The Big Silence
Not a word about climate instability being the consequence of the warming of the earth, even though global anthropogenic warming is a virtual scientific certainty. The industries that profit from activities that pump carbon into the atmosphere have silenced much of the media. We shall all pay dearly for believing this willful misinformation.
Nuclear Power and the Perception of Risk
Nuclear reactors share much in common with other machines and devices which humans have constructed and fabricated: they wear out from use and must be eventually be either discarded or recycled. Many of the reactors in use, however, have exceeded what the manufacturers—mainly General Electric and Westinghouse—specified to be the life of the reactors, but the Nuclear Regulatory Agency has allowed the utility companies to continue to operate the reactors in spite of their advanced age and fragility.
In addition to the age of the reactors, which presents an increased risk of structural failure, the spent fuel rods generated by the fission process have been stored on-site in large containers of circulating water to keep them cool, since they generate enough heat from the remaining radioactivity to combust in the atmosphere if left alone. The government has all but given up its efforts to find a safe repository to store the spent fuel rods for the thousands of years before they become safe.
I wrote a fairy tale for the Jackson Progressive in 1999 that illustrates the problem, The Persistent Genie. The story was prompted by the September 30, 1999 accident at the JCO nuclear fuel plant at the village of Tokaimura, Japan. It began when workers attempted to dissolve 16 kilograms of enriched uranium in nitric acid, although it is considered dangerous to process more than 2.4kg at one time. This set off an uncontrolled chain reaction, resulting in a 'blue flash' at the processing plant. The reaction punched a hole through the roof of the building, radiation began spewing into the atmosphere, and radiation levels went up to 4,000 times normal levels within a minute. There was no containment around the plant, because it was not thought that an accident like this could happen.
Rain
Readers of the JP will know that I oppose the death penalty, no matter the crime. But I’m tempted to make an exception for the guy that invented the leaf-blower. :-)
Tom Lowe
BP Still Spraying Dangerous Dispersants in the Gulf?
That strategy has been successful, for the most part. News of the spill has disappeared from the local and national media, and the attention of the public has moved on to more immediate distractions, like tea parties and the Superbowl.
But a lot of crude petroleum sits under the Gulf of Mexico, along with some unbelievably toxic chemical dispersants (the composition of which is still secret -- wonder why?), whose long-term effects, while unpredictable, are all potentially devastating, both to the marine environment and the humans that depend upon it for sustenance and livelihood.
We will be dealing with the results for a long time, but the damage will be individualized, so as to render it innocuous to the BP media narrative that the spill is over and the damage has been contained. The story has already become the story of unfortunate individuals, rather than a far-reaching public health disaster that has caused and will cause untold suffering to the people on the Gulf Coast for years and years. And we media-consumers have been conditioned by the commercial media to entertain no thought longer that the typical sound-bite. The result is a breathtaking superficiality that has rendered us defenseless to the manipulations of the Rupert Murdochs and Koch families that would keep us ignorant of what is really happening and then cleanse our memories of almost everything that has happened more than a few weeks before.
Dahr Jamail, an American journalist of middle eastern extraction, has made a name for himself reporting independently from Iraq. Now he has written an article for the Dubai-based Aljazeera on the effects of the BP oil spill, documenting the efforts of the EPA to downplay the seriousness of the spill and its after-effects. It is though everyone wants to simply forget about the spill, rather than honestly face the facts.
Environmental Protection Agency?
Efforts to obtain information from the EPA about the effects of the spill and plans for removing the pollution from the lakes, estuaries, and wetlands in the Gulf region have been unsuccessful. People on the ground are encountering evidence that dispersants are still being used, apparently to hide the scope of the disaster.
Offshore drilling has returned to business as usual.
Have we learned nothing from the spill? It was said that the French monarchs learned nothing and forgot nothing. We seem to be learning nothing and remembering nothing.
And it is embarrassing that we must turn to Aljazeera to find out what is going on in our own backyard. It reminds me of the days when Jacksonians subscribed to the Commercial Appeal (Memphis) to find out what was going on in Mississippi, since the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News did such a poor job.
Human Rights Impact of Oil Pollution: US Gulf Coast
http://www.business-humanrights.org/Documents/Oilpollution/USGulfCoast
The Jones Act Has Nothing to do With the BP Cleanup
McClatchy sets out the facts
Text of The Jones Act
42 USC §55113 Use of foreign documented oil spill response vessels
The right-wingnut response to inconvenient facts, even among friends and loved ones, has always been extremely frustrating to me. The idea that if the facts contradict your beliefs then you ought to carefully examine those beliefs seems to be a completely alien concept to this type of person. It is always disheartening to contemplate that a substantial number of adults in the U.S. still believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attack on the WTC when even George Bush finally admitted that the government had no evidence to support Saddam’s involvement.
