Todd Akin: Is He Any More Stupid and Insensitive Than Other Politicians?

This is apparently big news. I’ve been hearing about it just about any time I turn on the radio. Defending his stance against abortion rights, Todd Akin, the Missouri representative who is competing with Claire McCaskill for her Senate seat, said during an interview with a Saint Louis television station this past weekend that pregnancies do not result from “legitimate rape.” Besides the absolute ignorance of basic biology he displays with this statement, he’s also showing a great deal of insensitivity with the terminology of calling any sort of rape legitimate.

            So there is an outcry and calls for him to drop out of the Senate race against McCaskill. I tend to agree with the folks who say he should drop out of the race. A person who would say such a thing, whether or not you think that access to abortions should be restricted or outlawed, is too stupid to hold any sort of public office, from the U.S. Congress down to your local school board.

            But, compared to other congressional representatives, is Akin all that stupid? Despite some of the best science ever performed in the history of the empirical method, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe denies that there is any evidence for global warming. As a matter of fact, he goes so far as to say that all the science on climate change is a fakery, a hoax, perpetrated on the world by mendacious scientists. This is a scenario that, if it were a movie, would contain thousands of Doctor Frankensteins in cahoots with a sort of covert Trilateral Commission working with a great PR department.

            Obviously crazy or really stupid, maybe even paranoid. Where are the calls for him to resign?

            Then there is Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky, a state in which mountaintop removal coal mining has destroyed hundreds of mountains, ruined ecosystems, and has been shown to cause kidney stones, tooth loss, diarrhea, learning disabilities, and some forms of cancer,[i] as well as numerous forms of birth defects.[ii] Rand said of the mining practice that, “I don’t think anyone’s going to be missing a hill or two here and there.”

            People are getting sick and dying, and as far as Rand is concerned it all amounts to “missing a hill or two here and there.” I don’t think much consideration is needed to find this statement stupid and insensitive. Once again, where are the calls for his resignation?

            I could go on and on. The list of things said that are stupid and insensitive is long: equating Islam with terrorism; blaming poor folks for their plight; classifying vandalism as terrorism; calling any kind of coal production “clean.” There is a lot of stupid getting in the way of real political progress.

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[i] Holzman, David C. “Mountaintop Removal Mining.” Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 119, Issue 11 11/1/2011 electronic journal

[ii] Ahearn, Melissa M. et at. “The association between mountaintop mining and birth defects among live births in central Appalachia, 1996–2003.” Environmental Research Vol. 111 Issue 6. Aug 2011, p 838-846 electronic journal

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama: What Their Campaigns Say About the Environment

As it is that I’m concerned about the environment and how our thinking about the environment affects the manner in which we live our lives and how those actions affect our rivers and streams, the air we breath, and the creatures that share this planet with us, I venture into the political from time to time to examine the thinking behind new or proposed legislation or the rhetoric about the environment that comes from candidates and parties. I have pointed out that some of the rhetoric of the GOP over the last 30 years runs counter to its traditional conservationist attitude toward the environment. And some of what the Grand Old Party says and does also strikes me as weird or crazy.

            That being said, it piqued my curiosity to look at the websites of the presidential candidates governor Mitt Romney and president Barack Obama to see what they both had to say about the environment.

            Energy and the environment are listed as issues addressed on Obama’s campaign website. Clicking into that webpage, topics include wilderness protection, increasing the fuel economy of our automobiles, as well as improving the quality of our air. Some of the ideas listed on this page I consider dubious. With the environmental destruction of modern mining methods, no kind of coal is ever clean, no matter how many times you scrub it. Constructing great wind farms in the desert can also affect the land and be deadly for birds and bats.

I don’t’ believe that Barack Obama has a great environmental record. But whether or not I agree with the policies and actions he endorses, the President has established the environment as a campaign issue.

On the other hand, clicking over to Mitt Romney’s website, of the 24 subjects that his campaign lists as issues, the environment is not mentioned once. If you look at the Energy issue page, it says that Mitt Romney, as president, will “make every effort to safeguard the environment.” And yet a familiar trope of “regulatory reform,” which means loosening or doing completely away with environmental laws appears further down the page.

Even among Democrats the environment is not a big issue right now, overshadowed by jobs and pocketbook concerns. And yet it seems so odd to me that someone could run for president and expect votes from a constituency that is unconcerned about the health and safety of our waters or our ability to breath clean air.

Congressional Hearings on Climate Change: Did Anybody Hear About This?

There was a Congressional hearing this past week on climate change and the connection that climate change has to the extreme weather we’ve been having. Except for a 75-word piece in the Washington Post that announced the participation in the hearing by Senator Benjamin Cardin from Maryland, the hearing received no U.S. press. I read about the hearing in the Guardian, a paper from Britain.

