As I've said here repeatedly, sometimes you really have to shake your head at the sheer idiotic depths this country has sunk to. Though it really isn't a big surprise, newly (re)installed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just announced that the new Republican Senate's VERY FIRST PRIORITY will be to pass a bill forcing approval to allow the TransCanada corporation to build the controversial Keystone Pipeline. That's right, with all the many problems facing America these days, many of our current elected "leaders" believe that enacting a law that will enrich a FOREIGN COMPANY is the most important thing that needs to be done.
McConnell's announcement is supremely stupid on many levels. Let's start with the fact that the State Department is expected to render a final decision on Keystone later this year after a court case in Nebraska over the pipeline's proposed route is resolved. In other words, there is a chance--probably a very GOOD chance--that the pipeline will be approved in just a few months anyway. THEN there is the little matter of collapsing oil prices, which if they remain at or near their current levels for awhile will likely cause a shutdown of Canadian tar sands production--meaning there could very well be no oil to ship through the pipeline ANYWAY. Oh, and let's not forget that one of the supposed reasons to approve the pipeline--to help the U.S. become less reliant on Middle Eastern oil--totally contradicts all of the crowing in conservative circles about how our own domestic oil shale production is turning us into "Saudi America."
But let's put all of that aside for a moment and consider what it is that is really going on here--namely more sound and fury in the ongoing and sadly successful effort to convince American citizensconsumers idiots that there really is a difference between the two parties and that American representative democracy is not in fact dead as a doornail. The biggest reason McConnell and company are making Keystone their top priority is that their troglodyte conservative base DESPISES environmentalists and right now this is the best way to very publicly score political points and stick it to the environmental movement. Forcing Obama to veto the bill (assuming he does) would allow the Republicans to demonstrate how they differ from blue tribe (Obama, of course, would no doubt prefer to sit back and allow the State Department to take the final decision out of his hands).
On the other side of the equation, the environmental movement has been almost as stupid in making the defeat of Keystone such a big (ahem) cornerstone of their own agenda. Even if the pipeline is never built and assuming oil prices quickly rise back into the territory that makes tar sands production economically viable once again, Canada has already indicated that it will build an alternative pipeline on its own soil since much of the tar sands oil is slated to be shipped out to Asia anyway. Assuming the dip in oil prices is short lived, an Obama veto would be at best a pyrrhic victory for the environmental movement. But hey, at least the Democrats would then have their very own "accomplishment" to sell to their idiot base as a reason to keep supporting them. After all, they'll need SOMETHING to point to in 2016 to try and claim that voting for Hillary is a better choice than voting for Jeb.
If it seems like I spend a lot more time on this blog bashing liberals and progressives than I do reactionaries and conservatives, it's because I do. The latter I consider to be a lost cause, while liberals and progressives are supposedly open minded enough to "know better." Sadly, they rarely do, even if most of them have convinced themselves that they do.
Twenty-somethings who postponed having babies because of the poor economy are still hesitant to jump in to parenthood — an unexpected consequence that has dropped the USA's birthrate to its lowest point in 25 years.
The fertility rate is not expected to rebound for at least two years and could affect birthrates for years to come, according to Demographic Intelligence, a Charlottesville, Va., company that produces quarterly birth forecasts for consumer products and pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer and Procter & Gamble.
Marketers track fertility trends closely because they affect sales of thousands of products from diapers, cribs and minivans to baby bottles, toys and children's pain relievers.
As the economy tanked, the average number of births per woman fell 12% from a peak of 2.12 in 2007. Demographic Intelligence projects the rate to hit 1.87 this year and 1.86 next year — the lowest since 1987.
The less-educated and Hispanics have experienced the biggest birthrate decline while the share of U.S. births to college-educated, non-Hispanic whites and Asian Americans has grown.
"What that tells you is that births have clearly been affected by the economy," says Sam Sturgeon, president of Demographic Intelligence. "And like any recession, it doesn't hit all people equally, and it hit some people much harder than others."
The effect of this economic slump on birthrates has been more rapid and long-lasting than any downturn since the Great Depression.
"Usually consumer sentiment bounces back a little quicker," Sturgeon says. "People are a bit in a wait-and-see pattern. … There's a sense of hesitancy, of 'What does better look like? How will we know?' — especially for those of prime child-bearing age. … The key word would be uncertainty, a lot of uncertainty. "
Many young adults are unemployed, carrying big student loan debt and often forced to move back in with their parents — factors that may make them think twice about starting a family.
"The more you delay it, the more you delay the possibility of a second or third child," says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. "This is probably a long-term trend that is exacerbated by the recession but also by the general hollowing out of middle-class jobs. There's a growing sense that college is prohibitively expensive, and yet your kids can't make it without a college degree," so many women may decide to have just one child.
I know that I have put my history as a former progressive well behind me because my immediate reaction was that this was the first good news I've heard in quite some time. Overpopulation is one of those issues that every thinking person realizes is a major crisis facing humanity, yet few ever want to discuss in polite company. More to the point, however, is that the raw number of human beings on the planet is only part of the problem. Author Mark Herstgaard, in his book, Earth Odyssey, observed that from a resource consumption standpoint, a child born into an American family will on average during the course of its lifetime consume approximately ten times as many resources and cause about ten times as much environmental destruction as a child born into a third world, subsistence level existence. Ergo, the effect of any decline in population in the U.S. is multiplied by ten times as far as a beneficial effect on the environment compared to the same reduction in poor third world countries.
Therefore, if you are a liberal or progressive who is supposedly concerned about environmental destruction, climate change and resource depletion, you should welcome this news. But no, instead what we get from many of those from my former political tribe, especially those who call themselves economists such as Paul Krugman, is a lot of Keynesian-on-steroids nonsense about how the U.S. should double down on its insane levels of deficit spending in order to jump start our economy.
