Mountaintop Removal and the Continuation of Evil

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are out of office, but much of the damage that they and their administration accomplished continues. One of the most insidious eleventh hour rule changes made by the last administration was a change to the part of the Clean Water Act that allows mountaintop removal coal mining companies to dump their wastes anywhere that they please.

            Before the Bush change, mountaintop removal mines had to maintain buffer zones of 100 feet between streams and the material that they dumped as waste from their mines. With the change of just a few words, the Bush administration changed the idea of a stream from that of a natural area to that of a construction site and the waste from the mine to being construction material. The mine companies could then dump their waste and bury streams any which way they wanted.

            Obama and his administration want to change the wording of the regulation to resemble its original intent. It seems, however, that this small step in the right direction is being impeded by House GOP members who are, in a fairly obvious tactic of harassing the Interior Department and the administration, subpoenaing documents in relation to the planned changes to the regulation.

            Edmund Burke, the British statesman who developed the philosophical underpinnings of modern conservatism, said “when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” When I think about mountaintop removal and run across an incident like this subpoena—only one of the ways that the GOP is guaranteeing that this most horrible and destructive mining practice continues—I can’t help but sometimes despair that Burke was a blind optimist who had no experience of the corruption of greed and money.

New Fracking Disclosure Requirement (Sort Of)

“New Proposal on Fracking Gives Ground to Industry” reads the New York Times headline.

Apparently the Obama administration gave a lot of ground.

Although the measure will, for the first time, make a federal requirement to disclose the chemicals used in fracking, those chemicals can be disclosed after the fracking has been completed. As originally proposed, the regulation would have required oil and gas companies to disclose the chemicals and solutions 30 days before they started the process of fracking.

If this original regulation had gone forward, we would have been able to see what they were planning on pumping into the cracks and crevices of the rocks that lie thousands of feet below us, and we could have ascertained the risks posed to our groundwater and health as we reviewed the chemicals and mixtures used in fracking. If we found carcinogens or poisons, we would have been able to raise our objections and have the energy company change the fracking constituents or possibly halt the process altogether.

            But with the “significant concessions” they can go ahead and frack away, using whatever chemicals they please, and they only have to tell us what’s in their fracking solutions after those chemicals are in the ground. Does this make any sense? Have you ever heard of anything else working this way? Your city council looking at the design for a community redevelopment after they have approved it? Learning the name of your wife after you’ve married her?

            With industry being so powerful we wind up with legislation that seems like it was written in Bizarro Land and that in reality doesn’t do a whole lot of good.

Watch Out For Those Madmen, Tyrants, and Others Who Might Be Informed About Global Warming

That’s right. This is for real. This is a real billboard put up by the Heartland Institute in Chicago. Where to begin with this? As the Guardian said about the billboard that it is “quite possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns.”

            On their website Heartland Institute announces that, Besides Kaczynsky, they plan to put up other billboards with the likenesses of Fidel Castro, Osama bin Laden, and Charles Manson and say that “The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”

            Who thought this campaign up? An unschooled eight-year-old? The folks at the Heartland Institute now realize possibly that there is no intellectual underpinning to their attacks on climate scientists. So they have reduced themselves to this almost surreal swipe. My desire for this blog is to write about how we think about the environment. I almost hate to include this billboard. I don’t think much thought went into putting it up.


Update 5/5/12: Apparently you can only push stupid so far. After criticism that even came from their supporters, the Heartland Institute pulled down this stupid billboard. The billboard was only up for a matter of hours. One of the heartland Institute's allies, Anthony Watts, attributed the ill-conceived ad campaign to battle fatigue. I think that it's more basic than that: when you believe stupid things, you do stupid things.

Forbes and Doublethink

Forbes magazine is one of the institutions that are part of the effort to attack climate scientists and the work that they do. Along with their attacks on scientists, the magazine also disparages conservation, green energy, and just about anything else favored by the Sierra Club and Al Gore.

            So it is one of those weird doublethink moments when Forbes publishes a piece with the title Wind Farms Cause Global Warming! Going from the text to a subtext, here is what Forbes is saying in this headline: “Here is something we dislike causing something we don’t acknowledge.” What is peculiar as well is the credulity with which they announce the findings of a single study, not to mention that they get the science of the study wrong. The study found localized warming by as much as 0.72C around large wind harvesting complexes. The change is local, how that temperature change affects a larger area is unknown. In essence, the warming may only be local, not global.

            In defending the status quo for fossil fuel companies, Forbes, the Heartland Institute, and the other organizations like them chose an easy tack, to attack the scientists researching global warming. Everybody is human and everybody is flawed. Attacking anybody, even scientists doing very good work, is easy. As the science of climate change becomes more certain, however, expect to find more head spinning headlines and twists of pretzel logic from these folks.

Should Environmentalists Vote for Barack Obama?

This coming national election should environmentalists vote for Barack Obama? Obama’s campaign is counting on green voters to support him this time around, as they did in 2008.  The Obama campaign has, predictably, set up a website, Environmentalists for Obama, that touts the environmental work that the president has achieved. The President even makes an appearance on his own environmental behalf.

It is true that the administration has set forth extremely high gas mileage standards. By 2017 cars will need to have an average mileage of over 50 miles per gallon. Given the current state of technology this is doable, and the administration deserves credit for pushing for it.

