One of Our San Diego Neighbors Uses Almost 38,000 Gallons of Water a Day

Despite receiving normal rainfall in the last year or so, we here in southern California have been trying to do our part to save water in a state that is experiencing one of the worst droughts in our history. So it is disheartening to read about one of our neighbors in Rancho Santa Fe who is using 13.8 million gallons of water a year.

            That comes out to almost 38,000 gallons of water a day. Almost 38,000 gallons a day! As our local paper, the Union-Tribune illustrates, that is enough water to supply the water needs of 110 single-family homes. The paper is leaving the name of the owner of the property unpublished.

            I can hear the argument, “Well, he pays for that water, so what is wrong with that?”

What could possibly be wrong with one southern California homeowner using almost 38,000 gallons of water a day?

The problem is that everybody else is paying for that water as well. We San Diegans are facing water rate increases, as much as 17 percent. Part of that increase would go to pay for the new water desalination plant in Carlsbad and the indirect potable reuse program, a plant and a program that would be unnecessary were it not for some folks using an enormous amount of water.

            The price paid by everybody else doesn’t stop there. We use pumps to bring water here from the Colorado River and the Sacramento River Delta, which uses energy. It is estimated that 20 percent of the energy used in California is to move water from one place to another. It also takes energy to desalinate water. That energy use translates into climate change.

            Maybe I shouldn’t grouse so much. The good news is that our neighbor has reduced his consumption of water down from last year’s 31.7 million gallons. I guess I should be thankful for that.

            How about you? What do you think when you read a story like this? Does it discourage you from conserving? Do you think there should be an upper limit on how much water one person or household can consume?

Global Warming Brings Air Conditioning to San Diego Schools

Global warming is melting glaciers and raising the level of the oceans, phenomena that, unless you live in the mountains or along a coast, may be obscured to you. Well, as in this story, climate change is coming home, or at least to school, here in San Diego.

            Responding to the rising temperatures in their classrooms, the San Diego Unified School District announced that it is installing air conditioning in the district’s schools. Parents and teachers complained that at the beginning of this school year temperatures in the 90s afflicted classrooms for several days. Children struggled to learn in the oppressive heat, and some fainted or fell ill.

            San Diego natives and folks who have lived here a long time have bragged that the weather here is so pleasant that air conditioning is never needed, even during the months of July and August when much of the rest of the country is sweltering. I’ve lived here for decades and have never lived in a house with air conditioning or an air conditioner.

            The obvious irony here is that the air conditioning will use electricity, the production of which is one of the drivers of climate change. The proposed program includes the installation of solar panels and thus promises to be carbon neutral. But the fact remains that the now needed air conditioning will be using electricity from those solar panels that could have been used for something else had we not been raising the thermostat on the planet with all the CO2 we’re throwing up in the air.

            And to those who have complained that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will adversely affect our economy, installing all that air conditioning in all to all those schools in San Diego will cost $204 million. That is $204 million in taxes. And all of it to be taxed and spent on something that would not have been needed if we had started reducing emissions when we first knew of the connection between burning fossil fuels and a warmer planet.

            Are you a San Diego schoolteacher? A parent? Student? Have you suffered through sweltering classrooms? As a taxpayer, what do you think?

Are the Cato Institute and Other Right Wing "Think Tanks" Criminal?

The Weekly World News has been around for a while. Started simply as a way to use the old black and white press tossed aside when the National Enquirer went full color 36 years ago, the former supermarket tabloid (the publication is now online) has introduced us to celebrities walking the earth long after their deaths, relics found and proven to be from the Garden of Eden or Noah’s Ark, and the best of the best of tabloid entertainment, Bat Boy, the half-human/half-bat wunderkind.

 

Bat Boy, The Alfred E. Newman of The Weekly World New

Bat Boy and insane religious relics aside, the publication proudly proclaims itself as “The World’s Only Reliable News.” Still, and despite the publication of an occasional story that is based in reality, since 2004 the publication has printed the wink and a nod disclaimer that “the reader should suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment.”

            For most folks leafing through Weekly World News is a pleasure similar to reading The Onion. There are a few individuals who wind up believing what they read in the paper, but these folks would probably fall for some other far-fetched story of alien abduction or that President Obama has issued an executive order to have his likeness carved into Mount Rushmore. Overall the general consensus would be that The Weekly World News is idiotic but harmless.

 

From The Weekly World News: Obama to join Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore

The fictions that The Weekly World News publishes are harmless, but in other cases we recognize that publishing stories or claims that are false is wrong and sometimes criminal. The Federal Trade Commission enforces “Truth in Advertising” laws, protecting consumers from false claims in ads. If you tell folks that your doggie waste bags are compostable and they aren’t, the FTC is going to do something about it. You also can’t publish untrue things that can damage a person’s reputation. That is libel, and it is a serious crime.

            So what about organizations like the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who have taken money from companies like Exxon and other oil companies so that they can spread lies and misinformation about global warming? Climate change can affect the lives of millions whose food supply is threatened by drought or whose homes and cities are inundated by rising seas. Lying about climate change, is that not as serious as when the National Enquirer was forced to pay $1.6 million to Carol Burnett because they said that the comedienne was seen drunk in public? Is that not as serious as a company having to pay out $45 million to consumers who were hoodwinked into believing that their more expensive brand of yogurt was more nutritious when it actually was not?

