Bad Deeds for 12-4-2008

United States, China, India, Israel, Pakistan, and Russia Refuse to Sign Cluster Bomb Ban – Some 100 nations began putting their names Wednesday to a landmark treaty banning cluster bombs. Dropped from warplanes or fired from artillery guns, cluster bombs explode in mid-air to randomly scatter hundreds of bomblets, which can be just eight centimetres (three inches) big. Many bomblets fail to explode, littering war zones with de facto landmines that can kill and maim long after a conflict ends. Worldwide, about 100,000 people have been killed or maimed by cluster bombs since 1965, 98 percent of them civilians, says Handicap International, a campaign group. More than a quarter of the victims are children who mistaken the bomblets for toys or tin cans. But the world’s biggest producers and users of cluster bombs — including China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and the United States — object to the ban and refuse to sign it.

Human-Caused Greenhouse Gas Emissions Continue to Rise – Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions rose from 7.1 million metric tons in 2006 to 7.2 million metric tons in 2007 – a one year increase of 1.4%. The main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, has continually rose (except for a minor fall in 2006) since 1990. The United States will account for 19.6% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2030.
So, have you made changes to help fix this? Have you changed your electricity provider to one that’s non-polluting (wind, solar, hydro)? Have you replaced your incandescent bulbs with CFLs? Does your vehicle have a low-emissions engine?

Drilling for Natural Gas May Be Polluting Groundwater Supplies – In order to get to the natural gas, some companies use a process called hydraulic fracturing where they blast fluid and a propping material (think sand) into layers of rock, cracking them and allowing the gas to flow to the surface. The fluids used by Haliburton, Schlumberger, and BJ Services, the three companies that dominate the hydraulic fracturing market, are proprietary, they argue. The companies refuse to disclose their secret chemical formulas, reports ProPublica, making it difficult if not impossible to determine what’s in them — and what could be seeping through the layers of rock. Contaminated groundwater near drilling sites has been reported in seven states.

Regards,

Jim