In Defense of Private Drones

Wonkblog's Timothy Lee has an interesting piece up on the use of commercial drones and states' efforts to come to grips with them. In case you're not familiar with them, these aren't the rather big pilotless aircraft used so controversially by the military. Instead, these are small aircraft like the remote-controlled model planes we're all familiar with -- except they don't look like models of anything. They're generally helicopter-like, with several rotors for increased stability. And, despite the darker associations the word "drone" carries with it, they're extremely useful.

...Because drones are cheap, light and don’t require a pilot, they can be put in the air for a fraction of the cost of a traditional airplane. That has created new opportunities for everyone from real estate firms to oil and gas companies to PETA  – anyone, in fact, who might have use for an eye-in-the-sky, but doesn’t have the money to hire a pilot and a plane. But the dawning era of cheap, private surveillance is leading a lot of states to ask how these private drones should be regulated.

Animal rights groups, for example, have announced plans to use drones to monitor farms for cruelty to animals. Some farmers are upset about the potential invasion of their privacy. So earlier this year, the Idaho legislature passed a drone privacy bill that specifically requires a farmer or rancher’s permission before a “farm, dairy, ranch or other agricultural industry” can be monitored with an unmanned aerial vehicle.

Does such a prohibition violate the First Amendment rights of animal rights advocates? There’s a good chance the answer is “yes,” but the courts have yet to consider the question.

The most obvious use of a private drone is aerial photography. At least, it's obvious to me. And this sort of thing actually isn't all that new. People use kites for the same purpose -- and have for almost as long as photography has existed.

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Overlooked Earth Day

Given the awful week we just went through, it might be easy to overlook Earth Day. After all, terrorist bombings and exploding fertilizer plants and a congress more interested in saving gun manufacturers' profits than in saving American lives aren't problems to be solved by reducing carbon emissions. But the truth is that we need to remember Earth Day now more than ever. If we don't have a survivable environment, none of these other problems will matter. Earth Day comes at a perfect time -- just when we start to lose sight of the importance of the environment, we're reminded that all other problems are of secondary importance.

Fortunately, we're able to walk and chew gum at the same time -- i.e., we don't have to solve problems one at a time, in order of importance. We can deal with terrorism and corporate anarchy and gun fetishism and the environment at once. It's really not that hard. Or, at least, it shouldn't be. But our media makes it more difficult. It's not that the media can't walk and chew gum at the same time -- newspapers prove the opposite. We don't get a big log of paper devoted to one, single subject  on our doorsteps every day. But the electronic media; now there's an example of a one-track mind. The explosion in West, Texas proves that. In any normal circumstance, it would be the story of the year -- but it was unfortunately overshadowed by another tragedy.

Now, I want you to consider how TV coverage of the Boston bomb attacks went. Think back. When you tuned into your favorite cable news network, you spent one helluva lot of time watching talking heads say nothing. They'd learn something new, take the few minutes it took to report that, then yack and yack and yack about nothing. In fact, if you remember correctly, you'll remember that TV media mostly talked about their own coverage; "We're hearing a lot of conflicting reports, so we'll keep you up-to-date when things get clearer." It's an oddity that cable news won't cut away from a story -- even when they have nothing to say -- but the purpose of that is to keep eyes on screens. If you turn on CNN to get news about The Big Story and they're talking about something else, you're switching over to MSNBC. Ratings bias kicks in and we all wind up watching big piles of nothing.

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Fracking: Bad for You, Good for China

The Marcellus shale formation is a huge deposit of rock that formed from the floor of a prehistoric sea. And it's massive. Taking up a large chunk of (mostly) the northeastern United States, it stretches from Alabama to New York, laying under vast swaths of many of the states in between:



Like any ocean, the ocean that formed the Marcellus was heavily populated by lifeforms, and this means that the lifeforms left behind organic chemicals -- which means fossil fuels. In this case, natural gas.

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Nuclear Plants Run on Tax Dollars

Yesterday, I wrote that any new nuclear plants in the US would likely be shoddy. "Take an industry that needs government assistance to survive, add government spending cuts, mix in a whole bunch of deregulation, and you've got a half-assed nuclear facility," I wrote. "This is the way we do things in the new Republican reality -- half-assed, all the way, every time."

We have a Republican party fixated on spending cuts -- to the point where they want to cut funding for tsunami preparedness and have mocked volcano monitoring as an absurd waste of money. They've got deregulation fever, meaning a hands-off approach to industry. And it'd be tough to find one who gave a crap about the environment. So a half-assed nuclear industry it would be, if Republicans had their way.

Over at ThinkProgress, Jeff Spross posts a video demonstrating the GOP's rhetoric on nuclear safety prior to the events in Japan. Not only is it enlightening, but it backs up my argument -- that, for Republicans, "half-assed" and "adequate" are synonymous.



McCain comes out the worst here. In a debate, he dismisses concerns about nuclear safety as an "extreme environmentalist" position. At a campaign event, he portrays it as gibberish, summing up safety concerns as "blah, blah, blah." Like it or not, Republicans are always going to be in American politics and Republicans are sometimes going to be in power. The very existence of the GOP in America is reason enough to believe that safe nuclear power is completely impossible here.

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Major Insurer Sounds Global Warming Alert

There are a lot of industries that would be adversely affected by global warming -- agriculture, fishing, real estate development, tourism, and timber all come immediately to mind. Shifting weather patterns means greater uncertainty for industries that rely on weather and a rising sea level means the redrawing of maps. As the world changes, the ancient evolutionary law kicks in -- adapt or die. Many of these industries may be able to adapt, but behind them all stands a second industry; the insurance industry.

