Slow motion planetary suicide

Call me crazy, but this non-stop radiation leak at Fukushima seems like a bigger threat to our national security than any terrorist could hope to be. I mean, let's check the map.

Radiation levels around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant are 18 times higher than previously thought, Japanese authorities have warned. Last week the plant's operator reported radioactive water had leaked from a storage tank into the ground. It now says readings taken near the leaking tank on Saturday showed radiation was high enough to prove lethal within four hours of exposure.

And then there's the pure incompetency of the utility company.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) had originally said the radiation emitted by the leaking water was around 100 millisieverts an hour. However, the company said the equipment used to make that recording could only read measurements of up to 100 millisieverts. The new recording, using a more sensitive device, showed a level of 1,800 millisieverts an hour.

This can't end well.

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The tyranny of light bulbs

Who says Boehner's House of Dysfunction can't get anything done? Why just today Republicans rescued America from freedom robbing energy efficiency.

The House on Wednesday voted to block the enforcement of light bulb standards that many say would effectively force people to buy more expensive compact fluorescent bulbs.

Just like last year, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) proposed the language as an addition to the energy and water spending bill. His language prohibits the use of any funds at the Department of Energy to implement the standards.

Of course, the law doesn't actually force anyone to buy any particular light bulb. There will be incandescent bulbs available that meet the standards. In fact, the industry has spent significant sums of money retooling their manufacturing plants to produce a variety of bulbs that meet the standards.

By abolishing the funding for the enforcement of the standards, Republicans have effectively given Chinese rip-off artists a license to undercut American manufacturers. But the freedom to waste our declining energy resources is a God-given right that can not be abridged. Or something. As long as it pisses off liberals and those gotdam tree huggers, it will please the crackpot base. Nothing else matters. Ever.

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Big Media ignores worldwide Monsanto protest

If the whole world protests against Monsanto and BigMedia refuses to cover it, did it happen? Maybe not in the United States but the rest of the world is banning GMO crops even as they're allowed to pollute our agriculture here at will.

In France, justice demands recompense for Monsanto's criminal negligence.

The French court in Lyon ruled that Monsanto’s Lasso weedkiller formula, which contains the active ingredient alachlor, caused Paul Francois to develop lifelong neurological damage that manifests as persistent memory loss, headaches, and stuttering during speech. [...]

In 2007, France officially banned Lasso from use in the country in accordance with a European Union (EU) directive enacted in 2006 prohibiting the chemical from further use on crops in any member countries. But despite all the evidence proving that alachlor can disrupt hormonal balance, induce reproductive or developmental problems, and cause cancer, the chemical is still being used on conventional crops throughout the U.S. to this very day.

“I am alive today, but part of the farming population is going to be sacrificed and is going to die because of (alachlor),” added Francois to Reuters.

In the U.S. it's not just the farmers. Our entire population is endangered by the corporate coup of our government by Monsanto and other deep pocket multinational corporations who have co-opted our political class.

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America's Nuclear Nightmare

The most terrifying thing I've read yet about our nuclear waste disposal problem.

There's a fire burning in Bridgeton, Missouri. It's invisible to area residents, buried deep beneath the ground in a North St. Louis County landfill. But the smoldering waste is an unavoidable presence in town, giving off a putrid odor that clouds the air miles away – an overwhelming stench described by one area woman as "rotten eggs mixed with skunk and fertilizer." Residents report smelling it at K-12 school buses, a TGI Fridays and even the operating room of a local hospital. "It smells like dead bodies," observes another local. ...

West Lake Landfill is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site that's home to some of the oldest radioactive wastes in the world. A six-foot chain-link fence surrounds the perimeter, plastered with bright yellow hazard signs that warn of the dangers within. On one corner stands a rusty gas pump. About 1,200 feet south of the radioactive EPA site, the fire at Bridgeton Landfill spreads out like hot barbeque coals. No one knows for sure what happens when an underground inferno meets a pool of atomic waste, but residents aren't eager to find out. ...

