Oh how cool is this–BP has set up a website where you, yes you can submit your suggestions for how to 
clean up all that nasty oil that they accidentally spilled. No word yet on if they are offering a prize for the winning idea. Great chance to tell them where they can go shove themselves.
Archive for Environment
BP Sets Up Website For Cleanup Suggestions
BP CEO Says Amount Of Oil In Gulf Is “Tiny”
Well it isn’t really, but he really said it.
Strong contender for the most effed up quote ever, via Grist:
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
— Tony Hayward, CEO of British Petroleum
One wonders how Mr. Hayward would categorize the number of dead fish, the destroyed wetlands, the lost jobs in the fishing industry, the lost tourism…oh never mind.
Can we say delusional? Memo to Mr. Hayward: Jail cells aren’t all that big either.
Let’s Quit Calling It A Spill
There are many ways in which to describe the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Any of the following will do:
Ecotastrophe
Disaster
Greedy, Criminal Corporate Arrogance
But spill? Not so much.
When I think of a spill, I think of this:
NOT this:
What happened should not be allowed to be framed in terms of oops, my bad. It is the catastrophic aftermath of the perfect storm that is the result of our very failed national energy policy and the persistent prioritizing of corporate greed over the public good.
Snake Oil Salesmen
The gulf oil disaster is beginning to become a predictable story–too little oversight, lax laws (and if you want to know why, just follow the money), profit over environment rather literally blows up in our faces and we got nothing except a lot of Congressional hearings, hand-wringing, brow-beating and good old fashioned buck passing, maybe a quick trip to bankruptcy court which will lead to lack of financial culpability and then surprise surprise, BP will be back to profitability in no time while the fishing and tourism industries die, along with the flora and fauna and we’ll keep drill baby drilling. Another episode of mourning in America and still we don’t get that this can’t continue.
Tennessee Coal Ash Disaster 2008--They called that a "spill" too.
__________
I saw a story this morning about the media being denied access to the disaster response headquarters which makes me grateful for the media heroes who are determined to tell the truth even if they do get turned away at the door. Watching Alabama resident John Walthen’s fly-over video of the slick reminds me of the citizen videos of the Tennessee coal ash disaster, absolute environmental destruction.
In Walthen’s words,
“At nine miles out, we began to smell the oil… What I see on the horizon–nothing but a red mass of floating goo.”
Watch Walthen’s devastating video. And then cry. And scream. Do not let BP and Halliburton, or the government or the media push this story to the back page, do not let them frame it as an accident, a spill. It is neither of those 2 things–it is an eco-catastrophe caused by negligence and greed, no matter what the snake oil salesmen tell us.
Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down To Me (With Apologies To Richard Farina)
On the morning after the British election Yahoo ran a headline that read, “‘Political vacuum’ sparks market jitters”. Just what we need after the Dow does a stomach tossing dive.
Only for sure thing--a pale white guy will be the next British PM
Should ‘market jitters’ indeed be a cause for concern after a day when the market plummeted? Yes in the sense that it has the potential of further destabilizing the already dicey European markets. But… My local paper ran a headline about yesterday’s Dow fiasco that read, “Dow plunges on Greek crisis, P&G sell order.” Truth–the market plunged because those events apparently triggered a bunch of algorithmic computer-driven sell orders that effectively fed upon each other and that is what really caused the market to plunge. In other words, a bunch of computers came perilously close to plunging the already fragile world economy into a death spiral.
For months now, I’ve been trying to understand how the market could keep going up when down here on the ground, things basically suck. Too many of us are poor, hungry, unemployed, sick and homeless. There is a huge disconnect between the health of the DOW and the health of the economy. What really hasn’t been discussed in depth yet is the impact of the mounting number of huge natural and unnatural disasters on our economic equilibrium; the utter destruction of entire countries in the aftermath of earthquakes, volcanoes that cost the airlines billions and utterly disrupt the transport system that we have become dependent upon.
And now the British Petroleum/Haliburton trashing of the Gulf of Mexico. A look at the long-term impact of the Exxon Valdez spill is instructive:
Three years after the 11 million-gallon spill in Prince William Sound blackened 1,500 miles of Alaska coastline, the herring on which he and other Cordova fishermen heavily relied disappeared from the area. Platt and some others stuck around, fishing for salmon and hoping things would improve.
The herring never returned to Cordova. Platt’s income plummeted, severely straining his marriage and psyche. He dipped into his sons’ college funds to support his family…
…The herring loss alone has cost the region about $400 million over the past 21 years, according to R.J. Kopchak, a former fisherman who is now developmental director at Cordova’s Prince William Sound Science Center.
The average fisherman suffered a 30 percent loss in income after the spill, but those who specialized in just herring lost everything, Kopchak said.