As we all know from the dragged out healthcare debate, insurance isn't about avoiding risk, so much as it is shared risk. It's simple math -- bad things happen, but they don't happen to everyone. If only X in ten people suffer a heart attack in their lives, for example, those who don't have heart attacks pay into a fund that helps pay for the victim's treatment. It's like a bet -- you bet you'll have a heart attack, even though the odds are against it. And, because the insurer is willing to give you odds, the money is worth it, since the payout is the only way you'd be able to afford the consequences of winning the bet.

This is also the reason why you can't buy insurance for some eventualities. You can't insure your car against rust or the paint on your house against peeling. These are things that happen to almost everyone and are practically unavoidable. You can insure against death, but the bet there is that you'll die earlier than most people, before you've paid in the amount that the insurer pays out, not that you'll die eventually. The concept of insurance is, at its heart, mathematical and rational.

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Blizzard Knocks Out the Right's Powers of Reasoning

It's always entertaining to see the rampant stupidity that a winter storm brings out in conservatives. A big blizzard really brings out the dumb. For them, snow means there's no such thing as climate change. But it's called global warming for a reason -- it effects the entire globe. Yet a weather event over a tiny fraction of that globe means it's snowing everywhere. Or something. Seriously, I can't work up enough ignorance to get the argument to make any damned sense at all. Apparently, being a wingnut requires a special talent for idiocy that I lack.

Add in the news that scientists now believe that global warming means more snow and, perhaps, lower temperatures in the winter and the right becomes insufferable.

Robert Stacy McCain:

Global warming is a hoax, a dishonest racket. a crooked scam whose chief purpose is to provide taxpayer-funded employment for "environmental science" majors. In a truly just society, the perpetrators of this hoax would be treated like Bernie Madoff.

That's right, the fact that it snows in the winter is solid proof that global warming is a crock and that scientists should be prosecuted. Never mind that warming is predicted to raise global temperatures only by low single digits and that no climate scientist anywhere has predicted the end of snowfalls, if there isn't actually fire raining down out of the sky, the whole thing is obviously hooey.

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A Rant Directed at the Average News Consumer

NOTE: Got a bit of a project today -- a little involved, so it's going to take some time. As a result, you get a shorty today.

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You may not know it, but there's an international summit on climate change going on in Cancun right now. Somewhere along the line, saving the world has become less sexy in terms of newsworthiness than Sarah Palin's twitter feed. So you probably haven't heard about it. It's nice to have a media that focuses on what's really important.

Among the un-newsworthy news coming out of Cancun is that global warming is going to create serious problems for the world, by creating a refugee crisis such as the world has never seen.

Guardian:

Devastating changes to sea levels, rainfall, water supplies, weather systems and crop yields are increasingly likely before the end of the century, scientists will warn tomorrow.

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ExxonMobil's Ever-Shifting Strategy on Climate

I've always felt that one of the best examples of human foolishness was offered by international oil corporations. At the same time they were spending millions on a PR campaign to deny that global warming was even happening, they were drooling over all that open water that warming was creating in the oil- and gas-rich Arctic Circle. In 2007, ExxonMobil was exposed as having earlier launched a massive disinformation campaign; coincidentally the same year that McClatchy reported "the melt [had] reached record levels," as "the ice shrank to the second smallest area on record." Exxon knew this of course, because McClatchy also reported, "The arctic accounts for 13% of undiscovered oil, 30% of undiscovered natural gas, and 20% of undiscovered natural gas liquids," as the following graphic shows:



McClatchy also reported that the melt had resulted in an increase of arctic shipping serving the oil industry. It's impossible to believe that Exxon was out of that loop.

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Making Every GOP Candidate Choke on Their Tea

Toward the end of last month, I wrote that everyone was nationalizing the craziest teabagger candidates -- that is, everyone but the Democratic Party. If dems put Republicans on the spot with positions held by out-of-state nutjobs, those Republicans would be forced to either reject Tea Party orthodoxy or embrace craziness. The last thing a candidate wants to do is spend a lot of time explaining that they're not Christine O'Donnell -- for more than one reason. My argument went like this:

The only avenue left to dig Democrats out of the hole is to point out the obvious and the undeniable -- a lot of these people are crazy. And not the fun-at-a-party kind of crazy, the bad kind. Put Republicans on the spot, make them defend these lunatics or cut them loose. Are you with Rand Paul on the Civil Rights Act? Do you agree with Alaska senatorial candidate Joe Miller that federal unemployment benefits are unconstitutional? Do you agree with Sharron Angle that Social Security should be phased out and the Department of Education shut down -- or that rape can be a blessing in disguise? Give Republican candidates a choice: appeal to the teabagger base or to the rest of the electorate. It's a situation most won't benefit from. Advantage becomes predicament, since most of that GOP enthusiasm comes from the feverish base. And that's not enough in all cases.

It seemed like a no-brainer to me. And now it seems that the Democratic Party has come to the same conclusion. Run against the crazies, no matter what race you're in.

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Every GOP Senate Candidate a Flatearther

I've decided that exercise is bad for you. Every time you light a candle, it gets shorter. Every time you take a drink of water, the glass gets emptier. Every time you draw off a battery, it's useful life gets shorter. Besides, I'm not the world's biggest fan of exercise, so this works out better for me.

Of course, this requires ignoring decades of research and the established opinion of the medical community. But I don't need some fancy-pants, ivory tower elitist medical degree. Common sense tells me that the more I work out, the worse off I'll be. It's a declaration I feel totally qualified to make: stop exercising everyone, it's killing you. It's all just a big scam to sell gym memberships and Gatorade. I don't care what your doctor might tell you, I'm just relying on good old American horse sense. And isn't that always better? It's certainly easier to understand than this pie-in-the-sky science stuff.

