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Group 3 Our group chose to discuss the shell oil spill in Nigeria in further detail. Shell was repeatedly warned by its own employees about the pipeline leaking but did not take fault until the pipeline burst in November 2008. Theft along the oil pipeline is uncontrollable, and it is thought that the JTF and police are allowing this to take place only if they are paid off. Key stakeholders are Shell and the military forces. Shell is losing thousands of barrels of oil a day due to theft and sabotage, and the military forces are either losing or making a lot of money depending on how many illegal operations they allow on the trans-Nigerian pipeline. Some solutions to the situation at hand would be if Shell were to put money into local communities along the pipeline, this could help with protection of the pipeline and the communities would not be so poverty stricken. The communities do not get any compensation for the pipeline. It can be argued that the money Shell wants to spend on a new pipeline to avoid these communities, if they spent even a tenth of that on the local communities, these problems may not even exist. A related issue is how a company in Canada called TransCanada wants to build a pipeline from Alberta Canada to the gulf coast of Texas and transport tar sands oil, one of the world’s dirties fuels. There is much concern about this pipeline because it could devastate ecosystems, pollute water sources, and jeopardize public health.

The article our group picked for the climate change project was “U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods”. This talked about how the climate has been changing very drastically throughout the years and is causing the heating of cities as well as more floods occurring along the coastlines. Since the climate is heating up, it is causing the melting of glaciers which unfortunately causes loss of habitat for artic animals as well as rising sea levels from all the water being added to the ocean.

Summary of US and UK Public Opinion Towards Natural Gas

There were many similarities and differences between the U.S. articles and the U.K. articles. For the discussion our group came up with, we saw that for both sets of articles, the people in communities seemed to favor certain renewable energies that were more popular with the public officials; they were drawn towards the more voted for energies. For the U.S. articles, the certain types of energies were voted upon political groups such as democrats and republicans. The democrats have solar power as their top choice and the republicans have natural gas as their top choice. For the U.K.

Joe Cloke GROUP 3 WIND ENERGY IN U.S MEDIA  

Ice sheets, Glaciers, and sea ice have huge impacts on our earths global climate and ocean current patterns, so we chose an article on Antarctic ice change. I found it interesting how Arctic sea ice is declining, while Antarctic sea ice is going up. climate.nasa.gov/news/2177/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/11/121116-california... The United States as a whole decided not to take action in climate change. But a few individual states and cities chose to do something anyway, one of which is California. The article is about how they are the leading force in climate change, and how they were the ones who started it. It also asks a big question, do we have to do this alone?