Assuming for a moment that we are not approaching the natural limits to economic growth, what would a return to a robust economy really look like? That's easy: more mindless consumption, more idiots trampling themselves at Walmart on Thanksgiving evening to save 20% on a loss-leader toaster oven, more SUVs on the road burning precious fossil fuels and expelling carbon into the atmosphere, more exurban McMansions and strip malls blighting the landscape, more garbage, more pollution, more poisons in the water and in the air, more species driven into extinction, and faster consumption of our remaining nonrenewable resources. In short, supporting a return to economic growth while claiming to be concerned about the environment is an insane position. Yet, I'll bet if you were to poll liberals and progressives as to whether they agree with the public policy positions of Bill McKibben and Paul Krugman an overwhelming majority would say yes to both.
My position, which I've stated here many times before, is that our society needs to start powering down voluntarily based upon the idea of shared sacrifice. That means giving up cars in favor of public transportation, giving up the American Dream of a single family home with a white picket fence in the yard, giving up on countless trips to the mall to buy more shit you don't need and giving up on taking a fancy vacations every year while still having money to save for retirement and also send the kids to college. In short, it means lowering the expectations of ever greater material comfort in exchange for a slower, simpler more personally enriching life based upon family, friends and community instead of continually buying the latest electronic gadget or running out like a lemming to the Multipleplex at midnight to see the latest stupid Batman movie.
But feel free to ignore my opinion on this subject because the sad fact is IT AIN'T EVER GONNA HAPPEN. As proof, I offer up the very next sentence from the USA Today article:
"We have to think through our policies," she says. "We've got to provide better support systems for working mothers as well as fathers."
Because we CAN'T POSSIBLY give up on the idea of growing our population, growing our economy and the growing destruction wrought upon the planet's environment. Perish the thought.
Bonus: From my You Tube channel: Sorry, liberals and progressives, but you can't always get what you want, and you probably won't get what you need, either
Many thanks to reader johnnyboy41 at the Hubbert's Arm discussion forum for alerting me to this story.
Genuine good news stories seem to be few and far between these days. But here's one from the Huffington Post:
Greenpeace, the Yes Lab, and members of the Occupy movement are claiming responsibility for a set of actions that have focused intense attention on Shell's Arctic drilling program.
"This experience shows that a few energized people can compete with the billions that Shell spends on advertising and lobbying," said James Turner from Greenpeace, who posed as an advertising executive at the event. "As people find out how this oil company is exploiting global warming to cause yet more global warming, thus endangering everyone, they won't allow it, no matter how many billions Shell has in its war chest."
The centerpiece of the action was a lavish party in the Space Needle, in which a model of an Arctic-bound oil rig "accidentally" spewed liquid in the face of the rig designer's "widow"—actually 84-year-old Occupy activist Dorli Rainey, well-known for having been brutally pepper-sprayed in the face by Seattle Police during Occupy protests last fall.
A one-minute video (see below) of that "malfunction," shot by Occupy "infiltrator" Logan Price, quickly reached the top spot on Reddit and the #2 spot on Youtube, with a half-million views in less than 24 hours.
"We know that climate change is putting the entire planet at risk," said Rainey. "It's our duty to stop companies like Shell from using fossil fuels as a lethal weapon—even if it means being sprayed again and again in the face."
As Shell denied, with disappointing blandness, having had anything to do with the party or the "malfunction," the Yes Lab sent out a press release on Shell's behalf, threatening anyone who reposted the video and attacking also the activists' brand-new ArcticReady.com website, which includes a social media ad generator and a dangerously addictive children's video game called Angry Bergs. The fake Shell release generated additional media coverage.
Earlier this year, Shell obtained a legal injunction stopping any Greenpeace activist from coming within 1km of any Shell vessel. To thank the company, Greenpeace teamed up with the Yes Lab to plan a promotional advertising campaign for Shell's Arctic drilling efforts, which Shell prefers to keep quiet. Besides the ill-fated ceremony and the website, the campaign includes a number of other elements that will shadow Shell's summer Arctic destruction campaign.
The device which sprayed Rainey's face was a model of Shell's drill rig, the Kulluk, which is set to soon depart Seattle for the Arctic. The Kulluk was built-in 1983 by Mitsui, the same company that, two decades later, built the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon. Earlier this year, Mitsui paid out $90 million to the U.S. for its role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran the above chart as part of a brief blog post covering the topic of Peak Fish:
Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted.
Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, has dubbed this situation “The End of Fish.” He points out that in the past 50 years, the populations of many large commercial fish such as bluefin tuna and cod have utterly collapsed, in some cases shrinking more than 90 percent (see the chart to the right).
Indeed, there’s some evidence that we’ve already hit “peak fish.” World fish production seems to have reached its zenith back in the 1980s, when the global catch was higher than it is today. And, according to one recent study in the journal Science, commercial fish stocks are on pace for total “collapse” by 2048 — meaning that they’ll produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. On the other hand, many of those fish-depleted areas will be overrun by jellyfish, which is good news for anyone who enjoys a good blob sandwich.
The full WWF report , meanwhile, is chock full of brightly colored graphs charting the decline of wildlife across the globe. All told, global vertebrate populations have declined by some 30 percent since 1970. But that number masks a lot of variation. Wildlife actually appears to be recovering in the temperate areas, while it’s utterly collapsing in the tropics. (It seems there have been some modest conservation successes in the wealthier temperate regions — the European otter is staging an impressive comeback, for instance.)
The big thing the WWF paper emphasizes, however, is that human consumption patterns are currently unsustainable. We’re essentially consuming the equivalent of one and a half Earths each year. This is possible because we borrow from the future, as is the case with fish — one day the world’s fish population may collapse, but there’s plenty for us now. WWF doesn’t quite call it a Ponzi scheme, but that’s the first metaphor that comes to mind.
Wow--a pretty grim assessment. Too bad Professor Pauly had to go soft at the end:
So is there any way to stop this slide? After all, it’s not like people can just stop eating fish altogether. Pauly, surprisingly, is fairly optimistic. He argues that strict government quotas on catches can help stop the slide. “There is no need for an end to fish,” he writes, “or to fishing for that matter.” (He’s not sold on aquaculture, or fish farming, since it often requires huge harvests of smaller fish to feed the big carnivorous ones in farms.)
