Category: environment

I Carry Within Me the Threat of a Global Mass Extinction Event…

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Most people are unaware of this, but the extinction of the dinosaurs (except for the birds) was not the most massive extinction event.

In fact, the mass extinction that led to the dinosaurs was the largest of all time.

So, how does this involve me?

Well to those who know me, in particularly my relatives, will understand from the headline:

Did Giant Earth Fart Give Rise to the Dinosaurs?

A huge release of methane gas may have triggered the prehistoric mass extinctions that allowed dinosaurs to become the dominant life form on earth, according to a new study.

About 201 million years ago, half of known species vanished in an event that signaled the end of the Triassic period and created the lack of natural competition necessary for the ascendance of dinosaurs. The oldest known dinosaur fossiles date back to about 230 million years ago, but they do not take over until about 30 million years later.

Scientists had attributed the mass extinctions to 600,000 years of rampant volcanic activity, but a team of researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Nordic Center for Earth Evolution develop that theory further by arguing that a surge in volcanic activity released methane trapped in the sea floor, sending temperatures soaring.

“A small release of carbon monoxide from volcanism initiated global warming of the atmosphere, increasing temperatures in the oceans,” lead researcher Micha Ruhl told FoxNews.com. “Methane is stored in the sea floor — it’s a molecule which is caught in some kind of ice structure. As soon as the temperatures got above a certain threshold, the ice melted and that methane was released.”

Ruhl and his team studied the chemical remains of plants that had lived on the ocean floor and found a dramatic spike in carbon levels that lasted for a much shorter time than the period of volcanic eruptions, suggesting a shorter, more intense release of methane gases. Methane is more powerful than the carbon monoxide released by the volcanoes, and could have created a period of intense warming.

Be afraid, be very very afraid.

On a slightly less silly note, the idea that there is a tipping point where solid methane hydrate on the ocean floor (and in the tundra) would start outgassing at a ferocious rate, creating a horrific cascade.

Australia Intends to Institute a Carbon Tax

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Well, this is a good policy, at least until 2015, when they turn the whole idea over to the Vampire Squid* and its ilk:

The Australian government has unveiled plans to impose a tax on carbon emissions for the worst polluters.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said carbon dioxide emissions would be taxed at A$23 ($25; £15) per tonne from 2012.

The country’s biggest economic reform in a generation will cover some 500 companies. In 2015, a market-based trading scheme will be introduced.

(emphasis mine)

Once the market based trading scheme is implemented, we can expect to see the investment banks come up with all sorts of opaque trading schemes (Carbon Default Swaps anyone?) that will serve primarily as a means to extract fees and other rents from the process, and then we will see another orgy of fraud and speculation bring the market down.

Of course, this won’t happen immediately, particularly since there would be floor and ceiling prices for the first few years, but it will happen, and money that is extracted from the public will go to private speculators rather than the public good.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

And In the World of the Surreal…

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The CIA is touting its green credentials by revealing that they generate heat by burning shredded documents:

A press release from the CIA explains that their “burn after reading” practice conserves energy because the exhaust from their incinerator generates steam to heat water at CIA headquarters. Says the CIA:

In addition to saving fuel, that process reduces the amount of waste–which would otherwise be destined for landfills–by nearly 1,000 tons per year. The CIA increases its recycling efforts each year, annually collecting over three tons of plastic, glass, cardboard, aluminum, construction debris, and other waste.

I dunno, I find this kind of …… odd.

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In response to the nuclear disaster in Japan, the EPA is looking to increase the amount of radiation deemed safe for the American public to be exposed to:

March 24, 2011, 12:30 EDT, NEW YORK CITY– In the wake of the continuing nuclear tragedy in Japan, the United States government is still moving quickly to increase the amounts of radiation the population can “safely” absorb by raising the safe zone for exposure to levels designed to protect the government and nuclear industry more than human life. It’s all about cutting costs now as the infinite-growth paradigm sputters and moves towards extinction. As has been demonstrated by government conduct in the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of Deepwater Horizon and in Japan, life has taken a back seat to cost-cutting and public relations posturing.

The game plan now appears to be to protect government and the nuclear industry from “excessive costs”… at any cost.

This would involve raising the acceptable levels of things like radioactive Cesium, Iodine and Nickel by up to one hundred thousand times ……… Yes, that’s times, not percent.

This is not without precedent.  Following the Deepwater Horizon blowout, they raised the acceptable levels of toxic chemicals for fish from the gulf, as “George Washington” notes at Naked Capitalism.

Not feeling hopey changey about Barack right now.