Today, West Lake's radioactive waste – all 143,000 cubic yards of it – sits on the outskirts of a former quarry with practically none of the standard safety features found in most municipal landfills. No clay liner blocks toxic leachate – or "garbage juice" – from seeping into area groundwater. No cap keeps toxic gas from dispersing into the air. This unprotected waste sits on a floodplain 1.5 miles away from the Missouri River. Eight miles downstream is a drinking water reservoir that serves 300,000 St. Louisans. Worst of all: The materials dumped in this populous metropolitan area will continue to pose a hazard for hundreds of thousands of years.

Meanwhile, "Republic Services also denies that it is dealing with a 'fire' – the company prefers the euphemism 'subsurface smoldering event.'"

This stuff is ticking time bomb. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when it explodes into an insoluble problem. Mankind will all be wanting to book that flight to Mars after that. [graphic via]

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Peak climate disruption

If we still had a functional BigMedia, this would be leading the nightly newscasts. Instead they'll be doing wall to wall coverage of BENGHAZZZZZZzzzzzzi, while our planet Earth burns.

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

The far north of this continent has been in a heatwave for weeks, while here in the south it's been the coldest spring since I moved here seven years ago. There are wild storms sweeping across the globe on a daily basis. Climate disruption is a far greater threat to our way of life than whether the State Department edited the talking points on a stupid memo. Yet, mark my words, every damn newscast and bobblehead pundit on TV will be parsing the difference between extremist and terrorist all weekend long. This real news won't make the cut.

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GOP blocks environmental protection

We continue to see the fruits of Harry Reid's handshake agreement with Mitch McConnell that derailed filibuster reform. Today Senate GOPers prevented a vote on a new EPA chief by refusing to show up, thus denying the committee a quorum:

Today, the eight Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee will not attend the nomination vote of Gina McCarthy to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). On April 25, 2013 the Committee Republicans asked Chairman Barbara Boxer to postpone the nomination vote because they had not received answers to their questions.

They blocked the vote essentially over only five unanswered queries, after the nominee Gina McCarthy, had already answered over 1,000 questions. Moreover McCarthy has been head of the Clean Air division for several years and had been easily confirmed to that position in 2009.

She's highly qualified for the job, had in saner times been lauded by Republicans for her work and has the support of the business and science community. Apparently the real problem is she believes in climate disruption or refuses to buy into climate change denialism or something. And besides, the GOP base hates the EPA, hates science and this grotesque grandstanding will piss off liberals.

The rubes love that crap, so no-brainer for the GOPers. Or more like the brainless Republicans still rule our world thanks to Harry Reid's apparently endless supply of patience.

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Deep in the broken heart of Texas

Looks like the residents of West, Texas won't recover damages from the explosion of the fertilizer plant.

The West Fertilizer Co., scene of an explosion last month that killed 15 people and injured 200, carried only $1 million in liability insurance.

Property damage alone in West could reach $100 million, according to the Insurance Council of Texas, an industry association. ...

Fertilizer facilities like the one in West are not required to have liability insurance that would compensate for damage they might cause, state insurance officials say, even if hazardous material is on hand.

Make that even if there hundreds of tons of hazardous and potentially explosive material on hand. The plant was storing 270 tons of ammonium nitrate. They were supposed to report anything over 400 pounds to DHS because it can be used to make bombs like McVeigh did in Oklahoma. They failed to report it.

Even more disturbing, they're are almost 7000 chemical facilities that pose a greater danger than the West fertilizer plant. The West facility wasn't even on the list because of their failure to report. And how is this possible, you ask?

Texas lawmakers have also recently sought to weaken the state environmental agency that oversaw the West plant and reduced its budget by $305 million. Governor Rick Perry (R) has also indicated that he isn’t interested in new safety regulations. Meanwhile, members have Congress have recently worked to advance a bill that would weaken the EPA’s powers to regulate major chemical plants.

West Fertilizer didn't make the chemicals. They're just a storage facility. A symptom of dereg, not the cause. The big money is the production. The real danger is coming from the manufacturers and their deep pocket lobbyists.

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Nuclear time bombs

The problems at Fukushima keep getting worse:

Two years after a triple meltdown that grew into the world’s second worst nuclear disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is faced with a new crisis: a flood of highly radioactive wastewater that workers are struggling to contain.

Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools.

