Spring snow is not unusual around here, but tonight’s will probably carry radiation. It’s been dry since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Tests taken by the Vermont Health Department have shown radioactive iodine, presumably from Fukushima is showing up in the state. There’s no safe level of radiation, but what we’re getting in Vermont is no cause for panic.

Now that precipitation is on the way, however, it might be a good time to take a holiday from milk. Not easy to contemplate in a diary state, where small farmers have enough to contend with, but milk drinking was the primary route for radioactive material into people’s bodies after Chernobyl in 1986. Radiation was detected in Washington State milk earlier this week.

Again, it’s not life-threatening, but precaution, a concept that escapes federal agencies – whether the issue is genetically-modified food, toxic pollutants, nuclear devices or climate change – is a good thing. “An abundance of caution.” The phrase looks so old fashioned.

Monday past was the 32nd anniversary of the partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island; last Thursday was the 22nd anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill. The first anniversary of the BP blowout is three weeks from tomorrow and the 25 anniversary of Chernobyl is four days after that. (It’s a busy time for me at work right now.)

A week ago, we learned General Electric, which designed the reactors at Fukushima (and 23 just like them in the US), pays no taxes, despite profits in the billions of dollars, while shipping jobs overseas.

As I mentioned then, America’s nuclear regulators knew in 1972 that the design of the GE reactor’s cooling system was flawed, but kept their mouths shut for fear it would lead to the end of nuclear energy. Four of the six troubled reactors at Fukushima Daiichi are the flawed GE design and were built AFTER the regulator’s memo was written.

Precaution, as I said, is notably absent from our government’s thoughts, even when lives are on the line. OK, so you’re a regulator who wants to cook the books on behalf of the industry you’re supposed to regulate. Could GE quietly be told to stop selling flawed reactors? Could the purchasers of said flawed reactors be quietly told to beef up the power supply for the cooling systems?

Will anyone ever be called to account for this? Doubt it. If you think your government is honest and acting in your best interest, act accordingly. If you think your government is dishonest and not acting in your best interest, act accordingly.

Those people in the tea party are not entirely off base. They’re right to be angry (and scared). I think they’re angry at some of the right people (and some of the wrong people). I think their prescriptions for change are misguided, deliberately misguided by the people on whom they rely for information.

Seismologists say as a result of the March 11 earthquake, the world is spinning faster, by 1.8 microseconds per day. It feels like we’re spinning faster than that.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

Margaret is our master gardener, dispensing advice. Last week she helped me prune a young plum tree so it will crown out and have sturdy limbs to support heavy crops of fruit in years to come. She lectured as she cut, telling me that by being selective, the tree would react in certain ways and side growth would be privileged over upward growth.

The world “privilege” stuck in my head. Here we were, Margaret and I, blithely interfering in nature with our bypass shears. The idea was to take certain actions in hope of obtaining particular outcomes.

We all do it, all the time. We choose one thing over another and we change the course of our personal history. Or we refuse to choose and our history is written for us, but it is written whatever we do or fail to do.

The executives at BP privileged profits over stewardship and look where they are now. Their corporation’s stock yesterday stood at half the value it had the day the Deepwater Horizon exploded and the slide continues today. Business pundits are wondering if perhaps the world’s fourth-largest corporation may be broken up and sold for spare parts. What color is your parachute, Tony Hayward?

Barack Obama, like every other US president before him, has privileged fossil fuels over every other form of energy. Tax breaks, incentives, oil depletion allowances, the list goes on forever. Greedy executives like Mr. Hayward have been allowed to regulate themselves and worse, to determine the America’s energy policy.

Mr. Obama, like every president before him (although Jimmy Carter should be recognized – finally – for his straight talk), uses “our dependence on foreign oil” as an excuse for more asinine drilling and less oversight of the drillers.

The United States consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil. The United States has two-three percent of the world’s oil under its territory. We cannot reduce our dependence on foreign oil unless we reduce our dependence on oil. If government-run lotteries are a tax on people too stupid to do simple arithmetic, then “drill, baby, drill” is a slogan for people too stupid to be running for office.

“Do something! Do something! Show some emotion!” the press screams at the president. The hell with emotion. Change our energy policy! Start privileging efficiency, conservation and renewables over fossil fuels and nukes! We’ve already killed the Gulf of Mexico on your watch; do you want to go for the whole planet now? If you can’t act like a president, could you at least try for “adult”?

This week we’ve been told that the siphon BP installed on the blown-out wellhead is working, although the numbers BP puts out keep changing. We do know that to install the siphon, BP had to cut away part of the well’s riser, thus increasing the flow of oil. It’s been reported that the flow of oil may now be as many as 100,000 barrels per day or 42 million gallons per day. That’s four Exxon Valdez spills a day – but BP’s siphon is taking as much 15,000 barrels per day, because that’s all the boat at the surface can hold. (Are there no supertankers available, anywhere in the world, at any price? One would think every oil executive on this soiled planet would have an interest in seeing this tragedy end.)

One of this fiasco’s enduring tragedies will be the height at which the bar is now set for oil spills. As big as 10 Exxon Valdez spills? Ha! That’s nothing! Tony Hayward used to spill more than that from his 10 a.m. teacup.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

Rick’s been helping governments respond to oil spills for the past 30 years (an unusually prescient career choice). A resident of Cordova, AK he found a spill in his front yard in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

“Right after the Valdez spill, someone told me, ‘Lawyers still to be born will be litigating this spill.’ I laughed at him, but he was right. It’s been 21 years and the litigation between the federal government and Exxon is still not over.”

