NEWSCLIMATE CHANGE

More than 3,000 people have joined a campaign on Change.org calling on the University of Michigan to commit to using solar energy in its football stadium.

The campaign, created by the Ann Arbor-based Ecology Center, follows a growing NFL trend of renewable energy-powered national sports stadiums, including the homes of the Philadelphia Eagles, Arizona Cardinals, New England Patriots, and Washington Redskins. Activists hope the petition on Change.org will lead the University of Michigan, home to the Big 10 Wolverines and the largest-capacity stadium in North America, to become the first big-name college football school to join in.

“The UM stadium has the potential to be the largest athletic venue in North America with solar panels, which is fitting with the University’s claim to be ‘the leaders and the best’,” said Monica Patel, policy specialist at the Ecology Center. “Even though the electricity generated won’t solve the climate crisis, it will go a long way in terms of solar energy education — just think of the awareness raised among the 100,000+ fans there on Game Day, and millions of others who tune in. The move would also give real support to Michigan's growing solar energy industry."

"This'll only cost you $9 billion," reads a billboard put up over the weekend on the side of I-70 near Grand Junction, Colorado.

Pictured is the desolate scene—the parched dry bed of the Colorado River's largest tributary— that would become reality if a proposed water project called the Flaming Gorge Pipeline ever gets built.

The pipeline would spell disaster on a number of levels, according to experts, editorial boards and activists in the region. With the astronomical cost of piping water from Southwest Wyoming's Green River to Colorado, 560 miles up and over the continental divide, the piped water would be the most expensive in the state's history, delivered to fuel even more unsustainable population growth along Colorado's booming Front Range.

The Flaming Gorge Pipeline would would also devastate the Green River ecosystem and Dinosaur National Monument. This can't be a good sign for thousands of recreational river users and the significant local tourism businesses they support. Lastly, given that the Flaming Gorge would withdraw 81 billion gallons a year from the Colorado's largest tributary, this pipeline is only going to exacerbate existing intractable conflicts among the seven Basin states that share this increasingly scare resource.

So what's a concerned citizen to do?

If I had to chose one city in which to climb a smokestack, Chicago—aka "The Windy City"—probably would be low on my list. But what's a death-defying stunt or two, when the lives of 42 people are at stake?

That's what a few brave community activists are proving today, anyway.

This morning, several activists scaled the smokestacks of Edison International's Fish and Crawford power plants, two coal-fired electric stations that produce pollution estimated to kill, every year, 42 people who live in the minority communities near the smokestacks. These plants, at nearly 100 years of age, have become extremely controversial—they are so old that they were 'grandfathered' under the Clean Air Act and lack modern pollution controls. They are so dirty that patio furniture in surrounding neighborhoods is covered in soot. They are the only large coal plants within a major U.S. city and have the largest surrounding residential populations of any coal plant in the country.

So why are they still open? That's what Greenpeace wants to know.

Historic Mississippi River floods are still ravaging the Midwest, destroying homes, livelihoods and flooding entire towns. As CNN Money reported, professionals say "the massive flood churning its way down the Mississippi River will go down in history for its catastrophic, multi-billion dollar impact on the Midwestern economy."

As with every disaster, this one has brought reflection about the causes of the havoc and about what we might do better. There will be another spate of long-overdue moves to reform our national, state and local flood protection strategies, though whether they will succeed is another story. What is bluntly clear is that the levees and storm walls we have built to protect us from disaster are not equipped to handle historic flood events. These historic events, of course, are becoming scarily common as climate change and wetland degradation accelerate.

No one knows this better than Iowans. In 2008, the Cedar River, which flows in the Mississippi, surged over its banks into the city of Cedar Rapids. This is the type of flood event for which no one was prepared, a 1 in 500 year occurrence. Today, residents are still recovering, and three years later, local officials  are still struggling to map out a strategy for the city moving forward.

It seems the news just keeps getting worse these days for those in the Marcellus Shale gas-fracking business. First there was the damning new Cornell University study which revealed the worse-than-coal climate impacts of the natural gas drilling procedure. Then, the Chesapeake Energy Corporation experienced the mother of all bad press days when one of its Pennsylvania wells experienced a massive blowout, spewing thousands of gallons of frack fluid into a nearby stream. In a poetic touch, the blow-out occurred on the one-year anniversary of the gulf oil spill.

While nowhere near the scale of the BP blowout, the Chesapeake Energy frack-up certainly echoed the massive gulf disaster in terms of the outrageous incompetence and recklessness of the well’s owners.

According to a Pro-Publica article it took the company a full 13 hours to respond to the accident. The reason for the egregious delay: despite widespread fracking activity in the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale, the state did not have a single team of specially trained fracking accident responders, and instead had to fly in workers from Texas. In the end, thanks to the holdup, it took no less than two days from the time of the accident before workers managed to cap the spill.

Even as record flooding threatens much of the South, Cambridge and nearby Belmont in Massachusetts have chosen to build an apartment complex on what is now a wetland. Another name for the area is the Alewife Reservation, home to a silver maple forest that would serve as a natural buffer to rains that could threaten the entire Boston area. If the trees go, the water has no place else to flow but into the very developments positioned as 'affordable housing.' That's how the development slipped past the environmental safeguards, by being zoned for the have-nots.