The above is basically the argument offered by global warming deniers. Sure, there are a few actual scientists who don't believe in global warming, but the vast, vast majority accept it. And the majority of people offering opinions contrary to the scientific consensus aren't scientists. So the odds are extremely good that anyone speaking against anthropogenic global warming is basically making my "no exercise" argument -- I'm ignoring decades of research, I'm ignoring the opinions of experts, and I'm going with my gut on this one. Besides, global warming is just as inconvenient for me as Al Gore said it was, so the science must be wrong. End of story.

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Fanaticism Disguised as Skepticism

If you've got a question about religion, ask an atheist. That's the short version of the findings of a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll. Pew polled 3,400 Americans and asked questions about broad religious knowledge. Of 32 factual questions, the average atheist was able to answer 20.9. Meanwhile, the talk-about-God-all-the-damned-time people -- white evangelical protestants -- managed to get only 17.6 correct. If you want to know about religion, don't ask the religious -- they don't know crap.

This is one of those "man bites dog" stories that isn't as surprising as you'd think. Most atheists become atheist after being born into some faith tradition. Atheism isn't really a religious belief (disbelief can't logically be belief), so much as it's a conclusion. And it's a conclusion reached after investigation.

I'm not posting this to blow my own atheist horn. Rather, I'm making a point about skepticism. Atheists come to their disbelief for a reason. And we do it in spite of a culture that makes faith a virtue. It's the end of a process; we look at all the facts and come to a conclusion. You can't say that an atheist wants to believe in atheism, because most religions promise a lot better things than atheism does. "You get to be worm food!" isn't the best sales pitch in the world. Atheism is what you're left with after you've eliminated all the other possibilities.

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If Corporations are People, They're Very Stupid People

Yesterday, we had two environmental near-disasters. In a saner world, this would serve as a reminder that we're dancing on the edge of disaster every day, with global disaster certain unless we make some changes. But this is not that saner world.

The first near-disaster was an explosion on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico -- shades of Deepwater Horizon. One day before the rig -- Marine Energy's Vermillion Block 380 -- blew, one of that company's officials complained about Barack Obama's crazy deepwater drilling moratorium. "I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this administration is trying to break us," Barbara Dianne Hagood said. "The moratorium they imposed is going to be a financial disaster for the gulf coast, gulf coast employees and gulf coast residents."

After warning about financial disaster, Vermillion Block 380 flirted with environmental disaster -- which brings us back to financial disaster again. Maybe Hagood didn't notice, but the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon was really expensive. And it's going to stay expensive for a long time. But corporations are shortsighted -- practically by design. When your top-paid employees do almost nothing but obsess over quarterly returns, spans of five or ten or twenty years become almost foreign concepts. The corporate future lasts about three months.

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It's Hot and It's Just Going to Get Hotter

Around the world, people are facing record heat. The UK's Guardian newspaper reports, "Record highs have occurred in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine -- the three nations at the centre of the present eastern European heatwave which has continued for more than three weeks -- but also many African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries." In all, 17 nations globally have set records, with only one nation -- the west African nation of Guinea -- having reached a record low so far this year. In Russia, the heatwave is contributing to wildfires with the potential of becoming a nuclear disaster.

All of this follows a year that, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, tied for the second warmest on record. NASA also tells us that 2009 marked the end of the "warmest decade on record." Long story short, it's freakin' hot. And a new study by the National Wildlife Federation shows that it's not going to get any better. What we call a "heat wave" today, we'll call the normal tomorrow.

"Global warming is bringing more frequent and severe heat waves and the result will be serious for vulnerable populations," says Dr. Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist with the National Wildlife Federation. "That means air pollution in urban areas could get worse, bringing increased risk of heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks. Children, the elderly, poor, and people of color are especially vulnerable to these effects." And, of course, this trend brings with it a cyclical problem; more heat means more energy usage. As the mercury rises, thermostats are turned down. We can't be blamed for this really -- excessive heat is extremely dangerous.

"The science confirms that the frequency and duration of heat waves has increased significantly over the last 50 years. In the United States, heat waves already kill more people during a typical year than floods, tornadoes and earthquakes combined," says Peter Wilk, MD, executive director, Physicians for Social Responsibility. "Given these worsening trends, taking decisive action to stop global warming becomes a medical necessity."

In short, we're in the middle of a slow-motion emergency. And this is what it looks like:


Click for full-size graph

That's the trend for arctic sea ice volume from July 1979 to July 2010. As you can see, it's dropping and most recently that drop has become drastic. The world is losing ice because it's getting warmer and warmer and warmer. At this point, the global warmer deniers are operating on pure faith -- the evidence contradicts their wingnut religion.

But hey, look on the bright side. Pretty soon you'll be able to bake a cake by locking a bowl of batter in your car. So that's something. It's not all bad news.

Here's a crazy idea: let's actually do something about this. Do you have any idea what tackling CO2 emissions could do -- especially now? We're talking about new markets and industries. We're talking about bringing manufacturing back to the United States. We're talking about moving from an unsustainable economy where everyone is a paper-shuffler and becoming a nation that actually produces something again. We're talking about the production of actual, real-world, tangible gears and wires and turbines and solar cells, not fancy -- but stupid -- ways to resell our own personal debt to each other.

We need to change our economy and bring back jobs. At the same time, we need to avoid a future where global temperatures are uniformly dangerous. We can kill two birds with one stone. Economically and environmentally, we can't afford not to.

Which begs the question; why aren't we?

