Good Morning readers! This is an Open Thread with a twist of Green and yet open for all topics. Fire away!

THIS ZERO-WASTE GROCERY STORE HAS NO PACKAGING, PLASTIC OR BIG-NAME BRANDS

Forget Whole Foods.
The Germans have created a store with eco-conscious customers in mind. Well, at least in Berlin-the newest home of Original Unverpackt (Original Unpackaged). You won’t find any paper or plastic bags here-or any kind of bags for that matter. This new grocery store creates zero waste by allowing customers to purchase exactly how much they need, reducing waste in their homes.Original Unverpackt doesn’t carry any products under popular brand names; instead, they carry mostly organic products. Original Unverpackt stocks their shelves using a bulk bin system with an assortment of fruits, vegetables and grains. Even shampoo and milk are dispensed from refillable containers according to Salon.

For the anniversary of Katrina, Bobby Jindal wrote President Obama a letter:

Jindal, who’s also running for president on the Republican ticket, sent a letter to Obama Wednesday urging the president not to mention climate change during his trip to Louisiana.
“Although I understand that your emphasis in New Orleans will – rightly – be on economic development, the temptation to stray into climate change politics should be resisted,” Jindal states in the letter. “While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, that is not a view shared by many Louisianians. I would ask you to respect this important time of remembrance by not inserting the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism.”

From DeSmogBlog, one of the best new eco sites:

Obama Barely Touches on Climate Change In New Orleans Speech Marking the 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

In May, the Obama administration opened the Gulf of Mexico to further oil and gas drilling despite the BP oil spill five years ago. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement permitted LLOG Exploration Offshore LLC to drill a new well near BP’s failed Macondo well...

New Orleans where social injustice and environmental injustice meet.

While the USA has military bases around the world to protect its national interests at the same time it is allowing industry to destroy its land one football field per hour. The oil & gas industry dredges the coastline, it slices up the marshes introducing salt water into fresh. It has created 10,000 miles of canals breaking up what were the protective marshes.

Ten Years After Katrina, Here's What's Happening to Louisiana's Coastline

It's been ten years since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, crippling New Orleans and highlighting America's vulnerability to natural disaster. In the aftermath, a central question has been whether New Orleans — and other areas along the coast — can be rebuilt better, stronger, and more equitably. But with coastal development swallowing up wetlands, canal dredging by oil and gas companies ruining coastlines, and global warming pushing up sea levels, Gulf Coast residents are wondering whether the land on which they live will continue to exist at all.
[...]
Activists are using the tenth anniversary of Katrina to highlight the multiple threats along the Gulf Coast and point out how economic inequality and racial injustice mean the poor and people of color are disproportionately impacted.

Over the past year, the group Gulf South Rising has attempted to build a first-of-its-kind coalition linking the region's history of racial injustice, its persistent economic inequality, and the ways in which climate change will impact the coast. The group's motto is: The seas are rising and so are we.

Its leaders say that without addressing those larger issues, the communities most impacted by a disappearing coast in the Gulf will continue to be ignored

Oil and Water

11 minute video
Oil And Water: Louisiana's Coastal Crisis

Mississippi River Outlet-Canal or MRGO

MRGO Must Go

New MRGO Report

THE BIG UNEASY: Gone with the Water

The oil industry has been good to Louisiana, providing low taxes and high-paying jobs. But such largesse hasn't come without a cost, largely exacted from coastal wetlands. The most startling impact has only recently come to light—the effect of oil and gas withdrawal on subsidence rates. For decades geologists believed that the petroleum deposits were too deep and the geology of the coast too complex for drilling to have any impact on the surface. But two years ago former petroleum geologist Bob Morton, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed that the highest rates of wetland loss occurred during or just after the period of peak oil and gas production in the 1970s and early 1980s.
[...]
"When you look at the broadest perspective, short-term advantages can be gained by exploiting the environment. But in the long term you're going to pay for it. Just like you can spend three days drinking in New Orleans and it'll be fun. But sooner or later you're going to pay."

An article in November 2013 Harper's about the contamination of the Louisiana coastline by industry and the legacy lawsuits that followed.

Dirty South
I’d come to Louisiana to report on another major source of worry for the industry: so-called legacy lawsuits, through which landowners have sued companies for contamination of properties leased to produce oil and gas. By the late 1980s, the major oil firms had largely moved their non- refinery operations offshore, selling their remaining active fields to inde- pendent firms. They left behind thousands of sites contaminated by oil, organic pollutants, and other hazardous materials. At particular issue has been a byproduct of the drilling process that the oil compa- nies euphemistically refer to as “pro- duced water” or “brine.”

As its name implies, brine, which is produced in vast quantities by both conventional drilling and hydrofracking, contains a great deal of salt—its salinity is up to ten times that of seawater, mean- ing any storage breaches can greatly alter the chemistry of groundwater and endanger nearby vegetation. Analyses of brine frequently detect traces of benzene, chromium, lead, and other potential carcinogens, as well as radioactive isotopes.