And yet, the Post, actually gives a pretty realistic rebuttal to Pauly's optimism:
The hitch is that when governments have tried to institute such quotas in the past — as they’ve recently attempted with Atlantic bluefin tuna — the rules tend to get, uh, watered down under intense lobbying. Or else shadowy black sushi markets emerge to flout the rules. But no one said it was easy, halting the end of fish.
Of course, one could reasonably ask why this story was not plastered across the Post's front page as a screaming headline instead of being tucked away on Ezra Klein's Wonkblog (please note that it was NOT Klein who actually posted it), but I guess you have to start somewhere.
Of course, with any story like this, the reader comments can also be enlightening. Like this one:
large23220
5/20/2012 12:56 PM EDT
More lib crap-aganda. God told us to be fruitful, multiply, and take dominion over all the fishes of the sea. God didn't qualify that instruction with any touchy-feeling whale-hugging horse hockey.
There will always be enough fish sticks. God promised.
Warnings about potential future water shortages have been sounded repeatedly for many years now, but we are only just beginning to see their reality starting rear its ugly head. The Weather Channel just this week posted a story outlining the regional water war flare ups that are already occurring within the United States:
Americans have enjoyed centuries of abundant natural resources, but when it comes to fresh water that may no longer be the case. Recent droughts in the southern and western United States have exposed a mismanagement of nature's most valuable resource. Now the fight for clean water is heating up.
States have always fought over rivers and lakes, but lawsuits don't yield more water. Early laws and agreements were based on the assumption there would always be enough water to go around, but Americans are quickly learning that's not the case.
Many reservoirs were built to control flooding, and help farmers irrigate their crops. But those reservoirs became popular places to live and recreate, increasing the demand for water to stay locally to sustain the booming economies.
There may never be a definitive resolution to this conflict, but one thing is clear. Americans will soon be forced to decide how to allocate our most valuable resource, and adapt to the ensuing culture shift.
The article then goes on to describe each in detail. Here are the ones they identified:
Chattahoochee River
Source: Blue Ridge Mountains, Northeast Georgia
Flows To: Apalachicola Bay (Gulf of Mexico)
Length: 430 miles
Passes Through: 3 States
Klamath River
Source: Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon
Flows To: Pacific Ocean
Length: 263 miles
Passes Through: Oregon and California
Colorado River
Source: Rocky Mountains, Colorado
Flows To: Gulf of California
Length: 1450 miles
Passes Through: 5 States and Mexico
Colorado River Watershed
Source: Texas Panhandle
Flows To: Matagorda Bay (Gulf of Mexico)
Length: 862 miles
Passes Through: Texas
More details are available at the link for the story.
Bonus: Visions of a drought...with SWEET guitar work
Welcome to modern day America, where our politics is as toxic as the air we breathe, and the water we drink and the soil in which we plant our crops. It is the playground of unaccountable billionaires, who throw their wads of cash around as they please, buying the political process to ensure they make even more money--long term damage to the environment and the body politic be damned. Here is Common Dreams with the story:
A toxic waste disposal site owned by Texas billionaire Harold Simmons -- one of the GOP's largest donors in the 2012 primary season, and the largest single donor to Karl Rove's super PAC, American Crossroads -- has environmentalists, and at least one Texas state representative, very concerned over the risk of transporting huge quantities of hazardous material across the state and what impact the waste itself could have on groundwater supplies once it arrives.
If Simmons gets his way, toxic materials -- including medical waste, low-level radiated materials, and even depleted uranium -- from up to thirty-six states could end up at the Texas Compact Disposal Facility in remote west Texas.
"Texas is going to become a nuclear waste dump if everything happens under their plans," state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "We will be the major route for nuclear waste."
"We continue to have concerns about the site itself and whether or not there is enough protection ... and whether there will be contamination of the water," said Karen Hadden, executive director of the statewide SEED Coalition environmental group, according to the Star-Telegram report. "Once radioactivity gets into groundwater, it's a difficult thing to clean up and it can get into the millions and billions of dollars."
Simmons has invested huge sums into the political process in hopes that he can ease regulations on the dumping of nuclear and other toxic wastes. “Whatever federal switch has to be thrown to get uranium into the hole, believe me, it will be thrown; that’s how Harold Simmons works,” Glenn Lewis, a former Texas environmental employee who retired in protest over Simmons’s influence-peddling, told Bloomberg news recently.
Simmons has been outspoken about his disdain for the President Obama, and he has spread his large political contributions relatively evenly among the GOP contenders. “Any of these Republicans would make a better president than that socialist, Obama,” Simmons told the Wall Street Journal recently. “Obama is the most dangerous American alive.”
I would be inclined to argue that it is billionaire asshole Harold Simmons who is actually "the most dangerous American alive," except that he is in fierce competition with most of the other members of his class. I've often said that the truly regrettable thing about Obama is that he is NOT in any way, shape or form the "socialist," so many of his political enemies claim that he is. For if he were, those of Harold Simmons's ilk would have a LEGITIMATE reason to hate him as they do.
The sad part is that liberals and progressives will read his vitriol against Obama, and it will make them more apt to rally behind a President who has sold them out every step of the way. America is governed by two elite factions who compete against one another, and their battles for supremacy are very real to them. But for the rest of us they are a largely meaningless spectacle designed to distract the masses every four years and perpetuate the lie that we still live in a representative democracy.
Does anyone really doubt that Simmons will ultimately get his way regardless of who wins the White House this November? That is the real fallacy of the illusion of choice when people go to the polls. Liberals and progressives may think that if they dutifully line up behind President Hopey-Changey despite their previous disappointments, they are helping to thwart the ambitions of odious cretins like Harold Simmons. Then, two years after his next inauguration when Simmons's radioactive waste disposal operation is going full throttle anyway, they will all stand around scratching their heads wondering what the hell happened.
It's bad enough that rampant natural gas fracking is being allowed in the U.S. despite the negative environmental impacts of the process as well as the risk of earthquakes. Because natural gas is difficult to export, however, one could at least argue that fracking is helping to reduce America's dependence on foreign energy sources. But now all of that is about to change thanks to the fact that the U.S. government has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporations. Here is CNN Money with the details:
The government approved the first ever natural gas export facility in the lower 48 states on Monday, clearing the way for a project that could be a significant job creator.