It is a fair assumption that tourism dollars will plummet along the Gulf and maybe up the eastern seaboard, unemployment in those states will rise, and if you take fish oil for your heart, the price is going up. And then there is the price that cannot be calculated for destroying ocean and wetland habitats, damage that can never be undone.
The HAL 9000
There are lessons to be learned from oil slicks that spiral out of control and computer programs that take off on their own (shades of Stanley Kubrick’s HAL) and make no mistake about it, these things are going to keep happening but unlike a roller coaster where you know that after the big plunge, the ride will go back up, here on planet Earth, there is no such guarantee. Time to fasten our seatbelts.
Peak-A-Boo
Hello U.S. media? Why exactly am I reading this story because of a link on Buzzflash to a blog that quotes a British newspaper?:
The good old days no more: "Come listen to a story about a man named Jed A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed, Then one day he was shootin' at some food, And up from the ground came a bubblin' crude. Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea."
The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.
The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.
“By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.
It adds: “While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth (emphasis mine) in both the developing and developed worlds.
They are still concerned about growth? Talk about epic delusional understatement, survival might be the more relevant consideration. But hey, what me worry, think I’ll just drive over to the nearest java infusion station and read the local paper so I can learn which hunky guy is misbehaving with which starlet, but first I’m going to send some money to support independent media and you should too. Gotta have your priorities.
The Collateral Damage of an Unsustainable Lifestyle
There is so much to say about the the oil that is being spewed all over the Gulf of Mexico. Calling it a spill is a misnomer, that is what you say when a child accidentally tips over a glass of milk. This is an act of national and corporate terrorism. But still, Americans will buy gas for their cars at BP and I don’t hear Obama saying there will be a freeze on Halliburton contracts.
‘Experts’ are saying the the disaster ‘may’ cost upwards of $14 billion. No may about it, it will. Not only is there the environmental damage, we need to realize that the economy of the gulf shore is clearly shot to hell for the foreseeable future, energy prices will no doubt rise, and we already have a vulnerable economy. You add that up. And BP’s promises to pay for it, yeah, right.
Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the folly of our lack of attention to infrastructure is once more bearing fruit,
A major pipe bringing water to the Boston area has sprung a “catastrophic” leak and is dumping eight million gallons of water per hour into the Charles River. Governor Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency and issued a “boil-water” order for Boston and dozens of other communities.
The oil, the water pipe–these are disasters for which we have only ourselves to blame. But even if we suddenly became exemplary planetary citizens, the volcanic eruption in Iceland a few weeks ago that brought the European continent to a standstill reminds us that our future would still not be ours to control.
Perhaps Margaret Atwood has already described what may happen in The Year of the Flood, –the silent flood, a disaster of epic proportions, human-made or not (it doesn’t matter in the end) that we don’t see coming and is beyond all of our fancy science and technology.
Only time will tell, but I don’t think it will take too long.
———-
“But love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need – if only we had eyes to see.” —Edward Abbey
Collateral damage from oil 'spill' washes ashore
My New Decade’s Resolution
Most years, my New Year’s resolutions are the usual mundane fantasy items– lose weight, spend less money, improve my love life, yada yada. The other day however, I received a lovely little notepad that says, “I am fairly certain that given a cape and a nice tiara, I could save the World.” Of course the author probably should have mentioned having a magic wand, but nonetheless, I was inspired to think that after the last ten abominable years, a decade-size resolution might be in order, so here it is:
TAKE BACK THE COUNTRY AND
SAVE THE WORLD
Cut to the chase, the last ten years have been a horror. From the stealing of two Presidential elections to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the wars first in Afghanistan and then based on outright lies, Iraq. The fleecing of investors and non-investors alike by companies like Enron and Goldman Sachs. Katrina, the economy, foreclosures, the healthcare debacle and the failure of substantive progress in addressing climate change.
Add to that a global perspective, and of course things are much worse-horrendous weather along the Pacific Rim, the ongoing hell of places like Gaza and Darfur, people starving and dying of disease unnecessarily, half a million maternal mortality deaths every year, melting glaciers, it was, let’s face it, a decathlon of disaster.
In a must-read piece about what is needed, Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association refers to those who run the government as “indentured politicians,” a thought echoed by Carl Bernstein who knows a thing or two about crooked politicians.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling Democrats a win on the health issue will reverse the slide in public opinion, just as passage of another controversial proposal, the North American Free Trade Agreement, lifted President Bill Clinton in the polls.
And after all, it is all about public opinion…not.
Health insurers get some big presents in the Senate’s health overhaul bill — about 20 million new customers and no competition from a new government plan.Taking advantage of those boons might take some time, though.
