Conservative radio host.Dilbert_X wrote:
Who is Rush Limbaugh?FEOS wrote:
OMG you are in agreement with Rush Limbaugh...
I think I see three dudes on horses coming down the street...one's got a sword...
Who, according to left-wing pundits, runs the Republican party.JohnG@lt wrote:
Conservative radio host.Dilbert_X wrote:
Who is Rush Limbaugh?FEOS wrote:
OMG you are in agreement with Rush Limbaugh...
I think I see three dudes on horses coming down the street...one's got a sword...
Last edited by Dilbert_X (2010-08-10 06:31:31)
Last edited by Turquoise (2010-08-10 06:44:14)
Closed at $41.93 today. Total return of 26.53% or $2,653 in mah pocketJohnG@lt wrote:
Yep, $2279 now. I r genius.Cybargs wrote:
40.66 now. God damn it's going back upJohnG@lt wrote:
Up $2065 now Dems christmas presents baby!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12460333Chevron fined for Amazon pollution by Ecuador court
A court in Ecuador has fined US oil giant Chevron a reported $8bn for polluting a large part of the country's Amazon region.
The oil firm Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, was accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic materials into unlined pits and Amazon rivers.
Campaigners say crops were damaged and farm animals killed, and that local cancer rates increased.
Condemning the ruling as fraudulent, Chevron said it would appeal.
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadoreans, in a case which dragged on for nearly two decades.
The plaintiffs said the company's activities had destroyed large areas of rainforest and also led to an increased risk of cancer among the local population.
The trial began in 2003 after almost a decade of legal battles in the US. At that time, a US appeals court ruled that the case should be heard in Ecuador.
Environmentalists hope the case will set a precedent, forcing companies operating in developing countries to comply with the same anti-pollution standards as in the industrialised world.
Ecuadorean Indian groups said Texaco - which merged with Chevron in 2001 - dumped more than 18 billion gallons (68 billion litres) of toxic materials into the unlined pits and rivers between 1972 and 1992.
Protesters said the company had destroyed their livelihood. Crops were damaged, farm animals killed and cancer increased among the local population, they said.
Pablo Fajardo, lawyer for the plaintiffs, described the court ruling as "a great step that we have made toward the crystallisation of justice".
Speaking by phone to the Associated Press, he added that the damages award was too low and he was also considering an appeal.
Having just received the 187-page ruling, he said he needed time to digest it before commenting further.
A Chevron statement said the firm would appeal, and called the ruling "illegitimate and unenforceable".
The corporation has long contended that the court-appointed expert in the case was unduly influenced by the plaintiffs.
Its statement described the ruling as "the product of fraud (and) contrary to the legitimate scientific evidence".
Asked by BBC News if the fine imposed did indeed amount to $8bn, Chevron said it was still not clear. The corporation was, it said, still "trying to decipher" the ruling.
The Ecuadorean court was not immediately available for comment.
Last edited by Dilbert_X (2011-02-14 20:55:49)
Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.
That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.
At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't.
"There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.
"Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there."
The head of the agency in charge of the health of the Gulf said Saturday that she thought that "most of the oil is gone." And a Department of Energy scientist, doing research with a grant from BP from before the spill, said his examination of oil plumes in the water column show that microbes have done a "fairly fast" job of eating the oil. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientist Terry Hazen said his research differs from Joye's because they looked at different places at different times.
Joye's research was more widespread, but has been slower in being published in scientific literature.
In five different expeditions, the last one in December, Joye and colleagues took 250 cores of the sea floor and travelled across 2,600 square miles. Some of the locations she had been studying before the oil spill on April 20 and said there was a noticeable change. Much of the oil she found on the sea floor — and in the water column — was chemically fingerprinted, proving it comes from the BP spill. Joye is still waiting for results to show other oil samples she tested are from BP's Macondo well.
She also showed pictures of oil-choked bottom-dwelling creatures. They included dead crabs and brittle stars — starfish like critters that are normally bright orange and tightly wrapped around coral. These brittle stars were pale, loose and dead. She also saw tube worms so full of oil they suffocated.
"This is Macondo oil on the bottom," Joye said as she showed slides. "This is dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads."
Joye said her research shows that the burning of oil left soot on the sea floor, which still had petroleum products. And even more troublesome was the tremendous amount of methane from the BP well that mixed into the Gulf and was mostly ignored by other researchers.
Joye and three colleagues last week published a study in Nature Geoscience that said the amount of gas injected into the Gulf was the equivalent of between 1.5 and 3 million barrels of oil.
Yes...thank you for your change, Obama.Mekstizzle wrote:
Would be nice if the video/slides were actually available to the public....