Why a Carbon Tax is Superior to Cap and Trade

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In either case, the consumer pays for it, but a carbon tax can go to things like government programs (Or, if you are of that ilk, per person rebates that favor the less well off), while carbon trading enriches polluters, the Vampire Squids of the world, and people who game the system for personal profit:

The European Commission suspended trading in greenhouse gas emissions permits on Wednesday for at least a week after the theft of permits worth millions of euros via online attacks.

The Emissions Trading System was a target of “recurring security breaches” over the last two months, the commission, the executive agency of the European Union, announced on its Web site Wednesday.

The commission said it needed to shut the system down until at least Jan. 26 because “incidents over the last weeks have underlined the urgent need” for enhanced security measures.

The attacks raised new questions about the viability of Europe’s main tool to combat a rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The stolen permits are part of Europe’s effort to cap the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, that companies may emit each year. Europe’s system is the world’s largest market for greenhouse gas emissions credits.

The only advantage to carbon trading is that it gives politicians the ability to give another revenue stream to their classmates from Ivy League/Oxbridge/Sorbonne/Etc. who work in investment banks.

It’s a giveaway to the investment banker, and an invitation to fraud, the case of hydroelectric plants in China without transmission lines to accumulate credits being just one such example.

Suspected Israeli Spy Released By Saudi Government

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The suspect spy was a vulture.

Really, I mean that literally.

It appears that an Israeli academic tagged some vultures with tracking tags, and the Saudis were worried about their potential threat to state security:

A Saudi Arabian prince has announced that a tagged Israeli vulture captured last week and accused of being a Mossad agent will be released, according to ABC News.

The bird was reportedly captured last week by Saudi officials and accused by local media of being part of a “Zionist plot” after it was discovered wearing a GPS tracker labeled Tel Aviv University.

Prince Bandar bin Saud Al Saud dismissed the accusations on Sunday: “These systems are fitted to birds and animals, including marine animals. Most countries use these system, including Saudi Arabia. We have taken delivery of this bird, but we will set it free again after we [have] verified its systems.”

When a member of the House of Saud is the voice of sanity, you are doing something very wrong.

Obama Wants to Nuke the Whales

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MAnother Wikileaks gem, it appears that the Obama administration was preparing to go after the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s tax status to placate the Japanese and their whaling obsession:

Japan and the US proposed to investigate and act against international anti-whaling activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as part of a political deal to reduce whaling in Antarctic waters.

Four confidential cables from the US embassy in Tokyo and the state department in Washington, released by WikiLeaks, show US and Japanese diplomats secretly negotiating a compromise agreement ahead of a key meeting last year of the International Whaling Commission, the body that regulates international whaling.

The American proposal would have forced Japan to reduce the number of whales that Japan killed each year in the Antarctic whale sanctuary in return for the legal right to hunt other whales off its own coasts. In addition, the US proposed to ratify laws that would “guarantee security in the seas” – a reference to acting against groups such as Sea Shepherd that have tried to physically stop whaling.

The US proposal was eventually shot down by Britain and the EU in June 2010, but the cables show that the Sea Shepherd group had become a political embarrassment to Japan after stopping its whaling fleet reaching its annual quota of whale killed for several years.

It simply buggers my mind. What next? Are they going to be biting the heads off of kittens?

Seriously, for all the low expectations that I had for Barack Obama, I didn’t expect that they would stun and amaze the way that Bush and His Evil Minions™ did on a regular basis, but here I am, staring at the screen with an expression on my face resembling that of a cow that just stepped on its own udder.

<Facepalm>

Federal Judge Judge Spanks Ag Department and Monsanto

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In August U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, in response to the suit by environmentalists, issued a ruling that no new genetically modified “roundup ready” sugar beets be planted until a full environmental impact statement has been filed.

The US Department of Agriculture, never a big one for following the law, then issued permits to plant them anyway.

In response to this the judge has ruled that the crops must be destroyed.

This is what happens when you metaphorically call the judge a cock sucker.

The appeals court has stayed the ruling pending a review, but my guess is that they will be inclined to go along with the judge’s decision.

Judges hate it when you ignore their orders.  They think that it’s illegal or something.

Come to think of it, it is illegal or something.

Vote For Me You C@cksucking Losers Is Not a Good Campaign Slogan…

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But it is the apparent strategy of Barack Obama and His Stupid Minions™ for the mid terms.

Here’s the story, a group of activists lobby the Obama administration to put Jimmy Carter’s solar panels back on the White House. They do a tour with a panel, and get people to sign a petition, and the panel gets on Letterman.

