The Media's Failure With the Biggest Story in the World
4/11/2015

...Pooley is only one of several journalists who have spoken of the failure of the media. In 2009, Joe Romm wrote that, although "our scientific understanding of business-as-usual projections for global warming has changed dramatically," the U.S. public has largely "remain[ed] in the dark about just how dire the situation is. Why? Because the U.S. media is largely ignoring the story." Romm and others have tried to capture in a phrase the size of the story the media have missed:

• Saying that 2010 had been "a stunning year in climate science," which revealed that "human civilization is on the precipice," Romm said that the media have been "missing the story of the century, if not the millennium."

• Pulitzer-prize journalist Ross Gelbspan said, "the fact that the planet is caving in around us" is "biggest story in our planet's history." (2)

• In 2014, Tom Engelhardt said . . . : "Climate change isn't the news and it isn't a set of news stories. It's the prospective end of all news."

To return to Pooley's parable: We cannot imagine that, if we knew that we had only 10 years to divert or destroy a humanity-destroying meteor heading straight at us, the governments and media would continue with business as usual. Governments, at least those with technological capabilities, would work together day and night to figure out the best approach, then provide all the needed resources - many trillions of dollars, if necessary - to prevent the destruction of human civilization.

The U.S. media would, as they did in World War II, explain the nature of the threat and why citizens will need to make sacrifices - perhaps enormous ones, because no sacrifice would be too great.

In that situation, it is possible that a contrarian movement might emerge, declaring the report about the meteor to be a scientific hoax. But if so, the media would surely not take it seriously - unless, at least, many of our best scientists agreed. Rather than spreading the contrarian story, the various news organizations would, recognizing that they had the biggest story since the beginning of human civilization, spare no expense in covering it.

However, with regard to climate change, the media - especially the American media - have acted in a very different way. Far from treating the CO2 threat as the biggest story since the beginning of civilization, they have failed to treat it as the story of the millennium, or the century, or the decade, or even the year.

Dimensions of the Media's Failure: False Balance

The U.S. media's failure to give the American people an accurate understanding of global warming and climate change has several dimensions....

Read more~
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/30006-the-media-s-failure-with-the-biggest-story-in-the-world

75,000 New Jobs to Enter Solar Workforce, Including Military Veterans
4/3/2015

Today, there are nearly 17,000 veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces who are working in the solar energy industry. Well, that number is about to grow substantially.

In a decision that’s certain to help to speed up America’s transition to a clean energy future, President Obama announced today that the Department of Energy (DOE) will launch a new initiative to train 75,000 Americans—including military veterans—to enter the solar workforce by 2020. The President made the announcement at Hill Air Force Base in Utah as part of a roundtable discussion on clean energy technology and workforce training with Sen. Orin Hatch, Congressman Rob Bishop and Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker.



This new initiative will provide a big boost to the U.S. economy, while also helping to maintain solar energy’s explosive jobs growth. I’ll make this promise: With stable public policies in place, we will not only meet the President’s goal of adding 75,000 new solar jobs in America by 2020, but we will blow past it!

Today, the solar industry already employs 174,000 workers nationwide—more than tech giants Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter combined—and pumps nearly $18 billion a year into our economy. This remarkable growth is due, in large part, to smart and effective public policies, such as the solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC), Net Energy Metering (NEM) and Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS). By any measurement, these policies are paying huge dividends for both our economy and environment.

...Every 2.5 minutes of every single day, the U.S. solar industry is helping to fight climate change by flipping the switch on another completed solar project. We’re proud that solar accounted for one-third of all new electric generation capacity last year in the U.S. And, frankly, we’re just scratching the surface of our industry’s enormous potential. As the old saying goes, the sky’s the limit.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/04/03/new-jobs-solar-veterans/

In Dry California, Thirsty Oil and Big-Ag Industries Exempt from Water Regulations
4/3/15

As California Governor Jerry Brown this week instituted the state's first-ever mandatory restrictions on water usage to combat its historic four-year drought, environmental activists are pointing out two glaring exemptions from the order: the fossil fuel and agriculture industries.

Brown's mandate, announced Wednesday, directs cities and communities to cut down their water consumption by 25 percent, but does not make any requirements of the state's numerous oil companies, including those which practice the water-heavy fracking method of extraction, nor of large-scale farming operations.