-Wisco


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EPA Declares Global Warming Debate Over

One thing that global warming deniers really hate is being told that the debate is over. Of course, that's because the "debate" is just a stall -- at this point, they add nothing to the science and only try to find fault with the consensus. Like creationists, they only attack the science, while offering no evidence of their own. If you want proof the debate is over, then consider that even the deniers have stopped debating. But it's one thing to recognize that the debate is over and another to stop it. The Environmental Protection Agency recently took that step.

The EPA has the authority to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. And they plan to. At the end of last month, the EPA rejected petitions to reconsider the effect of carbon dioxide on the climate, saying the arguments presented were without merit. While the petitioners argued that the ginned-up "Climategate" was a good reason to back off research that showed global warming has a human cause, the EPA -- like every other scientific body that had investigated the issue -- found that the critics, not the scientists, were misrepresenting the science. The final word from the EPA; the debate is over. CO2 is a pollutant in need of regulation, the EPA is the regulatory agency to do it, and you get to shut up about it.

"Climate change is already happening, and human activity is a contributor," the agency said in a statement. "The global warming trend over the past 100 years is confirmed by three separate records of surface temperature, all of which are confirmed by satellite data. Beyond this, evidence of climate change is seen in melting ice in the Arctic, melting glaciers around the world, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, shifting precipitation patterns, and changing ecosystems and wildlife habitats." It's over, we're done here, please close the door on your way out.





Sadly, the EPA's strong response may have provided cover to allow this to happen:

Union of Concerned Scientists:

The Senate will adjourn for its August recess today without passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill -- inaction the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) called "infuriating, distressing and inexcusable."

"Too many senators put the oil and coal industries' near-term financial considerations ahead of the environment, public health, national security and economic future of the nation," said Kevin Knobloch, president of UCS. "It's distressing that the oil and coal lobbies, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and conservative news media apparently have an iron grip on our elected officials."

[...]

If the Senate fails to act -- as is expected -- it is paramount that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proceed with its plan to limit power plant, transportation, industrial and agricultural heat-trapping emissions, Knobloch said. UCS will continue to fight efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act and prevent the EPA from setting pollution standards.

There's probably not much danger of "efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act and prevent the EPA from setting pollution standards" succeeding in the short-term. Republicans are concentrating almost solely on sabotaging economic recovery to increase their chances in November. They don't give a damn about climate change. At least, not right now. In fact, all evidence points to Republicans lying low on issues other than the economy. A lot of their candidates are way outside the mainstream on other issues, so they want to limit debate to safe territory. Get off the scripted talking points and these people have a habit of wandering off into crazy land. After November, the GOP will gear up for 2012, so most of their legislative efforts will be aimed at making the president look bad. Again, wedge issues seem to be losing their "wedginess" and the GOP will probably steer clear of anything other than making the president seem ineffective.

So we've got an EPA willing to regulate CO2 as a pollutant, we've got a Republican Party all but abandoning the warming deniers... What do we need climate legislation for?

Think Progress, 2008:

In December, EPA administration Stephen Johnson rejected "California's long-standing request for a waiver from federal law to be able to implement its own landmark regulations to slash greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles."

According to new documents released today by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Johnson, a political appointee, overruled his own staff, who in October recommended that California receive the waiver. According to the case laid out in briefing slides, EPA staff believed that legally, the agency could not deny California's waiver...

The EPA, like any other executive branch agency, is not apolitical. If the president says, "We don't want CO2 regulated," then CO2 emissions will not be regulated. And, as the Bush administration so ably demonstrated, they can go out of their way to keep states from regulating CO2 on their own. As they do with constitutional principles, Republicans like to talk a lot about the importance of state and local control in governance, but they really don't walk the walk. They like it until they don't.

We need climate legislation because repealing a law is a lot harder than Republicans would have their base believe. And because we can't count on having an administration unwilling to be stupid about climate science forever. Sooner or later, an idiot or an ideologue is going to be sitting in the Oval Office and the EPA's ability to regulate carbon dioxide isn't going to mean squat.

-Wisco


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Republicans Filibustering Our Future

Global warming is a hoax. Before you buy that line, it pays to consider which side of the aisle is making that claim. If the fact that these people come from the same side as those who believe that Barack Obama is an illegal alien, that creationism makes more sense than evolution, and that George W. Bush was a perfectly competent president doesn't convince you that they're either crazy or dishonest, then consider that many of the "climate skeptics" are formerly out-of-work tobacco lobbyists. These are not the most level-headed or trustworthy people.

But these people were the winners last week, when the Senate killed cap-and-trade legislation. Opposing the legislation was the minority position in Washington, but in the Senate, the minority rules. "We've always known from Day One that to pass comprehensive energy reform you've got to have 60 votes," said Sen. John Kerry. "As we stand here today we don't have one Republican vote."

Which makes the timing of a report by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration pretty bad. A week too late to influence the debate, the new report calls global warming "undeniable."

Reuters:

Melting glaciers, more humid air and eight other key indicators show that global warming is undeniable, scientists said on Wednesday, citing a new comprehensive review of the last decade of climate data.

Without addressing why this is happening, the researchers said there was no doubt that every decade on Earth since the 1980s has been hotter than the previous one, and that the planet has been warming for the last half-century.

This confirms the findings of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which reported in 2007 with 90 percent certainty that climate change is occurring. The IPCC also said that human activities contribute to this phenomenon.

"The new report was released after US Senate Democrats delayed any possible legislation to curb climate change until September at the earliest," the article goes on. "Prospects for U.S. climate change legislation this year are considered slim."

Just great...