Truth be told, this is precisely the sort of guerrilla theater agitprop that I hate, but you know, whatever floats their boat.

So, they get their meeting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and what what happens next is illustrative: They meet with a couple of low level drones, who try to filibuster the meeting by reading Washington Post articles to them about how pro-environment they are, and then they refuse to have their pictures taken with either the panel or for the presentation of the petition.

When asked why, their response is, “If reporters call and ask us, we will provide our rationale,” and then they, “pass out Xeroxed copies of a 2009 memorandum from Vice President Biden,” and end the meeting.

So, here is your pamphlet, now get the f%$# out.

You know, whoever decided on this response, because it is clear that the drones were just following orders, are as Ronald Reagan, Jr. said about Dick Cheney, “[Not] a mindful human being. That’s probably the nicest way I can put it.”

Obama Throws the Environmental Movement Under the Bus

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This is a distressingly familiar refrain

I’m sure that there are a lot of “eleventy dimensional chess” folks out there, but when you look at Obama’s record, both in terms of his support for coal and for his full throated endorsement of the fiction that is “clean coal,” the fact that the administration filed an brief urging the Supreme Court overrule the appellate court decision does not surprise me one bit:

The Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to toss out an appeals court decision that would allow lawsuits against major emitters for their contributions to global warming, stunning environmentalists who see the case as a powerful prod on climate change.

In the case, AEP v. Connecticut, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a coalition of states, environmental groups and New York City. The decision, handed down last year, said they could proceed with a lawsuit that seeks to force several of the nation’s largest coal-fired utilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

……

In a brief (pdf) filed yesterday on behalf of the Tennessee Valley Authority, acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal agreed with the defendants, saying that U.S. EPA’s newly finalized regulations on greenhouse gases have displaced that type of common-law claim.

……

Matt Pawa, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, said he and his colleagues expected the White House to stay out of the matter. During a meeting with more than 30 administration lawyers at the solicitor general’s office on June 24, it seemed they had “a lot of friends in the room,” he said.

“We feel stabbed in the back,” Pawa said. “This was really a dastardly move by an administration that said it was a friend of the environment. With friends like this, who needs enemies?”

I would also note that the regulations that the Solicitor General is touting, which he says should preempt this suit, only applies to new power plants, and these new plants are not the subject of the nuisance suit.

I suppose that a lot of folks will blame Rahm, who has a history of sucking up to miscreant industries for campaign cash, but remember, Obama knows who and what Rahm is, and hired him. Remember, the Cossacks work for the Czar.

As gay activist Joe Sudbay noted at Americablog:

Welcome to our world.

Now, what these environmentalists don’t understand — yet — is that Team Obama isn’t really on their side. Not in the way they think, anyway. It’s a tough lesson and hard to swallow. The gays learned it early on, between Rick Warren and the DOMA brief.

(Mr. Pawa and Mr. Bookbinder should be prepared. They’ll see a lot of their colleagues in the environmental movement make excuses and apologize for what the Obama administration did.)

If the Obama were serious about carbon emission regulation, then it should see this suit would be a wonderful lever to get Congress to move on comprehensive legislation.

The only two justifications for this brief are that they aren’t serious, or, once again, they are trying to expand the reach of the executive branch.

Not Enough Bullets

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BP has given their CEO, Tony Hayward, his waking papers.

Only, he gets to stay on until October, at full pay, and he still has his millions in stock options, and in 2 years, he is eligible for a pension of £600,000 a year.

On the brighter side, he is literally being sent to Siberia, as, BP is, “Planning to nominate him as a non-executive director of its Russian joint venture, TNK-BP.”

If you are one of the hyper-rich, you are safe from the consequences of your actions, which is why these f%$#s act the way they do.

If they win, they make a sh%$ load of money, and if they lose, they are still set for life.

One note here, he will be replaced by Bob Dudley, who is an American, which just goes to show that the BP board does not get the USA.

I think that they think that an American CEO will defuse American anger at them.

They are wrong. Americans are suckers for a British accent, we love being conned by people with British accents, just look at the success that lying charlatans like Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens, and Andrew Sullivan have done selling their crap as gold.

The problem here is that something bad happened, and the more people looked at BP, they saw that it is a corrupt criminal psychopathic organization, even by the standards of the oil industry.

About F%$#ing Time!!!!

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The Department of Justice has opened up a criminal investigation of BP’s oil spill.

I don’t know if laws were broken, but we have an environmental disaster, and eleven people died, so there should have been an investigation as soon as the fires were put out.

