Global Warming Issues

Senate lawmakers remained deadlocked on Tuesday over legislation to rein in excessive energy speculation, as they haggled over adding amendments to the bill.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday gave Republicans a chance to offer four amendments to the bill, including a measure expanding offshore oil drilling.

A spokesman for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said the deal was not rejected, but that lawmakers are still working on a deal. Calling Reid’s offer “good progress,” he said they hope to have a deal by the end of this week.

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Republicans on Wednesday pressured congressional Democrats for a vote to lift a ban on offshore drilling before Congress begins its summer recess.
The partisan fight over offshore drilling has stalled efforts to pass legislation meant to lower high gas prices before Congress adjourns for its monthlong break at the end of the week.

Most Republicans want to lift a 1981 ban on offshore drilling, saying it will increase domestic oil supplies. But the Democratic leadership wants to keep the ban in place, arguing that more offshore drilling will have little effect on prices and could threaten the environment.

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We need a new John McCain, one who throws overboard some worn-out ideas he has been toting around, and — with fire in his eyes, his belly and his rhetoric — would give an energy speech something along these lines:

“My fellow Americans, we are facing a crisis that could cripple our industry while lowering our standard of living to something that will make today’s travails seem puny by comparison.

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The work, recently published in the Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science magazine and financed by the Euro-Mediterranean Institute of Water, represents the first data-based assessment of the vulnerability of the lagoon’s entire coastal ecosystem to a probable environmental change and eutrophication. According to the researchers, it is “essential” to know the interactions between the processes for identifying future impacts and establishing effective coastal planning and management measures.

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The study, co-authored by Florida Museum of Natural History researchers Michael Kirby, Douglas Jones and Bruce MacFadden, is published in the July 30 issue of PLoS ONE, the online journal of the Public Library of Science. The study uses geologic, chemical and biologic methods to date rocks and fossils found in sides of the Gaillard Cut of the Panama Canal. The results show that instead of being formed by rising and subsiding ocean levels or existing as a string of islands as scientists previously believed, the Isthmus of Panama was first a peninsula of southern Central America before the underlying tectonic plates merged it with South America 4 million years ago.

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Five states intend to sue the Environmental Protection Agency if it does not act soon to reduce pollution from ships, aircraft and off-road vehicles.

In a letter that California Attorney General Jerry Brown was to send Thursday to the EPA, the five states and New York City accuse the Bush administration of ignoring their requests to set restrictions.

“It’s a necessary pressure to get the job done,” Brown said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press. “The issue of reducing our energy dependence and greenhouse gas emissions is so challenging and so important that we have to follow this judicial pathway.”

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When it comes to air pollution, there’s oil and there’s oil. And then there is bunker fuel, the dirty, tarlike oil ocean-going ships burn.

Emissions from bunker fuel are a major source of the soot-like particles that aggravate respiratory diseases and cause cancer. An estimated 600 Californians die prematurely every year from breathing pollution emitted by dirty ships. But for years, the shipping industry has successfully resisted international efforts to force them to reduce pollution.

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