            And yet there are so many areas in which the administration has fallen flat when it comes to protecting our air, water, and land. Regulations that were loosened during George W. Bush’s time on the White House that gave the mountaintop removal coal companies an almost completely lawless free ride in Appalachia have not been changed by the Obama administration. And as I noted in a previous blog, the Obama administration wants to ease the protections for endangered species.

            And now the administration is turning its back on the polar bear. Because the CO2 that comes out of our tailpipes and factories is melting the ice on which the polar bears live, their survival as a species has become quite dicey. No polar ice = no polar bears. But the administration has issued a new rule that exempts activities outside the range of the polar bear from any restrictions that may protect the bear, even though those activities have been shown to harm the habitat of the bears.

Polar bears in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Photo credit: Susanne Miller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, April 17, 2012 

OK, I admit that there are lots of complications to this. Restricting greenhouse gasses and thus protecting the bears here in the United Sates may not have any bearing on what India, China, or Uruguay does. We could do a very fine job of protecting the polar bears, and because the rest of the world, or at least a portion of it, continues to pump CO2 into the atmosphere polar bears will go the way of the passenger pigeon.

            The oil and gas industries, which are most likely the forces behind the new rule, appeal to a type of environmental isolationism, saying that it “makes no sense to require someone building a bridge in Florida to compensate for threats to polar bears at the top of the globe.” I would be a little sympathetic to this outlook had these same voices made similar arguments to that someone in Florida when it came to supporting or fighting in a war in Iraq, which is at the other end of the globe, too.

            The Fish and Wildlife Agency may have a point that regulating CO2 to protect the bears could lead to a flood of lawsuits, but we don’t know that for certain. I admit that I don’t like to spend a whole bunch of time inside a courtroom. But what would you rather have, a full docket of lawsuits or melting ice sheets and drowning polar bears?

            So for environmentalists, what do we do at the polls this November? Barack Obama’s record on the environment is mediocre at best. But there doesn’t seem to be any push for the environment coming from Romney. As a matter of fact, the GOP, with Newt Gingrich calling for the elimination of the EPA and Romney walking back his earlier acknowledgement that we are warming the planet, seems to be actively hostile to the environment. Is that our choice? Mediocre or bad?

February 3, 1973 Richard Nixon signs the Endangered Species Act. If we only had presidential candidates like Nixon today.

Squeeze This, Mr. Whipple!

Eleven centimeters. That’s less than half an inch. That is the amount by which a British company that makes toilet paper is going to reduce the size of the cardboard tubing that holds its toilet paper. This is a very simple and small change, yet the effects are big. With this one small shrinking of packaging over 140 British tonnes (over 150 tons, US) of carbon will not go up into the atmosphere every year.

            That’s almost hard to believe. One company. And it is one company in Britain, not the largest country in the world. Maybe this serves as a reminder. It is those little acts—keeping our tires inflated, turning off the lights when we leave a room, using low-watt bulbs—that add up.

Keep Squeezing, Mr. Whipple!

Those Who Disparage Climate Scientists Can Take a Vacation

I sometimes wonder why there is an industry that disparages the scientists who investigate climate change and the work that they do. If the Heartland Institute, Forbes Magazine, Fox News, and other organizations like them stopped their attacks on climate scientists, would it make any difference? Would there be serious discussion and action to reduce our carbon emissions?
             One of the latest opinion pieces from the Forbes is tediously silly. Because R.A. Pielke, a meteorologist with a skeptical yet nuanced view of the current understanding of climate change, criticized on his blog what appears to be a stupid statement in a scientific paper on climate, the Heartland Institute’s James Taylor insists that this is proof that the whole endeavor to understand how our use of fossil fuels is warming our planet is nothing but a house of cards. By his way of thinking, one corrupt judge is proof that the entire judiciary is morally bankrupt, and one bad teacher demonstrates the hollowness of our educational system.
             Obviously this cramped and weak reasoning is enough for the true believers who still disbelieve that the world was warming, even when they are presented with the most convincing evidence. And manufacturing doubt sways a few additional folks as well.
             But if the Heartland Institute stopped its attacks, if Forbes magazine stopped publishing dubious op-eds on climate scientists, if Fox News started reporting facts instead of opinion, would it make any difference?
            Mitt Romney, who only two years ago acknowledged the human thumbprint of global warming in his book, No Apology, has adopted a line acceptable to the GOP to become their nominee. Speaking at a recent closed-door fundraiser, he said, “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO₂ emissions is not the right course for us.” This line rings with doppelganger-like similarity to George W. Bush’s climate change mantra that more research needed to be done before we took any action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But with Barack Obama, who, like Romney, has also acknowledged that humans are causing climate change, we have a president who is running for reelection and is in the meanwhile saying nothing about global warming. On his recent energy tour—in which he talked about his “all of the above” energy strategy, which includes a reliance on fossil fuels—not once did he mention climate change, greenhouse gasses, or global warming.

             So there you have the two candidates’ stances on global warming: a policy of glib doubt or silence. The Heartland Institute could probably lay off its staff that attacks climate scientists, and Forbes could probably take the space in its magazine devoted to global warming and use it for something else, because right now, no matter who you vote for, it looks like Heartland, Forbes, Fox, and all the big business that they speak for will get their way: Nothing is going to change except the climate.