... In a sign of the sheer size of the problem, the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, plans to chop down a small forest on its southern edge to make room for hundreds more tanks, a task that became more urgent when underground pits built to handle the overflow sprang leaks in recent weeks.

Don't think it couldn't happen here. Dr. Jaczko, now retired regulator says we should shut down every reactor in the US.

All 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday. Shutting them all down at once is not practical, he said, but he supports phasing them out rather than trying to extend their lives.

Meanwhile the current regulatory commission is talking about extending their operating licenses for another 20-40 years beyond what was supposed to be the life of the plants.

Once you poison the earth with radioactive waste, it can't be unpoisoned. We've already saddled further generations well beyond our lifetimes with enough spent fuel rods to destroy every living thing. We should be shutting them down as fast as we can.

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Consumer society

I started worrying about the ruination of our planet at an early age, long before they started calling us treehuggers. I was about 12 years old when I first heard the phrase planned obsolescence. I recall being indignant even at that young age at the calculated wastefulness of the corporate profit seekers.

I remember before that, when things were built to last using high quality materials and engineered so they were easily repairable when parts inevitably wore out. More importantly, the cost of parts and repair work were low enough to make it worth it to extend the life of the product. Seemed like every country road had a sign in someone's front yard where some retired handyman would fix your TV or replace the brushes in kitchen mixer and it work again for a many more years. That's rarely true anymore. Hell, at this point, people will replace perfectly functional items just for the status of owning the new shinier model. Apple has made a fortune on the mania to acquire the latest cool stuff.

Mindless consumerism has always bugged me, so I was happy to see this new trend emerging. They call it hackerspace but it's not about sabotaging your computer, it's crowdsourcing people in real life rooms to repair useable items from electronics to toasters. Great concept. Hope it catches on. [via Avedon]

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You and me and rain on the roof

This is a brilliant idea. Harvesting rainwater.

In the video above, Lancaster demonstrates how he turned his own neighborhood into a kind of vessel that would make the most out of its natural rainfall—and it doesn't require any money or a significant amount of time to maintain.

Simply cutting into the sidewalk curb prevents downstream flooding, while allowing rainwater to disperse among plant life; planting native, fruit-bearing trees opens a low-maintenance source of fresh, whole foods; and the entire system promotes wildlife, cleaner air, cooler ground temperatures and a better quality of life for his neighbors.

Worth clicking over to see the video. Didn't embed it because it was vimeo and those tend to bog down the page loads.

Shared it on facebook and someone said it's illegal to do this is certain places out west and that was a good reason for it. Didn't say what the reason was and can't imagine what it could be. Especially out west where the water just runs off anyway. I was thinking the biggest problem would be getting permission for the curb cuts. City zoning boards generally hate curb cuts.

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Bigger pipelines breed bigger disasters

The tar sands oil spill cleanup in Arkansas is ongoing, not that you're going to see it happen. There's apparently a media blackout in place so the only video is being surreptitiously captured by locals. But here's something new. It's quite possible taxpayers would end up paying for a major tar sands oil spill, say if the KXL pipeline was built and subsequently ruptured. And this is why:

Companies that transport oil are required to pay into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, giving the government a pot of money for immediate spill responses. The Enbridge pipeline in Michigan and the Exxon pipeline in Arkansas, however, are exempt because these pipelines are not considered to be carrying “conventional oil,” despite the fact bitumen spills are more expensive and more dangerous.

In a January 2011 memorandum, the IRS determined that to generate revenues for the oil spill trust fund, Congress only intended to tax conventional crude, and not tar sands or other unconventional oils. This exemption remains to this day, even though the U.S. moves billions of gallons of tar sands crude through its pipeline system every year. The trust fund is liable for tar sands oil spill cleanups without collecting any revenue from tar sands transport. If the fund goes broke,the American taxpayer foots the cleanup bill.

And how could this happen you ask? As the saying goes, follow the money:

Connolly’s story highlights the clear effects of the revolving door of money from politicians and fossil fuel companies keeping the safety standards and oversight low. In 2009 and 2010 fossil fuel companies like Enbridge spent $25.8 million lobbying Congress and in return they received subsidies and tax loopholes worth $20.5 billion. That’s a 5,800 percent return on political investment; about $59 in return for each dollar they spend lobbying.

