brainiac conspiracy

It's Not All Bad News

But of course, you have to go overseas to find some. And it is good news!

As an aside, it probably needs to be noted that the commercial fishing industry is one of the most difficult to regulate because, well, the ocean is a big place to patrol. You can even lose a 747 out there! But the fact that they are at least attempting a conservation-enforcement regime is a positive first step. Might we consider implementing something like it here, or is that no longer possible because Stalin?

---Baron V

Bad Policy

Also too, bad politics:

Democratic Sens. Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Warner of Virginia, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mark Begich of Alaska, who all face tight races this November, signed the letter, which urges Mr. Obama to put in place an explicit timeline to decide on the project and to make a final decision by May 31 [...]

The letter, organized by Ms. Landrieu, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, also included Democratic Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Montana’s Jon Tester and John Walsh.

Your humble blogger is willing to bet dollars to donuts here that every one of these awful people who is up for reelection this year will lose. Run as a Democrat, at least Democrats will vote for you. Run away from Team Democrat, why should anyone vote for you? It's not like we haven't seen this before . . . but thanks for reminding me again why I left the party.

---Baron V

Definitions of Insanity

This:

For Tom Frantz, a retired teacher and third-generation farmer, the exploratory drilling is already too much.

"This is prime farmland and they have drilled between 200 and 300 wells in the last 10 years in the Monterey Shale," Frantz said. "Every one took out an acre or two of farmland. Every one has used hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. Each one has contributed to our air pollution. Each one has had spills on the ground of different chemicals and crude oil. Each one is emitting methane as we speak. If this thing happens and there are thousands and thousands of wells---that's scary because an accident is bound to happen," he said.

In a state that is running out of water, and that is prone to earthquakes.

I wonder if our wretched corrupt species will ever come to the realization that there are no guarantees against extinction, or if it's already too late for us to save ourselves. I kinda hate to think that way, but reading stuff like this every freaking day on the Interwebs is slowly turning me into a fatalist. Might as well keep railing for a return to sanity anyway. It beats giving in to cynicism and despair.

(Via.)

---Baron V

Foot-Dragging

This:

The White House on Friday opened the way to cutting emissions of methane from the oil and gas industry, saying it would study the magnitude of leaks of the powerful greenhouse gas [...]

[T]he White House said the EPA would undertake a series of studies to determine the magnitude and prevalence of methane leaks from fracking sites, compressors, and gas pipelines.

The agency would decide by the autumn of 2014 whether to propose new controls on the industry. “In the fall, we will determine the best path forward to get reductions,” a White House official told a conference call with reporters.

But they can't mandate any methane reductions without disavowing their existing energy policy---which, you know, is a big part of the problem.

---Baron V

Amoral Grifters

Sadly, they don't all play for the other side.

Bet you anything she loses in November.

---Baron V

Writing's on The Wall

Easter Island . . . still chopping down trees . . . oh the humanity.

---Baron V

Not Getting It

Really don't understand why the leaders of the developed world are so nonchalant over this:

[J]obs at Fukushima . . . pay less and are more sporadic, chasing away qualified workers. Left behind, laborers and others say, is a work force often assembled by fly-by-night labor brokers with little technical or safety expertise and even less concern about hiring desperate people. Police and labor activists say some of the most aggressive of the brokers have mob ties.

Regulators, contractors and more than 20 current and former workers interviewed in recent months say the deteriorating labor conditions are a prime cause of a string of large leaks of contaminated water and other embarrassing errors that have already damaged the environment and, in some cases, put workers in danger. In the worst-case scenario, experts fear, struggling workers could trigger a bigger spill or another radiation release.

“There is a crisis of manpower at the plant,” said Yukiteru Naka, founder of Tohoku Enterprise, a contractor and former plant engineer for General Electric. “We are forced to do more with less, like firemen being told to use less water even though the fire’s still burning.”

That crisis was especially evident one dark morning last October, when a crew of contract workers was sent to remove hoses and valves as part of a long-overdue upgrade to the plant’s water purification system.

According to regulatory filings by Tepco, the team received only a 20-minute briefing from their supervisor and were given no diagrams of the system they were to fix and no review of safety procedures---a scenario a former supervisor at the plant called unthinkable. Worse yet, the laborers were not warned that a hose near the one they would be removing was filled with water laced with radioactive cesium.

