BP, Halliburton Ready to Rumble
A pox on both their houses. Legal battles surrounding the Deepwater Horizon 2010 drilling disaster will be just as messy—and way lengthier—than the spill incident itself.
The latest shots in what bids to be a never-ending exercise in passing the buck and liability were fired last month when oil giant BP went to court in New Orleans claiming that the U.S. contractor Halliburton (you know – Iran, Dick Cheney? That Halliburton) botched the cement work on the doomed oil rig. Read the rest of this entry »
Putting transportation and urban planning on the same sustainable page
Is it really possible that urban planners and transportation planners aren’t very much in sync when they do their planning things?
Apparently so, although it’s a situation that’s changing, according to a new book from Jeffrey Tumlin, Sustainable Transportation Planning, published this month by John Wiley & Sons.
“Transportation must be seen as inseparable from land use planning or economic development – indeed, the best transportation plan is a good land use plan,” he says.
Early on in the book, he makes this salient and telling point: “City planners and urban designers are often in conflict with transportation professionals.” Of course his statement is true if reversed, but he adds that for a long time “transportation professionals may have barely noticed the planners.” Read the rest of this entry »
EPA mercury regs end 2011 on a high note
It took a while—20 years!—but the EPA’s historic decision to regulate mercury emissions are cause for a major celebration and at least a dollop of optimism that the U.S. is on the right environmental path heading into the new year. That is if the Republicans don’t mess it all up by winning the White House in November. (Writing that just sent a major chill up my spine.)
Not long ago I wrote about how a few miniscule drops of mercury can contaminate a 20-acre lake and the fish that happen to reside there, thanks to coal-fired plant emissions. That’s a major reason why the EPA’s decision to regulate the emissions of mercury, lead and other toxic pollutants from coal- and oil-fired plants is a major victory for the health and environmental welfare of the nation. And for jobs.
Please ignore the scare tactics from Big Coal and right-wing wackos about blackouts, job losses and energy security risks as a result of the rules. That’s their big lie and they are sticking to it no matter what.
“Congress ordered the EPA to regulate toxic air pollution more than 20 years ago when it passed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior climate economist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The EPA has been regulating most industries up until now, except for the biggest polluters—coal and oil-fired power plants. The public health benefits far outweigh the costs. And contrary to the doomsday predictions of industry and their allies in Congress, the lights will stay on.” Read the rest of this entry »
OWS: A sustainable progressive movement?
I believe it is. Police can break up the various “Occupy” camps across the country, but they can’t break the movement. As disorganized, disparate and disheveled as some would like to believe Occupy Wall Street and its regional allies are, the barn door is open and the horse is romping freely in the field.
This could well be the early stages of a new progressive movement, according to Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The Occupy gatherings “are most likely the start of a new era in America,” he wrote in a recent New York Times article.
“Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings,” he continued. “We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.”
The roots of today’s crises of vast income and wealth inequality, corporate dominance and feckless, inept elected leaders lie with the direction that Reagan took the nation – making government the problem, slashing taxes for the rich along with outlays on public services and infrastructure investment, and sweeping deregulation.
“Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis,” Sachs says. “He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.”
And yet Washington “still channels Reaganomics… Both parties have joined in crippling the government in response to the demands of their wealthy campaign contributors, who above all else insist on keeping low tax rates on capital gains, top incomes, estates and corporate profits. Corporate taxes as a share of national income are at the lowest levels in recent history. Rich households take home the greatest share of income since the Great Depression.”
The American people are waking up and the OWS movement wants to challenge and change the channel of inequality.
“Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making,” Sachs writes. “This one should aim for three things. The first is a revival of crucial public services, especially education, training, public investment and environmental protection. The second is the end of a climate of impunity that encouraged nearly every Wall Street firm to commit financial fraud. The third is to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington.”
Sachs says the people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have put the nation on a path to renewal.
While it’s hard to think in absolute terms about something so new, something without central leadership or a written platform, the need to reverse obvious flaws has touched a chord.
Perhaps, as Sachs says, a new generation of leaders who are not on the corporate take is just getting started. Perhaps it is history in the making and the dawn of a new progressive era. Perhaps it needs to be the crowd-sourcing movement it is and not a party or corporation or organization that’s easily corrupted and dominated by the wealthiest few. Perhaps the pendulum—as pendulums do—is swinging back.
Yeah, that’s a lot of perhaps – but one thing is certain – the OWS idea. A tent can be taken down and people can be dispersed with pepper spray. Not an idea.
