Citizen Power

Not long ago, autism was suspected by lots of people to be caused by mercury in vaccines, or by the preservative thimerosal which contained mercury.  Thimerosal has been removed since then from nearly all (but not all) vaccines. In February, a federal court ruled that there is no obvious cause and effect between mercury in vaccines and autism.  When I heard about the court ruling, my first though was, well then how about mercury in the environment?  There is a lot of mercury in the environment, which people don’t always realize.  In fact, I live in Minnesota, and some lakes in Minnesota’s famous “10,000 lakes” have been determined to be unsafe to take fish from due to high levels of mercury.  Also, our public health department puts out warnings about eating even small fish from these lakes due to concentrations of mercury in the fish themselves.  So my thought was that possibly kids with autism are getting it from something in the environment, and there is plenty of toxic stuff, including mercury, in our environment.

Where does a lot of mercury in our environment come from?  Coal burning  plants.  Coal plants emit about 50 tons of toxic mercury into the air each year.   There are a few very large coal plants in or near my state, which could possibly explain the high levels of mercury in our environment and the high levels of autism here too.  And according to the U.S. EPA,  “Coal-fired power plants are the largest single man-made source of mercury pollution in the U.S.”    And autism rates are now 8 time higher in my state than they were in the 1980s.  Doesn’t that tell us something?

We are poisoning ourselves in more than one way with this cheap, big power source.  Is it worth it?  Not when the EPA has to even warn us about eating too much tuna fish because of mercury, and not when it might be leading to growing numbers of cases of autism.   This hasn’t been proven yet,  but environmental causes of autism have  been suspected for years.

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This isn’t about piracy, although pirates seem to be a huge problem lately.   This is about ocean acidification, a much bigger problem than most people realize.   For one thing, the growing ocean acidification might end a lot of the life in the ocean, especially that associated with coral reefs and with shells, and that would lead to massive food shortages around the world.  Hundreds of millions of people depend on the ocean as a major food source.  Why is the ocean becoming more acidic, and what is the problem?

This information is from a recent radio interview with Dr. Richard A. Feely, an Oceanographer at the NOAA Pacific Marine Laboratory in Seattle, and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. His main area of focus is carbon cycles in the ocean, and this very problem.

At a 3-day summit in Copenhagen last month, European scientists warned that we’re creating ocean conditions not seen since dinosaurs walked on the earth, 65 million years ago.   Human beings have recreated these hostile conditions in about 200+ years by burning fossil fuels and with harmful agriculture practices,  and as a result, carbon emissions continue to rise and affect the oceans.

Ocean acidification isn’t complicated.  As we burn coal and oil and natural gas and gasoline for fuel and energy, all that CO2 is released into the atmosphere.  Over about the past 250 years, we have released about 540 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.  About a third of that has been absorbed by the oceans. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a gas that immediately reacts with sea water, and it forms a weak acid called carbonic acid .   This carbonic acid quickly dissociates and releases a hydrodyne, which gives the ocean its acidity. This increase in carbonic acid over time has increased the acidity in the last 200 years of about 30%.  With the projections of the use of fossil fuels in the future, we could see increases in acidity by 150% by the end of this century. This is what has scientists hugely concerned.

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Ken Salazar was a one-term senator from Colorado when he was nominated to be the  Interior Secretary by President Obama.  I remember at the time there was a lot of trepidation from people on the left that he wouldn’t be “progressive” enough as the new secretary.   It doesn’t make any difference to me whether he’s a “conservative” Democrat or not as long as he does a good job protecting the environment.

The Interior Department secretary is a very important job for the environment — it oversees energy resources, natural resources, drilling for fossil fuels on public lands, and oversees the country’s parks and wilderness areas.   Salazar has turned out to be very good so far, protecting a lot of wilderness in many states and showing he cares very much for the environment, as someone in this position should.  There is a good article in Rolling Stone about the accomplishments and viewpoints of Salazar so far that is definitely worth reading.  He’s not afraid to stand up to the big energy companies either, something that was completely lacking during the Bush administration.

Shortly after taking the job, Salazar canceled  77 oil and gas leases Bush authorized near Utah’s national parks, including ones that would have put oil wells in eyesight of major landmarks in the parks.  Can you imagine going to a national park and seeing oil wells nearby?  I would much rather see windmills in the distance, if anything.  Salazar also delayed the rush into offshore drilling and he said a big “NO”  to Bush’s plan for oil-shale mining in the Rocky Mountains.  Salazar’s already proven himself to be worthy of the job of Interior Secretary.

