Enviro News Wrap: Farm Bill Foibles; Oil Theft in Nigeria; Expected Opposition to Obama Climate Plan, and more…

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

• Charles Krauthammer Washington Post op-ed belies his understanding of climate science and misrepresents Obama’s climate plan. The whole article is misleading and riddled with pseudo-scientific arguments.
• Obama has started his environmental campaign with 3 years left in office. A necessary focus of his campaign is coal which is drawing strong opposition from such a wealthy interest group. But, he does not need their re-election money so whine they will while Obama tries to reduce the environmental impact of such a dirty industry. While the coal industry will use its puppets to spread the fear-based propaganda that the economy will crumble from this much-needed regulation, environmentalists are slowly winning this fight.
• In Nigeria 10 percent of the oil is stolen from pipelines to be sold on the black market. This has created a dirty illegal industry of poor polluters. This is the real affect of “dirty energy,” oil is always being stolen, spilled and regular people feel the consequences. A train in Canada carrying crude oil got out of control and spilled in a small town causing a large explosion that killed several and incinerated part of the downtown area. We need energy sources that can’t easily explode and cause massive death when spilled. If accidents happened like this in the renewable energy industry conservative politicians would be demanding the end of all clean energy, but since the blood is on the hands of the dirty energy industry then the suffering of this town is just part of the cost of cheap energy.
• As we use up the easily accessible, high quality sources of oil, we are increasingly forced to dig deeper, both on land and underneath the oceans. The cost and environmental impact of this is huge. If companies invested billions of dollars of exploration money into research and development of renewable energy we would be much better off.
• The US farm bill entrenches in our economy large agricultural companies pumping out lots of cheap corn, cotton, wheat and soy. The “farm bill” has passed in the US congress every year for decades, but this year it did not pass and now some groups are scrambling to upkeep the status quo.
• People need to be healthy to make healthy environmental decisions. That means we need a society that grows and eats healthy food –  that means real food, not processed food. No matter how much we engineer our food, nothing will beat the bounty that is naturally provided by mother nature. Eat real food.