ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Credit: Bazuki Muhammad / Reuters
ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling, and energy dependence are overblown.
Overblown? Are you serious?
In a speech Wednesday, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will be able to adapt.
Yes, we will be able to adapt. However, many people’s version of adapting is on the other end of the spectrum from Tillerson’s idea of adapting. Tillerson, in a break with predecessor Lee Raymond, has acknowledged that global temperatures are rising. “Clearly there is going to be an impact,” he said Wednesday. “We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.”
Today, the Sierra Club is gathering with allies from around the country to encircle the White House with 5,000 people and rally against tar sands. Can’t make it to D.C.? Be one of the 5,000 links in the virtual chain to stop the dirty Keystone XL pipeline!
I just returned home from a business/vacation trip to Seattle WA. While there, I took a side trip to do some whale watching off of the San Juan Islands near Anacortes WA. I had to catch the ferry in Anacortes, and while en route, I passed the Shell Oil Refinery (owned by Tesoro Corp). It was a horrible eye-sore… belching pollutants in the air, and who knows what else into the surrounding waters. The steel tower monoliths all lit up pointing to the sky paying homage to mans dependency upon oil. The crude containers all in line like sentinels protecting the block gold they held.
While out on the waters, I was blessed to watch the Orca’s and the porpoises playing, leaping out of the waters, and simply just being the magnificent creatures that they are. Sea Lions laid on the rocks in herds (or is it called a “raft”?). Witnessed a Bald Eagle eating a delicious lunch of fish caught from the bay, to be joined by a juvenile Bald Eagle. The Harbor Seals curiously watching us “oh-ing and aw-ing”, snapping thousands of pictures. The water fowl soaring ever so gracefully just inches above the water in search of their next bite of food. To me, I was in natures Nirvana. (Please see my pictures below.)
I have always loved wildlife and supported many environmental groups. But it was not until I actually was able to experience the wildlife that was I truly able to absorb the reality of our dependence upon oil while driving by the Anacortes refinery.
We have put man on the moon. At each of our fingertips, we have access to the world via the internet. Anyone can carry a cell phone and call, or text, anyone else from most places at any time. We have a space station where we can (well, used to) fly men in and out of with a reusable space craft known as the space shuttle.
Yet why can we not use alternative clean energy? I have a hard time believing that our technology is incapable of creating an inexpensive engine for our cars which does not require petro to run. Are we that bound to those with the money and power that our wildlife is left to suffer and eventually die off? Yes, I drive a mini-van which gets about 20 mpg simply because I haul my dogs for agility. I feel as though I am a hypocrite driving this gas-guzzling vehicle – but yet I have no option. There are more fuel-efficient autos around, but they are priced out of my budget, yet they still function on unclean energy resources – just not as badly (like that really helps ease the pain). People like the Koch Brothers, the oil companies, and that genre need to stop running our country from “behind the curtain.” It is with their power and wealth they control what is designed and invented. We have the technology to create vehicles powered with alternative clean energy, but if we do so, these power and money rich companies will stand to lose all they have built.
And in the meantime, our environment and wildlife loses all they have built. Remember, these creatures below all share the same waters as the refinery in Anacortes WA.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has the ability to stop Koch Industries, Inc. from profiting off a pipeline that would carry the dirtiest oil on Earth through six states, one of America’s most important aquifers and almost 2,000 miles of American homes and farmland.
Environmental Defence has released a report calling the Alberta Oil Sands the most destructive project on Earth.
Few Canadians know that Canada is home to one of the world’s largest dams and it is built to hold toxic waste from just one Tar Sands operation,” Rick Smith, the executive director of Environmental Defence.
Pick Up America is a local, regional, and nationwide initiative committed to reducing plastic waste in our communities and waterways. The Pick Up Artists will coordinate community trash clean-ups while walking across the country to encourage alternatives to our nation’s throwaway mentality. The two year trek began on March 20, 2010 from Assateague Island, MD., and will span 13 states to the San Francisco Bay, Calif., sometime in November 2011.
There are 7 volunteers who are doing the entire cross country walk. Along the way, many local volunteers walk along, help pick up and bag the trash. The bags are left alongside there road where the following day, the state’s highway DOT will come by and pick up the bags.
The volunteers seperate the garbage as they go into recycling items which are taken to the local recycling areas. Each bag is weighed so they will have a total amount of trash picked up by the end of their journey.
Most common item is platic bottles, followed by cans, plastic bags and beer bottles. Also common are tires… everywhere.
Mission: Walk across the country, pick up trash, and inspire a transition to zero waste.
One of the goals is to help connect the churches with businesses with students and with environmental organizations. The biggest item is to help build coalitions pushing towards zero waste. To help transition where we are at a place where we’re not taking resources straight from the earth, using them once, then landfilling them.
Most importantly, Pick Up America is trying to get people to understand why we are producing so much trash in the first place.
Let’s all work together in transitioning to a country of zero waste.
Thank you, Pick Up America, for helping build awareness towards our environment and waste problems.
After twenty years of silence Charles Manson speaks … about the environment. Discussing topics such as President Obama and Wall Street, he emphasizes his concerns for global warming. Manson has gathered yet another group of followers, this time agreeing with his thoughts towards saving the environment, our ‘one world.’ ABC News reports:
Manson, who was convicted 40 years ago in the gruesome murders of eight people — among them the pregnant actress Sharon Tate — also talked about killings and his group of followers who came to be known as the “Manson family.”
Manson: ‘I’m a Bad Man’
Other comments revealed the familiar, chilling Manson.
“I am a bad man. I’m nasty. I’m in the bull ring. I don’t play. I shoot people … I’m an outlaw. I’m a criminal. I’m everything bad,” he said.
Murdered on Aug. 9, 1969, were Tate — who was the wife of film director Roman Polanski — and their houseguests, Jay Sebring, a hairstylist; heiress Abigail Folger; writer Wojciech Frykowski and teenager Steven Parent. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were killed the next day.
All the victims were brutally stabbed to death.
Manson didn’t carry out any of the killings during a two-day rampage in Southern California, but he was sentenced to death for ordering the murders.
In the middle of the interview, Manson began to ramble in Spanish.
“I’m very mal hombre, nasty,” he said, meaning “bad man.”
He added, “La mala hierba nunca muere,” a take on a Spanish phrase that translates as “a weed never dies,” which can be taken to mean that the devil looks after his own.
Asked by the reporter if Manson knew Spanish, Manson replied: “Muy poco, muy poco,” or “very little, very little.”
Manson said he learned Spanish from his fellow prisoners.
Environmental Defence