            Exxon knowing of the hazards of global warming while paying groups to deny or obfuscate those harsh realities could prove to be a crime. So far, from what I’ve read in the LA Times and Inside Climate News, it was certainly unethical. So what about Exxon’s enablers? If Exxon committed a crime, aren’t Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, and a lot of other organizations that took money from oil giants and other big polluters just as culpable?

Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Corporate Lies?

Possible Prosecution of Exxon and Possibly Falling Short

This is a great development. While the story was broken over a month ago, the headlines today tell us that Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general has launched an investigation into Exxon looking into allegations that the oil giant misled their shareholders and the public on the risks that global warming posed to the corporation’s business. Even the Wall Street Journal, which has ties to the global warming denial industry, printed the story.

            The corporate headquarters of Exxon in Irving, Texas acknowledged receiving the subpoena for internal documents, some of which go back 38 years, related to Exxon’s climate change research and business decisions.

            If Exxon actually knew of global warming and its dangers and paid off front groups to work at denying those hard facts, it may very well be the greatest wrong done to the world by a corporation. So it is a bit of an irony that the wrongdoing Exxon may wind up having to pay the piper for is that of their responsibility to their shareholders. Schneiderman is investigating Exxon under the Martin Act, a broad New York state law that allows for prosecution of companies for financial fraud, which includes the act of misleading stockholders.

            I don’t deny the importance of investors being properly informed of their financial risks when they put their money in a company like Exxon. After all, people rely on their investments to finance their children going to college or provide for a good retirement. But the people who are going to suffer the most from global warming are farmers whose lands may be hotter and drier and subject to more severe weather, coastal inhabitants who will have their beaches and bay fronts submerged under rising tides, and people who live on Pacific Islands, whose homelands may be lost to rising oceans.

            Isn’t there any law that can hold Exxon responsible for these people?

Exxon Trashes Planet and the Press Yawns

It has been almost a month since Inside Climate News and a partnership of the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism began publishing their findings that, while Exxon’s scientists had determined decades ago that the burning fossil fuels caused global warming, the large company funded groups like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute who dealt in the business of casting doubt on the science of climate change.

This is possibly one of the greatest scandals of our time; so it is maddening to observe the lack of press coverage of this story. A Proquest search of Donald Trump, only one of the GOP presidential candidates, for the month of October brings up 2043 newspaper stories. A Proquest search of Exxon and climate change brought up 84 results.[1] That is Donald Trump receiving 2,332% more coverage than one of the world’s largest corporations knowing that they are propelling the whole planet into a climate crisis and covering it up. If you like pie charts, here’s a pie chart of the respective press coverage.

You say, OK, but that’s Donald Trump, a headline magnet. A similar search on Carly Fiorina brought up 185 results, still way more than Exxon and their cover-up. Why is there such silence from the press on this? Tell me what you think.

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[1] For the Donald Trump search, I searched on the term “Trump” and restricted the search to headlines in the last 30 days. For the Exxon search, I searched for both the term “Exxon” and “climate change” occurring anywhere in the news story.

Exxon: The World Is Filled With Hillbillies

For me, I remain hopeful. I’m still inspired by the pope’s encyclical of this year, in which he encourages Catholics, actually encourages everybody, to care for the place we live and encourages us to steer away from practices that make the earth a warmer world.

And at the same time it is maddening, as I’ve been mulling over the news that came out this month of Exxon’s duplicity. While employing its own scientists, who informed the multinational company as far back as the 1970s that the effects of man-made global warming were going to affect the company’s operations in the arctic, Exxon was paying front groups and organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute to run their PR campaigns to encourage people to doubt the science of global warming.

Paying scientists to investigate global warming and paying lawyers and PR executives to deny the existence of global warming. The mind is boggled.

The news investigation of Exxon is solid, coming from a yearlong collaboration between the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Los Angeles Times. Their work includes interviews with dozens of experts, including former Exxon employees, and reviewing Exxon related documents, many of them internal memoranda of Exxon, archived at the University of Texas and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta. A similar investigation by Inside Climate News reached the same conclusions.

Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben in an op-ed for The Guardian used the words “treachery” and “sheer, profound, unparalleled evil” to describe Exxon’s decision. He said, “[T]his company had the singular capacity to change the course of world history for the better and instead it changed that course for the infinitely worse. In its greed Exxon helped—more than any other institution—to kill our planet.”

I cannot disagree at all with what McKibben has said.

Democrats in the House (no GOP folks) have called on the Department of Justice to investigate the actions of Exxon as to whether the actions of Exxon are illegal. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has called for the same.

There are also the usual folks you might expect who defend Exxon or who try to obfuscate the truth of the matter. There is this from Forbes, written by James Taylor, who has been employed by the Heartland Institute, as he repeats the trope of uncertainty of climate change. Reading this piece, the most glaring questions that Taylor, a lawyer and not a scientist, never addresses are: If Exxon had been truly skeptical about the research of global warming, why did they continue to fund it? If Exxon had that much doubt about their own scientists conclusions about global warming, why did they plan for its eventuality?

