Fatalistic Friday: 'Cash for Clunkers' could save 16 mpg Hummer

by Emily Gertz

categories: Arctic & Antarctic, Consumer, Fatalistic Friday, Food & Agriculture, Fossil Energy, Greenhouse Gas, Oceans, Policy & Legislation, Politics, Transportation, Water, Wilderness, Wildlife & Biodiversity

Published July 24, 2009 @ 11:02AM PT

Source: failblog

It's been an unusually fertile week for apocalypcious news, so let's dive right in:

'Cash For Clunkers' Program Could Boost Hummer: People who trade in their gas guzzlers for more fuel-efficient cars can get a government subsidy -- even if they trade in old pickups for ones that get just 2 miles per gallon more. Which means the program could provide an unexpected boost to the beleaguered Hummer brand. Its H3T pickup gets 16 mpg. (NPR)

Related:
Cash for Clunkers: Compare the fuel savings (Consumer Reports)
Cars.gov, the official cash for clunkers website

Energy companies opened wallets wide to sway house climate bill: Electric utilities boosted lobbying in the second quarter of 2009, narrowing the gap with oil and gas companies that had dominated spending on persuasion by a wide margin earlier this year. (Greenwire/The New York Times)

Grist grades senate websites on climate transparency; flunks some: Grist combed the Web sites of 99 senators and issued report cards grading them on how well they explained the senators' positions on climate change and energy. "The results aren't pretty. We found a distinct lack of information among Democrats and Republicans alike, senators with and without strong environmental voting records, and from all regions of the country." (Grist)

Meet Belcha - Europe's biggest carbon polluter (and it's about to get even bigger): The biggest single producer of carbon emissions in the European Union has been named - and it is about to get even bigger. The appropriately titled Elektrownia Belchatow - a massive coal-fired power station - belched out 30,862,792 tonnes of CO2 last year and by 2010 the whole generating facility will have grown by 20%. (The Guardian)

Sea Ice Melting Faster Than Expected: A NASA study finds that Arctic ice is melting at a rate that scientists didn't anticipate. (Environment Report)

Massive Glacier In Sub-Antarctic Island Shrinks By A Fifth: French scientists say satellites show a glacier on a southern Indian Ocean island shrunk dramatically in recent decades. They think global warming may be a factor. (AFP)

Warmest june on record for global ocean surface temperature: The world's ocean surface temperature in June rose to its warmest since 1880, breaking the previous high mark set in 2005, according to a preliminary analysis by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville. (Environment News Service)

Arctic Mystery: Identifying The Great Blob Of Alaska: The mysterious, miles-long "blob" found floating in the Chukchi Sea is not an oil spill or alien life-form, according to early tests, but an unusual algal bloom. (TIME)

Caribou Populations Fall Sharply: Scientists are finding what seems to be a global decline in caribou populations, due to global warming (Christian Science Monitor)

Shrinking fish, dying sequoias, rampant tomato fungus, and more after the jump.

Fish 'shrinking due to global warming': Fish have lost half their average body mass and smaller species are making up a larger proportion of European fish stocks as a result of global warming, a study has found. "It's huge," said study author Martin Daufresne of the Cemagref Public Agricultural and Environmental Research Institute in Lyon, France. "Size is a fundamental characteristic that is linked to a number of biological functions, such as fecundity - the capacity to reproduce." (News.com.au)

Global Warming Killing Sequoias? Scientists in California have set up a unique experiment to track the life histories of some of the world's oldest and tallest trees. The project is designed to follow up research, in the Yosemite National Park, which suggests that giant trees are perishing as a result of climate change. (BBC News)

Climate change threatens Colo. River water supply: Most drastic warming scenario shows 50 percent chance of depletion by 2057, according to a Colorado University study. (The Daily Camera)

Winter heat threatens crops: All fruit and nut trees require periods of dormancy each winter before they can bloom again, and it's the cold that keeps them dormant. When the length of that chill is disrupted, the trees' flowering time is disrupted and crops can fail, the scientists said. At the current rate of global warming...the winter chill times in the Central Valley will decrease by 50 percent before the century is up. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Fungus threatens tomato crop: A highly contagious fungus that destroys tomato plants has quickly spread to nearly every state in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic. Near-record cool, wet June weather has allowed the pathogen to flourish. William Fry, a professor of plant pathology at Cornell, said, "I've never seen this on such a wide scale." The weather over the next week may determine whether the outbreak abates or whether tomato crops are ruined. (The New York Times)

California's 2006 heat wave was much deadlier than previously reported, researchers say: New analysis of data in nine counties, including L.A., San Bernardino and Kern, indicates that 350 to 450 heat-related deaths may have occurred -- two to three times more than coroners' counts.(Los Angeles Times)

Will Global Warming Melt the Permafrost Supporting the China-Tibet Railway? Three years after the railway opened in 2006, international research shows that the Tibetan territories are among the fastest warming, and fastest melting, on the planet ... the work raises concerns that the warming ground could lead to a buckling of the railway. (Scientific American)

Mountaintop mining legacy: Destroying Appalachian streams: The environmental damage caused by mountaintop removal mining across Appalachia has been well documented. But scientists are now beginning to understand that the mining operations' most lasting damage may be caused by the massive amounts of debris dumped into valley streams." (Yale 360)