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The economy is bad everywhere. Where I live, unemployment is now about 10%.  Early last week one day when it had snowed a lot,  I was out in the backyard with my new puppy. While I was watching her, a man in his 30s walked through the alley with a shovel.  He paused when he saw me, seemed to hesitate, and then asked, “Do you need anything shoveled?”  At first I thought, “what a nice person”, even though I told him “No thanks”. Then I realized he was asking me for a job.  He was probably unemployed, and looking for a few dollars here and there shoveling snow for people in my neighborhood.  Then I felt sorry for him, but he probably wasn’t the only man trying to use the snow to get some work that day.

This recession is driving people to make money from jobs kids used to have. How many older people do you see stocking shelves at local stores, or delivering newspapers these days?  It’s really kind of depressing because you know that isn’t the type of work they were doing a year ago.  It’s hard to believe the economy will get even worse, but that’s what we hear is coming.  If it does get worse, I really fear for people, and what might happen to them.

Even so, there is optimism that the green energy and jobs revolution we were hoping for will still happen.  In fact, it could really help the situation!  Even the Wall Street Journal   has noticed that green jobs could help the economy.   I’ve noticed a few articles about environmental issues lately from their website.  And like the mayor of San Jose just said, “We’ve got to create not just green jobs but green careers.”  We need long-term green jobs to really help the economy and people, not just jobs that start now and end in a few months.  You can read a WSJ story on green jobs here.

I agree that a jobs and energy revolution should include long-term plans for a real green revolution, not just create busy jobs like repairing roads and building bridges.  That won’t even help global warming,  because it might even encourage more car traffic, and right now that’s not a good idea.  Let’s not get too carried away with transportation-related work and instead focus more on planning for what U.S. transportation should look like in 50 years.

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This is about where not  to get energy.   Look at this photo — it was once beautiful green mountains.  Appalachia mountaintop explosions still happen, caused by coal mining by large coal companies .  Huge amounts of TNT are used to blow the tops off the mountains in a few southeastern states.    Boulders and dirt roll down the rolling green mountains of Tennessee and West Virginia, and North Carolina.  This type of coal mining literally removes the tops of mountains. The results are moonscapes — miles and miles of vegetation free, flattened hills where mountains once graced the landscape.   These beautiful natural landscapes  are now literally ruined forever because of coal mining, and the irresponsibility of coal mining companies.

This is environmental devastation in so many ways.  The toxic runoff from the procedure kills wildlife and poisons drinking water.  This is nothing less than a crime.  Why do people allow this to happen?  I Love Mountains is one  activist group and website trying to change these practices.  I like promoting their site because it’s a good portal to more information on this terribly damaging coal mining in an area of the U.S. that not too many people know about.  The coal plant nearest to me, in South Dakota, uses coal from this area of the U.S.

Last Christmas millions of tons of coal fly ash from a holding pond in Tennessee broke through its levees and devastated the area around the holding pond for miles and miles. This created a disaster the scope of which is still being discovered.  The sheer volume of this coal slurry itself was 48 times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of about 20 years ago.   At least two rivers, and the groundwater, were contaminated with many different pollutants,  including radioactivity,  and arsenic and barium.   This spill was a major catastrophe, and yet when is the last time you heard the mainstream media in the U.S. write about this spill in terms of catastrophe, or in any way at all?  It’s not yet been cleaned up. Not even close.   When is the last time you heard the mainstream media talk about coal waste as radioactive, or about mountain top removal, or about how damaging coal mining is?  Oil shale mining is nearly as bad.

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Let’s get back to the basics, and look at the differences between fossil fuels, clean fuels, renewable energy, and alternative energy.

There are many types of real renewable energy.  Renewable energy means it comes from a source that renews, and will not run out — a natural source that is more or less infinite and free,  like energy from the sun and the wind and water.  Non-renewable energy comes from oil and gas and coal, and because they are running out, they are finite.  Makes sense, right?  We might have less than 50 years worth of coal left.  It’s finite.  So is oil and gas. We might have reached the other side of “peak oil” already and as demand is increasing due to the short-sightedness of car makers and humans in general, oil, gas, and coal will probably all run out in a few decades as use increases. That’s just a fact.   These things will run out during the lifetimes of many people alive right now.  And then what?  We might as well start to use real renewable energy now and save what oil is left for plastics and other things future generations will need it for. Oil is used in hundreds of products, not just for energy.