The bill imposes hefty new taxes and coverage rules that will pinch insurers by forcing them to cover more sick people without gaining enough healthy, lower-cost customers, industry insiders say. The industry is also worried the bill doesn’t do enough to control health care costs.
It’s a matter of figuring out how to make those new customers profitable, analysts say.
However, the most damaging thing about the health care debate is not the legislation itself, flawed as that is, but rather that those who have opposed meaningful reform have been allowed to hijack the discourse with tactics such as using the issue of abortion rights not only to weaken the legislation but to create such a lengthy ruckus that things such as the economy, military spending and most importantly the environment have been relegated to afterthoughts.
“We need to deal with the phenomena of global warming, but I think it’s very difficult in the kind of economic circumstances we have right now,” said Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, who called passage of any economy-wide cap and trade “unlikely.”
At a meeting about health care last month, moderates pushed to table climate legislation in favor of a jobs bill that would be an easier sell during the 2010 elections, according to Senate Democratic aides.
“I’d just as soon see that set aside until we work through the economy,” said Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), “What we don’t want to do is have anything get in the way of working to resolve the problems with the economy.”
Leaving aside the absurdity of cap and trade, so nice to hear from you again Sen. Nelson after your sellout of women’s human rights in exchange for the health of the insurance companies, and now you would have us believe that the economy is going to get better while the environment falters? Can I interest you in some oceanside property in Florida?
Translation of all this thanks to my handy B.S.-to-English translator: We need to see past our noses when it comes to the word from Washington according to self-serving politicians such as Nelson, Bayh and Emanuel. We may have voted these folks into power, but the reality is, their loyalties are to themselves and their corporate owners.
Which leads me back to that super-sized resolution. Enough already. Why in tarnation are we allowing corporations to pull the strings? Why is corporate welfare being valued over human rights? Why are we allowing the continued trashing and degradation of our planet? Where is the culpability?
I’ve written several times recently about the need to stand up for what you believe (here and here). It is time to do some serious introspection and to think about what we truly believe in and what is important, and quite frankly, whether we plan to be able to look back upon the next decade 10 years from now because that is just how serious the issue of climate change is. And then it is time to get off the couch.
We don’t have the luxury of waxing poetic while we watch the ball drop in Times Square. We’ve already dropped the ball enough. We need to be in the street, we need to go to Washington, and yes all that might mean going to jail, but no way around it, we need to reclaim the body politic and we need to do it now.
What Now?
Remember that careful list you think about making early in the year about how much you will spend on holiday shopping and then it all goes to hell in late December when you mostly just want to get done and go home…
The U.S. Senate approved a $636 billion military spending bill on Saturday that funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and also includes money to extend jobless aid and Medicare payment rates for two months.
By a vote of 88-10, the Senate approved the bill and sent it to President Barack Obama to sign into law. The House of Representatives passed the bill on Wednesday.
The bill covers Pentagon operations through September 30, 2010. But the $128 billion approved for ongoing wars probably will not be enough to cover Obama’s plans to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan…
…lawmakers funded 10 more Boeing Co C-17 transport planes than the Pentagon had asked for, at a cost of $2.5 billion.Congress also kept alive over the Pentagon’s objections the troubled VH-71 presidential helicopter, made by Lockheed, and an alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter made by General Electric Co and Rolls Royce Group Plc.
Then there was the health care bill that we were told last summer would cost a trillion dollars over 10 years. The cost of the current plan is unknown because the Senate has devolved into a last minute Christmas shopper who has to buy a gift no matter what it costs, might find a bargain or have to pay full price but hey as long as you get it before Christmas who cares. And then there is the Copenhagen “agreement“:
“Finally we sealed a deal,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. “The ‘Copenhagen Accord‘ may not be everything everyone had hoped for, but this decision…is an important beginning.”
But a decision at marathon 193-nation talks merely took note of the new accord, a non-binding deal for combating global warming led by the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
The 193 nations stopped far from a full endorsement of the plan, which sets a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degree Celsius rise over pre-industrial times and holds out the prospect of $100 billion in annual aid from 2020 for developing nations.
The plan does not specify greenhouse gas cuts needed to achieve the 2 Celsius goal that is seen as a threshold for dangerous changes such as more floods, droughts, mudslides, sandstorms and rising seas.
If asked, I wonder how President Obama would characterize his leadership style, because I don’t know what you call it when the Congress spends the better part of a year crafting an expensive, deadly healthcare plan while barely blinking an eye about spending even more money on poorly defined wars while completely trivializing the issue of climate change that ought to be a national emergency priority item.
Without a question we need to re-prioritize our thinking and change our framework, to wit, profit at the expense of human rights and environmental degradation should be considered a treasonous act. We also need to play a little round of six degrees.
