I am sorry to say I’ve been off the air for too many weeks.  It’s been a busy Spring, culminating in a week-long trip to Berlin with my graduate students to take a live and in-color look at German clean tech.  I will be following up here with some reporting on that.  Great stuff!  Stay tuned.  Plus there’s other news on which I will add my two cents, including the recent G7 talks and the upcoming encyclical from Pope Francis.

In the meantime, I just wanted to flag an important new statement from scores of primarily Canadian and American scientists and other distinguished scholars who count among them 12 Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, 22 Members of the US National Academy of Sciences, 5 Recipients of the Order of Canada, and a Nobel Prize winner.  These worthies are calling for nothing less than a moratorium on development of the Canadian tar sands and give ten fairly compelling, more-or-less irrefutable reasons why. 

The “Ten Reasons” include tar sands development being incompatible with climate protection, contamination of the landscape, and the fact that Canadians and Americans want climate action, not further plundering of the earth and climate system with the many negative externalities that our still-too-carbonized energy economies produce.

If you want to a pithy explanation of why so many people are dead set against this ongoing abomination, see this video from NRDC: