Category: Environment

How comfortable would you feel knowing that “planned subsidence” mining was being conducted 600-1,000 feet underneath your home? It all starts with a letter notifying you that the mining will commence anytime in the next 5 years. Next come the contractors with bulldozers to knock down your trees and clear your fields. Then you hear the underground mining noises that are not as freightening as the continual earthquake rumblings and the above-ground noises of your house falling apart while the streams explode before they vanish. After a year-long investigation, The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) revealed how homeowners feel violated, anxious and stressed out as their dream home and real property are legally destroyed.

This diary starts with the IBM slogan, as viewers were exposed to it in the telecasts of the NFL playoffs this weekend, and speculates on what it would really take to “build a smarter planet.”  Thus I will embark upon a critique of the notion that being “smarter” is the same as being more informed, or cleverer, and suggest a version of “building a smarter planet” that has some planetary wisdom built into it.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)

The Blue Green Alliance was formed by the Steelworkers Union and the Sierra Club in 2006. Recently, the Communication Workers of America (CWA), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) announced that they were joining the Blue Green Alliance. By joining forces, the Alliance now unites more than 6 million people working to create a Green Economy based on justice and fairness.

The Alliance is a strong advocate of a Green Economic Recovery:

“If we invest $100 billion into six green strategies, we project it will create 2 million jobs“

This is a real movement growing to make change, to make a new future.  This is the path to economic recovery, sustainable growth and economic fairness. More, after the fold.

(a version of this diary is also on Daily Kos at http://www.dailykos.com/story/… )

Knowing of my interest in food and water, a dear Australian friend of mine sent me a copy of the BBC’s excellent investigative team, Panorama, which was aired Down Under recently. The documentary showed how many Fijians are falling ill and dying from typhoid and other diseases caused by a lack of safe, clean water. The irony of course is that these South Pacific islands have a flourishing bottled water industry, worth over $200 million per year and employing around 700 people. Having visited Fiji twice I can vouch for the purity of its water. Bottles of Fiji natural mineral water are a common sight in restaurants and on supermarket shelves across the US and Europe, some are cleverly called Fiji Water, and it travels up to 10,000 miles to get to your table, depending where you are. Click on the preceding link and you will see how they use Obama’s name to push sales. Follow me for the sick story.

Government investigations found that officials responsible for protecting endangered species have violated the law, censored scientists and manipulated data to limit recovery  of species facing extinction in order to protect financial interests of industries instead.  Many oppose Bush’s rampant violations of our rule of law governing human rights and civil rights but say we should move on. But, the lack of any accountability has caused illegal conduct to be silently accepted and spread like a virus infecting most substantive issues, including the Endangered Species Act (ESA). We face a catastrophic loss of species globally, the inability to provide the beauty of sustained biodiversity for future generations as well as financial repercussions.  Taxpayers will pay for the investigations and the “unnecessary expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-issue decisions” as well as the expensive costs of litigation filed to compel the government to comply with the rule of law.

This is my last Water News diary for the year and I’d like to take the opportunity to remind the fighting I/P posters that the Middle East, where a few great waterways are the major source of water for a large area of dry lands spanning a number of national borders, the scarcity of water has played a central role in defining the political relationships in the region for thousands of years. Its ideological, religious, and geographical disputes go hand in hand with water-related tensions and it is becoming abundantly clear that the incoming administration of Barack Obama will have to deal swiftly with the powers of the region as the water crisis is not limited to the Jordan basin, but extends throughout the Middle East, encompassing also the watersheds of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates. Because of water’s preeminent role in survival (Israel depends on fresh water resources originating in the occupied territories for about one-third of its total supply) the parched and volatile Middle East must be dealt with because the fact is that the region is running out of water. The people who have built their lives on what was once a reliable source of fresh water are now seeing a shortage of this vital resource impinge on all aspects of their increasingly fragile relations.

Cross-posted on La Vida Locavore and DKos.

God works in Mysterious Ways

Right as they are on the brink of selling “Clean Coal Technology” to the American Public, Kingston Tennessee gets buried in 300 million tonnes of coal sludge. Its now in the watershed.

Have a nice fucking day, morons. Nothing like cadmium in your water cocktail with a nice fat lead stick to swizzle it and a sprinkle of mercury bits on the brown foam topping.