The report cites 10 key indicators that show that the planet is warming:


-- Higher temperatures over land

-- Higher temperatures over oceans

-- Higher ocean heat content

-- Higher near-surface air temperatures (temperatures in the troposphere, where Earth's weather occurs)

-- Higher humidity

-- Higher sea surface temperatures

-- Higher sea levels

-- Less sea ice

-- Less snow cover

-- Shrinking glaciers


This was all predicted by the "junk science" of climate researchers. "The seven indicators expected to rise in a warming world rose over the last decade, the report said," Reuters reported, "the three indicators expected to decline did so over that same period." If climate change is a bunch of hooey, how is it that climate scientists always seem to get it right in the end? Weird... It's almost like they're correct or something.

There's a move to reform the filibuster in the Senate right now. It's long passed time for a fix. There is no way that the founders of the nation intended for the Senate minority to be given a de facto veto. The prospects for reform are reportedly mixed, but I don't think there's any doubt that something needs to change. For those who'd make the "what comes around, goes around" argument, I'd point out that the filibuster is currently causing more problems than it solves.

This has got to stop.

-Wisco


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Cap-and-Trade is Dead. Now What?

Cap-and-trade is the purest form of socialism. It would be a tremendous destructive force on our market and a hidden tax that would destroy the economy. This is why Republicans and "centrist" Democrats killed it dead, dead, dead yesterday. Common sense conservatives just can't get behind it. This is why George H.W. Bush instituted a cap-and-trade system to fight acid rain -- because Ronald Reagan's Vice President was a Marxist. It's why it was the solution offered by McCain/Palin in 2008 -- because Sarah Palin is a commie. Never mind that Bush Sr's program worked, the economy didn't collapse, and unbridled socialism didn't run rampant throughout the land. Those are facts and facts are for elitists.

As we all know, conservatives hate history. If tax cuts have never worked as a way to reduce the deficit, that's irrelevant -- this time they will for sure. So by the same token, if cap-and-trade as a market-based solution was a success story in the past, this time it won't be. They have the zen of a cow in the field munching grass; always in the "now," without any past or future. The only real difference is that where cows are incapable of learning from the past, Republicans refuse to. The past is filled with facts and facts are the greatest enemy of the modern conservative, so the past is the enemy. Maybe even a lie.

But are Senate conservatives the only ones to blame here? As is always the case these days, the answer is no. By now, you know how they're going to react to something. They're going to react negatively. Without fail. Never mind that cap-and-trade was their own damned idea, Republicans are 100% guaranteed to hate it if it comes from a Democrat. Because they're children. You don't have to be a psychic to see this coming a mile away. What was missing on this issue is the same thing that's been missing on so many issues; leadership.

Andrew Revkin, New York Times:

On a host of issues, Obama campaigned as a voice of reason, willing to listen to all views, amid all the polarized shouting. But on climate and energy, he has not yet, apparently, found the strength to break free of the 20th-century-style left-right fight to forge a positive path that is true to the scope and time scale of the climate and energy challenge and could resonate with Americans, particularly the young generation that will inherit the environment being shaped by decisions, or indecision, now.

Revkin points out that Obama has given no major address on the issue, has not "invited a variegated stream of researchers and analysts of climate science and policy to the White House," and has failed to counter congressional voices of idiocy like Sen. James Inhofe's. In short, the administration has been MIA on this issue -- an issue of the utmost importance to our future.

But that may be the glass-half-empty point of view. As Revkin points out, "Could it be that the White House has concluded what some political analysts have quietly told me -- that only a Republican president could muster the Senate votes to pass a meaningful climate bill?" If that's the case, I wouldn't hold my breath. Given the '12 GOP field so far, they're going to have a hard time offering a serious challenge. And none of the nutjobs lining up for the job seems to be very interested in reality. Even if one were to wake up out of their stupor and admit that global warming was real, they'd probably blame it on illegal immigrants or abortion.

We'll pass it off to Time's Joe Klein now:

[A] Supreme Court ruling, now three years old, [says] carbon dioxide is a poison that needs to be cleaned up. Next year, the Environmental Protection Agency will begin regulating the hell out of CO2. The business community won't like that, nor will many Republicans. "Putting a price on carbon is the only alternative," says Senator Maria Cantwell, who has offered a bill--with Maine Republican Susan Collins as co-sponsor--that would force the 2000 top polluters to participate in an auction to purchase the right to spew; 75% of the income would be returned as a "dividend" to taxpayers, the other 25% would go to alternative energy...

And so, yesterday's death of environmental legislation should be considered a pre-election maneuver. Given a choice between taxes and potentially punitive regulations, the wise--the more elegant; the less expensive--choice is a tax every time.

The administration can use the EPA as a hammer to force a legislative solution and, if that fails, continue to use it as a hammer to force CO2 reduction. Reducing CO2 is not optional, it's not something we can just give up on because Republicans have chosen to be idiots about it. If they need to be forced into a corner, then release the border collies and herd them into a corner.

I just wish that border collies weren't to sweet to bite.

-Wisco


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Hillbilly Windpower vs. Gleaming Super-Science

Something that's been kind of distracting me lately is wind power. By now, we've all seen the giant wind generators, but what about smaller ones? What got me started on this line of thinking was an online argument about nuclear energy. We're going to have to look at nuclear, the argument went, because other sources of energy were either way to expensive or not viable yet. Ironically, when I brought up the problem of nuclear waste, it was countered with "generation IV" reactors -- these recycle the waste. I say this was ironic because generation IV reactors aren't viable yet either. But the proponent was a nuke disciple and soldiered on with the argument anyway. I also pointed out that nuclear is stupid-expensive -- something I knew a little about, since I'd written about it before. But the disciple countered that wind power costs between $1,200 to $1,300 per kilowatt, which is comparable to nuclear. This struck me as insane. There's no reason wind power should cost that much. It's way too easy to do.