As the men shambled off in their bulky protective gear, their supervisor, juggling multiple responsibilities, left to check on another crew. They chose the wrong hose, and a torrent of radioactive water began spilling out. Panicked, the workers thrust their gloved hands into the water to try to stop the leak, spraying themselves and two other workers who raced over to help.

Three years in, it's obvious by now that the local job creators are utterly incapable of addressing this problem, let alone solving it. Since we are dealing with oceans and the atmosphere, this is a global crisis that requires a global solution. So why aren't the people who govern us pulling out their hair and screaming bloody murder to the General Assembly about this? It's bad enough that we are slowly roasting our world; we shouldn't be irradiating it to death as well. This really is an "all hands" moment.

---Baron V

Tuesday Night Music Blogging

Because resistance is futile, and we're utterly hosed. Nice while it lasted, though!

)

---Baron V

Writing's on The Wall

Wish I could a bit more sanguine about the fate of humanity, but it's really difficult to imagine a rosy future for the species when the people who govern us have, essentially, thrown in the towel and said there's nothing they can do about it---even though, of course, they could. Cockroaches and jellyfish will soldier on in our absence, then.

---Baron V

Safe Clean Nuclear Energy

It's another lie we tell ourselves because it simply doesn't exist.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Edmund G. Brown, Jr.

Yeah, his environmental record has been basically good, but come on: We are running out of water and we are prone to earthquakes. Why on earth would we waste the water---which can't be recycled---on energy extraction, and trigger more earthquakes while we're at it? This serious centrist "all of the above" energy strategy is, good intentions aside, slowly destroying the planet, and we don't have a Plan B on which we can rely in the event the world becomes uninhabitable.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

Barack Obama.

Snark aside, this "all of the above" energy policy is, and always has been, utterly inadequate to address the most pressing existential challenge of our time. Raising taxes on these poisons was among the first things that needed to be done five years ago, and nobody---even on Team Democrat---cared enough to mention it. I'm glad I likely won't be around to witness the most catastrophic extinction events, but who knows: at the rate we're running out of water, I might just be.

---Baron V

Priorities

If only we knew whether it was a good idea to cut down the last tree on Easter Island:

Last fall the Environment America Research and Policy Center estimated that at least 250 billion gallons of water had been used since 2005 in the estimated 80,000 wells in 17 states. Drought-prone Texas led the way with at least 110 billion gallons [...]

The Ceres report showed that as of January, 56% of the 39,000 wells studied that used hydraulic fracturing were in parts of the U.S. experiencing "abnormally dry to exceptional drought" conditions, said Monika Freyman, the study's author, who used federal drought-monitoring statistics to reach her conclusions.

(Via.)

---Baron V

Death March

I wish I could be a bit more sanguine about the future of humanity in particular, and life on this planet in general, but I'm having a hard time seeing how we're going to be able to get off this capitalist merry-go-round that demands ever-increasing amounts of natural resources to generate perpetual growth from a global ecosystem that's no longer capable of providing it. I mean, tens of millions of jobs around the world (which generate trillions of dollars in GDP) are dependent on access to that oil, gas, coal, et al., and they're not all CEOs. If we were to do what's needed, and sequestered 90 percent of these fuels in the ground---well first, we would crash the global economy to an unprecedented degree, and as a result, we would need to entirely rethink and redefine the very nature of wealth and of work. We'd need to reconsider how we grow our food and how we are to be housed. Most importantly, of course, we'd need to renounce the philosophical underpinnings of the last several centuries of Western thought---the individual as the measure of all things---and realize that we must live our lives with a greater obligation to collective humanity, and to the other sentient beings that inhabit our world, than to ourselves. As foreign---repugnant, even---as that concept is to so many of us, and given how little time we have left before there's no turning back, I'm just not so sure we're capable of adapting before we wake up to find Miami under 30 feet of water. Sure hope I'm wrong, though!

---Baron V

Cows Need Water. People Don't

Priorities, people:

A hundred billion gallons of water per year is being exported in the form of alfalfa from California," argues Professor Robert Glennon from Arizona College of Law.

"It's a huge amount. It's enough for a year's supply for a million families---it's a lot of water, particularly when you're looking at the dreadful drought throughout the southwest."

