Tag Archives: environment

Political Rants

Something shiny.

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Another week loaded with shiny objects. Trump letting loose a series of crackhead tweets, conducting his campaign-style Klan rallies, stoking conspiracy theories tweeted by his mutant son. But in the midst of all of this (and so much more), a lot is happening throughout this administration that is threatening to do lasting, perhaps permanent damage to the nation and the world. Most of this is not even reported on, mainly because the Trump/Russia investigation and related prosecutions provide such an attractive source of content for our TV networks in particular. CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, etc. …. they have been pointing cameras at this guy since he started his run for president in 2015. As I’ve said before, it’s the reality show that took over the universe, and since the networks love the reality TV format (and viewers tune in), they are taking this opportunity to expand their audiences and rake in some serious bank.

Rick 'splainin' nuk-yuh-ler.They have been busy as hell, too. Just this week, the unbelievably clueless energy secretary Rick Perry (about whose idiocy we did an entire album a few years back) was tooling around upstate New York, stopping at the aging Fitzpatrick nuclear power plant, not so very far from where I’m sitting now. Perry, who originally thought the Energy Department was some kind of lobbying job (!), spouted off about how essential nuclear power is and that investing in it is a “national security” issue. He told our dimwitted local media that the only two types of power sources that are “uninterruptible” (i.e. less vulnerable to attack) are nuclear and coal. This being New York, he probably had to duck while saying it to avoid being hit in the head by a wind turbine … which is more “uninterruptible” than either of his examples. Then there’s solar. (Like I said …. idiot.)

The point being, while Trump fiddles, his minions are burning the nation down, either by pushing world-crushing retro technologies like coal and nuclear, or by packing the courts, or by deregulating the hell out of everything. The press needs to report on this shit. They can STILL talk about the Mueller probe … just not every hour of every day. If we are going to survive this insane presidency, we have to build awareness around these crucial issues. We need to get our neighbors to think about the courts, think about the environment, think about potential war with Iran or whomever, and we need to come up with solutions that move us in a progressive direction. If we don’t do that, losing Trump won’t get us very far at all.

Look away from the shiny objects. That’s my advice, for what it’s worth.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Sand and salt.

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Non-stop fun here in the land of the free. No coincidence that this is the week they dedicated the George W. Bush presidential library. Some of the key “decision points” of his presidency were in play this week. Let’s start with a honking big one.

Syria. Bush’s political allies (and many in the “muscular” liberal establishment) have been pushing for wider involvement in the Syrian conflict for a good long while now. This week, unconfirmed reports of the use of sarin gas by the Assad regime surfaced this week, by way of the Israeli and French intelligence services, for the most part. The Obama administration intelligence services seem ambivalent and non-commital on this evidence, but not so Admiral … I mean Senator John McCain and some of his clones, who really really really wants another mid East conflict on his resume of error.

Mac is back
Mac is back!

McCain is once again proving why he would have been a catastrophic president. He affects to believe that creating a “safe zone” in northern Syria and arming the fractious opposition (which includes a strong element of jihadi fighters from the Gulf) will not lead to a broader confilct that will commit us to another long-term occupation of a Middle Eastern state, ignite a broader international war, and generally result in another Iraq-like catastrofuck. I say, let’s just drop McCain on Syria, since he’s so eager to put someone’s life on the line. And if chemical weapons are a “red line”, we should have drawn it before using white phosphorus and depleted uranium munitions in Iraq. If Syria goes to the Hague, they should be in line right behind us.

Seneca Lake. A blockade by activists at the site of a salt cavern natural gas storage site being established by Inergy LLP resulted in arrests a few weeks ago. One of those arrested, Sandra Steingraber, was interviewed on the Capital Pressroom radio program this week along with her attorney. This project involves storing natural gas shipped in from outside the state in salt caverns left from old salt mining operations. Similar facilities across the nation have caused sinkholes, water pollution, etc., and now they want to site this thing on the largest of the Finger Lakes. Steingraber and her fellow protesters are fighting the good fight on this one. Pumping natural gas into geologically questionable formations beneath one of the largest fresh water lakes in the region seems like, well, not a real good idea.

Energy coporations and faulty intelligence. It’s like Bush all over again.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Game over.

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Some storm, that Irene. Trouble is, it may – as so many recent catastrophic weather events have – turn out merely to be a taste of things to come. I can tell you, I’ve lived in the northeast for fifty years – that’s 350 dog years, young ‘uns! – and I have never seen anything like the flooding that has affected so much of northern and eastern New York. For chrissake, a street two blocks away from me was evacuated due to flooding… and we got just a very small piece of the storm. I shudder to think what might have happened to us if that storm had hit a bit further to the west.

Here’s the thing, though – this has been a disastrous year for weather pretty much everywhere. We’ve had tornados here in upstate New York. Multiple tornados. (My cousin saw three funnel clouds while out on the golf course that day.) Sure, we’ve gotten them before, but they were more like three in a decade, and not anything on a grand, midwestern scale. Just this morning, on NPR, the first three or four minutes of their news summary was taken up by extreme weather and other disasters – the aftermath of Irene in Vermont and New York, a tropical storm bearing down on New Orleans, record-breaking drought in Texas as well as wildfires there and in Louisiana. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard harried residents of some devastated town say something like “this is the worst ____ I’ve ever experienced” or “we haven’t had a ______ this bad in 60/80/100 years.”

