From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/21-3
by Peter Rugh
Published on Saturday, April 21, 2012 by Common Dreams
Earth is melting down like a nuclear reactor. At current rates of warming, Arctic sea ice will melt away by 2030. According to the UN's environmental program, countries' current greenhouse gas emissions pledges for the year 2020 would put them on par with current global levels, not enough to prevent the planet warming by at least 2C by the end of the century. Nasa climate scientist James Hansen has described such a rise as “a prescription for disaster”, leading to an increase of droughts, floods and other forms of extreme weather. Some estimates project a rise upwards of 6C by 2100.
On April 21st and 22nd, Occupy Wall Street activists will hold a series of rallies and non-violent civil disobediences against corporate-induced climate change taking grassroots action to reclaim Earth Day from the greenwashing interests of the 1%.
Earth Day, established in 1970 to celebrate and advocate for our shared planet, has become a shopping scheme. Nowhere is this clearer than in New York City. At EarthDayNY.org visitors to the website can download a “passport to green New York” which various retailers in the five boroughs will stamp for them. Twelve stamps and passport holders could win a 40” flat screen television from Toshiba. For $10,000 corporations can show off their supposed green credentials while competing for green dollars with a booth inside Grand Central Station's Vanderbilt Hall. The event is sponsored by Home Depot, an importer of rainforest wood and by ConEdison, which paid zilch in taxes for 2011 and continues to source electricity from coal and from Entergy Corp.'s precarious Indian Point nuclear plant. Also on the corporate sponsor list—Rupert Murdoch's New York Post.
The latest environmental expert on Murdoch's Fox News, “birther” Brian Sussman, claimed this week the green movement was “concocted in the minds of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.” Paranoid for America's resources rather than concerned the future of earth, Sussman calls for increased domestic oil and gas drilling, the hoarding of water, and for 100, “100% clean” new nuclear reactors to be built in the US.
There is nothing clean about nuclear power. One merely has to look at the ongoing disaster at Fukushima. Furthermore, many corporations, such as Southern, who run nuclear plants also run coal-burning plants. Fossil fuels are used in every part of the nuclear process, particularly in the extraction and transport of uranium. Recently, Entergy Corp. paid a $1.2 million penalty to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation for violating the Clean Water Act, after a transformer at Indian Point exploded in 2010, spewing 10,000 gallons of petrol into the Hudson River.
Continue reading at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/21-3
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