Coal export plans a dirty business for the PNW
Hey kids! Here’s an idea: Let’s inundate the global market with our cheap dirty coal! We won’t be burning and polluting the atmosphere here in the U.S., merely transporting the coal on 1.5-mile long trains through densely populated areas of the Pacific Northwest, where it will be exported to foreign markets. We’ll boost our exports, help our balance of trade and create jobs!
That’s the gist of the coal industry’s argument for proposals to export tens of millions of tons of coal through the Pacific Northwest to China and other Asian nations.
But major organizations including the Sierra Club, the Sierra Student Coalition, Climate Solutions and Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility are gearing up to derail the coal train idea. Read the rest of this entry »
No Doublespeak in Nukespeak
In The Stand, one of Stephen King’s early (and imo best) novels a nuclear power plant becomes a central part of the action, and indeed is instrumental in keeping the world from descending into barbarism.
It sort of makes the point that, as The Police say, “When the world is running down/You make the best of what’s still around.” There is something to be said for the role of nuclear power as part of the modern-day, post-carbon-based fuel energy mix.
But a revised and updated version of the Sierra’s Club‘s classic Nukespeak throws some needed clear thinking about the inherent dangers of nuclear energy and concludes, as the first edition did, that it’s not really worth the risk.
Nearly 30 years ago, in the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the first edition of Nukespeak from Sierra Club Books was published and immediately framed public debate on the immense risks of nuclear technology.
The extensively revised and updated edition promises to continue that debate, especially in the aftermath of the March earthquake and tsunami that struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan.
According to the Club, the original 1982 edition broke through the “linguistic filter of the nuclear mindset,” by documenting how nuclear developers confused their hopes—remember the dream of energy too cheap to meter?—with reality, covered up damaging information, harassed and dismissed scientists who disagreed with official policy, and generated false or misleading statistics to bolster their assertions about the benefits and safety of nuclear power. Read the rest of this entry »
Maritime Industry Goes Sustainable
Shipping lines, shipbuilders, banks, insurers and shippers are joining forces on a major sustainability initiative that’s “designed to help the industry make long-term plans for future success.”
They call it the Sustainable Shipping Initiative/Vision 2040. They even assert that “radical changes” are needed to make the global shipping industry more energy efficient, environmentally-friendly and sustainable for the long haul.
The initiative unites maritime-related companies from across the industry with the NGO’s Forum for the Future and WWF, including:
- Ship owners, charterers and operators: BP Shipping, Bunge, Cargill, Carnival Corporation, China Navigation Company, Gearbulk, Maersk Line, Rio Tinto Marine and Tsakos Energy Navigation.
- Shipbuilders, engineers and service providers: Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering; Wärtsilä.
- Banks and insurers: ABN Amro, RSA.
- Classification society (which set technical standards): Lloyd’s Register
- Representing shipping customers: Unilever Read the rest of this entry »
Staxxon: Folding the box inside the box
Containerization revolutionized the maritime freight transportation industry more than 50 years ago; those ubiquitous 20- and 40-foot steel intermodal boxes seen in ports and on truck and rail chassis have made cargo handling faster, easier, safer and more efficient.
The next revolutionary phase of containerization might well reside in the vertical folding container from Staxxon Technologies, a clever solution to the old trade imbalance problem of moving and repositioning empty containers from where the freight isn’t to where the freight is. Read the rest of this entry »
Groups use energy security scare tactic in opposing EPA
Talk about turning logic on its head: Four right-wing, anti-big government groups contend the EPA is “abusing” air-quality laws because the agency’s MACT (maximum achievable control technology) utility rules will force coal-fired electrical plants to shut down, thus jeopardizing the security and reliability of the U.S. power supply.
A recent petition by the Institute for Liberty, Americans for Prosperity, Center for Rule of Law, and the Freedom Through Justice Foundation is asking EPA to “look at the facts on electric reliability and its Utility MACT rule, which the agency is rushing to finalize in November.”
The coalition’s petition contends the EPA is rushing to judgment and questions the EPA’s assumptions on electric reliability. “EPA has never taken reliability seriously,” it says. “The message of this petition is simple: slow down, do the job right, and do not put reliable electric service at risk.” Read the rest of this entry »
Blog Action Day: A few drops of mercury can spoil your lunch
A few measly drops of mercury can contaminate a twenty-acre lake and the fish that happen to reside there, and you can thank coal-fired plants for that largesse.
A Sierra Club article by Dashka Slater, “This Much Mercury… How the coal industry poisoned your tuna sandwich,” explains a situation in which people who think they are eating healthy are in fact poisoning themselves.
It’s a lengthy, compelling and well-researched article, well worth a read on Blog Action Day.
