08/12/2010

Drinking Dry the Sea

Consider the environmental woes that confront us. Consider drinking dry the sea. They feel about the same.

Global warming, overfishing, deforestation, uncontrolled release of genetically modified material, nuclear waste.

So cut it down, make it manageable. Choose a single issue – say the release of toxic chemicals into our air, soil, water and our bodies. Reduce it further; only look the effects on human health – in fact, just look at the effect on the health of children.

Even this, perhaps, is more than we can bear.

Poisoned for Profit by Philip and Alice Shabecoff (Chelsea Green, 2010) tours the landscape and history of post-war America’s poisoning of its population, particularly its children.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Toxics | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
08/05/2010

“… Is to Stop Discriminating…”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in Parents Involved in Community School Districts v. Seattle School District No. 1, (2007) wrote, “(t)he way to stop discriminating on basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Who says the Supremes are immune to sound bites? If Chief Justice Roberts believes what he wrote, can we fairly extrapolate that he thinks, “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation is to stop discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation”?

Does he believe? Can we extrapolate? Probably not. Mr. Roberts famously told his the US Senate during his confirmation hearings that a judge’s role is to “call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” Once ensconced in his lifetime appointment, the record of his court has been to pitch, bat and push as hard as it can toward the right end of the spectrum. In Lebetter v. Goodyear, Mr. Roberts and company eliminated workers’ ability to sue for race or gender discrimination. In Exxon v. Baker, the court slashed away 90 percent of the damages Exxon had to pay victims for the Valdez spill and in the infamous Citizens United case, allowed corporations to spend freely on elections, giving First Amendment rights to businesses.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
07/29/2010

Vacation, Then and Now

JOE’S POND, VT – We’re on vacation this week at Joe’s Pond (formerly “Injun Joe’s Pond”) in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Swimming, canoeing, reading on the dock, getting sunburned, walking down to the little store for an ice cream after dinner, hearing the loons call at night.

It’s the kind of vacation I had as a child when my dad would take his one week’s respite from work and the whole family would drive up to a small lake in Ontario. The latitude’s about the same, the same warm days and cool nights, the same lumpy mattress, the same vague aromatic evidence of a bed-wetter’s occupation of the space before we arrived.

There are differences. I’ve been marveling all week at how cut off we used to be. No mail, no phones, no radio, newspaper or tee vee news. I’m sure my parents must have given the neighbors a means of getting a hold of us in case the house burned or some other emergency, but nothing like that ever happened.

In an act of questionable judgement, the “beach book” I brought along on this trip is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” which covers the years 1965-1972 and the fracturing of American politics. Sixty-five through seventy-two were among the years my family spent our summer sojourn at Sparrow Lake. Every summer brought a raft of distressing news – the war in Vietnam, riots in the cities, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate. No wonder my folks were happy to get away from the news and spend a week thinking about something other than the nation we’d left to the south.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
07/22/2010

On the Bayou

I was asked this week to write something for a fishermen’s publication about the BP oil spew. Here’s what I sent them:

I was in the Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana in the weeks after the Deepwater Horizon blew out. I’m an environmentalist; I work for Greenpeace. I was there to see for myself what was going on and to talk with people about the consequences of the blowout.

In those weeks, there was much we didn’t know. There’s much we still don’t know.
Here are some of the things I saw.

On Friday, 30 April, I stood at the edge of a crowd of fishermen as they met with NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco and Congressman Charlie Melancon (D-LA). The oil spill had yet to come ashore. Neither BP nor the federal government had been providing much information about the spill. (At that time, both BP and the feds were still claiming that only 5,000 barrels per day were leaking from the well.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oil | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
07/15/2010

Whistling Past the Gas Station

I started writing about peak oil in this space in 1999; the last time I wrote about it (if I can believe my own search engine) was May 2008. Why so quiet lately?

The recession. In that May 2008 post, I noted that Goldman Sachs was predicting an oil price of $200/barrel in 2010. But that was May 2008 and by Election Day of that year, the economy had solidly tanked, destroying demand for oil along the way. The price of oil today is around $77/barrel. Even Goldman Sachs gets a money question wrong once in a while.

What happens when (if?) the global recession ends and demand rebounds? Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market that has been the world’s leading authority on business risk for the past 300 years this month predicted “catastrophic consequences” for businesses that fail to adequately prepare for the effects of peak oil.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Energy, Iraq Invasion, Peak Oil | Tagged , | Comments (0)
07/08/2010

HD4

Next Tuesday is the fourth annual Hansen Day – or HD4 – how do you plan to commemorate it?

What’s “Hansen Day”? Hansen Day – or what should be known as Hansen Day – is July 13. It was on that date in 2006 that NASA scientist and leading climate change
expert James Hansen wrote in the New York Review of Books: “…we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating.” (The entire article is worth reading, or re-reading.)

Statistics in the article still surprise me. How could I have forgotten? Warmer isotherms – the bands in which given temperatures dominate – are moving toward the poles at 35 miles per decade, while species that depend on those isotherms are migrating at four miles per decade. If we don’t change our ways – and we haven’t since Dr. Hansen published the article – isotherms will be moving at 70 miles per decade by this century’s end, a recipe for mass extinction.

The same business-as-usual scenario may yield an increase in sea levels of 80 feet (!) by the end of the century, wiping out every coastal city in the world, sending hundreds of millions of people scrambling and setting off global warfare. It seems too impossibly catastrophic to be true, so we ignore it and do nothing.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , | Comments (0)
07/01/2010

Obama’s a Fool (Part II)

I was going to get to part II sooner, but there’s been this huge oil spew in the gulf and besides, part II is related to part I – only it may be worse.

At the end of March – three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster – Barack Obama told us he wants to expand offshore oil drilling and said with the new rigs oil spills were almost impossible. We know he was as wrong as he could be. Mr. Obama didn’t mean to lie, it’s just that he relied on the idiots of the oil industry for his talking points. (Is “idiots” too harsh? Think Tony Hayward. No, it’s not too harsh.)

At the same time he’s plumping for more offshore drilling, Mr. Obama wants to build more nuclear plants. Guess where he’s getting his information on nukes? Like the oil industry, the nuclear industry is in charge of Mr. Obama’s talking points and they too are idiots who use the president as a ventriloquist’s dummy to lie to the American people.

When the current generation of nuclear power plants began to reach the end of their lifespans, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) began to take them off line. The nuclear industry responded with a lobby campaign, the NRC regulations were altered and now other members of that same generation of nukes – now nearing 40 years old – are being granted 20-year extensions to their operating permits. Sound familiar?
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Nuclear Energy | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)