Here’s a partial explanation from the blog Stop the Spirit of Zossen 2.0:
Narrative radicalization and escalating vehemence through cant and acting out must — by internal logic — treble when fantasy can not surmount the limits imposed by Objective Reality (say Nov. 2008). Obama’s victory is a crisis threatening the ability to segregate their disassociated fantasized self-image with their often fragmented and undeveloped self. Why anyone remotely close to the Movement who said after defeat “now is the time for introspection” was doomed to be mau maued and kicked off the island. And Lord help you if there was a photo with you hugging Obama . . .
Read the entire post: Rightist Collective Narcissism And Why Obama’s Own Fantasy Of Rational Dialogue Is Doomed
I felt from the beginning that Obama was in error, if not denial, in striving for a bipartisan approach. There is a certain strategic advantage to appearing reasonable when your opponent is determined to do anything in his power to make you fail, including causing a great deal of unnecessary suffering to the American People, but at some point it becomes imperative to be honest with everybody and state the unvarnished truth about your opponents, that they are scoundrels who would sacrifice this nation’s welfare in a Texas minute to regain political power.
It’s the right thing to do. Secondly, there is the 25-30 percent of the voters who will not change their minds if the Lord himself descended from heaven holding gold tablets with the truth written on them in 7th grade English, if the contents of the tablets contradicted their beliefs. The rest of the electorate expects Obama to do something more that he has done so far. Part of his failure must be attributed to his misguided attempt to appeal to the better natures of the Republicans in Congress. (His other major mistake is in listening to Summers, Geithner and Bernake, the gruesome threesome that played such a huge part in bringing about the current financial mess.) They have no better natures and will stop at nothing to defeat him. That’s a fact.
The End of Suburbia - 52 minute documentary on peak oil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug
Airplanes Greener than Trains?
That is the conclusion of researchers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath of the University of California, Berkeley, as reported in NewScientist online via the newsletter from Scientists & Engineers for America:
Train can be worse for climate than plane
The article points out, however, that the concentration of passengers is critical. A city bus with only 5 passengers is one of the worst offenders, whereas a full city bus is relatively efficient. The same goes for autos and planes.
The lessons: 1. no matter how certain we are, things are not always what they seem; and 2. looking at the big picture frequently invalidates the lessons we learned from looking only at the small picture.
Watching Home
The scientific evidence is overwhelming that our civilization is creating almost insurmountable problems for the human race by heating up the planet, and that if we are to avoid almost certain catastrophe there will have to be drastic changes that will affect every one of us.
Climate change skeptics are either deliberately blinding themselves to the evidence, or they are being highly paid to prevaricate.
Dr. James Burke made a two-hour movie about global warming around 15 years ago, After the Warming, and it seemed to have no impact whatever. Now that the ice cap at the North Pole is fast disappearing, perhaps Home will get a better reception.
Watch it on YouTube. It’s about an hour and 33 minutes in length.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU
Biolab Going to Kansas
We have been spared a very, very risky project. The politicians and economic development people, as well as the local press, have been strong supporters of the project. The JP has opposed it from the moment that Flora looked like a candidate. I’ve never seen such a blackout on unfavorable comment about the project in the press. The possibility of so much money seemed to blind everyone to the dangers of keeping potentially lethal organisms and toxins near our homes.
The lab belongs on a remote deserted island, not on the U. S. mainland.
Christianity and the Future of Creation
Recently, I came across an essay by Wendell Berry, who, along with Matthew Fox, Thomas Berry, and a host of other thinkers, authors, scientists and teachers, has established a spiritual basis for the care of the earth, that, while it does not explain why fundamentalists have ignored the crisis, sets out a compelling case for Biblical environmentalism.
http://www.crosscurrents.org/berry.htm
Berry suggests that Christians read their Bibles:
If we read the Bible, keeping in mind the desirability of those two survivals--of Christianity and the Creation--we are apt to discover several things that modern Christian organizations have kept remarkably quiet about, or have paid little attention to.
We will discover that we humans do not own the world or any part of it: "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof: the world and they that dwell therein" (Ps. 24:1). There is in our human law, undeniably, the concept and right of "land ownership." But this, I think, is merely an expedient to safeguard the mutuality of belonging without which there can be no lasting and conserving settlement of human communities. This right of human ownership is limited by mortality and by natural constraints upon human attention and responsibility; it quickly becomes abusive when used to justify large accumulations of "real estate," and perhaps for that reason such large accumulations are forbidden in the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus. In biblical terms, the "landowner" is the guest and steward of God: "the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me" (Lev. 25:23).