But critics argue that, just like the Keystone pipeline expansion, building this project will have environmental impacts far beyond the plant itself. They also say it could raise the price of natural gas in the U.S.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted in favor of Texas-based Cheniere Energy's plan to build a giant natural gas liquefaction and export terminal at Sabine Pass, which straddles the Texas-Louisiana boarder just north of the Gulf of Mexico.
Well, so much for the argument that fracking is helping to make America more energy secure. Surprise, surprise, that argument is and always was complete bullshit. Instead, it's all about the Benjamins:
Cheniere says the plant itself and the natural gas extraction needed to fuel it will support between 30,000 and 50,000 jobs a year.
The United Sates is currently experiencing a boom in natural gas production, largely thanks to the controversial process of hydrologic fracturing, or fracking for short.
All the big oil companies, including BP, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch Shell, are now participating in the boom.
But the surge in production -- without any way to export it -- has caused a collapse in natural gas prices in the U.S. The gas industry sees exports as crucial to keep the boom going, along with the thousands of jobs the boom has created.
Natural gas can command five times the U.S. price in Asia or Europe. It can be used as a home heating fuel, burned to make electricity, or used in chemical or fertilizer production.
Notice how they lamely try to justify this action by claiming it will create jobs. Not withstanding the fact that, just like with the Keystone Pipeline, the job creation estimates are no doubt greatly overinflated, there is this little problem:
Cheniere's application was the first the government approved. Applications for seven other facilities around the country are pending. If all are approved, the nation could end up exporting one-fifth of its current gas output.
That's something critics are working to stop.
Fracking is a big reason why. Opponents say an increase in gas exports will lead to an increase in fracking.
Fracking involves injecting sand, water and chemicals deep into the ground to crack the rock and allow the gas to flow more freely. Some fear it is contaminating the ground water and leading to earthquakes.
Critics also say it could lead to an increase in natural gas prices in the U.S.
That could harm not only consumers who may pay more for heat, but also manufacturers that could pay more for electricity and materials.
That "could potentially have catastrophic impacts on U.S. manufacturing," said a report on the matter from House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee.
Which would no doubt destroy far more jobs than will be created in the fracking industry. So all of the risks that the American public is being asked to run by allowing fracking to continue are not even being borne to benefit them, and what's more, their own elected government is the one selling them down the river. Too bad so many of them are hooked on American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and the NFL and will never notice until the day a fracking-generated earthquake drops the roof right down on their fucking thick skulls.
Bonus: Now you know what it is like to live in an exploited colony
Last Friday, in the wake of President Hopey-Changey abruptly changing course on the Keystone Pipeline project, Rolling Stone political writer Jeff Goodell wrote a piece called, "Lessons from Obama's Keystone Cave-In," which was particularly notable because it demonstrated yet again that if you don't understand the dire implications of peak oil you are hardly going to learn the right lessons from any energy-related decision made by our so-called "leaders." Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd go through the four lessons listed by Goodell and offer a rebuttal for each of them:
1. "All of the above" = "Drill, Baby, Drill"
Obama talks a good game about developing "green" energy sources, but here he is, doubling down on oil. Although this speech was clearly political theater, I expected him to appease anti-pipeline activists by using his visit to Cushing – the belly of the fossil-fuel beast – to remind Big Oil that not only has he promised to yank away $4 billion in subsidies, but that oil is, as he said the other day, "the fuel of the past." Ha! Instead, Obama offered up a speech that would make Sarah Palin proud, reminding us how, over the last three years, "I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore." And he crowed: "We are drilling all over the place now." And as for pipelines, he bragged that "we’ve added enough new oil and gas pipelines to encircle the earth." Climate blogger Joe Romm rightly called the address "Obama's worst speech ever."
Okay, so Obama seemingly contradicted himself in two different speeches before two different audiences. That happens all the time with politicians. So which time do you suppose he was lying? The time he mouthed an empty platitude about oil being "the fuel of the past," or when he started bragging about his administration's pro-drilling record?
As the old saying goes, Money Talks and Bullshit Walks. In this case, the latter example was money while the former was the bullshit.
2. If Obama gets re-elected, the northern half of the Keystone pipeline is going to get built.
He did not say this explicitly in his speech yesterday, but the political code is perfectly clear. Obama is essentially endorsing tar sands oil production, with all the environmental wreckage it causes, as well as dooming the Midwest to more pipeline spills. It also means that investment dollars will now flow to boosting the production capacity of the tar sands operations, which in turn will pump up the industry's political clout even more. In effect, there’s no stopping the tar sands now. The dirty bitumen is gonna get dug up and refined and piped down to the Gulf and slimed across the world.
It should have been perfectly obvious even before Obama gave his speech that the whole damn pipeline was eventually going to be approved. All along, he was just trying to run the clock out until after the 2012 election and hoping there wasn't another spike in gasoline prices to force his hand before he was safe from ever facing the voters again. Well, the spike happened as you might have noticed, and Obama quickly realized there were more votes to be lost from being seen by Spoiled Rotten Nation to be standing in the way of America accessing another major source of oil (even if it will do nothing to bring down prices in the short term) than he will likely lose in support from environmentalists. Speaking of which:
3. Enviros have no muscle.
When the State Department last year decided to block the pipeline at least temporarily, enviros cheered. Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called it "a victory of truth over misinformation," and writer/activist Bill McKibben said "it isn’t just the right call, it’s the brave call." But that bravery wilted quickly in the face of high gas prices and Republican attacks, lame as they have been (the pipeline will have no measureable impact on gas prices in America today, tomorrow, or ever). The unmistakable subtext of this speech was: Tough shit, Frances and Bill and all your earnest followers. Are you really gonna vote for Romney in November?
Of course environmentalists won't be voting for Romney, and that is exactly why Obama was able to make the political calculation I outlined in my response to lesson 2. Yeah, a lot of environmentalists might stay home in November, or they might choose to throw away their votes by casting them for the Green Party, but they WON'T be voting for Romney and that will blunt any political effect their protest might have. Some of them will no doubt even cave in and vote for Hopey-Changey anyway, using the totally self-defeating lesser of two evils "logic."
