NASA Images Reveal Destruction of Mountaintop Removal

This page from NASA’s Earth Observatory shows the growth of the Hobet mine, one of the largest mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia, from 1984 through 2013. If you're in a good mood and don't want to spoil it, please don't click on the link! It's pretty depressing. Otherwise on the Earth Observatory page you can see the footprint of the mine grow across the landscape. Remember, this is only one mine.

The Hobet Mine in 1984, dwarfing the towns of Danville and Madison, West Virginia.
In the next 20 years it gets way worse. photo: NASA

Wisconsin Public Lands Commission Bans Employees From Working On Global Warming

The headlines from Wisconsin have been a little weird in the past few years, going back to when governor Scott Walker went and punished the unions who did not support his election.

            Now the three-member Board of Commissioners of Public Lands has voted 2-1to ban its employees from working on global warming issues during company time. The single vote against the ban, interestingly enough, came from Tia Nelson, the daughter of Gaylord Nelson, the U.S. Senator from Wisconsin who was the driving force behind the first Earth Day in 1970. The two votes in favor of the ban came from GOP members.

            I understand that those who work with public lands do a lot of things, the main purpose being the stewardship of a state’s lands. Now it seems to me that stewardship of lands of any state of the union would have to take into consideration climate change. How are these folks in Wisconsin going to be able to do their jobs?

ESA Protection Proposed For Two Appalachian Crayfish Threatened By Mountaintop Removal

Two crayfish that have died out throughout much of their range in Appalachia may have some hope. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to protect the two species under the Endangered Species Act.

            More than half of their habitats of the Big Sandy crayfish and the Guyandotte River crayfish have become too polluted, mostly from mountaintop removal coal mining, for these creatures to live in. The proposed protection by the Fish and Wildlife Service is in response to a petition and a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Big Sandy crayfish photo: Guenter Schuster

Though the evidence that mountaintop removal causes ecological damage has been mounting, and the health hazards to people because of mountaintop mining have become more evident, this is the first news that I’ve run across that any legislators or government agency is doing anything to mitigate the harm that this mining practice inflicts on the people or land of Appalachia.

            You can read more about the proposed listing in the press release from the Center for Biological Diversity.

ALEC Denies That We're Causing Global Warming, But They Don't Want Folks To Know That They Deny Global Warming

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been around since the eighties. They draft and support business friendly legislation. As part of their mission, they have received money from oil companies, such as Exxon, to deny the existence of climate change.[1]

            They have been a big part of the global warming denialist industry, but suddenly they don’t want folks to know that they are in the denialist industry. ALEC lawyers have sent letters to Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters telling them to immediately “cease making false statements” and “remove all false or misleading material” that may suggest that the conservative organization has any doubt about climate change.

            Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters certainly do call out ALEC for its global warming rhetoric. You can check out instances of where the do so here (League of Conservation Voters) and here (Common Cause).

            And ALEC really does, at least in a gobbledygook sort of way deny that we humans are causing global warming. The following is from ALEC’s Position Statement on Renewables and Climate Change:

Climate change is a historical phenomenon and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions. ALEC will continue to monitor the issue and support the use of sound science to guide policy, but ALEC will also incorporate economic and political realism. Unilateral efforts by the United States or regions within the United States will not significantly decrease carbon emissions globally, and international efforts to decrease emissions have proven politically infeasible and unenforceable. Policymakers in most cases are not willing to inflict economic harm on their citizens with no real benefit. ALEC discourages impractical visionary goals that ignore economic reality, and that will not be met without serious consequences for worldwide standard of living.

OK, nowhere in this statement do they come out and deny that we are making a very warm world with our power plants and automobiles, and I guess that ALEC’s lawyers could stand up in a court and expect to convince a judge or jury that this statement does not deny that climate change is real. But to me it’s obvious that such statements as “the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions,” reveal their intention to keep their obfuscation going.

If all of ALEC’s money came from the fossil fuel industry, they could brush aside the organizations that point out their denialism, but other companies, such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have left ALEC because of its stance on global warming. Even British Petroleum left ALEC because of its denialist position.

So ALEC wants to have it both ways. They want to serve their supporters who want them to deny that global warming is happening. And they want to bring back Google and Yahoo into their tent as well. So they are left in the very awkward position of denying their denial.

The world keeps getting warmer and my head keeps spinning.

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[1] Lee, J. S. (2003, May 28). Exxon backs groups that question global warming. New York Times

Maybe It's Time to Talk About Geoengineering, and Maybe We'll Do Something About CO2

I’ve only blogged about geoengineering once or twice. My feeling has been that it is an inevitability. Most folks know of and are concerned about global warming, yet we still keep electing politicians who make no promise of reducing our carbon output. We even elect politicians who are hostile to the idea that climate change is even real.

Senator James Inhofe calling Climate Change a hoax on the Senate Floor

We elect individuals like this to Congress. Who is to blame? 

So nothing gets done. In the meantime the world warms. I see things going from bad to worse until desperation sinks in somewhere, possibly India or another powerful country with a lot of land giving way to a rising sea, and that government will start shooting sulfate aerosols into the air to cool things down. We will then have crossed the threshold from inadvertently rearranging the dynamics of the atmosphere to intentionally manipulating the atmosphere.

Most folks, me included, have a very natural reaction to these ideas, that they remind us of the workings of some mad scientist. We see Vincent Price or Bella Lugosi in a black and white B movie crazily using his evil genius to despoil an innocent world.

Atomic supermen? Or sulphate aerosols. You decide. 

Lex Luthor, Superman won't let him geoengineer the world.

So are you scared now? Are you sufficiently freaked out by the idea of scientists taking a monkey wrench to the atmosphere to cool down the world that we’re warming with our power plants and automobiles? It seems that this is the real irony of geoengineering. Climate change freaks out some folks, but not all that many. And there are folks who aren’t freaked by it at all or deny that it’s happening. But geoengineering freaks the bejesus out of everybody.