Perhaps this country’s press was correct to pass on reporting on this hearing. After all, maybe there was nothing newsworthy in the hearings. That there was nothing new in earnest scientists telling Congress once again that, yes, global warming is really happening, and yes, that some of the freakish weather that has brought drought to half of the United States and wildfires throughout Colorado can be connected to that warming.

            And maybe they know that there is no news that Senator James Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate’s environment and public works committee, continues to claim that the science of climate change is a hoax. And they also know that there is no news in reporting that two of Inhofe’s biggest campaign contributors are Koch Industries—which has made its fortunes from oil, gas, and other extractive industries, as well as the Koch brothers being the financiers behind the T Party—and Murray Industries, the largest privately owned coal company in the United States.

            We know that big oil and King Coal are to blame for the inaction of our government to take steps to reduce carbon emissions and that shills like Inhofe are the most egregious enablers of this dangerous charade. The press, particularly the major papers and television networks, are also partly to blame for leaving important hearings and other news on climate change unreported.

Mountaintop Removal: The Damage Goes Beyond Appalachia

When I was a child growing up in West Virginia, on our way to school the school bus would drive us over a bridge that spanned a small stream. Out here, where I live in southern California, the waterway would be called a river, but in Appalachia small streams are called creeks. This one was called Simpson Creek. I remember that as we approached the bridge, and for a time after we crossed the span, an acrid smell would fill the school bus. The smell came from sulfur, as well as other toxins in the creek. Those pollutants came from the runoff of old surface mines that were farther upstream in the watershed of Simpson Creek. Besides the odor, the rocks in the stream were stained orange. And there weren’t any fish in the stream.

Simpson Creek earned some infamy back in the seventies. Mayf Nutter, a local native who had become a television star of soap operas Knott’s Landing and Days of Our Lives*, had a country music hit with “Simpson Creek Won’t Never Run Clean Again.” In the song Nutter sang of the freakish color of the creek and its lifeless waters. Simpson Creek was only one of the waterways close to where I grew up with sulfur stained rocks and streambeds devoid of life. I remember that some streams had a smell so strong that it seemed that I could taste the fouled river, although I might be 30 or 40 yards away from its shores.

A creek with acid mine runoff from strip mining (Photo: Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club ohiosierraclub.org)

Besides the fouling of Simpson Creek, in his song Nutter sang of the West Fork River, a waterway that claims Simpson Creek as a tributary, and how it’s waters were fouled by the contribution of Simpson Creek. You don’t need a degree in watershed management to understand the aquatic karma of tossing something in a creek: whatever goes into a creek flows downstream.

Mayf Nutter, musician, actor, and a man who understands acid mine runoff (Photo: mayfnutter.com)

So in a recent study we have a finding that a television star and country singer understood over thirty years ago: Acid mine runoff flows downstream.

And as the surface mining operations have expanded—when I was a child riding the school bus across Simpson Creek, those mines encompassed dozens or hundreds of acres; mountaintop removal mining now encompasses thousands of acres—that selfsame aquatic karma only grows. You don’t need to be a watershed manager, or even a 1970s country singer, to understand that.

Mountaintop removal does just that, removes mountains. And as the mountains are removed, so are the forests, streams, and ecosystems of those mountains. The lives of the people who live around those mountains are disturbed as well. Their wells are often contaminated from the mining, and they are subjected to noise and coal dust from the mines. They may be facing health risks as well.

But as we know that what you throw in a creek flows downstream, mountaintop removal goes beyond the mountains that it destroys. The pollutants flow downstream. Lives are disrupted or destroyed. And all that coal being burned adds more tons and tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, warming the planet. The problems of this type of extraction go beyond the hills of Appalachia.

* Nutter’s television and film credits exceed these two shows. You can check his website here: http://www.mayfnutter.com/

H.R. 5959 The Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act: Common Sense From Dennis Kucinich

Thank goodness for Dennis Kucinich. He has introduced to Congress the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act. It is heartening to know that there are members of Congress who are trying to help people and that there are 13 cosponsors for this bill.

            The Appalachian Communities Health Emergency Act (H.R. 5959) simply makes the commonsensical requirement that before more West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky mountaintops are blown apart for their coal, the health implications of the residents around those mines need to be understood.