See, you set up a wind generator and you're done, for the most part. There's some maintenance and storage batteries need to be replaced occasionally, but the fuel itself is free. Meanwhile, everything that's true of wind is true of nuclear -- minus the free fuel. You've got to mine it, refine, and enrich it -- none of which are free. And besides, how difficult can it be to generate power from the wind? Turns out, not very difficult at all.

OK, so this is a small generator, but I want you to get a few points from it. First, you could build one. And I don't mean the hypothetical "you" as in "you can buy a 747 if you've got the money," I mean you personally. You could build one. And the reason for this is also my second point: you can make one out of junk. Mr. SlickVideo here made one out of an old treadmill motor and leftover PVC pipe. You could use a washing machine motor or a pump motor or an old car alternator... You get the idea. When it comes to wind -- or solar, for that matter -- we don't need the centralized generation as much. We'd still need it, but mostly as a back up.

So what would it take to generate enough electricity for a home? Let's take a look. We'll forget about Mr. SlickVideo and observe some geeks in their natural habitat.

Did you catch the cost there? About four hundred bucks for the generator, because it's made from the wheel bearing of a junkyard van.

Now I'm not asking anyone to go out and build a wind generator (although, if you want to, knock yourself out). But what I am asking you to do is think about energy differently. Do you know how a nuclear plant generates power? All electrical generators could be called energy converters -- they take one kind of energy and convert it to electricity. In the case of a nuclear plant, the reactor creates heat, which is turned to kinetic energy, which is then converted to electrical energy. The plant is basically a steam engine, which turns a generator. In other words, it works exactly the same way a coal or natural gas plant does. Put as simply as I can, you build a huge radioactive triumph of modern science and technology and you use it to boil water. This strikes me as overkill.

On the other hand, you can use some old crap you found at the junkyard to turn the generator. Either way, miracle of super-science or Sanford & Son, you're turning that generator. Now I ask you, which makes the most sense?

Yes, we're still going to need that centralized power grid and we probably always will -- multiple residence buildings, office buildings, schools, hospitals, etc. are probably too big for the junkyard solution. And everyone else is going to want that grid in times of what I guess we'll have to call "wind drought." But the goal is to reduce carbon emissions, not to eliminate them. Get enough of these things up and running in backyards and parks and parking lots and you'll have gone quite a way toward that goal of reduction. And when they finally break down, you just tear it down and build another one -- using some of the parts of the dead turbine -- because it's all crap that's lying around anyway. If there isn't enough room for a windmill-style generator, stick a vertical turbine on a roof.

I think part of the problem here is that we have a prejudiced view of the future. We grew up thinking it would be ultra-high-tech and shiny, gleaming white and stately. Nuclear looks a lot like the future we imagined. But it may be that the wiser future is steel rods and axle grease, some PVC pipe and the wheel hub from an old tractor. It may be that going green means the ultimate in recycling -- going hillbilly.

And, if it comes down to which future I'd rather live in, I'll take a roofing tin turbine over the gleaming white mystery. The wind generator is simple. I understand it. I've understood it since I built an electric motor in science class in the sixth grade. Like the guys in the second video, I might have built even the generator myself -- and this runs into a simple circuit I wired, into a couple of old motorcycle batteries, and then into a transformer I got for twenty bucks off eBay. It's not nuclear science and that's the beauty. It's no more complicated than it has to be. Nuclear power or wind power, all we're doing here is turning an axle.

-Wisco


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BP and GOP Attempting History's Largest Cover-Up

The oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is bad. Really bad. Mile after mile after mile of bad. This bad:

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Given the sheer size and scope of the disaster, it seems impossible that someone would even consider hiding it. Yet that seems to be what BP has in mind. Out of sight, out of mind. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that the company that caused the catastrophe by cutting corners in building Deepwater Horizon would also try to cut corners in cleaning it up. BP's attempts to keep the worst of the spill off the front page have been well-documented -- they turn reporters away, while sending their own "journalists" out to cover the story.

According to a whistleblower who spoke to CNN, BP is using dispersant not to mitigate the disaster, but to hide its magnitude.

Examiner:

In a shocking interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper on June 29th, Allegiance Capitol Corporation V.P. Fred McCallister said that BP is deliberately sinking oil with the toxic chemical disbursant [sic] Corexit, to hide the size of the oil spill. By sinking the oil before it can be collected, BP won't have to pay fines on it.

McCallister said, "Everybody in Europe, where the standard practice is to raise the oil and collect it, is scratching their heads, and quite honestly laughing at what's happening in the Gulf." He added, "Everyone is looking at us and wondering why we're allowing this to happen."

This is one of my suspicions confirmed. Using dispersant never seemed to make sense to me. I could see using it near the well, where it would clear the water and improve visibility, but using it elsewhere just made no sense to me. It's not like dispersant makes the oil "go away."

And this isn't the only way BP is trying to cover up the damage and hide the oil. They seem to be trying (and thankfully, failing) to literally bury the story under tons of sand.

"BP is trucking in sand to cover up the oil," writes Shannyn Moore. "Let me repeat that -- instead of cleaning up the oil they are just bringing in sand from other beaches and covering it up. In the photos and the video you can see the layering of Grand Isle, LA sand, oil and then a sand of a different type. Photo-journalists have four independent confirmations by local Sheriff's in Grand Isle, Louisiana."

