The war on bottled water

From Alternet:

In the last year, municipalities across Ontario and the rest of the country have begun taking a much-needed stand to protect local water sources. Since World Water Day in 2011, nine municipalities across Canada have become Blue Communities with many well on their way. Blue Communities are municipalities that adopt a water commons framework by: banning the sale of bottled water in public facilities and at municipal events, recognizing water as a human right, and promoting publicly financed, owned and operated water and waste-water services.

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Time to remake corporations as stewards of the planet

In the June 7, 2012 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers),Pavan Sukhdev, chief executive of environmental consulting firm GIST Advisory, offers a formula for turning corporations into environmentally responsible entities. Sukdev points out that our corporations tend to cater to rampant consumerism, and this is immensely damaging to the environment. The effects can be seen in the form of "emissions, freshwater use, pollution, waste and land-use change." Corporations have also learned to excel at "influencing government regulation, avoiding taxes and obtaining subsidies for harmful activities in order to optimize shareholder returns." [More . . . ]

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Interview of Richard Muller regarding his changed view regarding global warming

Today, Amy Goodman interviewed Richard Muller: The following excerpt is from Democracy Now:

After years of denying global warming, physicist Richard Muller now says "global warming is real and humans are almost entirely the cause." The admission by Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, has gained additional attention because some of his research has been funded by Charles Koch of the Koch Brothers, the right-wing billionaire known for funding climate skeptic groups like the Heartland Institute. "We can make the scientific case more solidly than had been made in the past," Muller claims. "I think this does say we do need to take action, we do need to do something about it."

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Elementary Election Protest Too Muchedness

For the last few weeks I'd been receiving approximately daily post cards protesting the electric company considering a rate hike of more than a few percent in order to finance and build future power plants to replace some of the nearing dangerously obsolete ones. Some mailing came from a very liberal local politician with whom I generally agree. Someone is spending bales of money to encourage people to not-want to spend more for what they are already getting. Seems like sweeping the water downstream, to me. But I'm a Tanstaafl skeptic: Rebuilding infrastructure without incurring crippling debt does not seem like such a bad idea, my knee jerks. Also, local electric rates are lower than when I was in college, when adjusted for inflation, so it seems about time for a rate hike, anyway. Yesterday I finally got a rebuttal mailing that describes the finances behind this odd campaign: PAC affiliated with aluminum corporation at play in state Senate primaries. Yep, an aluminum company fears that it will have to raise prices, because a major part of the process of making it requires megawatts of electricity. Here's how aluminum is made, if you are at all curious: So now we know who has the profitability to outspend a huge power company on a campaign to make people do what they want to do anyway, and things are making sense, again.

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Not just a hot summer

At Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben puts the hot summer into perspective:

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

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