From Appalachian Voices: The First of the Five Great Political Lies in Support of Mountaintop Removal

The 5 Worst Political Lies in Support of Mountaintop Removal « Appalachian Voices

The above link is from Thom Kay of Appalachian Voices. He discusses some of the distorted rhetoric of the coal industry and the politicians who support mountaintop mining. Today’s word is “balance.”

Your Food in the Future: Faster and Filthier

Under a test program that has been in effect for 15 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed five meat processing plants to increase the speed of their processing lines by as much as 20 percent and allowed them to replace USDA meat inspectors with private inspectors hired by the slaughterhouses.

            Needless to say, the results were along the lines of a fox guarding the henhouse disaster. A long overdue report on the program found that three of the plants in the program were among the 10 worst meat processing plants in the country and the plant with the worst failing grade by far was one that is in this pilot program.

            As I said earlier, this report is long overdue. The USDA promised to study the performance of the program but never did so. That’s right, they allowed the pilot program to go forward but never looked into it. In the 15 years since the beginning of the program the USDA collected no data on the slaughterhouses in the program.

            I don’t imagine that the conditions of the plants approached what Sinclair Lewis found when he entered Chicago’s slaughterhouses to perform research for his book The Jungle, but among the safety and health violations that were found at the plants was meat contaminated with partially digested food and fecal matter.

            The Government Accountability Office looked into the matter and issued a separate report, saying that it did not recommend that the pilot program be extended to other slaughterhouses. The GAO found that, with only five plants allowed to try out the faster processing, the program was too small to “provide reasonable assurance that any conclusions can apply more broadly to the universe of 608 hog plants in the United States.”

Business liked the pilot program because of increased profits and less government oversight. The meat packing industry is also behind the crop of new legislation in several states that are commonly referred to as ag-gag laws. These laws make it illegal for folks to go undercover to find and report on animal cruelty or unhealthful and dangerous conditions within slaughterhouses and meat packing facilities. The laws also severely restrict the ability of whistleblowers to report violations.

So OK, the USDA found increased health and safety violations at the plants in this program, and the GAO doesn’t recommend it either. But they still plan to expand the program to other pork plants nationwide and allow a similar program to be used in all chicken and turkey plants nationwide.

I don’t know if I should feel more outraged or nauseated.

The World Warms As Australia's New Government Promises to Drop National Carbon Tax

For global warming there are two competing truisms. The first truism is that the most efficient and effective means of reducing carbon emissions is through a carbon tax. The basic economic rule is that people buy less of something when it’s more expensive. And a tax on carbon would make all things reliant on carbon emissions—gasoline, electricity, etc.—more expensive. Folks would buy less of this stuff and there would be less carbon thrown into the air.

            The most common approach around carbon taxes is levying them on industries that are heavy users of fossil fuels, mostly the electric utilities, with the increased costs passed on to consumers. These taxes can be finessed, with rebates going to lower income individuals to mitigate their hardship from these taxes. A good thing about a carbon tax is that the revenue can be used to promote cleaner and greener energy options.

            The other truism is that people hate to pay taxes. It doesn’t matter what sort of tax it might be, an income tax, a carbon tax, a sales, tax, folks hate to pay taxes.

            We just saw the clash of these truisms play themselves out in Australia, where the recent elections delivered a whopping blow to the Labor Party that had been in power for the past six years. The new Prime Minister-elect, Tony Abbott, proclaimed in his acceptance speech that one of his prime objectives once he is in office is an end to Australia’s carbon tax.

            Down under the carbon tax has not been around a long time, only about a year. In its short life it proved to be, as with all taxes, unpopular. It was one of the issues that Abbott used to hammer the Labor Party in his campaigning.

            This was not a single-issue election. The Labor Party might have been voted out anyway. In power, the Labor Party was unstable and prone to internal bickering, although their popularity increased when Kevin Rudd, who had been Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, replaced Prime Minister Julia Gillard in something of an internal party coup in the past few months.

            The death of Australia’s carbon tax is nonetheless disconcerting. The planet, and humanity, will be in a lot better shape if human beings reduce their use of fossil fuels, but we’re not going to magically do that sort of thing without being prodded to do so. Despite the good that a carbon tax might be able to do for us, we just don’t like being prodded.

A Chemical Spill Turns a West Virginia River Milky White

West Virginia is famous for whitewater. Folks come from all over to ride the rapids of the New River and other great rivers of the Mountain State. Whitewater is a good thing, when the river is naturally given over to rapids. But a river up in Boone County suddenly and unexpectedly had its waters running white from a chemical spill today.

