Tag: climate change

I have 4 articles on a common theme for ya this morning!

First, TransCanada is using eminent domain to seize land, and all those property rights folks on teh right are strangely silent, go figure:

TransCanada Is Seizing People’s Land To Build Keystone, But Conservatives Have Been Dead Silent

Crawford, who lives in Direct, Texas, had been trying since 2011 to keep the pipeline company off her property. But she ultimately lost, the portion of her land needed for the pipeline condemned through eminent domain – a process by which government can force citizens to sell their property for “public use,” such as the building of roads, railroads, and power lines. Crawford can’t wrap her head around why TransCanada, a foreign company, was granted the right of eminent domain to build a pipeline that wouldn’t be carrying Texas oil through the state of Texas.

That question – how eminent domain can be used in a case like Keystone – has some anti-Keystone groups stumped too. But the groups that usually are vocal proponents of property rights, including the Institute for Justice, have been silent when it comes to the controversial pipeline.

“I have not seen a single group that would normally rail against eminent domain speak up on behalf of farmers or ranchers on the Keystone XL route,” said Jane Kleeb, founder of the anti-Keystone group Bold Nebraska.

That’s surprising to Kleeb, whose organization is supporting the efforts of a group of Nebraska landowners along the pipeline’s proposed route who have held out against giving TransCanada access to their land. She had thought that at least a few conservative or pro-lands rights groups would have voiced their general support for Keystone XL, but still denounced the use of eminent domain to get it built. That hasn’t happened, Kleeb said – not among property rights groups nor among most pro-Keystone lawmakers.

“If this were a wind mill project or a solar project, Republicans would have been hair-on-fire crazy supporting the property rights of farmers and ranchers,” she observed. “But because it’s an oil pipeline, it’s fine.”

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I have 3 articles for you this morning!

First, a brief history on how we got today’s conservatives:

It’s Worse than Scott Walker and Ted Cruz: Secrets of Conservatives’ Decades-Long War on Truth

Make no mistake: the attack is deliberate.

The Enlightenment blossomed in the wake of the religiously-inspired Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century, when thinkers horrified by the war’s carnage set out to break the fetters of superstition and tradition that had prompted the strife. Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Jefferson and other thinkers advanced the idea that if people could listen to reasoned arguments, weigh them against evidence and choose the soundest ones, progress would follow. The Enlightenment revolutionized science, culture and politics, and gave rise to the modern world.

Enlightenment ideals prompted America’s founding and reigned for generations as Americans searched for the best ways to manage the economy, changing demographics and international conflict. But in the 1950s, the idea of progress through reason presented a problem for wealthy businessmen. They hated New Deal legislation because it regulated business and protected workers. The boom years of the 1920s had been good ones for them, and they believed that the continued success of their enterprises depended on their complete control over their businesses and the workers they employed. They believed that government meddling in their affairs would disrupt natural economic laws. And with their downfall would come the downfall of the entire American economy, and with it, the nation.

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Unless you are living in the Southern Hemisphere, where it is summer, Latin America, a Caribbean Island or Hawaii, a good part of the the Northern Hemisphere is experiencing some really rough winter weather, especially the northeastern United States.

The police department of Harlan, Kentucky think they have found the culprit who is causing the cold temperatures and snow storms (It’s not Mother Nature) and issued a warrant for her arrest.

All points bulletin!!! HPD has issued an arrest warrant for Queen Elsa of Arendelle. Suspect is a blonde female last seen wearing a long blue dress and is known to burst into song “Let it Go!” As you can see by the weather she is very dangerous. Do not attempt to apprehend her alone.

The weather is getting more extreme. An article in Scientific American discusses the link between the rapidly warming Arctic and the wavy jet stream that is causing the weird winter weather:

One thing we do know is that the polar jet stream-a fast river of wind up where jets fly that circumnavigates the northern hemisphere-has been doing some odd things in recent years.

Rather than circling in a relatively straight path, the jet stream has meandered more in north-south waves. In the west, it’s been bulging northward, arguably since December 2013-a pattern dubbed the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” by meteorologists. In the east, we’ve seen its southern-dipping counterpart, which I call the “Terribly Tenacious Trough.”

These long-lived shifts from the polar jet stream’s typical pattern have been responsible for some wicked weather this winter, with cold Arctic winds blasting everywhere from the Windy City to the Big Apple for weeks at a time.

We know that climate change is increasing the odds of extreme weather such as heatwaves, droughts and unusually heavy precipitation events, but is it making these sticky jet-stream patterns more likely, too? Maybe.

I have 3 articles – 2 longer ones – but all 3 good reads.

First, a great piece on ACC and the Pentagon:

The Pentagon & Climate Change: How Deniers Put National Security at Risk

Rear Adm. Jonathan White, the Navy’s chief oceanographer and head of its climate-change task force, is one of the most knowledgeable people in the military about what’s actually happening on our rapidly heating planet. Whenever another officer or a congressperson corners White and presses him about why he spends so much time thinking about climate change, he doesn’t even try to explain thermal expansion of the oceans or ice dynamics in the Arctic. “I just take them down to Norfolk,” White says. “When you see what’s going on down there, it gives you a sense of what climate change means to the Navy – and to America. And you can see why we’re concerned.”

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I have 3 articles for you this Lundi Gras morning!

First, some dire climate news:

NASA: The US Faces a “Mega-Drought” Not Seen in 1,000 Years

Scientists have bad news for West Coasters in the grips of the worst drought in decades: The worst is yet to come.