At least that seems to be the conclusion of a study by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who looks into how people’s values influence how they process information and assess risk. I won’t go into the details of the study. You can find it here, published by the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and there is a Grist article about the study here. I’ll just sum up that the study found that if you have folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for stricter controls on carbon emissions, it only made folks more entrenched in the beliefs they had before, whether they thought of global warming as a threat or were skeptical or doubtful.

If folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for geoengineering, then skeptics were open to the reality of climate change. Also, those who believed in global warming were left more ambivalent after reading about geoengineering.

 

Pumping sea water into the atmosphere, one proposed geoengineeering idea 

Besides cluing us in, once again, to the reality that people are quirky and don’t behave predictably, what does this study tell us? I think we all feel that if we talk more about geoengineering, then it will normalize the idea, making all that much easier to consider and make us complacent about reducing our CO2 emissions. But maybe if we started to include the topic more in our discussions, it might be a way to loosen the skepticism of a good number of people. And it might get them to sign on to reducing our emissions and adequately dealing with global warming, instead of waiting for somebody to come along and start making atomic supermen to suck up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

What do you think? Should we talk about geoengineering, even though we don’t want to do it?

Or we could throw these giant parasols into orbit Good idea, or scary?

Governor Brown Issues Executive Order to Save Water

Our governor, Jerry Brown, has issued an executive order directing our State Water Resources Control Board to impose on all of California’s local water supply agencies a 25 percent reduction in their water use.

 

Drought stricken Oroville Lake, which is north of Sacramento. Now how you gonna float your boat? photo: Rich Pedrocelli Associated Press

Snowpack in the Sierras, which gives California about 30 percent of our water supply, is right now only about five percent of average. Yes, that’s right, five percent. That’s the lowest recorded level going back to 1950. Locally, here in San Diego, we’ve received about six and a half inches of precipitation for the year. Normal rainfall ranges from 10 to 12 inches a year, which usually falls from November through March.

The executive order leaves it to the individual agencies as to the manner in which they might achieve their water savings. Certainly most agencies will target gardens and lawns, which consume about 30 percent of residential water use. The New York Times says that water conservation measures may even have us skipping showers.

The order directs the state to work with local agencies to replace grass with drought tolerant landscaping. Left out of the executive order are large farms, which use a lot of water, although the owners of large farms will be required to give detailed water use reports to state regulators. A number of large farms have already seen their water allocations reduced.

So what do you think? Is this too drastic? Too little too late? Or has the governor done the right thing?

West Virginia Leads the Country in Population Loss

The population of West Virginia continues to decline. Thirty years ago there were about Three million people living in the Mountain State. Now less than two million folks call West Virginia home. As the Charleston Gazette explains, with more than 3000 residents leaving the state last year, West Virginia is losing folks faster than any other state.

            As one among the many who have left the hollows and the mountains, this is bittersweet for me. I dearly love West Virginia. I grew up eating pepperoni rolls, and I’ve drunk more than my share of sassafras tea. My mom would make cobbler from the blackberries that I picked in our fields. And I remember how black my hands would stain when we’d gather walnuts in the fall.

            More than anything, it was wanderlust that lead me away. And I never really had a reason to go back for longer than a visit. So I now live in southern California instead of West Virginia. Although I am one of the many former West Virginians, my story is not typical of how and why it is that so many thousands of folks have left. When it comes right down to it, there are fewer and fewer jobs. And the jobs that are there don’t pay as well as they may have in the past. Poverty plagues the state, one of the poorest in the union. With a 18.5 percent of West Virginians living in poverty, the Center For American Progress ranks the Mountain State 41st in its state poverty raking.

Below is a map indicating the counties that have seen population loss and the ones that have seen increases in their numbers. The eastern panhandle has seen an increase in numbers, largely because now the eastern panhandle now serves as a large bedroom community for the D.C. area. Monongalia County has seen the largest increase, almost seven percent. As well, it may be that this area of the state is becoming a bedroom community for Pittsburgh.

 GIS mapping by Paul Hormick. Source files: West Virginia Broadband Mapping http://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/bb/data.html. Population information from West Virginia Public Broadcasting http://wvpublic.org/post/which-west-virginia-counties-have-seen-most-population-loss-recent-years

But of the 55 counties, only 15 have seen increases in their numbers. Forty counties have fewer folks than just a few years ago. Wyoming, Clay, Pendleton, and Mingo have seen population losses of over four percent each. If you take another look at the map, you’ll see that down in the southwestern section of the map are all counties that have lost folks. The one at the bottom, that’s McDowell County, which has lost almost seven percent of its population. Now take a look at the same map below that now shows where the great surface mines and mountaintop removal mines are.

 

GIS mapping by Paul Hormick. Source files: West Virginia Broadband Mappinghttp://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/bb/data.html and I Love Mountains http://ilovemountains.org/maps: Population information from West Virginia Public Broadcasting http://wvpublic.org/post/which-west-virginia-counties-have-seen-most-population-loss-recent-years

For all of those who equate coal with jobs, this second map reveals the falsehood of that claim. At one time, before the giant machines came in to make the giant mines in the mountains, dozens of men might be employed at a mine. And those jobs were union jobs paying good wages. As with the mountains, those jobs and good wages are gone.

 

A closer view of the footprint that the mines make across West Virginia

This has nothing to do with a fantasy world in which president Obama has a “war on coal” and much more to do with the loss of labor rights, cheaper natural gas from fracking, a criminally negligent West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (and the same can be said of the federal EPA), and politicians who are beholden to and serve King Coal instead of the West Virginia citizens who cast their votes and send them into high office.