It may surprise some people that renewable energy does not mean “natural gas” as the current misinformation from some politicians (Nancy Pelosi) and oil men billionaires (T. Boone Pickens) would have you believe.  Even more astounding, the new GOP budget contains much talk of renewable energy as being offshore oil drilling!  It’s on page 11 if you care to download that ridiculous document from the GOP website**.  (See quote below.)

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Now that April fool’s day is almost over, I can assume that no one will be fooled by the above picture, which appeared on the Whole Foods website.  Yes, it was a joke, but I bet someone would buy it if it wasn’t!   Too bad the site will remove the silly stories tomorrow, because they were pretty funny.  Including stories like “When milk goes bad: 12 daring recipes“.  While I was enjoying the funny stuff on their site I was listening to a radio show (the Jeff Farias show, which isn’t exactly on the radio) that  mentioned sour gas.   I wasn’t familiar with this so I had to look it up and I was disgusted.  Sour gas isn’t something your grandmother produces after a large meal.  Sour gas is not a joke!    It’s a deadly, toxic gas that can kill people.  And yeah, it’s related to the drilling of natural gas, the very fossil fuel that T. Boone Pickens and his “army” of tens of thousands are pushing on you and me and the rest of the world.  They want us to drive around with this in our gas tanks, or at least fill the gas tanks of large trucks with it.  Why?  So T. Boone Pickens can make a lot of money, that’s why.  Unfortunately, natural gas isn’t going to help us with climate change or our energy problems in the long run.

A sour gas well produces deadly hydrogen sulfide during the process of drilling for natural gas. This is perfectly fine with many natural gas energy companies.  They have no problem sickening people with this deadly gas.  “Sour gas” by the way is the actual term for this gas and yes, it stinks, as its name implies..   Here is the wikipedia explanation of what sour gas is, exactly.

And it is making people sick.  One family in Texas especially has a problem and has become sick from sour gas drillling,  because they don’t own the mineral rights to their 100 acres of land. So there are 4 natural gas “sour gas” wells on their property.  I can’t imagine how angry I’d be if some energy company put 4 wells on my property and their drilling was making my family sick on top of that.  Hydrogen sulfide, or H2S, is supposedly burned off during the process of drilling for natural gas, but in this case, in January,  the hydrogen sulfide leak lasted 13 days.  The legal limit is 10 days. So if you live in Texas and some big corporation wants to drill for natural gas on your property, they can sicken your family with deadly hydrogen sulfide, legally, for 10 whole days. 

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The writer of this blog (me) is certainly not at the G20, (which is starting next week) but plenty of protesters are out there trying to bring awareness of global economic insecurity and climate change to the world.    Thousands are marching for jobs, and justice, and environmental awareness and action.  People don’t often think of economics and climate change as being related, but they very much are. Everything is ultimately related to our climate, the atmosphere, and the weather, as that all affects food supply and jobs and the economy.    As global warming progresses there will be more droughts,  more severe storms, and more severe weather in general. This will lead to more food shortages, more displaced people, more refugees, more homelessness, more unemployment, more social unrest, and more division of the poor from the wealthy.  It may also lead to more wars for resources, disguised as “liberating” people.

I’m a big fan of street protests even though most of them are ignored by the media. But when the G8 meets or the G20 or any group of the wealthy who determine the fate of the poor meets, protesters will be there.  For many protesters it’s just about having a voice and having a say in their fate and futures.  Protesting has always been the ultimate free speech, the empowerment of the average citizen.   In London alone it is estimated that 35,000 people will turn out to protest the G20 economic summit.  The photo above is of the actual protest in London and is from The Guardian.

What are they protesting? Lack of jobs, lack of control, lack of power — what people always protest.  In this case, they are also trying to bring awareness to the need to remake the way the world does things, really and truly fix the economic crisis, and seriously deal with our climate crisis.

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If you think about it seriously you can often find a connection between unusual weather events and climate change.  That’s true of flooding this year already.  President Obama has declared a State of Emergency in Fargo, ND.   The Red River in the area is expected to crest at 43 feet this weekend, which will be a disaster for homes and businesses on this flood plain.  Right now, the flood waters are at over 40-1/2 feet .  Volunteers from across the Midwest are fighting against time to fill sandbags and implement flood relief measures.   Obama recently suggested that the flooding currently happening in Fargo is connected to climate change and that this flood should help raise everyone’s awareness of it.  He may be right.  Flooding to this degree, and it seems to get worse every year, is not how things have always been  in Fargo.