Just how cheaply our politicians can be bought never fails to astound. Least they could do is whore themselves out at high class call girl rates instead of a $5 hooker on lower 10th Avenue.

The frightening thing is we already have thousands of miles of pipelines carrying who knows what kind of toxic fuel all over the country.



[original larger graphic]

Tar sands oil shouldn't be exempt from the fund. They should be paying double considering tar sands crude is much more dangerous than conventional oil. As Charlie Pierce informs us:

One question central to the debate is whether this type of fuel is more corrosive than conventional crude. Fuel from Alberta's oil sands can pose a greater risk if it is transported at a higher temperature or under greater pressure, Richard Kuprewicz, president of Accufacts Inc., a Redmond, Washington-based pipeline safety consultant, said yesterday in a telephone interview. Operators using modern pipeline-safety techniques can manage the risks by cleaning out the line more frequently or carefully monitoring how the bitumen is diluted, he said. "You just don't write off the corrosion threat," he said. "You've got to be sure you're managing it."

[Insert sardonic laughter] As Charlie so perfectly put it:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't all this bitumen-diluting and frequent line-cleaning, to say nothing of "modern pipeline-safety techniques" as a whole, cost, you know, actual money to the oil companies and their ancillary business partners, who are on the whole greedy bastards who'd soak your white-haired granny in crude like she was a Louisiana pelican rather than spend an extra dime not to? Thought so.

Every major disaster I can recall was traced to cutting corners on safety and maintenence. And none of these "greedy bastards" are going to do more than minimally necessary to clean up their mess either. It seems one added hazard of the filthy tar sands crude is it's so heavy it doesn't float. It sinks to the bottom of waterways. Three years after the major spill in Michigan the oil corporation had to be ordered to do more dredging in the river they fouled. Which they'll probably fight in court while it continues to lie there and quietly poison the water.

Does anybody really want to trust these people with bigger pipelines able to do infinitely more damage? I don't.

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This is your future with the KXL pipeline

The Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline hasn't been authorized yet, but the filthy tar sands oil is already streaming through the heartland in existing pipes that have been retrofitted by Big Oil, in this case our old friend Exxon-Mobil. The unfortunate residents of this neighborhood in Arkansas got a hard lesson on what that means this weekend, when the pipeline sprung a leak.


[photo via]

Imagine walking out your door and discovering this.



The town evacuated the neighborhood and shut down sections of highways because a single spark could blow up the whole damn place. Not to mention the toxic fumes are not conducive to breathing.

No one knows exactly how much oil spewed into lovely Mayflower, AK before they managed to shut the line down. I've seen some claims of hundreds of thousands of gallons but surely it was a lot:

Exxon Mobil said it's investigating the cause and working with local authorities in clean-up efforts. The company added that the breach was in a pipeline that originates in Illinois and carries tar sands oil to the Texas Gulf Coast.

In 2009, Exxon modified the capacity of the Pegasus pipeline, increasing the capacity to transport Canadian tar sands oil by 50 percent, or about 30,000 barrels per day. In a 2012 report, Bloomberg News reported the pipeline daily capacity to be 96,000 barrels of oil per day.

There's 42 gallons in a barrel of oil. Considering how far the spill reached before they contained it, it's a safe bet we're talking thousands of barrels. Worse yet, according to this (unverified) video at least one homeowner had no idea the pipeline was so close to his home.

Just this little leak is being classified as a serious incident. The KXL would be a much bigger pipeline, snaking across our entire country, including over major aquifers and agricultural land. A rupture in a KXL pipe could be a major disaster for the entire nation.

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Smart kid saves the oceans

Saw it on the internet. Don't know anything about this website, but I really hope this Ocean Cleanup Array is real and that it works.

19-year-old Boyan Slat has unveiled plans to create an Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans. The device consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Instead of moving through the ocean, the array would span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling.[...]

It is estimated that the clean-up process would take about five years, and it could greatly increase awareness about the world’s plastic garbage patches.

The process would make the patches visible. Hard to believe it could happen that fast but the kid is organized. He also started up The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit organization which is responsible for the development of his proposed technologies. Wish the nightly news would be investigating this instead of obsessing on the latest drama in the Amanda Knox case.

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