The real lesson on this point ought to be obvious. The environmentalists, as well as those who believe in economic justice and those who are opposed to America's big business, war and empire foreign policy, DO NOT LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY. In a democracy you have real choices at the ballot box. As non-elite Americans living in a full blown corporatocracy, we most assuredly do not have any choice on issues of real importance that affect the economy or our future other than to throw our votes away on third party candidates who stand zero chance of ever being elected.
4. Obama is still wimping out on climate change.
Duh. But people had hopes. During the 2008 campaign, Obama talked about slowing the rising seas and putting a price on carbon pollution. After the election, he hired John Holdren as science advisor and Steven Chu to run to the Department of Energy, both of whom understand the dangers of climate change as well as anyone. Didn’t help. Today, despite the fact that global carbon pollution is accelerating and extreme weather is becoming the norm (it’s a sad but revealing irony that, as Brad Johnson points out, Cushing has been ground zero for climate disasters in the U.S.), Obama won’t even mention the words "climate" or "global warming," much less demonstrate any leadership on the single most dangerous threat that civilization has ever faced. Instead, he has shifted the conversation to energy independence. That may be a worthy goal, but if it’s pursued without regard to the risks of climate change, it will only increase the danger of future catastrophes.
Obama most certainly is "wimping out" on climate change. Why? Because he is a product of a system that is completely dependent upon never ending economic growth for its very survival, and curtailing the burning of fossil fuels would destroy that system pretty quickly. Obama would have to be politically suicidal NOT to wimp out on climate change, and the world only very rarely ever sees the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev achieving high political office.
Goodell then concludes his piece with this:
In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations. Obama wants to be thought of as the president who freed us from foreign oil. But if he doesn’t show some political courage, he may well be remembered as the president who cooked the planet.
Excuse me for being so blunt, but what a childish statement. I don't know how old Mr. Goodell is, but the last president I can recall who didn't make every single decision based upon "crass political calculation" was Jimmy Carter, and we all know how well that worked out for him.
So many environmentalists just refuse to get it into their heads that humanity has painted itself into the tightest of corners. Beginning in earnest about a century ago, we tapped into the greatest energy resource nature could have possibly bestowed upon us. Instead of wisely managing that very nonrenewable resource, we exploited it as quickly as we could and allowed our population to expand in a very short time to well beyond what the planet can possibly sustain when that resource runs out, even if the resulting environmental damage from burning that resource wasn't also a hugely negative factor.
Not only America, but all of humanity is barreling towards the cliff at breakneck speed, and it is likely already too late to put on the breaks. "Leaders" like Obama have been put into place by his billionaire backers in order to pull the wool over the eyes of the masses and keep the game going for as long as possible. That is the real lesson to be learned from Obama's Keystone cave-in, and accepting it is the key to becoming part of the reality-based community.
Bonus: "I believe before the world ever got that bad, I'd be on my knees a-crying"
Is there ANYONE left in this country who gives a damn about the common good anymore? Hardly a day passes when I don't see at least one story that illustrates just how stupid and short sighted our society has become. I visited the Everglades once about 20 years ago, and was struck by their natural beauty. You would think the will would be there to protect such an important and fragile ecosystem. That the Everglades are environmentally stressed by the rapid development of southern Florida is old news. But, as reported this week by the Atlantic Wire, they now face a new threat that was appallingly preventable:
According to a new study, the introduction of non-native snakes into southern Florida swamps has devastated the population of small mammals, almost completely wiping out some vulnerable species. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the number raccoon and possums spotted in the Everglades has dropped more than 98%, bobcat sightings are down 87%, and rabbits and foxes have not been seen at all in years.
Large snakes, like boa constrictors, anacondas, and pythons, are not native to North America, but are popular among reptile collectors and traders who — inadvertently or not — re-introduced them to the Florida swamps about a decade ago. Since that time they caused a huge disruption to the already fragile ecosystem, threatening wildlife and even some humans. They grow fast, breed rapidly, adapt well to their environments, and prey on small animals that don't recognize them as a threat. They're also great at hiding, which makes them both deadly hunters and difficult to catch.
They will also eat just about anything, even birds, deer, and alligators. (The 162-pound Burmese python pictured above had recently swallowed a gator.) That's why the government banned the import of Burmese and other pythons last year, although (thanks to lobbying by the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers) the reticulated python and the boa constrictor are still allowed to be traded.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the snakes never should have been allowed into the U.S. in the first place, and especially not into an area where they could thrive in the wild. And note how difficult it has been for the government to even close this particular barn door long after the horse has escaped, disappeared over the horizon and become boa constrictor bait. The answer to U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers should have been: thanks to your dumbass membership, there are plenty of the damn reptiles right out there in the swamps for you.
No word yet on whether pythons and boa constrictors actually eat Newts...but we can certainly dream.
Okay, so technically the recent earthquakes in Ohio were not the result of fracking, but check out the key passage in this USA Today article about the quakes:
Oil-drilling wastewater pumped into a northeast Ohio well "almost certainly" triggered 11 minor earthquakes around Youngstown since last spring, including one Saturday, a seismologist tells the Associated Press.
Ohio officials closed four inactive "fluid injection" wells within a five-mile radius of the Youngstown well, which is near a fault that geologists apparently weren't aware of. Pressure from the wastewater caused the fault to shift.
Northstar Disposal Services has used the wells to dispose of brine wastewater from shale oil and gas drilling, which officials said is different from so-called fracking, the Youngstown Business Journal and AP report.
Despite the disclaimer, The Christian Science Monitor writes that the disposal wells -- and the earthquakes -- are related to fracking, or hydraulic fracturing ("How fracking caused an Ohio earthquake").
The seismologist interviewed by the AP, John Armbruster of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said more minor shakes can be expected throughout 2012.
"The earthquakes will trickle on as a kind of a cascading process once you've caused them to occur," he said. "This one year of pumping is a pulse that has been pushed into the ground, and it's going to be spreading out for at least a year."
"...which is near a fault that geologists apparently weren't aware of..." in other words they were tampering with the geology of a potentially unstable area and had no idea about the risks they were taking. If they had no idea this fault line was there, how many other fault lines in potential fracking zones around the country do they have no idea about?
