Andy Rowell

Just as the political opposition to crude by rail trains is growing in the US over the latest crash along the Colombia River Gorge, so is the public opposition.

The political and regulatory fall-out from the crude by rail crash in the Colombia River Gorge earlier this month is still continuing.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will shatter the critically important barrier of 400 ppm this year and are now not predicted to fall below that level again in our life-times.

In a year of climate records being broken on an almost weekly basis, the Arctic is breaking more than most and now could be stuck in a spiral of what is known as "Arctic amplification".

Some twenty one years after the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni activists, there is some hope that finally, finally, the oil polluted Ogoniland in the Niger Delta will begin to be cleaned up from decades of exploitation.

The fallout from Friday’s crude by rail crash in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon is intensifying after numerous local elected officials called for a temporary halt to the so-called “bomb trains” through the area until the cause of the crash is known and wreckage cleared. However, the company involved, Union Pacific, has blataently ignored their concerns and started running trains again, even though the clean-up of the crash site is still ongoing.