 2006 some 192 billion tonnes of Antarctic ice was lost [search] into the sea from narrow glacier outlets.
While there has been little scientific doubt that Greenland's ice is melting [search], there has been more uncertainty over the fate of the larger stores of ice on Antarctica. Until now there has been no consensus whether ice cover is growing, shrinking, or stable -- and various studies have had conflicting results. Some have suggested increased precipitation was leading to the accumulation of ice, a finding contradicted by this new study.
