Category: environment

Well, It Appears that these Colors Do Run

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Let’s be clear: the air in Beijing is a miasma of pathological chemistry, and members of the US Olympic Bicycle team were completely justified in wearing filter masks when they flew in.

It looks like as a result of some arm twisting from Steve Roush, the chief of sport performance for the U.S. Olympic Committee, they all signed a letter that he drafted apologizing for wearing a mask, though bicyclist Mike Friedman said, “I’m not sorry for wearing the masks at all.”

This is a health issue. Athletes are delaying going to Beijing to minimize their exposure to the air. The bicyclists are completely justified in their actions.

Truman’s Aphorism on Phony Republicans Applies to Germans Too

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As our 33rd president of the United States once said, “When people have the choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they’ll choose the real thing.”

It appears that Kurt Beck, head of the German Social Democrats, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, their most likely candidate for premier in the next election, are discovering just how right Truman was.

They are unable to do anything to lower Angela Merkel’s popularity, and the party is now hemorrhaging members to the “Left Party”, created from trade unionists and the ashes of the old East German communist party.

If they have any chance of returning to power, they will necessarily have to be in coalition with the Left Party, and probably the Green Party too, but the LP would require more concessions, if the GP’s time in the coalition is any indication.

The LP would likely require a roll back of some of the anti-worker and anti-safety net policies of Shroder, which are a much bigger deal than the GP’s focus on environmental issues.

There is also a pensioner party forming to resist cutbacks in government pensions which may grab a few seats in the next elections.

Great Lakes Basin Compact Passes Senate

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The Great Lakes Basin Compact is a multi-state agreement that would, among other things, prevent transfer of water out of the region and coordinate environmental efforts.

It’s interesting that it’s being cast as preventing the export of water to foreign nations, though it’s far more likely that any mass transfers would be to the mountain west, parts of which rely on the rapidly depleting Ogallala aquifer.

It appears that the House will pass it too, and Bush has said that he will sign it.

Why John Sidney McCain Didn’t Talk to the Exorcist

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I mentioned that the sick old man was going to Louisiana to talk with Bobby “The Exorcist” Jindal, and the scuttlebutt was that he was sizing him up as a VP running mate.

Well, he also intended to fly to an oil rig, to talk about the safety of oil rigs, and to falsely state that there was not a single oil spill post Katrina:


Dennis Knizley looks out on an oil rig beached just off of Dauphin Island, Ala., Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 30, 2005, a day after Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the island and brought the enormous structure a few hundred yards from shore. (AP Photo/Birmingham Post-Herald, Jan-Michael Stump)

In fact, there were somewhere between 146 and 595 oil spills, depending on whose numbers you use, that spewed 9 million gallons of oil.

In any case, the McCain campaign canceled the flight to the oil rig, claiming that the “weather” was to blame, though the weather was actually pretty good, it further south, on the Tex-Mex border where Dolly was hitting.

More likely what stopped him from giving the speech was the fact that there was a barge accident on the Mississippi that day, which spilled 419,000 gallons of oil, and it would have made the campaign stop look like a clown show.

Come to think of it, the entire campaign is starting to look like a clown show, and I’m beginning to wonder if God hates the John McCain campaign.

Acid Seawater as a Result of Globan Warming

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One of the issues with most of the models of global warming is that they have been wrong most of the time.

The problem is that they have been wrong because they’ve been too conservative, and each time new data comes out, it’s worse than predictions.

Now we are seeing Acidified seawater showing up in Pacific coastal waters about a century ahead of schedule.

Basically, as ocean water heats, it absorbs more CO2, and this turns the water more acid.

The measurements found a pH of 7.6, as opposed to the normal 8.1

Yes, There Are Similarities. Corruption is as Corruption Does

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Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) is noting that the firing of Mary Gade as regional administrator of region 5 for her attempts to keep dioxin out of the environment resembles the US attorney scandal.

Of course. When one believes that government is an unmitigated evil, as movement conservatives do, the only role for government agencies is to do favors for friends and allies.

Dow is a friend, poor children who you put at risk for cancer are not.

I Disagree With Paul Krugman

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In his latest post, he thinks that Barack Obama gave too much credit to the Republicans in his Fox interview.

I agree with him on that. The ideas in question have been floating around in academic circles, and have been proposed by politicians on both sides for years.

What I disagree with is his classification of emissions trading as a successful policy.

Emissions trading is not a success relative to a tax of some sort.

They’ve never been shown to be more effective than a tax on emissions, they reduce revenues available to government, and they are more difficult to administer, which increases the regulatory load, and hence costs to taxpayers.

Additionally, if you think that mortgage backed securities are a morass of corrupt arbitrage, just wait until Wall Street gets its hands on actual dirt.

Carbon trading is a solution, it’s just a bad one.

Because Dick Cheney Likes Death

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Dick Cheney is a busy, busy man.

In addition to outing a CIA agent, authoring torture policy, selling out the nation to oil companies, shooting people in the face, and taking payments from Halliburton, it’s nice to know that he can still taking time out to kill whales:

Another internal document shows that the officials working for the Vice President also raised spurious objections to the science. According to this document, the Vice President’s staff “contends that we have no evidence (i.e., hard data) that lowering the speeds of ‘large ships’ will actually make a difference. NOAA rejected these objections, writing that both a statistical analysis of ship strike records and the peer-reviewed literature justified the final rule. In its response to the objections from the Vice President’s staff, NOAA reported that there is “no basis to overturn our previous conclusion that imposing a speed limit on large vessels would be beneficial to whales.

Is there even the smallest bit of evil that is done by Bush and His Evil Minions&trade has to have Cheney’s finger prints all over this?

I feel like stunned like that cow that just stepped on it’s own udder.

No, I Haven’t Worked There

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Though I am currently working on similar projects, basically end of life stuff in the nuclear fuel process.*

In any case, I’m glad not to be working on a new shelter for the Chernobyl reactor. It’s a no win situation. Even if you get it right, no one will know for years and years while the costs continue to mount.

Truth be told, “Even if you get it right, no one will know for years and years while the costs continue to mount,” is a good metaphor for civilian nuclear power in general.

Price tag $1.4 billion and climbing.

*No specifics. My client company’s business (I’m a contractor) is their business, and it is unethical, as well as unwise, to discuss this in detail.†
†I feel no similar compunction about commenting about how a co-worker resembles Captain Jean Luc Picard. Since this does not, nor could it be construed as sensitive or compromising information.

Bush Personally Intervened to Poison National Parks

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Yes, the Avignon President is busy making the air we breath unsafe for humans and other living things:

The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA’s scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

“It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA’s expert scientific judgment,” said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

This is more than just bad policy. His actions are also against the statute.

Really, just despicable.

Southern Baptist Agree that Global Warming is Real

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You know, when the Southern Baptist Convention decides to stop being the Republicans bitch on global warming, it’s pretty significant.

Reasons why it’s significant:

  1. They are saying that Al Gore is right.
  2. They are recognizing reality.
  3. They are realizing that their alignment with one political party is harming them.
  4. A realization that global warming is not a plot of the one-world-government liberals.

Give them time. I think it was 1995 when they finally admitted that they were founded to support slavery, and apologized, because slavery was a bad thing.