            The spill is from Patriot Coal, and the substance that blanched the river is DT-50-D, a chemical sprayed on coal cars to inhibit the spread of coal dust. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection says the substance is not toxic, but people should not swim in the river or drink its milky water. Not toxic but don't drink it. That sort of talk reminds me of Fukushima—or dozens of other spills for that matter—when officials said that the radiation—or other toxins—were not at high levels and not to be a concern.

            Somehow their assurances don't make my worries go away.

The Coal Industry Teaches the Teachers In Texas

In Texas the coal industry has a program to ensure that their agenda makes it to the classrooms of the Lone Star State. The industry sponsors “Coal Camp,” five days of workshops for Texas schoolteachers in which the coal industry schools the schoolteachers on the industry's message.

            What’s in it for the teachers? They can get credit to renew their teaching certificates. And the workshops are paid for—to the tune of about $100,000 a year— by the coal industry. The teachers pay nothing for coal camp.

In Appalachia they are far more direct with their message, going right to the classrooms and schoolchildren. But the effort of this program in Texas is probably the same, getting the next generation to accept the methods of extraction used by the industry to get coal out of the ground and into the power plants.

Any industry has the right to promote its business, but taking business, any business not just coal, into the classroom is wrong. After the three R’s, schools are to teach history, the sciences, and give kids a notion of critical thinking skills. The children will have plenty of time during their lives to absorb the promotion of the coal industry through their normal PR campaigns and their advertising, and all the coal companies are welcome to come into the schools on career day to attract the workers that they might need in the mines and in their offices. But the coal companies should leave the schoolchildren of Texas alone to do their math problems and learn their grammar.

Global Warming Brings Us a 1950s Sci-Fi World

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time watching old science fiction movies on TV. The plots varied some, but the movies always had a reasonable scientist who properly performed his research and warned of coming disaster, lest the world continue in its foolhardy practices. The movies always had beautiful and vulnerable young women. And, of course, there were always the world-threatening cataclysms—like giant grasshoppers or giant bunny rabbits that killed, destroyed, and threatened all of civilization—that came to fruition because the world did not heed the warnings of the reasonable scientist. And there was always the brave hero who, on the advice of the reasonable scientist, took some bold action to kill off the giant critters and ensure civilization its survival while the beautiful and vulnerable young woman fell in love with him.

            Maybe all that time in front of the television wasn’t wasted, and it actually prepared me for life in the twenty-first century and the science fiction headlines that are becoming common due to climate change.

            In the Guardian today, two stories tell us about the science fiction world we now live in. We learn that the folks in the Marshall Islands, a country comprising a group of Pacific atolls between Hawaii and Australia, are seriously concerned that their entire nation could become uninhabitable in the next 30 to 60 years. The islands are only an average of about six feet above sea level, and the rising ocean threatens increased occurances of flooding as well as increasing the salinity of their groundwater supplies.

            Even for places that are high and dry global warming threatens crops, health, and living standards. Hundreds of agricultural pests that have been confined to the warmer parts of the world are moving north and south at a rate of almost two miles per year. That is the conclusion drawn by British scientists who studied data that has been collected for the last 50 years on over 500 tropical pests. As these pests advance into temperate climates, it could increase the costs of food or even lead to serious shortages.

            Reasonable scientists have been warning us about these kinds of climate change scenarios, but I’m afraid that there won’t be any brave heroes to save the world this time.

Nobody listens to the reasonable scientist and the giant grasshoppers attack the Wrigley Building in Chicago. Maybe the sugar in the gum attracts them.  From  Beginning of the End, AB-PT Pictures Corp. 1957

More Research Finds That Fracking Contaminates Groundwater

A recent study has found that in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania the closer you live to where there is fracking the more likely your water well will be contaminated with methane.

            The study was performed by Robert Jackson, a chemical engineer from Duke University. He found that home wells that were less than a mile from a fracking operation had methane concentrations that were six times higher than concentrations of wells that were farther away. He found methane in 115 of 141 residential water wells he examined.

            It is believed that the wells are contaminated when the protective metal casings and concrete around a frack well leak. Isotopes and traces of ethane characteristic of the natural gas found in the Marcellus Shale distinguish the gas found in the well water from methane that might have been produced by microorganisms in the groundwater.

            There is also the possibility that the fracking actually opens up pathways for the natural gas to seep up and contaminate the groundwater. A fracking expert from Cornell University, Anthony Ingraffea, is in the process of examining inspection reports from most of the more than 41,000 gas wells that have been drilled in Pennsylvania since the beginning of 2000. So far it looks like his research reveals that a higher percentage of fracking wells are leaking than conventional oil and gas wells drilled into other formations besides the Marcellus Shale.

            With these new findings, I wonder if there will be any Pennsylvania lawmakers who might say, “Hey, we better investigate this a little more before we let even more fracking in our commonwealth.”