Posts tagged: Environment
Really clever use of CSS and HTML5 technology in this web site that reveals more information about hydraulic fracturing as you scroll further down the page.
Texas scientists wrote a report detailing the state of the environment in Galveston Bay. Rick Perry-appointed officials from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality went through the report and systematically deleted every mention of changes to Bay ecology that could be attributed to climate change. Now the scientists are rebelling. All the authors have asked for their names to be removed from the published, censored version of the report, and they’ve shared the original paper with the press. You can see how the report was censored, page-by-page, at Mother Jones.
August 31. This Adbusters page, Who the F**k Do You Think You Are, is almost completely wrong, and the popularity and unquestioning acceptance of this message is depressing. Here’s the text:
You blame China. You blame India. You blame America. You blame the CEOs, the oil companies, the vague and incoherent ‘system,’ the international regulatory regimes, the hypocrisy of the left, the righteous of the right, the educators, the economy, your parents, your childhood, your job, your bank account, your mental health, your government, everyone and everything but yourself. Wake up! This is no joke. Ecocide is actually happening and your five planet-lifestyle is the primary cause of it.Adbusters is correct that sitting back and pointing fingers, without doing anything about it, is a mistake. But the alternative it offers is a worse mistake. At least if you blame some of those other things, you might organize to change them. But changing your personal lifestyle will not do anything to stop ecocide. Even if you could organize a million people to use fewer resources, those resources would just be freed to be used by someone else. To stop consumption by voluntary action at the consumer end, you would have to organize every consumer in the world. It’s like you’ve got a hose with a billion leaks. Do you convince a billion people to painfully plug every hole with their fingers, or do you turn off the faucet?
I wrote about this a few years ago in this post:When we think about being “green,” reducing waste and so on, we almost always think in terms of stuff that we can do as individuals, and we almost never think about regulating manufacturing. Imagine: instead of making 50 million people feel guilty for using disposable cups at Starbucks, we could just pass a law prohibiting the manufacture of disposable cups. The reason we don’t is that in 1953 Vermont passed a law that banned disposable bottles, and the forces of Evil formed an organization called Keep America Beautiful, which has been working ever since to block that kind of law, and generally to make us think of waste “as an individual responsibility, and not one connected to the production process.”Of course I was wrong to use the word “evil”. Corporations are just machines that are doing exactly what they were designed to do: generate profit with indifference to external cost. They were designed that way because humans are still beginners at designing large complex systems. As I mentioned in my post on evil elites, we apply moral condemnation to harmful systems because our ancestors lived in tribes, where moral condemnation worked by making its targets feel shame. Shame doesn’t work on governments and corporations and the people inside them doing their jobs. But it does work when those systems use shame on us! Bottom-up shaming is useless, but top-down shaming is used all the time. As with all top-down power, we must resist it.
I’ve never said that people should feel guilty for consuming resources or for any other political reason. Guilt is for when you cheat on your spouse. Politics is cold tactics. Tactically, I don’t see any way to stop or change the present system. But there are plenty of ways to build the new systems that will grow through its cracks. Personally I am a huge energy miser. I haven’t used air conditioning all summer, yesterday I baked a loaf of bread in a solar oven, and I seem to be the only person in Spokane who rides a bike to Costco. Why? First, to save money, which I can then spend on other things, like good tools, healthful food, and not having a job. Second, to practice for the coming times when most of us will have to live this way. Also, using external energy makes me feel like a slave to that energy and its sources, while doing stuff without it makes me feel free.
Some interesting thoughts here.
A finalist entry in an Environment Minnesota short film contest to promote solar in Minnesota.
Via BoingBoing.
Some interesting details of biofuels.
Journalist Barry Estabrook has won two James Beard Awards for his writing about food. His newest book, called Tomatoland, is about … er … the tomato. More importantly, it’s about what it takes to grow food that can meet full-year, everywhere, low-cost demand and how the changes we’ve made to agriculture have both helped us and hurt us. You can read an excerpt, about growing tomatoes in Florida, at On Earth magazine. It’s a prime example of the kind of trade-offs Estabrook is talking about. To get a glistening red tomato in the depths of winter, you have to grow the fruit in a place and using techniques that pretty much ensure the tomatoes you do get won’t taste nearly as good as you want them to.
