The San Diego UT Keeps the Stupid Rhetoric of Eco-Terrorism Alive

Ten years ago folks who associated themselves with the Earth Liberation Front set afire a construction site here in San Diego. It was a big, big fire. The building was to be a five-story condominium complex. In the past decade no one has been indicted for this crime.

            In covering the anniversary, our local paper, the UT, continues to call this act of arson eco-terrorism. This was a horribly stupid, and wasteful crime, but it does not compare to exploding pressure cookers on the streets of Boston or radicals flying jet airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

            I get so tired of stupid rhetoric.

The Wall Street Journal: Global Warming, What Me Worry?

What is it with the Wall Street Journal? I understand the business and financial emphasis of the newspaper; I understand that a lot of that business concerns the fossil fuel industry. So I understand that the editorial page needs to support the fossil fuel industry. But it really sent my head spinning when I read this editorial: Dialing Back the Alarm on Climate Change. While celebrating the finding in the soon to be released IPCC report that anticipates a lower rate of global warming than what previous reports found, the author contends that a moderate increase in global temperatures would be a good thing.

            While it seems that northern countries like Russia could capitalize on warmer and longer summers to grow more food, for the most part most of what I read about global warming is pretty nasty. We are just beginning to get the enormity of the ecological ramifications of climate change. Most of the experts in this area try to be conservative in their estimates, but they are nonetheless predicting substantial ecological damage, such as greatly accelerated pace of extinctions.[i] A lot of folks are talking about such drastic measures as assisted migrations.[ii]

            The world is starting to experience the wanderings of climate refugees. And that says nothing of the instability, suffering, and warfare that will happen because of a warmer world and rising seas. Maybe the author should have read the Christian Science Monitor and this article on the possible link between global warming and the war in Syria.

            If this editorial wasn’t enough, the Journal also published this opinion piece in which a number of scientists say that climate change is nothing to worry over.

            Extinctions? Droughts? Refugees? Warfare? Nothing to worry over?

            Does anybody take the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal seriously?

---

[i] GREGORY SHUFELDT, et al. "Expert Opinion On Climate Change And Threats To Biodiversity." Bioscience 63.8 (2013): 666-673. Environment Complete. Web. 14 Sept. 2013.

[ii] C. Ste-Marie, et al. "Why We Disagree About Assisted Migration: Ethical Implications Of A Key Debate Regarding The Future Of Canada's Forests." Forestry Chronicle 87.6 (2011): 755-765. Environment Complete. Web. 14 Sept. 2013.

Calculating the Enormous Environmental Costs of Mountaintop Removal

Over the last half dozen years or so research has been revealing what the folks of Appalachia have known for decades, that mountaintop removal is a bad thing. While previous scientific studies of MTR have concentrated on specific environmental impairments to streams or nearby ecosystems, a group of scientists have now calculated the total environmental costs of mountaintop removal, and it’s as ugly as any valley fill.

            Using satellite images and county-by-county records of coal production, the scientists examined mountaintop mining from 1985 to 2005. Appalachian coal produced during that 20-year period totaled 1.93 billion tons. That equals about two years’ worth of current domestic coal demand. To mine that coal about 770 square miles were converted from mountains and forest to mountaintop mine sites like the one pictured below.

 

Just one of the more than 500 mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia

770 square miles is the about the same area as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. From the paper’s abstract:

To meet current US coal demands, an area the size of Washington DC would need to be mined every 81 days. A one-year supply of coal would result in ~2,300 km of stream impairment and a loss of ecosystem carbon sequestration capacity comparable to the global warming potential of >33,000 US homes. For the first time, the environmental impacts of surface coal mining can be directly scaled with coal production rates.

OK, if the enormity of that doesn’t’ knock you out of your boots, the scientists have some other numbers. One of the scientists who worked on this study, Emily S. Bernhardt, says the carbon sequestration lost when forests are wiped out to make way for mountaintop mines is extremely long-term. The associate professor of biogeochemistry at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment said:

“Based on the average carbon sequestration potential of formerly forested mine sites that have been reclaimed into predominantly grassland ecosystems, we calculate it would take around 5,000 years for any given hectare of reclaimed mine land to capture the same amount of carbon that is released when the coal extracted from it is burned for energy.”

Brian D. Lutz, who is an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Kent State University and who began the analysis for this study while he was a postdoctoral research associate at Duke last year, adds that “Even on those rare former surface mines where forest regrowth is achieved, it would still take about 2,150 years for the carbon sequestration deficit to be erased.”

            The scientists found that great areas of the Appalachians were destroyed for sometimes paltry amounts of coal. Their data suggests that some mines were instigated to dig up coal seams that were only about one meter in thickness. Including the valley fills and other adjacent disturbance to the land, they calculated that the area disturbed by a mountaintop removal mine exceeds by 50 percent the spatial extent of the underlying coal.

            Working with Lutz and Bernhardt was William H. Schlesinger. He is a biochemist and President of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies an independent not-for-profit environmental research organization in Millbrook, New York. The study was published today in the online peer reviewed journal PLOS ONE.  No external funding financed the study.

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.