The Sierra Club is launching a nationwide campaign to showcase what it sees as the dark side of SUV's - the brown haze of air pollution, weather disasters linked to global warming, and oil derricks chugging away to fill gas tanks.
   Switching from an average new car to a 13 mpg SUV for a year would  waste more energy than leaving a refrigerator door open for six years, a bathroom light burning for 30 years, or a color TV turned on for 28 years.

SUV's put out 43 percent more global-warming pollutants-28 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon of gas consumed - and 47 percent more air pollution than the average car.
   Raising the fuel-economy standards for SUV's and other light trucks to equal that of cars would save 1 million barrels of oil a day.
   An average SUV or a pickup is more than twice as likely as a car to kill the driver of the other vehicle in a collision, and an SUV is four times as likely to roll over in an accident.

UNOCAL Signs
Agreement with Brutal Burmese Military

UNOCAL SIGNS AGREEMENT WITH BRUTAL BURMESE MILITARY Unocal, a California oil corporation, is involved in a joint venture with Burma's brutal and repressive Junta military regime. The military maintains its stranglehold on Burma's people by using weapons bought with foreign currency gained in partnerships with multinational oil companies. Unocal is one of the last U.S. companies doing business with Burma's regime. In 1995, Unocal signed a contract with the junta to extract and transport natural gas using a pipeline from the undersea Yadana\ Field located off Burma's coast. The pipeline crosses from southern Burma to neighboring Thailand. The pipeline area is the homeland of the Karen, Mon and Tavoyan peoples. These ethnic minorities have been under attack by the junta's troops which are seeking to suppress rebellion and use civilians for forced labor on army projects. Thousands of people have been forcibly relocated and their homes and farms destroyed by the junta's troops. Unocal executives have been callous when confronted with accounts of this human rights abuse. "If you threaten the pipeline, there's gonna be more military," said Unocal's President John Imle. Email Unical at crp@unocal.com and tell them what you think.

Evidence of Global Warming
Continues to Accumulate

   The Geological Survey of Canada reports that the zone of continuous permafrost has retreated some 100 kilometers over the last century, leaving in its path areas of sunken, uneven land that destabilize houses, roads, oil wells, and other man-made structures. Between 1978 and 1996, Arctic sea-ice cover shrank by as much as 5.5 percent, a visible loss of almost 1 million square kilometers, according to satellite images taken at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Other studies suggest that the Arctic ice cap is 40 percent thinner on average than it was in the 1970s. The retreat has been so rapid, says Douglas Martinson, a scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, that at its present rate the pole's summer ice cover could completely vanish within the next 350 years. Other computer models suggest a more accelerated loss, with the thickest, most stable portions of the ice vanishing in half a century. http://ens.lycos.com/ens/aug2000/2000L-08-30-10.html

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