A subject repeated again and again in this blog is the absolute disregard that the coal companies have for the land and people of Appalachia Mountaintop removal has spread poverty, disease, and ecological destruction all across Appalachia. They do not care about the people who live in those hills. And the folks there have put up with the abuse, raising little protest when it comes to the ways of King Coal

And so here we have Exxon treating the whole world as though it were some impoverished holler in West Virginia. In the course of their pursuit of profit Exxon has said that it does not care about the coastal cities infringed upon by rising seas. They don’t care about greater storms bringing floods and destruction. They do not care about the water shortages exacerbated by longer and drier droughts. They do not care about the coral reefs dying from the oceans being 30 percent more acidic than they were 100 years ago. Exxon cared about dollars and the whole rest of the world is filled with ignorant hillbillies.

So far we have proven Exxon right. Except for Sanders and a few others, I hear no outcry. I don’t sense that folks are upset. I’ve heard of no boycotts. Maybe the whole world is a bunch of hillbillies.

A Brief Glance At Pope Francis' Encyclical

I’ve only had time to read about half of the Pope Francis’ Encyclical On Care For Our Common Home. Just a couple things to say from what I’ve read so far. The Encyclical is not only about climate change. It is about our entire global environmental crisis, of which global warming is only one aspect.

            I’ll have much more to say about this later, once I’ve read the whole thing and had time to digest what the Pontiff has to say. In the mean time I thought it might be good for you to take a look at what Francis says in part of the first chapter about superficial ecology, something that I run into much more than I want to. Francis says:

At the same time we can note the rise of a false or superficial ecology, which bolsters complacency and a cheerful recklessness. As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear. Superficially, apart from a few obvious signs of pollution and deterioration, things do not look that serious, and the planet could continue as it is for some time. Such evasiveness serves as a license to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen.

Pope Francis

The Depths To Which Men Will Sink Themselves For King Coal

It amazes me how shamefully some people can act, even when they are in public, even when they know that there are microphones and cameras running, even when they are in a House Subcommittee hearing room.

This video shows Representative John Fleming, a GOP representative from Louisiana, questioning Dr Michael Hendryx during a hearing of the House Energy and Minerals Resources Subcommittee today. Hendryx is  the former Director of West Virginia Rural Health Research Center and Founding Chair of the Department of Health Policy Management and Leadership in the School of Public Health at West Virginia University. Among his dozens of published scientific papers are studies of the health effects of mountaintop removal on the residents of Appalachia. In this “hearing” Fleming badgers Hendryx about one of his studies that found cancer rates among residents who live near Mountaintop mining to be twice that of their fellow Appalachians.

            This video is embarrassing. It shows you, like a drunkard lying in a trash strewn ditch, the depths to which men will sink themselves just for that next campaign contribution from King Coal.

Mountaintop Removal Affecting Bird Populations

This is just out from the U.S. Geological Survey. Mountaintop mining is not only changing the landscape, it is, unsurprisingly, changing the ecology of the Appalachians. According to a new study published in Landscape Ecology, songbirds that thrive in forested areas are in decline in areas adjacent to reclaimed mountaintop removal mines, while birds that live in shrub lands are increasing in these areas.

            The results make sense on the face of things. Even when MTR mines are reclaimed, they are mostly large grassland areas devoid of trees. And as you can surmise, it will take a while for trees to take root, grow, and reach maturity in reclaimed mines. Most optimistically the forests will grow to maturity in the mines in a matter of a few decades, but in most cases it will probably take longer.

            Here are some details from the USGS news release:

The study evaluated the bird communities in the forest that remains around the reclaimed habitats in West Virginia and Kentucky. Researchers found that even small amounts of forest lost to mineland or grassland within a landscape resulted in lower abundance for the majority of bird species in the forest that remained adjacent to the reclaimed lands.  Declines in abundance were detected for 12 species of forest interior birds and 11 species of interior edge birds including species of conservation concern such as Cerulean Warbler and Worm-eating Warbler.  But the numbers of some species did go up.

“Some shrubland species, for example the brown thrasher and song sparrow, or forest generalist species such as the brown-headed cowbird and the yellow-throated vireo, did have a positive response to the loss of forest and the gain in mineland or grassland, but most bird species did not,” said Doug Becker, professor of biology at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and senior author of the study.  “If managers want to take actions that may benefit sensitive, forest-dependent species, they need to minimize the amount of forest lost in a landscape.”

A reclaimed mountaintop mine. No trees here. photo: ovec.org

The Cerulean Warbler, one of the bird species in decline around the mountaintop removal mines photo: nc.audubon.org

Other ecological effects have been documented, including the recent finding that the mining was threatening rare endemic crayfish. And it is needless to say that for years and decades we will be finding even more effects that mountaintop removal coal mining has had on the lives of Appalachians and the environment of their mountains.

Mountains that have not been removed for their coal, where many songbirds want to live