The fact that people who lost their livelihoods in the Exxon spill waited 20 years before they saw a nickel of compensation from Exxon is not happy news here, but Rick pulls no punches and gives straight answers. It’s as welcome – and as rare – as a cool breeze in Louisiana.

“The executives at BP must be reading the Exxon spill response playbook because they’re doing exactly what Exxon did,” he said. For those of you without access to the oily inner sancta, the playbook’s rules are these:

1 – Understate the amount of oil spilled.

2 – Understate the environmental damage caused by the oil.

3 – Overstate the effectiveness of your company’s response.

4 – Try to buy off the locals with tiny amounts of money (BP is offering $5,000 each to coastal residents in Mississippi) in exchange for waivers promising not to sue for damages.

5 – Slap gag orders on anyone doing business with the corporation. (Fishermen who want work from BP in the cleanup efforts have to agree in writing not to speak to the media. The gag orders are legally meaningless; it’s the intimidation factor that counts.)

Following the guidance of point three, BP has strung miles of bright orange boom everywhere there’s a tee vee camera. As if booms are some kind of magic wand. Booms are useless unless skimmers pick up the oil they collect and no one has seen any skimmers. Beyond that, the oil from the spill is bubbling up from a mile below the ocean. By the time it gets to the surface, it’s so thoroughly mixed with water it just slips under the booms.

Nonetheless, BP had a couple hundred shrimp boats on the gulf Wednesday, trolling booms back and forth. It’s not an oil spill response, it’s Response Theater. As Rick points out, in the best of circumstances (and we’re very far from that in the gulf) only ten percent of the oil is ever recovered. In the Exxon spill, after $2 billion, three summers with 1,000 boats and 13,000 workers, only five to seven percent of the oil was recovered.

One worry here is that the massive spill – which may spew oil for many weeks to come – will slip around the Florida peninsula and be carried up the east coast by the gulf stream. At the Exxon spill, which entailed a heavier grade of crude in the much more closed Prince William Sound, the oil was carried 800 miles down the Alaskan coast. There are several countervailing currents in the gulf, at all depths and of course, this oil is moving at every depth the gulf has. No one can predict where it will go.

“There’s never been a successful response to a marine oil spill. Ever.” Rick said. “We’re addicted to oil and like any addict, we are taking larger and larger risks to get our fix and the consequences are more and more disastrous.”

So what’s the solution? Break the addiction. We have to stop drilling in the ocean. The results are too catastrophic. Instead of reading from cue cards prepared for him by oil lobbyists, Barack Obama has to shift our government’s energy policy to privilege efficiency and clean renewables over fossil fuels. Not only will that prevent the next marine tragedy, but it’s our only chance of arresting global warming before we burn our species off the planet.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Navigating I heavy weather, Dan and I piled into his dad’s silver ’75 Honda cvcc, picked up subs at the SubYard and headed for my house, where my dad had a challenge.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“What day is it?”

“The nineteenth.” (Ha!)

“… of January.” (D’oh!) “Uh, I mean March.”

Busted.

I’m not sure that’s worth remembering, much less commemorating, except to remind me that 30 years ago, I was a young and unserious (perhaps reckless) high school senior. My dad, I’m sure, was wishing I’d wise up and get serious. I got a big dose of seriousness – and so did everyone else – nine days later when the Unit 2 nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island experienced a partial core melted down.

It was a sobering kick in the pants for an about-to-be-18-year-old only somewhat mediated in the following years by the realization that Three Mile Island went a long way toward ending the construction of nuclear electric generating plants in the U.S.

Sad to report, the nuclear industry is hoping that 30 years later, their shabby history has been forgotten as they try to peddle a new generation of nukes under the falsehood of combating global warming.

Ten years later, I was a still-young environmentalist working in Washington, DC when, on March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska and dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil.

Twenty years after that sorry day, Exxon has yet to compensate any of the thousands of people – entire communities – whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed that day. By 1991, Exxon declared that the spill had been “cleaned up,” but experts tell us that in the best of circumstances, a maximum of 15 percent of ocean-spilled oil is ever “cleaned up.”

Meanwhile 20 percent of the plaintiffs who sued Exxon for the damage the sill did them, have now died. That’s a solemn meditation for a 20th anniversary – 20 percent of the injured died with no compensation, only 15 percent of the oil treated.

What got me thinking about my high school misadventures, however, are the seniors in the class of 2003, because today is the sixth anniversary of the foolish and deadly invasion of Iraq.

Yes, Three Mile Island was a jarring wake-up for me, but it was still somewhat far away. Not geographically, but in terms of how much control I could have over it. I was still able to pretend it was an “adult thing.”

Wars are different. They’re fought by the young. If you go to one of the many web sites that list Americans killed in Iraq and read the ages, you’ll see most of them don’t remember Three Mile Island. The Exxon Valdez spill is a hazy memory at best. The number of dead today stands at 4,259.

Barack Obama – who’s three months younger than I – has promised to get us out of Iraq, even as he sinks us deeper into Afghanistan. The all-volunteer Army, which had struggled to fulfill its quotas not so long ago, is now aided by the sagging economy.

There is value in anniversaries. They remind of us lessons we’ve learned or offer the chance to learn a lesson we’ve missed. Next year, we say, things will be better.

© 2009, Mark Floegel