Category: Human / Nature

Dirty Energy Trifecta

September 8, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The Obama Administration's Environmental Vision: Green Lighting Arctic Drilling, A Pipeline from the Alberta Tar Sands, and Delaying Carbon Emissions Regulations

The Obama Administration has recently made three moves that undermine the possibility of a green future by supporting dirty energy projects and deregulation.

1.  ARCTIC DRILLING:

Though Congress has passed no new oil drilling safeguards following the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dept. of the Interior last month gave Shell the green light to start their plans to drill in the Arctic, despite how dangerous it is.

2.TAR SANDS and the KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE:

The State Department is fixing to approve Keystone XL Pipeline that would transport oil from the Alberta Tar Sands across the U.S to Texas Refineries.

James Hansen, NASA scientist and the first person to warn Congress of the dangers of climate change, lists the negative impact from tar sand development:

The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal Forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and Caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities.

But worse still is that exploitation of the tar sand’s dirty produce would “make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”  Hansen concludes that if the oil from tar sands is burned together with conventional oil and gas and coal, “it is essentially game over” for our species.

Other scientists also agree that the pipeline sucks.

But nothing to worry about, agrees the company who wants to build the pipeline — what could go wrong? Meanwhile the State Department is following the Corporate Script, asserting without meaningful investigation that there will be “no significant” environmental impact.

Lots of protesters getting arrested in front of the White House, meanwhile. For more, see here.

3. EMISSIONS STANDARDS:

On September 2, Obama announced his decision to delay the implementation of emissions regulations that would have, according to the National Resources Defense Council, “saved up to 4,300 lives and avoid as many as 2,200 heart attacks every year.” This, in order to reduce “regulatory burdens” on the richest corporations in the history of humankind.

This decision means that the Obama administration will accept the Bush Era standards, which Lisa Jackson, the current EPA manager, wrote were “not legally defensible.”

The American Lung Association is pissed, and so is this asthmatic (former?) Obama supporter.


Famine and War in the Horn of Africa

August 15, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Famine in the Horn of Africa, again.

The U.N. is currently calling it the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world.”

Writing for al-Jazeera, economist Jeffrey Sachs reviewed the immediate causes of the crisis: Two years of failed rains, and colonial-era political boundaries that both divide and restrict the movements of traditionally pastoral communities.

Sachs reviews other contributing factors as well: the increasing instability of climate change, high fertility rates in the absence of contraception and family planning, widespread poverty and political instability.

The U.S. of course blames the political instability on — what else — Islamic “terrorist” groups like al-Shabaab, who are the target of and justification for black site torture prisons, drone strikes and proxy armed groups in Somalia.

Al-Shabbab, which has just lifted its ban on Western aid groups in the face of the severity of the famine,  has been the target of U.S. airstrikes and proxy attacks for years.  In a WGP post from May 2008, I tried to put a couple of these air strikes in context:

These bombings are directed at members of al-Shabaab, which is the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union who briefly controlled much of Somalia in 2006 — and who had brought relative peace and stability to the chaotic yet oil rich nation — before they were forced from power by U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops. (Christian Ethiopia is a historic enemy of Somalia, which is almost entirely Sunni Muslim.)

In that same three year old post, it was already clear how the U.S. proxy war against Somalia contributed to the threat of widespread famine:

The U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion has contributed to a humanitarian crisis the International Committee of the Red Cross has described as “catastrophic”. Over a million people have been made internal refugees, and the U.N warned that 3.5. million Somalis — nearly half the country’s population — face famine. Moreover, Amnesty International has collected many accounts of atrocities by Ethiopian troops.

Here is a recent episode of al-Jazeera’s Inside Story that focuses on the rather facile question, “Are the problems in the Horn of Africa down to nature, or are people and politics to blame?”

Khadija O. Ali, a former member of the Somali Transitional National Parliament, laments the lack of women in Somali government as “women and children are the primary victims of ongoing conflict and deepening drought and famine.”

See here for a story about how U.S. universities are participating in an “African Land Grab”.

See here for the darker side of the World Food Program’s efforts in Somalia.

The image of the starving boy was originally published in the NYT, and was commented upon here and here.

Extreme Energy: Oil, Coal and Nukes.

June 26, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Power industries have resorted to extreme measures in order to produce energy for an insatiable civilization, exploiting increasingly remote crevices of the planet in the pursuit of corporate profit  — without regard to heavy environmental costs.

