White House Mafia Blog

Article: Laying Waste to the Deep Sea

From the Thursday, Dec. 13, 2007, Time Magazine:

Laying Waste to the Deep Sea
By Ken Stier

Far out on the high seas, on any given day, hundreds of fishing vessels drag huge nets, big enough to snag a 747 jumbo jet, across the ocean bottom, vacuuming up 150-year-old fish, flattening ancient reefs and destroying everything else in their paths.

Only the biodiversity of tropical rainforests rivals that of the deep sea — our planet's largest wilderness — an aquatic wonderland that is now being systematically razed by what is likely the world's most environmentally destructive business.

Yet Another Way Bush Promotes Environmental Destruction

(click image for larger view -- in popup window)

“A parting gift to the coal industry from this administration.”

August 23, 2007
Rule to Expand Mountaintop Coal Mining
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 — The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.

It has been used in Appalachian coal country for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion.

The new rule would allow the practice to continue and expand...

Article: This Land Was My Land

"The George W. Bush public lands legacy. If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line — the place is yours. Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death."

From the June 23, 2007, New York Times:

Guest Columnist
This Land Was My Land
By TIMOTHY EGAN

MOUNT HOOD, Ore. Most Americans don’t own a summer home on Cape Cod, or a McMansion in the Rockies, but they have this birthright: an area more than four times the size of France. If you’re a citizen, you own it — about 565 million acres.

Article and Links - Not Buying It

The New York Times
June 21, 2007
Not Buying It
By STEVEN KURUTZ

ON a Friday evening last month, the day after New York University’s class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of Third Avenue North, an N.Y.U. dormitory on Third Avenue and 12th Street. They had come to take advantage of the university’s end-of-the-year move-out, when students’ discarded items are loaded into big green trash bins by the curb.

Article: How Many Scientists?

I don't know what this picture has to do with global warming, but for some reason it seemed fitting.

From the March 28, 2007, New York Times:

Op-Ed Columnist
How Many Scientists?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Sometimes you read something about this administration that is just so shameful it takes your breath away. For me, that was the March 20 article in this paper detailing how a House committee had just released documents showing “hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.”

The official, Philip A. Cooney, left government in 2005, after his shenanigans were exposed in The Times, and was immediately hired by, of course, Exxon Mobil. Before joining the White House, he was the “climate team leader” for the American Petroleum Institute, the main oil industry lobby arm.

Global Warming: Just a Theory in Bush's Amerika

From the March 27, 2007, New York Times:

Heat Invades Cool Heights Over Arizona Desert
By TIMOTHY EGAN

SUMMERHAVEN, Ariz. — High above the desert floor, this little alpine town has long served as a natural air-conditioned retreat for people in Tucson, one of the so-called sky islands of southern Arizona. When it is 105 degrees in the city, it is at least 20 degrees cooler up here near the 9,157-foot summit of Mount Lemmon.

But for the past 10 years or so, things have been unraveling. Winter snows melt away earlier, longtime residents say, making for an erratic season at the nearby ski resort, the most southern in the nation.

Article: Pig Out (animal rights)

From the March 14, 2007, New York Times

Pig Out
By NICOLETTE HAHN NIMAN

WITH some fanfare, the world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield Foods, recently announced that it intended to phase out certain cages for its breeding females. Called gestation crates, the cages virtually immobilize pigs during their pregnancies in metal stalls so narrow they are unable to turn around.

Numerous studies have documented crated sows exhibiting behavior characteristic of humans with severe depression and mental illness. Getting rid of gestation crates (already on their way out in the European Union) is welcome and long overdue, but more action is needed to end inhumane conditions at America’s hog farms.

Part II: The Great Gates Contradiction

Part 2 of 2 of the LA Times serries. See here for Part 1 of 2.

The Great Gates Contradiction

This is an interesting article from the LA Times. With one hand Bill Gates spends money improving lives and with the other he invests money destroying them. Until more of this type of contradictory behavior is exposed, people like Bill Gates, who has the power to influence major corporations such as those discussed in this article, will continue their contemptible behavior, donning their black ties at fancy dinners to accept charity awards when the source of their philanthropy is polluted.

Article: Report's stark warning on climate

From the BBC, October 2006:

Report's stark warning on climate
By Robert Peston
Business Editor, BBC News

The Stern Review says that climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen. And on the basis of this intellectually rigorous and thorough report, it is hard to disagree.

Sir Nicholas Stern, a distinguished development economist and former chief economist at the World Bank, is not a man given to hyperbole.

Yet he says "our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th Century".

His report gives prescriptions for how to minimise this economic and social disruption.