If BP needs help in covering all this up -- and it's clear they do, because it turns out the inept are unsurprisingly incompetent when it comes to hiding their ineptitude -- they don't have to look far. The Republican Party, eager to portray President Obama as an executive more bumbling than George W. Bush, is ready to pitch in on the effort. Want cover up everything? That's easy. Just say everything is Barack Obama's fault.

McClatchy Newspapers:

From former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to Arizona Sen. John McCain to junior members of the House of Representatives, conservative Republicans have accused President Barack Obama of failing to do all he can to help clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill because he hasn't waived a U.S. maritime law called the Jones Act.

That statute, established in 1920, requires that all goods transported between U.S. ports be carried on U.S.-flagged, U.S.-built and U.S.-owned ships crewed by U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Critics say that's needlessly excluded foreign-flagged vessels that could have helped.

"It's a little shocking to me that a president that has such a multinational orientation as this president didn't immediately see the benefits of waiving the Jones Act and allowing all of these resources to come in," former House Majority Leader Richard Armey, R-Texas, said in remarks to Newsmax.com, a conservative website.

"Totally not true," Mark Ruge, counsel to the Maritime Cabotage Task Force, a coalition of U.S. shipbuilders, operators and labor unions, told McClatchy. "It is simply an urban myth that the Jones Act is the problem." Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen says he's received no requests for Jones Act waivers -- because none are necessary in this case.

"If the vessels are operating outside state waters, which is three miles and beyond, they don't require a waiver," Allen says.

But the Jones Act lie as become the official stance of the Republican Party. In an act of political theater, the GOP will release a partisan "report," written by the unfortunate Rep. Darrell Issa, that claims, "According to local officials, the decision to not waive the Jones Act has impaired Gulf Coast clean-up efforts. The most likely application of a broad-based Jones Act waiver would be for the operation of boats equipped with skimmers, which is one of the most effective tools to clean up the oil. Rear Admiral Jim Watson conceded in a briefing to Chairman Towns and Ranking Member Issa that the Coast Guard does not currently have access to a sufficient numbers of skimmers."

Of course, these are Republicans we're talking about here. Lying is just part of the game for them. And Issa has a raging woody for impeaching Barack Obama -- again, lying is no impediment to this plan. In fact, it's necessary to it. Obama has broken no laws, so Issa has to make up crimes. He's been approaching the problem through a laughable attempt to trump up offering Joe Sestak an unpaid position into a crime, but that really doesn't seem to have any legs at all. If his big "Sestak affair" won't get the job done, maybe his "Jones Act affair" will. The point isn't to remove the president from office -- although I'm sure he wouldn't mind it -- the point is to tarnish Obama's boy scout image in time for the 2012 presidential elections. Speaking to Pennsylvania Republicans last month, Issa told them he'd use subpoena power to harass the White House and let corporations off the hook if Republicans gain control of the House in November.

"That will make all the difference in the world," he said. "I won't use it to have corporate America live in fear that we're going to subpoena everything. I will use it to get the very information that today the White House is either shredding or not producing."

And if inventing an Obama crime means helping BP cover up an actual crime, then cover-up it is. Because, let's face it, lying and protecting corporate interests are just what Republicans do.

-Wisco


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Climategate Dies, But No One Will Run the Obit

I want you to consider what I think is an undeniable and uncomfortable fact; that many so-called "climate change skeptics" are not skeptics at all. They're like the people in the tobacco or asbestos industries denying their products caused cancer. Most of them knew what they were saying wasn't true, but went ahead with the defense anyway, believing their bottom line was more important than your life. It's not a word I use often with any seriousness, but "evil" seems to be the best word to apply here. People were dying a terrible and expensive death, people continue to die that terrible and expensive death and, if these deniers had had their way, people would always die those deaths. Meanwhile, the money would keep rolling in.

As I said, evil.

Now consider how evil it would be if that denial didn't impact a just percentage of the population, but everyone in the world. If you disagree that evil applied before, your argument just got a lot harder to sustain. If climate change deniers' campaign of BS is successful, we can expect that "Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world." What granola-crunching, hippie alarmists warned about that? The pentagon, in 2004. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," a pentagon report warned the Bush administration. "Once again, warfare would define human life." This puts the knowing denier in the position of putting civilization itself in danger and deciding that it's worth it to keep making money in the short term.

I'm not going to perform a mind-reading act and start trying to figure out who the charlatans are and who are the chumps. In terms of consequence, it hardly makes any difference. I just want you to be aware that there are people on the "skeptic" side of the argument who aren't just wrong, but willfully wrong. The rest are ideologues and idiots, either unable to think outside their little worldview-box or unable to think much of anything at all.





One problem we've been facing has been that the media has been more than happy to play the role of chump on this issue. Sticking by their foolish theory of "balance," they've approached the issue skeptically themselves, bending over backwards to tell "both sides of the story." In the beginning, there might have been some merit to this approach, but as time went on, it became more and more idiotic. The only parallel that pops into my head at the moment is showing up with a news crew at a burning building and asking, "Is it really burning?" then interviewing some lunatic who claims the fire isn't happening at all. The evidence has become so overwhelming that today 97% of scientists agree that global warming is happening and humans are causing it. Need a consensus before you'll believe something? There you go. Among the experts, the debate is over.

But don't expect the media to go along with that consensus. For websites, controversy draws traffic, for newspapers, it brings readers, for television, it brings viewers. When you stop playing to their side of the argument, the deniers stop showing up. They'll go to the wingnut media where they can be sure their biases will be confirmed. And the media isn't in the informing business, so much as they are in the money-making business. If they share something with the knowing deniers, it's that bottom line. There is no sadder day in the corporate boardroom of a media empire than the day a controversy is settled, the day a scandal dies, the day the fighting stops.