Adam Scow, California director of Food & Water Watch, also said Wednesday, "It is disappointing that Governor Brown’s executive order to reduce California water use does not address the state’s most egregious corporate water abuses. In the midst of a severe drought, the Governor continues to allow corporate farms and oil interests to deplete and pollute our precious groundwater resources that are crucial for saving water."

California's oil and gas industry uses more than 2 million gallons of fresh water a day to produce oil through fracking, acidizing, and steam injections, according to environmental estimates. In 2014, California oil producers used up nearly 70 million gallons of water on fracking alone, state officials told Reuters on Thursday.

..."Fracking and toxic injection wells may not be the largest uses of water in California," he added, "but they are undoubtedly some of the stupidest."

The bulk of Brown's mandate focuses on urban water use, which as the LA Times points out, makes up less than a quarter of the total water consumption in the state....

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/04/03/dry-california-thirsty-oil-and-big-ag-industries-exempt-water-regulations

States Fail to Properly Manage Fracking Waste, Says Groundbreaking Report
4/2/15

...The fracking boom has brought oil and gas operations into states and communities that never dealt with them before. Elected officials in those states are often beholden to those oil and gas interests, especially as the amount of money flowing into elections has multiplied exponentially. Basically, the fox is guarding the henhouse.



A new study, Wasting Away: Four states’ failure to manage oil and gas waste in the Marcellus and Utica Shale, conducted by Earthworks, explore just how inadequate state oversight of drilling operations is today. It specifically looks at four states that sit on top of the lucrative Marcellus and Utica shale deposits—New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia—to discover exactly how well they are doing in overseeing the identification and handling of the potentially hazardous waste materials left behind after the shale has been fracked.

Not very well, it found.



...“Thirty years ago the Environmental Protection Agency exempted oil and gas waste from federal classification as hazardous, not because the waste isn’t hazardous, but because EPA determined state oversight was adequate,” said report lead author and Earthworks’ eastern program coordinator Nadia Steinzor. “But our analysis shows that states aren’t keeping track of this waste or disposing of it properly. States must take realistic, concrete steps to better protect the public.”



It found all four states lacking. While it pointed out that West Virginia has adopted some new regulations and Pennsylvania is currently revising its regulations, it cited numerous shortcomings in how those states handle fracking waste. Of Ohio it said, “Even as shale gas development surges in Ohio, the state has done little to strengthen regulations and procedures related to waste management. HB59, passed in 2013, directed Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) to adopt rules for waste storage and disposal—but critical regulations have still not been put forward for public review and adoption. As a result, operators and disposal facilities have wide discretion to decide whether waste is contaminated and how to dispose of it.”

“Ohio’s land and water are at great risk from improper and under-regulated disposal of fracking wastes,” said Melanie Houston, director of water policy and environmental health at the Ohio Environmental Council. “As this report details, regulations in Ohio remain woefully inadequate when it comes to protecting human health and the environment from the radiological and chemical risks associated with fracking waste.”...

http://ecowatch.com/2015/04/02/fail-manage-fracking-waste/

A Quiet Corporate Coup on Capitol Hill
Instead of lobbying congressional staff, lobbyists are now becoming the staff.
By Jim Hightower
3/31/2015

...Few people realize that congressional staffers have gained far-reaching control over legislation. While the mass media has ignored this power shift, which further removes the people from the making of our laws, corporate lobbyists have long understood it and assiduously wooed staff members with flattery and gifts.

But then it dawned on lobbyists that instead of wooing staff, they should simply become the staff. So when Republicans took charge of the Senate in January, K Street lobbyists moved right into the Capitol Hill offices of the new corporate-hugging majority.



What a sight to see Tom Chapman, a former top lobbyist for US Airways, now sitting atop the legal staff of the Senate aviation panel that oversees — guess who? — US Airways.

And there’s Joel Leftwich, who pushed furiously to water down nutrition standards for school lunches as a senior lobbyist for Pepsico. Now he can do it directly as the new staff director for the Senate Agriculture Committee, which will re-write the school lunch funding law this year....

http://otherwords.org/a-quiet-corporate-coup-on-capitol-hill/