Yeah, I know farmers gotta make money somehow, but perhaps it would be wiser for the Chinese to grow their own cattle feed, and for us to pay the farmers in the Imperial Valley for their excess water, and divert it to more productive uses---like, oh, growing food for people instead of food for cows.

---Baron V

Golf Courses Need Water. People Don't

When I was young, I used to play golf on a regular basis, so I know it can be a lot of fun. And, for whatever reason, it seems to have become a mandatory pastime for anyone who gets elected President of the United States. That said, we---and our Presidents---need to acknowledge the fact that golf courses can be wasteful of resources, particularly when the golf courses are located in the fucking desert:

The 124 golf courses in the Coachella Valley consume roughly 17% of all water there, and one-quarter of the water pumped out of the region’s at-risk groundwater aquifer, according to the Coachella Valley Water District. Statewide, roughly 1% of water goes to keep golf courses green. Each of the 124 Coachella Valley courses, on average, uses nearly 1 million gallons (3.8 million L) a day because of the hot and dry climate, three to four times more water per day than the average American golf course.

---Baron V

What We Don't Know

Won't hurt us. It'll just kill us instead:

The operator of Japan's wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant knew about record high measurements of a dangerous isotope in groundwater at the plant for five months before telling the country's nuclear watchdog, a regulatory official told Reuters.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) said late on Wednesday it detected 5 million becquerels per liter of radioactive strontium-90 in a sample from a groundwater well about 25 meters from the ocean last September. That reading was more than five times the broader all-beta radiation reading taken at the same well two months earlier.

---Baron V

Maybe if We Ignore It, It'll Go Away

This is not a new story---in fact, it's several years old---but I came upon it today, and it makes you wonder why nobody seems to be talking about it:

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.

That's when the world's oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change [...]

"This isn't predicted to happen. This is happening now," study researcher Nicola Beaumont, PhD, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, U.K., says in a news release.

"If biodiversity continues to decline, the marine environment will not be able to sustain our way of life. Indeed, it may not be able to sustain our lives at all," Beaumont adds.

This sure seems to me like an "all hands" moment, wouldn't you agree? I mean, a major food source for hundreds of millions of people faces imminent eradication, and where's the sense of urgency? Shouldn't someone be giving a rousing call-to-action speech before the UN General Assembly? Shouldn't someone be badgering Congress for billions of dollars to fund domestic aquaculture projects? Should we maybe not waste our dwindling water supply on energy extraction when we may need it for tomorrow's fish farms? I dunno, it just amazes me that people can be so blasé about the consequences of climate change when it's becoming increasingly obvious that we are quickly running out of time to fix it.

(Via.) ---Baron V

Priorities

We can achieve America's energy independence or we can stave off mass extinction events that involve humans in the 22nd Century, but we probably can't do both because

America's oil and gas rush is depleting water supplies in the driest and most drought-prone areas of the country, from Texas to California, new research has found.

Of the nearly 40,000 oil and gas wells drilled since 2011, three-quarters were located in areas where water is scarce, and 55% were in areas experiencing drought, the report by the Ceres investor network found.

Fracking those wells used 97 billion gallons of water, raising new concerns about unforeseen costs of America's energy rush.

There was nothing "unforeseen" about this. The West has always experienced periodic droughts, some of them quite severe. Perhaps the geniuses who govern us didn't foresee that we would experience the worst drought in 500 years, but we elect them to take worst-case scenarios into account when formulating public policy. But as usual, they failed to anticipate the magnitude of the problem, and proposed inadequate solutions to deal with it. In that, at least they are consistent.

---Baron V

The Tipping Point is Now

Hey, I have no idea what the President feels in his heart of hearts about climate change, fracking, the pending Keystone pipeline deal, etc. (He keeps using weasel words like "clean" coal, and "safe" nuclear, and natural gas "extracted safely", which allow him to signal his official approval of all-of-the-above energy extraction while distancing himself from its deleterious effects.) But the President is a well educated and well-informed guy, and you would think that he'd have to know that the problem of climate change is not one that can really be kicked down the road anymore. Because even if we manage to sequester nearly all remaining gas and oil in the ground forever starting tomorrow, we are looking at a 22nd Century where the only likely question that remains is whether we will have mass extinction events or whether we will have mass extinction events involving humans. This is not a hypothetical anymore.

---Baron V