Which would make last Friday a very sad day.

Newsweek:

A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on, as Mark Twain said (or "before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on," in Winston Churchill’s version), and nowhere has that been more true than in "climategate." In that highly orchestrated, manufactured scandal, e-mails hacked from computers at the University of East Anglia’s climate-research group were spread around the Web by activists who deny that human activity is altering the world’s climate in a dangerous way, and spun so as to suggest that the scientists had been lying, cheating, and generally cooking the books.

But not only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific impropriety and dishonesty in April, an investigation at Penn State cleared PSU climatologist Michael Mann of "falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and information, and misusing privileged or confidential information" in February. In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, The Sunday Times of London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central claim—namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was "unsubstantiated." The Times also admitted that it had totally twisted the remarks of one forest expert to make it sound as if he agreed that the IPCC had screwed up, when he said no such thing.

Big news, right? "Climategate," the one thing left to the deniers to hang their hats on, has collapsed under the weight of its own BS.

Tell it to CNN, who -- as far as I can tell -- has yet to run a story about the death of "Climategate." Yet the big news!! that Obama called Twitter "Twitters" makes CNN's front page.

News you can use.

MSNBC is no better. They don't seem to have caught the story either. Of course, if you go to their "Science and Tech news" page, you will learn about the newest video games. And FOX News? Pfffft! You're kidding, right?

Climategate may be technically dead, but that information is useless if no one knows about it. And, so far, the major TV news outlets couldn't be doing a better job of keeping that information to themselves. If knowing human-caused warming is true and arguing that the opposite is the case is evil, what is it when you know the truth and don't make any argument at all?

-Wisco


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Logic? Who Needs It? We're Talking About Money Here

Earlier this week, I wrote briefly about the decision by US District Court Judge Martin Feldman to strike down the Obama administraton's six month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling. Heavily invested [PDF] in oil and energy companies, Feldman's ruling seems more than a little... Well, let's say, "off."

See, it's not the investments themselves that throw doubt on the ruling. After all, it's entirely possible for a ruling to be good for investors and just at the same time. It's that his logic seems to be a real stretch. In his decision, Feldman wrote, "The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an unprecedented, sad, ugly and inhuman disaster. What seems clear is that the federal government has been pressed by what happened on the Deepwater Horizon into an otherwise sweeping confirmation that all Gulf deepwater drilling activities put us all in a universal threat of irreparable harm." So despite the the failure of a offshore platform anyone at BP, Transocean, or Halliburton would've told you was safe, we can't assume that other platforms are dangerous. Let me put this to you another way. The fact that there weren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic is no reason to start putting lifeboats on other ships. There's no proof that other ships might sink. So let's not get crazy.

Of course, there is reason to believe that other rigs are just as screwed up as Deepwater Horizon. For one, the overseeing agency -- the Minerals Management Service -- has been completely dysfunctional since 2002 at least. In 2008, an Interior Department's Inspector General for a deeply corrupt agency, with regulators doing cocaine and meth -- meth -- with lobbyists, open bribery, and a "culture of marketing," where the focus wasn't on extracting safely, but just extracting more. What Feldman is saying is, "The meth-head says the rigs are fine -- who are we to question that? Twitchy McFrybrain here is, after all, the expert."





And, if further evidence is needed, you can point to the fact that all the response plans for all the oil rigs are all wrong in exactly the same way. In reviewing the plans, Rep. Ed Markey was struck by the fact that the only real differences between different company's plans were the logos on the covers. "What we found was that Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell and BP have response plans that are virtually identical," he wrote. "The plans cite identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. In some cases, they use the exact same words and made the exact same assurances... The covers of the five response plans are different colors, but the content is ninety percent identical."

In case of emergency, the plans call on an expert to be called -- complete with contact information -- who's dead. Responders are warned to be careful not to disturb walrus habitats, in the Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press described the response plans as a "slapdash effort to follow environmental rules." To look at all this -- the drug use, the corruption, the dead experts and non-existent walruses -- and think, "Yup. Looks like these fellas have got it together," is a failure of logic that I don't have words to adequately describe. This isn't just a bad ruling, this may stand for quite some time as the worst-case example of a bad ruling.

For their part, the Obama administration has a remedy to Feldman's incompetence:

Businessweek:

The Obama administration may let certain deepwater drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico resume during a six-month halt, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

Rules to be issued "will include the criteria under which it is appropriate to take a look at the lifting of the moratoria," Salazar said today in Washington at a hearing of a Senate Appropriations Committee panel.

A six-month halt to deepwater exploration, imposed last month by President Barack Obama in response to the BP Plc spill, was overturned yesterday by U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans. The administration said it will appeal the decision, and Salazar announced he will reformulate the rules. Republicans and Gulf Coast Democrats have said the ban is too broad and jeopardizes tens of thousands of jobs.

I never said it was a good remedy. If it were me, I'd issue a new moratorium on drilling over 501 feet (the ban struck down was on 500 feet or more), then 502, 503, until the six months had passed. Sure, a lot of people are out of work while the moratorium is in place, but what about all the people put out of work by the spill? You've got charter boats, fishing boats, shrimpers, oyster fishermen, tourism industry people, etc. Why are they less important than people working in the oil industry? If there's another blowout, they're even more screwed. And who was the idiot who promised oil companies they'd be able to keep people working forever anyway? What entitlement do they have?

If Judge Martin Feldman's ruling proves anything, it's that once money becomes involved, people get stupid. If simple common sense can't prevail, if the freakin' obvious isn't proof enough, where can we go from here but down?

-Wisco


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