Mining The Earth & Fracking The World: A Long Walk For The Climate

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Every week, Kate Lanier assembles the most important global energy and climate news. This week includes:

New Mexicio: Diné youth are so concerned about corporate exploitation of underground resources, including oil and uranium, that they have embarked on a prayer walk of 200 miles. This first walk honors “The Long Walk of the Diné People to Ft. Sumner, New Mexico.” Other walks will follow this year.

Colombia: The underground Ocensa pipeline, carrying 650,000 barrels of crude/day between the huge Cusiana-Cupiagua oilfield to the Caribbean coast, built only about 15 years ago, has eroded campesinos’ farmland and led to severe loss of income. Campesinos sued BP in the UK seven years ago. The court case is nearing conclusion.

India: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will invest $100 billion in solar power and put solar plants “atop canals: efficient and cheap land use, and reduce water evaporation from the channels underneath.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is quite impressed.

Mining The Earth & Fracking The World: Keystone Showdown

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Kate Lanier’s collects global energy and climate news. This week, she has a special focus on the fight over the Keystone XL Pipeline in Congress including:

Keystone XL Pipeline, US Senate: Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) of the senate’s Energy and Natural resources Committee blasted the Senate’s Keystone XL pipeline bill. Sanders is concerned about the US Senate rejecting science and efficient renewable energy, while Warren concentrated on the pipeline benefitting the Canadian oil industry and not US families. Update: “Democrats plan tough votes for GOP on Keystone pipeline bill.”

Meanwhile, from Vatican City: Pope Francis has added his voice in opposition to mining, fracking, and disregard for the earth in general. He appears in a movie, La Guerra Del Fracking de Pino Solanas (The Fracking War), banned in Argentina (where the government calls fracking “non-conventional gas”), but now on YouTube.” Pope Francis also spoke to the urgency of focusing on youth, the future.

Alabama: Radioactive (tritium) leak at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant near Athens, after which TVA said “the leak was quickly contained and presented no public risk.” Not the only TVA radioactive leak, nor the only one at Browns Ferry.

Attack Of The Land-grabbers: The Race For Land In Africa

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This article aims to highlight stories which show the clash between small farmers and big, usually corporate or state-backed, agriculture. This clash is part of a fight that is occurring across the world, with some governments wanting control of land in order to feed their populations and others, usually in the business world, wanting to turn land into a commodity so they can gain increased profits.

Well over a majority of the world’s contributions to global warming comes from the actions of four industrialized states (United States, Japan, Canada and Australia) and one region (Europe), and those living in those states. The advent of a global climate catastrophe is key to buying land, since 40% of the world’s population may face a “serious drinking water shortage” within the next half-century, unless there is bold and quick action.

However, there are other factors to the fight over land across the world. One of the main battlegrounds is the African continent, where not only are many states dependent on only one resource or cash crop to gain money from exports, but numerous states were forced by the European colonizers to change from subsistence to cash crops, which caused parts of Africa to suffer from drought.

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