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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Contrails or chemtrails — if you ever look up at the sky on a bright and otherwise non-cloudy day, you might see the criss-crossing of jet contrails.  Sometimes they form patterns that seem so obviously designed they enter the category of “chemtrails”. That means, to people who study these things, that they were put there for a purpose.  The purpose varies, depending on the people or group who are studying them.  One (reported) purpose is to fight global warming, and another purpose could be for “population control” (whatever that means) and another purpose to these that I have read about it claims the government is trying to poison us or alter our behavior with chemicals.  To what end?  I tend to not believe conspiracy theories that have the government always trying to kill us.  (If they are trying to kill us, they are doing a terrible job of it.)  I just don’t believe the more nefarious reasons for chemtrails.  Whoever is spraying these chemicals into the air, if they are actually for a purpose, probably do not have a deadly purpose in mind but may be trying to alleviate global warming a little bit.  If they are not doing that, maybe they are spraying for insects, or maybe they are seeding clouds for it to rain.  There could be a hundred reasons to see emissions in the sky.  The mess in the skies and the clouds being created by this is referred to by many people as “global dimming”, and it’s true that it adds to that, but so does any regular smog or pollution.

Whether chemtrails are done on purpose is another thing that is being debated. I have seen variations of them myself and I think they are usually just plane’s and jet’s contrails that show up more on some days when the atmospheric conditions are just right than on other days. But they are definitely altering the sky’s composition.

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Another coal plant ash spill happened on the morning of March 8th: 4,000 gallons of coal ash spilled out of a hole in a pipe carrying it to an ash pond, according to initial reports, into the Potomac River. Coal ash is a dirty sludge mess of toxic chemicals, some of it possibly cancer-causing, and some of this ash went into the Potomac River, which could make its way down to the Washington D.C. area. What a message that would send to the White House. This is the third coal ash spill in only a few months. Did these used to happen before the media didn’t report them?

This spill happened from a coal plant that was dedicated to the New Page paper mill in Maryland. This company has three pipelines that go out from its power plant carrying coal plant waste. These pipes go over the Potomic River and dump the sludge into an ash pond. This is what the industry calls “clean coal”.

The reference to clean coal is an industry fantasy: they have put scrubbers on some plants that get the sulfer out of the emissions, but that’s about it. The CO2 is still being pumped out with no way to capture it, and the toxins and mercury still remain in the byproducts of burning coal for energy. In other words, coal plants are death factories, and they should all be shut down for good. (”Death factories ” is the terminology of climate scientist James Hansen).

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi is confused. She sent out a letter today claiming that natural gas is a “clean fuel”.

Washington, D.C.— Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent the following letter today to the Acting Architect of the Capitol, Stephen T. Ayers, asking that the Capitol Power Plant (CPP) use 100 percent natural gas for its operations.

The leaders wrote: “The switch to natural gas will allow the CPP to dramatically reduce carbon and criteria pollutant emissions, eliminating more than 95 percent of sulfur oxides and at least 50 percent of carbon monoxide…We strongly encourage you to move forward aggressively with us on a comprehensive set of policies for the entire Capitol complex and the entire Legislative Branch to quickly reduce emissions and petroleum consumption through energy efficiency, renewable energy, and clean alternative fuels.”

Pelosi and Reid are giving us the mistaken impression that natural gas is a “clean alternative fuel”. That’s clearly deceptive. Natural gas is a fossil fuel that emits CO2, the main greenhouse gas. She also wrote:

“The conversion will also reduce the cost of storing and transporting coal as well as the costs associated with cleaning up the fly ash and waste. Eliminating coal from the fuel mixture should also assist the City of Washington, D.C., in meeting and complying with national air quality standards, and demonstrate that Congress can be a good and conscientious neighbor by mitigating health concerns for residents and workers around Capitol Hill.”

I’m having a flashback to the campaign — the John McCain campaign. Sarah Palin often mentioned natural gas, since Alaska is in the business of selling it. In one speech, Sarah Palin even called Natural Gas “clean and green”. My message to all politicians: Natural Gas is a fossil fuel. It is burned, and when it is used, it emits C02, methane, nitrous oxide, and other things like radon and mercury. Surely Nancy Pelosi can’t seriously call any fossil fuel “clean alternative” energy. What is she thinking? If she really wanted to use clean alternative energy she would advise the use of solar panels or wind power. But she is calling for 100% natural gas. The letter says,

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