For the sake of a job, you have been poisoning yourselves, your children and grandchildren for a hundred years. How long will the denizens of Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky put up with Coal Mining not only for its irresponsible lack of environmental control, when will they figure out its just a bad overall idea, plain and simple?

Whether or not you believe in God, this is one of those moments where you have to think “Instant Karma” and think it a grand scale wake the fuck up call.

“Clean” coal is like saying “Dry” rain.

Proof of both is now soaking the Earth.

We wait and watch, with baited breath President Obama’s decisions about who will serve in senior positions in the Administration.  

When it comes to the critical issues of climate change and the creation of a clean energy future, some appointments have created great elation, fostering hope for Change toward something better.

Euphoria has, more than once, shifted to confusion with appointees whose devotion to and experience for creating a sensible path forward remain (generously speaking) open to question.

That confusion (dismay even) can shift quickly, as it did today.

Yesterday, we had news of three absolutely stunningly impressive appointments when it comes to the arenas of science, global warming, and energy.  

Today is a day for great elation and Hope.  Let us hope that tomorrow provides reason for more elation.

Governments at all levels around the country are facing severe budget problems, and that includes the city of Ankeny, IA.  Ankeny shares a problem with lots of other cities — a lack of road salt.  As our friends at the Salt Institute know, road salt is spread on roads to help melt ice and snow.  It can be a big expense for city governments, and a snowy winter last year hit city government budgets hard and created a road salt shortage heading into this winter:

Some towns are paying as much as $170 a ton as salt prices nationwide soar because of shipping problems and surging demand. Hoping for the best – but preparing for the worst – communities are making plans to stretch supplies by mixing salt with sand, brine or even beet juice.

Ankeny, unfortunately, does not have a lot of spare beet juice lying around.  But they do have a Tone’s Spices plant.  And Tone’s just happened to have 9 tons of excess garlic salt lying around which they graciously donated to the city of Ankeny.  

Santa George WPE Bush has had, we all agree, too long a run at ‘gifting’ the nation with disaster after disaster, bad policy after bad policy.  

And, on the eve of the holidays (Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, New Year’s, Obama’s Inauguration),

Santa Bush is working to put coal into as many lumps into coal into our stockings, our rivers, our lungs, our lives as he can.

“I’m dreaming of a polluted Christmas …”

I’m getting these questions about Marx, again, over on Big Orange.  “You’re against capitalism; are you some kind of marxist?” they ask.  To me it doesn’t really matter: either I am a marxist or I’m not a marxist, depending on whether or not the gang affiliation of “being a marxist” means a lot to the person asking the question.  But here’s a diary about old Moor, his chicken-scratchings, and his legacy.

OK, so this isn’t going to go away.  I wrote a long diary on this last year, but I can see it’s time for another one.

(Reposted from Big Orange (and rewritten a bit) for the viewing pleasure of the Docudharma people)

If you could suddenly find yourself standing atop the summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, the highest point in New England and home at times to some of the most bitter weather on earth, and you should happen to be there on a day that was unencumbered by clouds or haze or fog, and you were able to take in the landscape all around you for 50 or 100 miles in every direction – if you could, in other words, see the entire state of New Hampshire from the summit of Mount Washington, all the way north up U.S. 3 to Third Lake and all the way south on 3 to Nashua – if you could somehow make that happen, then you would be able to take in with your own eyes an area the same size as all the public land that Bill Clinton single-handedly protected during his term as President by invoking the Antiquities Act of 1906: that is to say, more than 6 million acres.

Now – if you could find yourself suddenly transported from the summit of Mount Washington all the way across the country and down to sea level, to the Walgreen’s drug store on Olympic Boulevard in west Los Angeles, and if you could have an opportunity to take a good look around – to walk up and down the aisles, past the magazines and the makeup, past the hair color and the headache remedies, past the one-hour photo counter and the pharmacy – and you could make sure you covered the entire store, not missing anything, including the storage warehouse and the employee lounge in the back – if you could do that, then you would be able to take in with your own eyes an area the same size as all the public land that George W. Bush has so far protected during his term as President by invoking the Antiquities Act of 1906: in other words, about 15,000 square feet, or less than half an acre.