Enviro News Wrap: No More Arsenic Chicken; Snowpack Decline; Tar Sands Pipeline Blocked. and more…

Jun 13, 2011 11:07 am

GlobalWarmingisReal contributor Anders Hellum-Alexander wraps-up the climate and environmental news headlines for the past week:

There’s a new food blogger at MotherJones, one of his goals is to illuminate what exactly we put in our food. For example, the US poultry industry is finally taking arsenic out of chicken feed. That means that we have been eating arsenic all these years!!! And the UK is having its ”driest spring in a Century.“
Oil from the Canadian tar sands is meant to flow to the US, but environmental opposition is blocking a new oil pipeline. The “Keystone” pipeline would eventually connect everything between Alberta, CA and the Gulf of Mexico.
A new study examines the past 800 years of Rocky Mountain snowpack history. The main takeaway is that while fluctuations have happened in the past, humans have never been so dependent on these snowymountains as a consistent source of clean water, and that snow is disappearing.
Advances in science are advances in environmentalism. The first biological laser is under development.
A warmer climate means a drier environment. A drier climate will lead to more devastating forest fires. Right now Arizona is in peril.
Deciding where to store nuclear waste in the US has been impossible. Yucca Mountain has been the battle ground for three decades, but under Obama the battle has ended and alternatives are being sought. The bureaucratic politics of the whole situation is covered by the New York Times.
A plastic-bag-alternative company is being sued for making bloated claims about the destructiveness of plastic bags on our environment. Its funny that the plastic bag industry is standing up to say “we destroy the environment, but not by that much.”