We currently do not have a comprehensive understanding of the health effects of mountaintop removal. Only ten investigators study the relationship between this type of mining and public health.[i]
There is nonetheless reason for concern. Recent evidence points to mountaintop mining as the root of many health problems for the residents of Appalachia. Among the recent investigations were a toxicologist and an associate professor in the department of Community Medicine at West Virginia University who found learning disabilities, kidney stones, tooth loss, diarrhea, rash, and some forms of cancer in individuals living close to MTR operations.[ii] Using GIS mapping techniques, a team of health professionals and geographers found higher rates of circulatory, respiratory, central nervous system, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, and urogenital birth defects in areas close to mountaintop removal.[iii]

            Kucinich’s bill would require a detailed review of these, and possibly other, health risks to be conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mountaintop removal would be suspended until the research is completed. If the research finds no health risks, then mountaintop mining could resume.

            As I said before, this is commonsensical. The FDA requires that new drugs be proven safe before doctors can prescribe them. And product safety is part of the process of other consumer goods hitting the market. Shouldn’t we do the same for the people who live around the mountaintop mines?

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[i] Holzman, David C. “Mountaintop Removal Mining.” Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 119, Issue 11 11/1/2011 electronic journal

[ii] ibid

[iii] Ahearn, Melissa M. et at. “The association between mountaintop mining and birth defects among live births in central Appalachia, 1996–2003.” Environmental Research Vol. 111 Issue 6. Aug 2011, p 838-846 electronic journal

Colorado Wildfires: Will We Have Our Cuyahoga Moment?

In June of 1969 the Cuyahoga River caught fire. After over forty years I still can’t get used to the image of a body of water igniting, but apparently for the river that meanders through Cleveland, Ohio it was nothing new. In the previous hundred years, the Cuyahoga had caught fire at least nine times. A conflagration on the Cuyahoga in 1952 caused over 1.5 million dollars in damage.

Apparently by the time of the tenth fire, the trash and pollution that had provided the fuel for these fires had befouled the river to such a degree that it was, in essence, a toxic waste dump devoid of life. Time magazine reported on the Cuyahoga River fire in August of 1969 and summed up the condition of the river as such:

Some River! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: "The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes." It is also—literally—a fire hazard.

The Cuyahoga goes up in flames in 1969. Photo from NOAA*

With environmental degradation of a river there is the degradation itself, pollutants and trash thrown in the river, and the consequences of that degradation: a lifeless river that catches on fire. Anyone can see the pipes from factories and sewage treatment facilities dumping their waste into a stream, and anyone can see a putrid, lifeless body of water. It is easy enough to make the connection between the two.

            The conflagration on a dead river, as well as other dire pollution problems with other bodies of water—for example Lake Erie being declared a “dead lake”—and people’s ability to make the connection between the pollution and the troubles of these waters lead to reforms. Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. Similar alarming environmental crises—the extirpation of the bald eagle from much of the lower 48 states and dense visible smog hovering over major cities—spurned Congress and President Nixon to pass the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.

We now have headlines like the following in The Guardian: Colorado wildfires are ‘what global warming really looks like.’ Citing the views of Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University geosciences professor and a lead author of the UN’s climate science panel, and Steven Running, a forest ecologist at the University of Montana, The Guardian says that effects of global warming are giving Colorado the conditions for the wildfires. Winters with lighter snows and springs occurring earlier in the year give Colorado an earlier and longer fire season. The higher temperatures consistent with the science of global warming also enhance conditions for wildfire. Add to this scenario lots of fuel for the fires provided by dead trees killed by the mountain pine beetle, which are surviving in greater numbers due to the milder winters.

Is this the time to have a Cuyahoga moment? Photo: Scott Seibold (@scottseibold), Twitter

The Cuyahoga had been befouled for decades, to the point of lifelessness, before any serious action was taken to clean it up. And as I said earlier, folks had the advantage back then of making a clear connection between dumping junk in the river and the river’s problems. In the case of the Colorado fires, though what the scientists talk about is easy enough to understand, people can’t see a direct connection between our cars and factories belching greenhouse gasses and whole mountainsides of forest going up in smoke. Because of this I fear that there are going to be lots more wildfires and lots of houses burning down in lots of other places besides Colorado, and there won’t be anybody to say, as folks said along the banks of the Cuyahoga in 1969, “OMG we need to DO something!”

* http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/pollution/media/supp_pol02d.html

Good News: Federal Appeals Court Rules That the EPA Has the Authority to Regulate Greenhouse Gasses

The ability of the EPA to regulate the gasses that are warming our world was affirmed today in a Federal Appeals Court decision that ruled that the agency was “unambiguously correct” in its use of existing law to curb global warming. Several states and greenhouse gas emitting industries had challenged the move by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate CO2 and other global warming gasses.

            I’m certain that this decision will be appealed to the Supreme Court and, considering the present rightward political leaning of the Court, this may only be a temporary victory for people and the planet. It is nonetheless good news.