The record-shattering drought currently gripping California is a light crudité compared to the “mega-drought” that’s expected to envelop the Southwest and Great Plains over the next 35 years, NASA revealed Thursday. The full study, ominously named “Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains,” was published in Science Advances.

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I have 3 things for your perusal this morning.

First, on the big oil worker strike going on right now:

First Nationwide Oil Worker Strike In Decades Grows Even Bigger

In January there were at least four major mishaps at a U.S. pipelines that resulted in costly explosions or spills. In 2013, Texas led the country in oil and gas sector fatalities with 106. Overall, oil and gas workers are six times more likely to die on the job than average Americans. With the recent growth of the industry due to the proliferation of new drilling techniques such as fracking, safety measures can suffer. In North Dakota, which has been at the forefront of the oil boom, the fatality rate for industry workers was three times the national average in 2013.

On Friday, the local Toledo union posted on its Facebook page that the “strike is NOT about money, this is about addressing safety issues that have been ignored for way too long … 138 workers were killed on the job while extracting, producing, or supporting oil and gas in 2012 … the number was more than double that of 2009.”

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I have 3 articles for your perusal this morning.

First, now this is a guy they should have made the movie about:

I was an American sniper, and Chris Kyle’s war was not my war

During my combat tour I never saw the Iraqis as “savages.” They were a friendly culture who believed in hospitality, and were sometimes positive to a fault. The people are proud of their history, education system and national identity. I have listened to children share old-soul wisdom, and I have watched adults laugh and play with the naiveté of schoolboys. I met some incredible Iraqis during and after my deployment, and it is shameful to know that the movie has furthered ignorance that might put them in danger.

Unlike Chris Kyle, who claimed his PTSD came from the inability to save more service members, most of the damage to my mental health was what I call “moral injury,” which is becoming a popular term in many veteran circles.

As a sniper I was not usually the victim of a traumatic event, but the perpetrator of violence and death. My actions in combat would have been more acceptable to me if I could cloak myself in the belief that the whole mission was for a greater good. Instead, I watched as the purpose of the mission slowly unraveled.

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I have 2 articles for your perusal this morning.

The first is a great article by David Mizner:

Don’t Blame Islam

Also in the New Yorker, Teju Cole wrote, “Violence from ‘our’ side continues unabated. By this time next month, in all likelihood, many more ‘young men of military age’ and many others, neither young nor male, will have been killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. If past strikes are anything to go by, many of these people will be innocent of wrongdoing.”

That counts as progress. As does CNN’s decision to run a piece by Noam Chomsky that calls President Obama’s drone killings “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times.” And as does Seamus Milne’s piece in the Guardian pointing out that violence like the Paris attack is an extension of Western wars.

Yet these pieces are still relatively kind to the United States and its allies. They downplay the role of the West in producing the violence that its “thought leaders” blame on Islam. The truth is not merely that Team USA’s violence is far greater than that of its enemies, or that the former triggers the latter, but that Western governments and their client states have actively empowered right-wing jihadist groups.

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This afternoon the Senate passed a bill that approves the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The bill passes after several marathons session that saw many amendments to improve the safety of the pipeline, which will originate in Canada, carrying the dirtiest oil extracted from the Alberta Canada tar sands. The bill passed by 62 – 36 with nine Democrats joining the unanimous Republican caucus. The bill already has passed the House by 266 to 153, with 28 Democrats voting with the Republican majority. The bill now moves to conference committee to rectify minor differences between the two bills. It will then be sent to President Barack Obama, who has said that he would veto the bill. Republicans have not been able to muster the votes in either the House or the Senate needed to overcome a presidential veto.

According to the State Department impact study, the pipeline would only create about 35 permanent jobs,  despite the oft repeated, and usually unchallenged, GOP and industry lie that it would create thousands of jobs. One popular blogger tweeted that more Senators voted for the bill than the number of jobs it would create.

Besides the impact on climate change that would be caused by refining and using this oil, the oil if spilled is nearly impossible to clean up from the soil and riverbeds, not to mention extremely expensive. The route that the pipeline would take across the US could have a severe impact on the water supply in the Midwest if there was a leak.

As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow pointed out pipelines leak

and blow up

There is also a need for inspectors

The environment does not need another pipeline, nor do we.

I have 3 articles for your perusal this Monday morning.

First, some necessary tempering about this “new” person the president has seemingly morphed into since the midterms:

He’s not suddenly Paul Krugman: Let’s not morph Obama into Elizabeth Warren quite yet

So what’s not to like? The bad news is there’s quite a bit. The problem is that Obama’s deeds so often contradict his words. Indeed, examine his actions over these same two months and one could also construct a compelling counter-narrative to this tale of populist transformation.

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I have 2 for you this morning on Climate Change.

The first is a big rundown with a lot of great links about the dire situation we find ourselves in with regards to the changing climate. It’s so much more than what the title says:

As Climate Disruption Advances, 26 Percent of Mammals Face Extinction

In this month’s Climate Disruption Dispatch, we look at how ACD is progressing rapidly on every front – and how even some diehard climate deniers are starting to recognize the dire danger we face.

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I have 3 things for you this morning!

First, from Bill Moyers:

Most Underreported Stories of 2014

Which stories didn’t get the attention they deserved in 2014? Below editors, journalists and friends of BillMoyers.com provide answers.

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