What is it going to take to stop this insanity, the accidental triggering of a major earthquake in a large metropolitan area? And before you scoff and say that can't happen, I would simply ask this question: how do you know? The science of earthquakes is still not well understood and they have yet to be predicted with any degree of accuracy. For all we know, every day that fracking and other injection techniques being used to extract oil and natural gas is placing us at risk of a major catastrophe. Do you want to be living in the area where the fracking equivalent of the Deepwater Horizon disaster takes place? Because I sure don't.
We should stop this madness once and for all and accept the fact that extending our fossil fuel supplies by a few years is not worth the risk of touching off a major earthquake, especially since we are eventually going to be forced to power down one way or another. But of course we won't. We're on a highway to hell, barreling at top speed with the brake line severed.
Bonus: "No stop signs...speed limits...nobody's gonna slow us down"
In doing this blog, I've become pretty numb to bad news. But sometimes, I'll read a story that depresses me so badly that I just want to stop the world so I can get off. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the politically motivated slaughter of wolves has resumed in the very same states where their reintroduction was widely celebrated just a decade-and-a-half ago:
Congress removed wolves in Montana and Idaho from the protection of the Endangered Species Act in April. And this fall, the killing began.
As of Wednesday, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game reported that 154 of its estimated 750 wolves had been "harvested" this year. Legal hunting and trapping — with both snares to strangle and leg traps to capture — will continue through the spring. And if hunting fails to reduce the wolf population sufficiently — to less than 150 wolves — the state says it will use airborne shooters to eliminate more.
In Montana, hunters will be allowed to kill up to 220 wolves this season (or about 40% of the state's roughly 550 wolves). To date, hunters have taken only about 100 wolves, prompting the state to extend the hunting season until the end of January. David Allen, president of the powerful Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, has said he thinks hunters can't do the job, and he is urging the state to follow Idaho's lead and "prepare for more aggressive wolf control methods, perhaps as early as summer 2012."
Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead recently concluded an agreement with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to save 100 to 150 wolves in lands near Yellowstone National Park. But in the remaining 80% of the state, wolves can be killed year-round because they are considered vermin. Roughly 60% of Wyoming's 350 wolves will become targeted for elimination.
What is happening to wolves now, and what is planned for them, doesn't really qualify as hunting. It is an outright war.
So what is the reason for the about face from protecting wolves as an endangered species, to not even tolerating a few hundred of them in the gigantic western states? Oh, the usual asshattery:
Part of the reason was the increase, particularly in Idaho and Montana, in paramilitary militia advocates, with their masculine ideal of man as warrior who should fight the hated federal government, by armed force if necessary. They were outraged by what they saw as federal interference in the region spurred by environmentalists, and their ideas found a willing reception among ranchers, who view wolves as a threat to their livestock — even though they ranch on federal land — and hunters, who don't want the wolves reducing the big game population.
The factions have reinforced one another, and today a cultural mythology has emerged that demonizes the federal government, the environmental movement and the wolves themselves. Many false claims have been embraced as truth, including that the Fish and Wildlife Service stole $60 million from federal excise taxes on guns and ammunition to pay for bringing wolves back; that the introduced wolves carry horrible tapeworms that can be easily transmitted to dogs, and ultimately to humans; that the Canadian wolves that were brought in are an entirely different species from the gray wolves that once lived in the Rockies, and that these wolves will kill elk, deer, livestock — even humans — for sport.
Once again, as I've pointed out repeatedly on this blog, the most destructive governmental policies are usually bipartisan initiatives:
Politicians from both parties in Western states have been eager to help with the fortifications. In Idaho, Republican Rep. Mike Simpson and the state's governor, Butch Otter, made removal of wolves from the Endangered Species Act a political priority. In Montana, Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg has made delisting wolves central to his 2012 Senate campaign against Democratic Sen. Jon Tester. In April, Tester in turn persuaded fellow Democrats in the Senate to approve his inserting a rider in a budget bill that delisted wolves.
In early November, Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, made his own political contribution. Thrilled at the testing of a drone aircraft manufactured in Montana, Baucus declared: "Our troops rely on this type of technology every day, and there is an enormous future potential in border security, agriculture and wildlife and predator management." A manufacturer's representative claimed his company's drone "can tell the difference between a wolf and a coyote." Pilotless drone aircraft used by the CIA and the Air Force to target and kill alleged terrorists now appear to be real options to track and kill "enemy" wolves.
I visited the Canadian Rockies a few summers ago, and one of the highlights of the trip came early one morning when my wife and I actually spotted a wolf near the side of a mountain road. It darted into the woods too quickly for us to get a snapshot of it, but just knowing it was there made us feel good. What a truly disgusting specimen we humans are as a species that we can't even tolerate the existence of a small population of a magnificent animal like the wolf among us.
There are those in the peak oil community who wish collapse would come sooner rather than later in order to halt the ongoing destruction of the natural world. I don't necessarily subscribe to that particular viewpoint, but after reading stories like this one I do understand why they feel the way they do.
Big corporations own America lock, stock and barrel. It's not a question that is open for debate among those few who understand how things really work this country these days. Yet another small example proving this assertion was reported on Thursday:
Officials at the Grand Canyon abruptly abandoned plans to ban the sale of plastic water bottles at the Arizona national park after conversations with Coca-Cola officials, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Stephen P. Martin, who crafted the plan, told the newspaper that the effort was scrapped after Coca-Cola officials raised concerns about the plan through the National Park Foundation. He was told the effort was being tabled about two weeks before its scheduled Jan. 1 start.
Coca-Cola, which distributes water under the Dasani brand, has donated more than $13 million to the parks.
Oh, and before anybody gets all misty-eyed because Coca-Cola donates money to the park system, I will point out that $13 million doesn't even represent a rounding error when compared to the company's yearly global earnings. The original plan to ban the sale of plastic bottles was admittedly a pretty small measure to combat the enormous amount of plastic trash our society produces every year, but at least their hearts were in the right place. Or were, until their idealism collided headlong with the steamroller that is the corporate bottom line.