This page from North Dakota State University shows past flood photos.  It seems there have been Red River floods in the past but not as frequently as now (which is almost every year).  There were big floods in 1969, 1975, 1984, 1989, 1995, 1997, and then in 2001, 2006, and 2009.  Some of the flooding is being blamed on blizzards this year.  When I lived in Moorhead there were blizzards every year, but no major floods. In fact, the photo here is of Moorhead, only a couple of days ago.

But the floods in Fargo are probably doing a lot more in the U.S. to raise awareness of winter and bad weather, because no scientists are really coming out in the media to show cause and effect of rapid melting in the spring, or what might be causing this flooding.  I have noticed rapid melting gradually in the last 5-6 years, because I live in central Minnesota.  For the last 3 springs my unattached garage and much of my backyard has flooded.  My garage in particular has filled with more than an inch of water from melting snow.  This started happening a few years ago, no matter how much snow we have had.

Spring use to come gradually to Minnesota, but now it comes suddenly.  One week it’s below freezing, the next we have a string of days in the 40s and 50s.  This may be  caused by solar flares, (according to my crazy Congresswoman ) but I really doubt it.  (That last comment was sarcasm, in case you missed it).

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On Monday, March 23, President Obama spoke specifically about clean energy, and described plans to spend about $59 billion in economic stimulus funds and $150 billion from the federal budget to promote a  clean energy future.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, (aka the stimulus bill) officially includes $39 billion the Energy Department and $20 billion in tax incentives for clean energy.  Even so, Obama didn’t say a lot that we haven’t heard before.  In fact, he mentioned cap and trade and energy again on Tuesday night during his press conference.  He’s a big fan of cap and trade (I’m not). I think we need to take more drastic action.

But the most interesting part of the speech were the remarks made by MIT President, Susan Hockfield, said before the President spoke.  She described our current energy problems as:  rapidly increasing energy demand, energy security, and solving the climate change crisis.  Hockfield called clean energy an historic investment, and said the stimulus bill makes a major investment in energy stimulus,  including 6.5 billion for R&D, which to her was the most important part, being the president of a major and prestigious university known for its research.

She called the stimulus bill the largest and most important investment in technology since Sputnik inspired the launch of the Apollo program.

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The billionaire Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens likes to claim that his natural gas scheme will get us off our dependency on “foreign” oil and make us safer.  He’s wrong about a lot of things, but he’s especially wrong about natural gas. He’s usually talking about liquified natural gas to run big semi-trucks when he discusses natural gas.  Liquified natural gas, or LNG, is natural gas that has been cooled down to minus 260 degrees F, which condenses it into liquid, and then it can be shipped and stored in refrigerated tanks.  It takes a lot of energy to convert LNG to it’s liquid form and then more energy to transport it in a cooled state so that it stays liquid, and in its liquid form it’s basically nearly entirely methane.  And despite the insinuations of Pickens, no natural gas is a renewable, and it’s also not an alternative fuel in the usually understood sense.  It’s a polluting fossil fuel that will run out someday, but for now, there is a huge boom in natural gas as more and more people use it for heating their homes.  Expanding the use of it to burn in big trucks is an especially bad idea.

Besides the fossil fuel part of natural gas, we have to consider whether or not it’s safe, and this takes us back to the foreign oil and terrorism connection.  Many countries that allow us to buy their oil and gas are currently not countries that the US has made a point of becoming equal partners or friends with.  The US has, in its recent history, even started wars for fake reasons, for the purpose of taking whatever fossil fuel resources a country has,  or for controlling its pipeline accesses, etc.   Obviously, starting wars does not make friends, and it has definitely decreased our “safety” where these countries are concerned.

Now it’s being pointed out that the natural gas is also a potential safety concern. LNG is usually safe to transport, and stable, but since it’s 90% methane, it’s highly combustible, which is another way of saying “explosive”.  There have been explosions involving LNG; though so far, not very many.

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The tiny Tata car is admittedly cute and compact, and I wish I could have one myself — but only if it were electric.  And why couldn’t it be — it’s small enough and looks lightweight enough to go pretty far on existing battery technology.   Unfortunately, the new small car from the Indian automaker that’s on the market right now is futuristic looking but still runs on gasoline, getting about  54 mpg (very respectable for an old fossil-fuel burning engine) So, it’s a throwback to all the other combustion engines out there.  Overall, I’d say Tata Motors is doing pretty good with emissions compared to other car makers though, especially American ones.  And it’s not a bad car, as cars go.   It’s actually got some room in it.   Tata Motors is also doing well with sales already, as India’s largest automobile company with revenues of US $ 7.2 billion in 2006-2007.

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