We will discover that God made not only the parts of Creation that we humans understand and approve, but all of it: "all things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made" John 1:3). And so we must credit God with the making of biting and dangerous beasts, and disease-causing microorganisms. That we may disapprove of these things does not mean that God is in error, or that the creator ceded some of the work of Creation to Satan; it means that we are deficient in wholeness, harmony, and understanding--that is, we are "fallen."
We will discover that God found the world, as he made it, to be good; that he made it for his pleasure; and that he continues to love it and to find it worthy, despite its reduction and corruption by us. People who quote John 3:16 as an easy formula for getting to heaven neglect to see the great difficulty implied in the statement that the advent of Christ was made possible by God's love for the world--not God's love for Heaven or for the world as it might be, but for the world as it was and is. Belief in Christ is thus made dependent upon prior belief in the inherent goodness--the lovability--of the world.
We will discover that the Creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God. Elihu said to Job that if God "gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together . . . " Job 34:15). And Psalm 104 says: "Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created.... " Creation is God's presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian, Philip Sherrard, has written that "Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God's hidden being." Thus we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate. To every creature the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God. As the poet, George Herbert, put it,
Thou are in small things great, not small in any.... For thou art infinite in one and all.
We will discover that, for these reasons, our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into his face, as of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them. To Dante, "despising Nature and her gifts" was a violence against God. We have no entitlement from the Bible to exterminate or permanently destroy or hold in contempt anything on the earth or in the heavens above it or in the waters beneath it. We have the right to use the gifts of Nature, but not to ruin or waste them. We have the right to use what we need, but no more, which is why the Bible forbids usury and great accumulations of property. The usurer, Dante said, "condemns Nature. . . for he puts his hope elsewhere."
I have omitted the footnotes, which can be found in the original document linked above.
EPA Secretly Closes Toxin Library
According to Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility (PEER):
Unlike its recent closure of its main Headquarters library and despite federal policy (Office of Budget & Management Circular A-130) requiring that the public be notified whenever “terminating significant information dissemination products,” EPA made no public announcement concerning the dismantlement of the OPPTS Library. In addition, the OPPTS Library was not mentioned in the “EPA FY 2007 Framework” as one of the several libraries slated to be shuttered.
“EPA’s hasty, buzz saw slashing at its library network is now interfering with its mission of harnessing the best available science to protect human health and the environment,” commented Ruch [PEER director], noting that Congress has yet to approve EPA’s actions. “Given the tremendous public health risks, this is absolutely the last place EPA should be cutting.”
The tragedy is that once a library is closed, the librarians will leave for other positions and the materials themselves will become inaccessible and outdated in a short time, thus making it nearly impossible to start back. This outcome is obviously intended by Bush and the incompetent ideological hacks he has been appointing to run federal agencies. It's a mindset incomprehensible to anyone with the slightest concern for public welfare, but second nature to those possessed by the right-wing philosophy that pervades our one-party government. That alone should be sufficient reason to vote them out of office tomorrow.
Humanity v. Monsanto
Bush Wants to Cut Back Pollution Reporting
Weakening these protections will, of course, benefit industries that deal with large amounts of toxic chemicals. It's a short-term benefit, though, as any relaxation of regulation toxic waste increases the likelihood of a disaster. Time and time again, large corporations have shown that they will leave no corner uncut in their drive to reduce the costs of doing business, regardless of danger to the public. Even a small disaster will create tremendous political pressure for far tighter regulation than they now experience.
But corporate finance and governance are structured towards short-term gain. CEOs and others at the top have every incentive to increase profits and the share value of corporate stock, secure in the knowledge that the bad times will almost surely come after they have left the corporation and cashed out their stock and stock options.
A sensible public policy would give fewer rewards for short-term gains and greater rewards for long-term gains. A change in the taxation of executive compensation, stock options and capital gains would be a good start, but only a systemic restructuring of the entire financial (and monetary) system can eliminate the
The deadline for comments is today. Sorry I didn't find out about it sooner. Make a Comment which will be sent to the EPA administrator.
The National Environmental Trust
Analysis: Nearly 1,000 Communities Across U.S. Would Lose All Toxics Information
Text of proposed rule and supplementary information. (Note: this is a large .pdf file and the actual text of the amendments begins on Page 74 of the document)
Right to Know Network (Part of OMB Watch. Features databases copied from EPA TWI database you can use to investigate toxic release in your area)