Below are three examples: oil from tar sands, coal from mountaintop removal, and nukes from a demonstrably unsafe and under-regulated industry.

1. Oil Extraction from Canadian Tar Sands

Tom Radford’s documentary film about oil extraction from Alberta’s Tar Sands tells the story of Canada’s sorry environmental trajectory, its obstructionism to a global climate deal, the pollution of the Athabasca River and the devastating effects on the humans and other organisms in the area.

A choice sequence from the documentary:

Narrator: In Kyoto, Canada promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 6%. Now, 20 years later, the tar sands are booming and the emissions are up 26%.

Bill McKibben: If you set out to devise a method to harm the planet, you couldn’t come up with a better one than what Canada is doing at the tar sands. You’ve got to bring in energy to heat this stuff up enough to get it out.  Once you spent all that energy in getting it out, then you refine it into gasoline and burn it again. If any significant portion of that tar sands continues to get exploited and burnt, then we’ll simply have too much carbon in the atmosphere

Tim Flannery: For every barrel of oil that you get from the tar sands, you release three times the as much carbon that you get form a conventional oil well in Texas or Saudi Arabia. So there is a big carbon liability… if the world followed followed Canada down that route… we would cook the earth.

2. Coal from Mountain Top Removal

Recent development from Mother Jones, on the devastating health effects of mountaintop removal mining:

A new study linking Appalachian mountaintop removal mining to birth defects offers compelling new evidence of the practice’s impact on human health..

Researchers at Washington State University and WVU pored over nearly 2 million central Appalachia birth records from 1996 to 2003. Their findings are disturbing: Kids born near mountaintop mining operations suffered higher rates of a bevy of birth defects, including central nervous system, musculoskeletal, urogenital and circulatory and respiratory problems.

I’ve posted on mountaintop removal before, and described how it saves the coal industry labor costs by simply blowing up mountains to get to the coal deposits inside.

In the process, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council,

Mining companies are clear cutting thousands of acres of some of the world’s most biologically diverse forests. They’re filling local rivers and streams with blasted debris, polluting drinking water with toxic waste and sacrificing the safety and sanctity of countless communities.

“The Last Mountain“, a critically acclaimed new documentary about mountaintop removal is playing in theaters this month. Here is a promotional trailer:

BTW, if you want to find your own electric connection to mountaintop removal, here is a useful tool.

3. Disasters and Lax Safety Regulation in the Nuclear Energy Industry

Although the Fukushima disaster has largely disappeared from U.S. “news” media that prefer to giggle at pictures of pee-pees, al-Jazeera is probably right to assert that it is “much worse than you think“.

The article quotes a longtime high level nuke industry exec Arnold Gundersen who claims that “Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind.”

The disaster has led global support for nuclear power to subside, but in the U.S. the AP has reported on how “federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation’s aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them.”

Meanwhile, these doctors are suggesting a connection between Fukushima and a 35% spike in infant mortality in the U.S. pacific northwest.

Fukushima Heart?

June 5, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The Tokyo Electric Power Company has detected 4,000 millisieverts per hour at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, “the highest measured so far“. With no end in sight,  here is a brief review of the situation:

Workers have been fighting to get the plant under control since the March 11 tsunami knocked out power, destroyed backup generators and halted the crucial cooling systems for the reactors, causing the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. Several explosions have scattered radioactive debris around the plant, and reactors are spewing radiation into the air.

Speaking of Chernobyl, below is an Oscar-winning documentary film from 2004 covering some of its long term effects, particularly on children:

Joe Giambrone, who has been collecting Chernobyl related documentaries on his political film blog, has a piece on Counterpunch summarizing what he has learned and worries about “The Future Children of Fukushima”.

Nuclear power engineer and analyst Arnie Gundersen maintains that Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl, and that an aftershock and additional damage to the Fukushima plant may require the evacuation of Tokyo.  You can here an interview here.

Meanwhile, The Obama Administration is standing by nuclear power, as Germany’s coalition government has announced a phase out of nuclear power plants by 2022.

Even in the face of such disaster and suffering, some environmentalists argue for nuclear power on the grounds that it is much better than continued reliance on fossil fuels.

I’m not convinced, but with greenhouse emissions reaching record highs, these pro-nuke arguments have some force: See longtime environmentalist Stewart Brand argue for nuclear energy in this TED debate, which took place before the Fukushima disaster.  Brand has not changed his tune, even after Fukushima (and Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island, etc.).

We almost lost [your city here].