From a purely botanical and horticultural perspective, you would have to be an idiot to attempt to commercially grow tomatoes in a place like Florida. The seemingly insurmountable challenges start with the soil itself. Or more accurately, the lack of it. Although an area south of Miami has limestone gravel as a growing medium, the majority of the state’s tomatoes are raised in sand. Not sandy loam, not sandy soil, but pure sand, no more nutrient rich than the stuff vacationers like to wiggle their toes into on the beaches of Daytona and St. Pete.
Why bother trying to grow something as temperamental as a tomato in such a hostile environment?
The answer has nothing to do with horticulture and everything to do with money. Florida just happens to be warm enough for a tomato to survive at a time of year when the easily accessed population centers in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast, with their hordes of tomato-starved consumers, are frigid, their fields frozen solid under carpets of snow. But for tomatoes to survive long enough to take advantage of that huge potential market, Florida growers have to wage what amounts to total war against the elements. Forget the Hague Convention: We’re talking about chemical, biological, and scorched-earth warfare against the forces of nature.
The tomatoes are always harvested when still green and hard so they have a long shelf life.
. “No consumer tastes a tomato in the grocery store before buying it. I have not lost one sale due to taste,” one grower said. “People just want something red to put in their salad.”
Watch out, it’s comin’ Atchafalaya! An unlikely title for a serious issue:
Every thousand years or so, the lower Mississippi changes course. It piles up enough silt at its delta that it ’spills over’ to a new shortest path to the ocean. At times, the outlet has been anywhere from Texas to the Florida Panhandle.
Since the early 20th century, the Mississippi has been trying to change course again—sending its main flow down the Atchafalaya river, which offers a much shorter, steeper path to the ocean. The Army Corps of Engineers was ordered by Congress to keep that from happening. The center of their effort is the Old River Control Structure, which limits the flow down the Atchafalaya to 30%.
Every now and then there’s a massive flood which stresses the system. The fear is that if the Mississippi ever broke through the ORCS and the main flow was captured by the Atchafalaya, it would be very hard or virtually impossible to return it to its old route. This would devastate the people and industries around in Baton Rouge and New Orleans who depend on the river (as if they haven’t had enough problems lately). This almost happened in 1973, when a massive flood undermined the structure; this was the subject of John McPhee’s book.
In this interview on Democracy Now!, Carl Safina explains quite succinctly the actions and mistakes that led to the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and the aftermath. This interview is well worth reading or watching.
At the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill:
Most of the oil is still there in the Gulf today. It’s in the water. It’s on the sediment. It’s on the seafloor. A lot of it’s washed up into the wetlands, and it’s still there. It’s still being eaten by marine life today.
What has been done to deal with the problem, and prevent future recurrences?
[…] one year later the rest of the nation seems to have forgotten this tragedy, and our policymakers, one year later—not a single piece of legislation—not one—written to respond to the disaster has become law. And the money that BP is supposed to be paying has not come to the ground. The care—the claims that are supposed to be filled, the health provisions, the environmental provisions, none of it is there right now, and the U.S. Gulf Coast is still suffering under this glut of oil and chemicals.
How about all those claims that BP is supposed to pay out?
BP set up a claims process right away, and that’s because, as a result of the Exxon Valdez disaster, we had a great piece of legislation passed: the Oil Pollution Act. We need legislation like that now. One of the things the Oil Pollution Act did was require an immediate claims process to be established. BP set that up. But at this date, one year later, less than 40 percent of the claims that have been filed have even been processed, much less paid out.
Are there any signs of rampant hypocrisy?
[…] Transocean, the company that owned the offshore rig that exploded, […] awarded its top executives these bonuses, and in doing so, saying—it described the, quote, “best year in safety performance in our company’s history.” The bonus for the Transocean CEO Steve Newman was $400,000. Amidst tremendous criticism, he said he would give it to the families of the—
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Part of it.
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, he said he would give a part of it to the families of the dead workers.