Of course, prosecuting wrong-doers is looking back and not forward, so I understand why Eric Holder was so loathe to look at BP’s actions.

In the Obama administration, prosecution for things that occurred in the past is generally reserved for whistle-blowers who reveal lawbreaking by Bush and His Evil Minions™.

About Fracking Time

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Australia is suing Japan in the International Court of Justice over their whaling:

CANBERRA, Australia — Australia said Friday it will challenge Japan’s whale hunting in the Antarctic at the International Court of Justice, a major legal escalation in its campaign to ban the practice despite Tokyo’s insistence on the right to so-called scientific whaling.

My guess is that they will argue that Japan’s “research” is a fig leaf for a commercial activity.

The Australians are right, of course.

Why Senior Management at BP’s Should Be In a Deep Dark Hole

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Click for full size

The Crime Scene

Hours before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, representatives of Slumberger*, who had been called in to perform a “Cement Bond Log (CBL) ” test.

Slumberger, much like Halliburton, is primarily an oil services firm, though it’s rep is as the Cadillac of the service companies, and is, unlike Halliburton, considered to be highly ethical.

Well, they were getting ready to run the test, about 6 hours before the blowout and explosion, and they look at the numbers, and say shut down the operation now, and when the BP management says, “no”, they ask to be flown off, and BP refuses, so they call in a Slumberger helicopter to get the hell out of dodge:

BP contracted Schlumberger (SLB) to run the Cement Bond Log (CBL) test that was the final test on the plug that was skipped. The people testifying have been very coy about mentioning this, and you’ll see why.

SLB is an extremely highly regarded (and incredibly expensive) service company. They place a high standard on safety and train their workers to shut down unsafe operations.

SLB gets out to the Deepwater Horizon to run the CBL, and they find the well still kicking heavily,† which it should not be that late in the operation. SLB orders the “company man” (BP’s man on the scene that runs the operation) to dump kill fluid down the well and shut-in the well. The company man refuses. SLB in the very next sentence asks for a helo to take all SLB personel back to shore. The company man says there are no more helo’s scheduled for the rest of the week (translation: you’re here to do a job, now do it). SLB gets on the horn to shore, calls SLB’s corporate HQ, and gets a helo flown out there at SLB’s expense and takes all SLB personel to shore.

6 hours later, the platform explodes.

Note that we do have confirmation that this cement bond log test was never conducted:

BP hired a top oilfield service company to test the strength of cement linings on the Deepwater Horizon’s well, but sent the firm’s workers home 11 hours before the rig exploded April 20 without performing a final check that a top cementing company executive called “the only test that can really determine the actual effectiveness” of the well’s seal.

A spokesman for the testing firm, Schlumberger, said BP had a Schlumberger team and equipment for sending acoustic testing lines down the well “on standby” from April 18 to April 20. But BP never asked the Schlumberger crew to perform the acoustic test and sent its members back to Louisiana on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight at 11 a.m., Schlumberger spokesman Stephen T. Harris said.

…………

Schlumberger’s Harris said the contractor was ready to do any such wireline tests, but was never directed to do so. The team had finished doing tests on the subsea layers of earth being drilled five days earlier and hadn’t done any work since, Harris said.

In fact, Harris said there was no time to get the company’s wireline testing equipment off the rig before it exploded.

So BP’s side of the story is that they hired the most expensive, top of the line, oil field services company out there to run a test, and never bothered to let them complete what they had paid for, and the time line is a bit different.

But what is clear is that Slumberger left, and they left their very expensive equipment in their haste to get off the platform, because they saw a disaster coming, and they could not stop it.

H/t Thom Hartmann.

*Full disclosure, one of my step-mother’s oldest and dearest friends was a Slumberger, yes, one of those Slumbergers.
†Basically, as they drill a well, they add fluid (mud) to balance the pressure so that it does not erupt out of the well head. When a well is “kicking”, it means that the pressure is not properly balanced and the oil/gas/water is blowing out the mud. See the Wiki.

This and $8.95 Will Get You a Starbucks

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BP is claiming success at its latest attempt to ameliorate the oil spill:

After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged pipe from which most of the oil is leaking.

“It’s working as planned,” Kent Wells, a senior executive vice president of BP, said at a briefing in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship now, we do have a flare burning off the gas, and we have the oil that’s coming to the ship going to our surge tank.”

I’ll wait for independent verification, thank you very much, and BP is not in the least interested in independent verification:

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

So I doubt that a meaningful amount of oil is coming up to the boat.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”