To preserve it for everyone, Belmont and the city of Boston are hoping to buy the land back from the developer, O'Neill Property Group; but its value has skyrocketed since it was sold over ten years ago. It's a tangled problem, really. The property is valuable to O'Neill only if it is razed, and only to the people struggling to save the forest if it remains intact. Essentially O'Neill Property Group can hold the property hostage for as much as it likes, unless the city retracts the building permit to save the forest and brings in assessors to apraise the land and buy it back again.

This is exactly what this petition by the Friends of Alewife Reservation is attempting. Please sign it to keep an urban water safeguard, and all that flies, crawls, or swims in it, from disappearing beneath a tide of irresponsible development.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI -- pronounced Reggie) is something I care a lot about. It was the first cap-and-trade initiative in the United States and has been highly successful. Of course, anything that's successful at encouraging clean energy and energy efficiency, and thus slowing catastrophic climate change, is heftily attacked by the Tea Party and it's number one funder, Koch Industries. And RGGI is no exception.

If you're not familiar with the Koch brothers, they are two of the richest people in the world (tied for 5th-richest in the United States) and have made most of their money off of oil and gas. They are strongly opposed to government regulations on polluters (or anything) and fund the some of the largest Tea Party and far-right-wing groups in the nation. The idea that the Tea Party is a grassroots movement is a joke -- it is a Koch Industries movement geared at making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Greenpeace exposed the Koch brothers and their anti-environmental efforts last year and, since that time, I think nearly every major media outlet has picked up on the story. But the Koch Brothers and their front groups (most notably, Americans for Prosperity) haven't slowed in their efforts to undermine clean energy, energy efficiency, and climate action.

This Mother's Day weekend and into next week, kids and their moms will march together all across the country and all across the world to demand politicians protect the Earth for the next generation.

The iMatter March will mark a moment when the next generation — the kids today who can't yet vote or, for that matter, can't yet donate vast sums of money to influence lawmakers–makes the moral argument demanding our nation take meaningful actions to stem global warming and protect their future.  It's not too late to join a march. They want everyone—kids, moms, dads, uncles, grandparents, and anyone who cares about the health of the planet for young people today— to join. You can check out this site to find where a march near you will take place.

What's awesome is that the kids aren't only making a moral argument. They are also getting an early schooling in our legal system. Alec Loorz, the impressive 16-year-old who is leading this movement, is working with other kids and a legal team to file lawsuits against the U.S. government for its failure to act in every state in the country. They have gained a massive amount of media attention for their plans, which is based on the legal theory that "the government has failed in its duty to protect the atmosphere as a 'public trust' for future generations."

Editor's Note: What follows is a guest post from Alec Loorz, the 16-year-old visionary of the iMatter campaign and founder of Kids vs Global Warming. A climate change activist since he was 12 years old, he has spoken to nearly 200,000 people in over 200 presentations, keynotes, and panels. Representing his generation, he advocates for and inspires youth to lead the way to a sustainable and just world.

Join the iMatter March he is organizing starting this Mother's Day weekend, and sign and comment on his petition to the right of this blog post to support the lawsuit he describes below.

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By Alec Loorz

I am 16 years old. Yesterday I filed a lawsuit against the United States of America, for allowing money to be more powerful than the survival of my generation, and for making decisions that threaten our right to a safe and healthy planet.

Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation have created a problem. They’ve developed a society that depends on burning fossil fuels, like coal and oil, to survive. They never realized that there were any huge consequences to running our lives with fossil fuels. But now, we do.

Our addiction to fossil fuels is messing up the perfect balance of nature and threatening the survival of my generation. If we continue to hide in denial and avoid taking action, my and I generation will be forced to grow up in a world where hurricanes as big as Katrina are normal, people die every year because of heat waves, droughts, and floods, and entire species of animals we’ve come to know disappear right before our eyes.

Two 15-year-old Girl Scouts — Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen — have been working tirelessly to protect rainforests in Indonesia. While tens of thousands of people have expressed their support for the two Scouts' work, one group surprisingly refuses to join the girls — Girl Scouts of the USA, the national Girl Scouts organization.

Yesterday, Madison and Rhiannon partnered with Rainforest Action Network and Change.org in a social media day of action. The task at hand? Push Girl Scouts' CEO, Kathy Cloninger, to eliminate rainforest-destroying palm oil from all Girl Scout cookies. More than 56,000 Change.org members had already requested that Cloninger ditch palm oil, and the social media day of action was intended to turn up the pressure.

Hundreds of concerned citizens — including current and former Girl Scouts — participated in the day of action, tweeting at the Girl Scouts USA and writing on the organization's Facebook wall. But in a surprising act of censorship, Girl Scouts USA deleted palm oil-related comments from its wall shortly after the messages started rolling in. They also shut off users' abilities to post on the official Girl Scouts USA Facebook page, limiting subsequent palm oil comments to a single thread on the Facebook page.

But wait, it gets worse.