How did the Grand Canyon officials try to 'splain themselves after caving in? With a classic example of Corporate FlackSpeak:
David Barna, a National Park Service spokesman, said National Parks Service Director Jon Jarvis made the "decision to put it on hold until we can get more information.
"Reducing and eliminating disposable plastic bottles is one element of our green plan," Barna said. "This is a process, and we are at the beginning of it."
So, Mr. Barna, this is "just the beginning of the process" is it? What exactly do you all plan to do, first ban the sale of plastic bottles on Tuesday afternoons from 1:00 to 4:00 and see how it goes? Clearly, with that blather you seem to be auditioning to get hired on in the corporate world at some point.
Better yet, here is what the REAL Corporate Flack from Coca-Cola had to say about this controversy. Buckle your seat belts, cause it's a doozy:
Susan Stribling, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Refreshments USA, said the company would prefer to help address problems with littered plastic bottles by making more recycling programs available.
"Banning anything is never the right answer," she said. "If you do that, you don't necessarily address the problem." She also characterized the bottle ban as limiting personal choice. "You're not allowing people to decide what they want to eat and drink and consume," she said.
Oh my GAWD! The evil Park Police want to decide what people eat and drink and consume! Nazis! Socialists! Commie Bastards!
You're absolutely right, Ms. Stribling. They are a bunch of dirty rotten, evil socialists. I have it on good authority, for example, that Grand Canyon National Park ALSO doesn't sell 100 proof whiskey, which I consider an outrage because I personally LOVE the thrill of getting massively fucked up right before hiking along the very edge of a mile deep canyon. You know what else they don't sell in the park? Condoms. Which also pisses me off because you never know when all of that amazing natural beauty is going to lead to a romantic interlude. Especially when you've got all that whiskey with you.
The person I feel sorry for in all of this is Stephen P. Martin, who apparently is a conscientious believer that our national parks should be kept as pristine as possible for the enjoyment of future generations. It's never a pretty thing to see someone's idealism get so mercilessly crushed in the relentless pursuit of the all mighty dollar. But hey, maybe he can console himself the next time he's hiking in the canyon by humming a few bars of "America the Beautiful."
Bonus: "A limited time offer, not valid in all states."
Disproving once and for all the notion that statisticians do not have a sense of humor, today is not only Halloween but the day, according to the leading entities charged with tracking human population growth, that our collective numbers will exceed the seven billion mark. My preferred source for keeping track of world population is Worldometers.info, which has been morbidly counting down to this momentous event for several weeks now. It looks like the clock will strike seven billion at precisely 1:48 P.M. EDT this afternoon.
To put what this means in perspective, here's a quote from an article written by Paul B. Farrell that appeared on the website MarketWatch back on June 28th:
Yes, you can forget “Peak Oil.” Forget global warming. Forget debt, deficits, defaults. Forget commodities, scarce resource depletion. Forget all other economic, political, military problems. Yes, forget all of them. None of them matter … if our leaders fail to deal with the world’s out-of-control population bomb. Nothing else matters. Nothing.
Still, the silence is defining. We’re trapped in this deafening “conspiracy of silence.” Neutered. Blind to this suicidal path, incapable and unwilling to face the greatest single economic challenge in history. Won’t wake up till it’s too late.
Why? Deep in our hearts we see no acceptable universal solution. So we wait … until this economic bomb stops tick-tick-ticking. Explodes in our faces. Till the wake-up call, a total economic collapse. Till then, the silence is deafening. We stay in denial. Waiting.
If you want to know why I am such an extreme pessimist you need look no further than the blurb above. Yes, optimists have been making fun of Thomas Malthus for more than two centuries, and have been deriding author Paul Ehrlich of Population Bomb fame for a couple of generations now. But the thing to keep in mind is that Malthus and Ehrlich need only be proven right once, whereas their critics have to keep being right forever and ever lest their criticism blow up in their faces as the bomb finally detonates.
The key question is how long do we have until the bomb does finally explode? No one can say for sure, obviously, and if I didn't think it was imminent--say within the next 20 years or so--I'd probably be off somewhere sipping a beer and a watching football game rather than sitting here writing for this blog.
Prepare yourself accordingly.
Bonus: since this song came out around the same time as The Population Bomb was published, I always thought it would be the perfect theme for the title sequence were they ever to make the book into a feature film.
Double Bonus: a wicked Doug Stanhope rant on overpopulation (warning: NSFW).
The week before last my wife and I took our annual fall trip, visiting the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York for a few days. It was the fourth time we’ve been to that area, of which we have grown quite fond. I remember being struck the first time we went there a decade ago by how brilliantly vibrant the fall colors were. The ridge lines in between the lakes, in particular, were an explosion of orange, red and yellow, much more dramatic than we ever see down here in Virginia.
The second time we visited in 2006, it was more of the same. This time we stayed in Ithaca on the southern shore of Lake Cayuga, which has become our preferred destination in the area. Ithaca, to paraphrase the local civic slogan, really is gorgeous, situated not only next to the lake but also amidst a whole region of deep canyons, rushing streams and spectacular waterfalls. And trees…lots and lots of trees, that were every bit as colorful as I had remembered from our first trip to the region. As you can see from the photo above, the large used bookstore in downtown Ithaca on the commons is even called Autumn Leaves.
We didn’t make it back to Ithaca again until last year, and although we once again had a fabulous time, hiking in the many parks, following the wine trail around the lake and eating at fine restaurants like nationally-famous Moosewood, I couldn't help noticing that the fall colors were actually very much absent. Instead, many of the trees were either still green, browning or had already lost their leaves. I didn’t think too much about it at the time, writing the lack of color off to perhaps the effects of a lingering drought or something.
Well, before this year’s trip began I had started reading a blog with the clever name of Wits End, by Gail Zawacki, an environmental writer and activist who lives on a farm in New Jersey. Gail has done a lot of research about the reason the fall colors have been absent in not just the Finger Lakes, but all over the country, and has identified the culprit: air pollution, more specifically ground-level ozone. Gail herself explains in an excerpt from the Basic Premise on her blog:
…does anybody stop to think what ozone must be doing to long-lived species - trees and shrubs and even lowly mosses - that suffer from cumulative exposure, season after season?