Former NASA scientist James Hansen (denounced by conservative hacks as an “alarmist”) and others have spoken out for years on the forces behind this extreme weather. But you hardly have to be a rocket scientist to work this out. Our climate is more unstable than it’s ever been in our lifetimes – I think we can all acknowledge that. And as of a few years ago, we seemed to have something like a broad consensus that the burning of fossil fuels was a major contributor to global warming. I think at that time major corporations saw some profit potential in what was agreed to be an unshakeable truth. Since then, the financial crisis and the Great Recession have convinced them and their political allies that cash-strapped Americans can more easily be sold comforting lies than inconvenient truths. Now it’s all about getting the economy moving again, drilling out more oil and gas, and turning everything into cash.

There are perceived upsides to things like building a massive pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. But there are enormous costs, as well. As Bill McKibben has said, the tar sands deposits represent an enormous carbon bomb waiting to go off. If it gets tapped more efficiently via that pipeline, it’s essentially “game over” in Hansen’s words, with costs previewed this past week in places like Montpelier VT and elsewhere.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Oilcano.

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The price of oil is going up. Way up. In fact, it looks like it’s going to cost us the whole Gulf Coast.

Don’t know if you heard this story on NPR, but apparently the oil volcano (as Rachel Maddow has been calling it) in the Gulf may be spewing ten times as much crude as BP has been estimating. That’s up to 70,000 barrels a day, according to this analysis. With all the finger-pointing going on between the various overfed corporations involved in engineering this catastrophe, I guess there just hasn’t been enough opportunity to calculate exactly how much toxic sludge is pumped into this vast body of water upon which millions of people – and countless animals – depend. This is almost beyond comment, and it happened before the echo died on Obama’s announcement that he would be opening more offshore areas to oil exploration. As great as that sounded at the time, it’s getting better and better by the day.

These companies are falling all over themselves trying to limit their liability. Not surprising, but quite honestly, why should they be allowed to do anything of the sort? Is anyone going to limit the liability of every living thing along the Gulf coast? Can a limit be placed on how much people, birds, fish, an entire ecosystem, in fact, will be allowed to suffer? And what the hell happens when we try to place a limit on how much companies like BP can take in profits? Excess profit taxes always raise cries of socialism, unjust takings, etc. These guys have been making billions hand over fist for the last few years in particular with no limits whatsoever. But liability for a massive catastrophe like this – that can be limited, somehow? Ludicrous beyond belief.

The plain fact is, there is nothing these companies can offer that will mitigate the damage done to the Gulf and the coastline and wetlands surrounding it. We will hear all about how much money they’re spending on clean-up. But the lesson of these big spills – and this one is really in a category by itself, since it is still spilling – is that ultimately the damage is permanent. I’m not saying that there’s no hope for minimizing its effects. What I’m suggesting is that, like Exxon in Alaska, these companies will delay, deny, and litigate against any meaningful reparation for years, perhaps decades to come. That is the pattern, and unless our government does something about it, it will play out the same way again.

This is the legacy of decades of deregulation and a cozy relationship between oversight agencies and the polluters they keep watch on. Time for a shake up, big time.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Drill this.

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Still under it, so I’ll make this brief.

The BP oil spill is shaping up to be one of the greatest environmental catastrophes in the age of greed. Comparisons have been made to the Exxon Valdez and the Santa Barbara spill, but this thing is potentially in a whole different category. For one thing, it isn’t a finite amount of oil leaking from a tanker. This thing is gushing straight from the well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day. Even if they deal with the enormous plume heading towards the coast now, there will be more right behind it.

Also… this is threatening some of the most sensitive, most biodiverse wetland areas in the United States. Perhaps 40% of the nation’s wetlands lie along that coastline, home to god knows how many species of birds, etc. Ecologically speaking it’s the soft underbelly of the nation – the fact that makes drilling in the gulf such a reckless choice. What the hell is this going to mean for this amazingly rich national environmental endowment? Disaster. Fucking disaster.

And this is one well. One bloody well! How many more are there in the Gulf? How many are they contemplating drilling? So much for the confident claims of the oil industry that they have this technology under control. BP has certainly been at the forefront of the spin machine, airing ads (like other oil companies and oil-dominated trade groups) that show typical Americans opining on the necessity for a diversity of energy sources (Ex-stoner college roommate talking about how we’ve got “lots of oil”; middle aged lady saying “we’ve got to find it here.”) You’ve seen ’em. Let me ask you this – did BP spend anywhere near as much on their wellhead safety technology as they did on their image-scrubbing ad campaigns? Doubt it. But even if they did, it evidently wasn’t enough.

For all their hype, they responded to this initially like any other corporation – minimize exposure; commence damage control. They suck just like rest of the oil giants.  

luv u,

jp