President Obama stood up to Big Oil and its puppets in Congress and denied a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline yesterday. This is encouraging news for the communities whose air and water would have been directly threatened by this pipeline, from Canada to Nebraska to the Gulf Coast. And it's an important piece of the struggle to avert a runaway climate catastrophe. But since the Keystone XL has become a pitched political battle, this announcement is also an encouraging affirmation of the power of people, creative protest, and grassroots organizing in the face of the entrenched power and big bucks of the oil industry.

Puntung is a Sumatran rhino, one of roughly two hundred left in the world.

Large-scale tusk smuggling has reached a record high this year, with at least 2,500 dead elephants used for ivory.
Organised criminals - particularly Asian syndicates - are increasingly involved in the illegal trade, according to environmental agency Traffic.
Experts believe it has been the worst year for the endangered animals since sales of ivory were banned in 1989.

PANAJI: Against the backdrop of public apprehensions over the Regional Plan (RP) 2021, the archbishop of Goa, Filipe Neri Ferrao, on Thursday reminded Goa government leaders including chief minister Digambar Kamat and cabinet ministers of "the duty to tend the earth and to be responsible stewards of God's creation".

No roast turkey with cracklin’ brown skin graced the groaning boards. Nor was there a pat of butter in sight to slather on the rolls, or a poof of whipped cream to dot the pumpkin pie.

photo by http://www.jamescornette.com/misc.html

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) faced scrutiny on Capitol Hill again this week over the high costs of its record number of environmental regulations.  During a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee, the agency’s air chief denied consequences of the Clean Air Act on jobs and the economy and argued that her agency’s rules relating to automobiles and fuel economy actually creates jobs and support small businesses.

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- With today's fiscal climate, Edwards Air Force Base is always looking for good ways to save money.
One area where Edwards is looking to save is energy costs.
After three years of planning and coordination with Southern California Edison, the California Public Utilities Commission and environmental agencies, workers are now building solar farms on base.

When the Exxon Valdez was wrecked off the coast of Alaska in 1989, cleanup crews were able to recover only about 14 percent of the spilled oil. Twenty-one years later, when the Deepwater Horizon disaster spilled oil into the Gulf of Mexico, recovery efforts had improved shockingly little: Responders were still burning, skimming, and directly trapping the oil coming out of the wellhead, and they captured just one quarter of the oil that spilled.
An Illinois-based company called Elastec/American Marine has something better. Its new rotating-disc design can recover a staggering 4670 gallons of oil per minute, more than three times what existing technology can do. Its design was also extremely efficient: What it sucked up was 89.5 percent oil (and just 10.5 percent water). And now the design has won them $1 million: Elastec was announced today as the winner of the Oil Cleanup X Challenge.