Answer: it's killing them incrementally - and most tragically, imperceptibly to most people.
The preindustrial level of ground-level ozone was in essence, zero. When it became obvious over fifty years ago that inversions and high spikes downwind of polluting sources were killing vegetation and sickening people, industries very cleverly learned to disburse the precursors. They built tall stacks and restricted some auto emissions, thus reducing much visible smog, and reined in locally extreme peaks of ozone concentration. Because the VOC's travel across continents and oceans, over decades the global background concentration has been inexorably rising - damaging trees everywhere on earth at a rapidly accelerating rate. Virtually no one is asking what role ethanol emissions might play in the most recent increase in dying trees.
That trees are dying is empirically verifiable by a cursory inventory. Characteristic symptoms you can readily locate in any woods, suburban yard, park or mall include stippled, singed foliage; yellowing coniferous needles; thinning, transparent crowns; cracking, splitting, corroded, oozing and stained bark; early leaf senescence; loss of autumn radiance; holes; cankers; absence of terminal growth; breaking branches; and ultimately, death. Why isn't this simply due to climate change and/or drought? Because, the identical foliar damage is to be found on plants growing in pots with enriched soil and regular watering - and even aquatic plants that are always in water.
I thought I was pretty well read regarding the ills that are plaguing our modern industrial civilization and the damage it is wreaking upon the natural world, but I have to admit that before reading Gail’s blog I had never heard about nor had considered the ground level ozone problem. So with this new awareness in mind, I decided to observe the trees more closely during this year’s fall trip. And you know what? Gail is absolutely right.
The trees in the Finger Lakes region appeared exactly as they did last year—dull and largely devoid of bright colors where they hadn’t already lost their leaves. No way the lack of color could be chalked up to drought this year, as the whole area is still recovering from the horrific floods it suffered during Tropical Storm Irene. Ithaca is still gorgeous, especially this time of year, but thanks to air pollution it has become a lot less colorful in October. And if ethanol really is greatly contributing to this phenomenon, that is very much proof that if there is a God, he or she has a perverse sense of humor.
Lest you think this is all just an inconvenience for vacationers and of little relevance otherwise, here is Gail again with why you should care:
What are the implications of a world without trees? Much the same as the parallel acidification of the ocean, which is destroying coral reefs that will lead to a collapse of the entire ecosystem.
Imagine a world without lumber, or paper...without shade, shelter, or habitat for birds and other wildlife...without walnuts, almonds, avocados, apples, pears and peaches...to say nothing of losing the splendid primeval magnificence of beautiful maples, oaks, hemlocks, tupelo, ash and sycamore. All of the species that depend upon trees - including humans - will ultimately go extinct without them.
As billions of trees expire, they are already turning from an essential carbon sink to carbon emitters, driving climate change to become even worse than the worst predictions. And how we will replace the oxygen they produce, to breathe? There is evidence that phytoplankton, the other major producer of oxygen and the base of the food chain in the ocean, has been reduced by 40% - and that they are absorbing ozone as well. Earth is a closed system, like a closed garage - with a car running inside. The invisible but deadly exhaust fumes are building up and up. If we don't turn off the engine everything will die, sooner or later.
If you care about the trees at all, or even if you just want to know more about this dire issue that, unlike climate change, is receiving very little publicity, I strongly urge you to check out Gail’s blog. It’s depressing to think about yet another way we humans are shortsightedly destroying the natural world, but my own personal philosophy has always been that it is better to know what ails the world, even if changing your own personal habits will have only a minute positive effect, than to bury your head in the sand.
The recent Solyndra scandal in which the solar panel company received over a half-billion dollars in loan guarantees from the Obama administration, only to go bankrupt and be raided by the FBI two years later, brought negative attention to the solar power industry just at a time when many are looking to it to “save” us from our fossil fuel and global warming predicaments. Time will tell if Solyndra failed due to mere incompetence or instead because of outright fraud, but one of the excuses made by the company for failing so spectacularly is that it was being undercut by state-sponsored solar power manufacturers in China.
Fair enough, let’s then divert our attention to the other side of the globe for a moment and see how things are going over there. Oops, not too well as it turns out, at least in one case. Here’s the New York Times with the story:
The authorities have suspended production at a solar panel factory in eastern China following protests by residents who blame the plant for fouling the local air and water, a government Web site said on Monday.
Hmmm…that doesn’t sound too good. Please elaborate:
Villagers have complained about toxic smokestack omissions and factory wastewater they say killed a large number of fish. Government inspectors have confirmed that fluoride contamination was 10 times higher than acceptable levels after heavy rainfall swept improperly stored wastewater into a canal, according to the state-run media.
Local residents have also blamed the five-year-old plant for what they claim is an unusual number of cancer deaths, although local officials say such fears are exaggerated.
According to the Haining city Web site, JinkoSolar has been fined about $74,000. Company employees reached by phone on Monday declined to comment.
So let’s see here. Toxic smokestack emissions and wastewater, plus a higher number of cancer deaths. Sounds like the kind of side effects that might result from residing near a more conventional power plant, doesn’t it?
What this article clearly demonstrates is one of the little inconvenient truths about so-called “green” energy: that it is still very much reliant upon dirty, old fashioned manufacturing techniques in order to make it viable. You want a wind turbine, or a solar panel, or a battery for an electric car? They got to be built somewhere, and it takes much more than just wind or solar generated electricity to manufacture them. The process may be many things, but one thing it is NOT is environmentally friendly.
The real problem with wind power or solar energy is not that they don’t have their benefits. It is obvious that they can be quite useful on a small, localized scale. No, the trouble comes when they are touted as being the next generation of energy sources that will replace fossil fuels without us having to make any meaningful changes in our lifestyles or to our economy.
It is just this sort of delusional thinking that caused the Obama administration to give those huge loan guarantees to Solyndra. Defenders of the administration are now claiming that even though Solyndra failed, the idea to promote solar energy was sound and can be done right next time around. What they refuse to understand is that squandering the government’s rapidly constricting financial resources on a pipe dream of maintaining business as usual in a glorious, green energy-fueled future is actually worse than doing nothing at all.