March 16, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

In October 1966, there was a partial meltdown of the Fermi I Breeder Reactor in Michigan. Gil Scott Heron wrote a song about it.

As the news from Japan becomes more dire, what else is there to do but turn to a bluesman:

Read about this and four other times “we almost nuked ourselves by accident.”  A fuller list of “civilian nuclear accidents” worldwide is here.

Nuclear Crisis in Fukushima and beyond.

March 14, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Japan is reeling from the onslaught of monumental challenges triggered by the 9.0 earthquake off of its eastern coast — a devastating tsunami, whole towns annihilated, thousands of missing and dead, and a quickly developing nuclear crisis.

DN summarizes:

Japan remains in a state of emergency three days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the country. An estimated 10,000 people have died, and Japan is facing the worst nuclear crisis since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On Monday, a second explosion hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and a third reactor lost its cooling system, raising fears of a meltdown. Radiation levels have been detected as far as 100 miles away. Dozens of people have tested positive for radiation exposure, and hundreds of thousands of have been evacuated, with the number expected to rise.

Japan’s nuclear crisis has put the spotlight on the facilities of other countries. Over the weekend, Germany witnessed mass demonstrations advocating the retirement of its own nuclear facilities, and on Monday Germany joined Switzerland in putting a freeze on nuclear development.

Although the U.S. is home to 104 nuclear power plants, some of which are situated along the coast and in earthquake prone areas, there has so far been no such revision to U.S. policy, with the Obama administration joining senators from both corporate parties in defending the continued use of nuclear power.

In fact, in 2009 Obama “cited Japan’s nuclear facilities as a model for [U.S.] America’s nuclear renaissance”; in 2011 he called for “a three-fold increase in federal loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants, from the $18.5 billion that Congress has already approved to $54.5 billion.”

Here is a map of U.S. nuclear facilities:

If there ever is a full on Chernobyl style disaster at any of these sites, it might look something like this:

Other links: At CounterPuch, A. Cockburn takes government and corporate media reassurances about the severity of the crisis as cause for worry, having trained himself to believe what is officially denied, while Robert Alvarez reviews the precarious situation in Fukushima. BagNews compares the image of a child undergoing a radiation check to a stick-up.

NHK World

March 14, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Here is a live feed from NHK World News in English for info on the situation in Japan:

Nuclear Explosions

November 16, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has made a beautiful and terrifying video mapping the 2053 nuclear explosions that have taken place on our planet between 1945 and 1998. Enjoy!

I wonder if this has anything to do with cancer rates?

(video via C&L)

Ice Cream!

July 1, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Don’t know how I missed this one…

This video was filmed at a dairy “farm” in Ohio.  Here is another video from a dairy farm in New York, which goes into more detail.

Do It Yourself

June 17, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Tuesday night’s blathering address from the Oval Office about the disaster in the Gulf has been widely panned for its timidity in the face of what could be the world’s worst ecological disaster - a disaster for which the President clearly bears some responsibility.  And meanwhile Obama has just approved 400 new leases for oil companies to operate in the gulf.

Since it seems like people are starting to realize, finally and begrudgingly, that their boy is a pro-war, anti-civil libertarian, corporatist spokesliar, I’m starting to feel like there is less of an urgent need to propagate that particular piece of increasingly obvious information.

So I thought I’d turn attention to some locals who are doing it for themselves – and, unlike the federal government, successfully fighting to address our culture’s addiction to the vile substance at the heart of many of the world’s problems.

Several months ago, these “Caution: Please Pass With Care” signs started popping up all over L.A.  They are the work of a group of guerrilla citizen-artists who call themselves the Department of D.Y.I.  Here is a video of them walking the walk:

L.A. Streets Blog covered an earlier guerrilla campain by D.I.Y. here, andThe LA.ist published the group’s manifesto here.  Their work can be seen all around the city:

Now it turns out that these guerrilla art campaigns – in conjunction with a sustained lobbying effort by the biking community — prepped the way for actual, official civic change: The LADOT has finally started to install “Sharrows,” which are an essential, although imperfect, piece of biking infrastructure.

Other things are afoot, as well: Only a few weeks after police harassment of a BP protest ride in Hollywood organized by Critical Mass, the L.A.P.D. is going to join Critical Mass as participants of a ride scheduled for June 25.

The la.ist hopes it is a game changer of cyclist/police relations in Los Angeles.

(BTW: If you are interested in following bike news, I recommend these feeds: Bike Commute News, L.A. Bike Coalition, L.A. Critical Mass, L.A. Streets Blog.)