The U.S. military is arguably the world’s biggest polluter. When we spend money on the military we need to take into account that aside from funneling that money from education, health care and other vital services that make us more secure, we are also contributing to the further environmental degradation of the planet. And courtesy of IrishAntiWar.org, here are some other connections between military spending and the environment:
- Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.
- CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road for one year.
- If the war was ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do.
- The $600 billion that the US Congress has allocated for military operations in Iraq to date could have built over 9000 wind farms (at 50 MW capacity each), with the overall capacity to meet a quarter of the US’s current electricity demand and cut 1/6 of the country’s total CO2 emissions.
- In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the whole world spent on investment in renewable energy.
- US president Obama has committed to spending $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of green energy technology and infrastructure. The US spends that much on the war in Iraq in just 10 months.
I’ve also been thinking about the odd juxtaposition of the use of abortion rights as a tool of white, conservative American men to jettison meaningful health care in this country and the increasingly louder drumbeat, mostly by white, liberal American men to tie the benefits of family planning to the use of population control for the sake of the planet. Really? Using the latter line of reasoning we should also cut maternal health care funds such as they are because hell, half a million (almost exclusively non-white) women die of maternal mortality every year and if we can up that number, that means less babies and mothers and that is good for the planet. It is no accident that the colonization and control of women’s lives is being ratcheted up at the same time we trash the planet. And we need to make that connection.
Derrick Jensen has an eloquent vision of the first step of what it would take to re-frame the discussion of how we are going to walk in this world, and I’ll leave you with that:
A lot of the indigenous people with whom I’ve worked have said to me that the first and most important thing any of us needs to do is decolonize our hearts and minds. Decolonization is the process of breaking your identity with and loyalty to this culture-industrial capitalism specifically, and more broadly civilization-and remembering your identification with and loyalty to the real physical world, including the land where you live. It means re-examining premises and stories this culture handed down to you. It means seeing the harm this culture does to other cultures, and to the planet. It means recognizing that we are living on stolen land. It means recognizing that the luxuries of this way of life do not come free, but rather are paid for by other humans, by nonhumans, by the whole world. It means recognizing that we do not live in a functioning democracy, but rather in a corporate plutocracy, a government by, for, and of corporations. Decolonization means recognizing that neither technological progress nor increased GNP is good for the planet. It means recognizing that this culture is not good for the planet. Decolonization means internalizing the implications of the fact that this culture is killing the planet. It means determining that we will stop this culture from doing that. It means determining that we will not fail.
Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer
As we grasp at straws trying to find a way to substantively address climate change, some folks on the left who really ought to know better are touting the use of nuclear power as an alternative to coal, usually prefaced with, “I hate to say this but…”.
Nuclear power is neither safe nor cheap and solving climate change by killing ourselves off another way is just plain stupid. Aside from cost, there are 2 BIG problems with nuclear power:
1. It has this ugly tendency to leak and explode and expose land and people to toxic radiation.
2. There is no known safe way to reliably contain it or dispose of its toxic bi-products.
(F)inancial and energy journals make clear that boiling water with uranium is the costliest and dirtiest energy choice. Even Time magazine reported Dec. 31, 2008, “It turns out that new (reactors) would be not just extremely expensive but spectacularly expensive.”
Florida Power and Light’s recent estimate for a 2-reactor system is a shocking $12 to $18 billion. The Wall St. Journal reported on nuclear’s prospects May 12, 2008 finding, “[T]he projected cost is causing some sticker shock … double to quadruple earlier rough estimates. These estimates never include the costs of moving and managing radioactive waste — a bill that keeps coming for centuries.
Radioactive tritium has poisoned groundwater near at least 14 U.S. reactors, including Kewaunee in Wisconsin. Water under Braidwood, Dresden, Brookhaven, Palo Verde, Indian Point, Diablo Canyon, San Onofre and Kewaunee is all contaminated at levels above EPA and NRC standards.
Nuclear power is so clean that Germany legislated a phase-out of its 17 reactors by 2025. Germany’s 1998 decision was based partly on government studies that found high rates of childhood leukemia in areas near its reactors.
This article is personal to me because one of the very first protests I ever attended back in the early 1970’s was to stop construction of the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant outside Phoenix, AZ.
Palo Verde protest circa the 1970's.
We were a scruffy lot, gathered just outside the barbed wire fence that was the future Palo Verde site with law enforcement on the other side waiting to see if we would go through the fence. Both photos taken by yours truly.
We were right to be concerned then, and those concerns are still valid today. This is not a viable way to provide energy. It is toxic, it is expensive and while there is still the possibility of constructively addressing climate change, once the monster of nuclear pollution is unleashed, we will have committed planetary suicide.
