Month: April 2012

Dear Senator Manchin, Your Jobs are Killing Us

The following is a letter to  Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) from Elisa Young, a resident of southern Ohio, not far from the West Virginia state line.

Dear Senator Manchin:

I read an article in the Charleston Gazette this morning where you expressed concern about the number of jobs that would be lost if environmental protections to protect public health and safety that the EPA has approved move forward, and your vow to fight these protections:

http://sundaygazettemail.com/News/201204030140

My family has long lived on the border of Ohio and West Virginia (Meigs/Mason/Gallia Counties) where 4 of AEPs power plants are concentrated (2nd largest concentration in the United States, second only to Morgantown, WV). I have personally witnessed the lives of people in community being harmed and even shortened due to coal dependency and specifically American Electric Power’s emissions.

Ohio has consistently taken home the prize for the worst air quality in the nation, and within that ranking, our county has the highest asthma rate in the state, the highest lung cancer death rate, the shortest life expectancy, the highest uninsured rate for children and families, and rank the second highest in the state for all cancer deaths combined (second only to another rural, coal-producing county in Southern Ohio).  The air quality in our schools under the power plants was ranked as being in the top third percentile for the worst air quality in the nation (post scrubbers).

I lost one neighbor to lung cancer who never touched a cigarette in her life.  Her husband also died of respiratory illness.

I lost 6 neighbors to cancer, had cancer myself (and 2 more precancerous conditions that we have no family history of – did I mention I don’t have health insurance?), and remember when one friend’s husband died, her sharing this story:

Both she and her best friend’s husbands were dying of cancer in the same hospital, one room apart from each other (one lived almost immediately under the power plants, the other about 2 miles out from the power plants on the Ohio side of the river – the majority of the pollutants fall within 15).  When Sue’s husband died (an hour before Lola’s), she shared that within the next month, they would have exceeded their lifetime maximum health care benefits of $1 million.  She didn’t want her husband to go, but had no idea how they would have made it once their health insurance ended.

Continue reading “Dear Senator Manchin, Your Jobs are Killing Us”

Cap and Trade. One Great Republican Idea.

I’ll say it again. My  Dad was chairman of the local county Republicans in the Eisenhower era. I know what a conservative is. These guys we have today, they’re no conservatives.

In a speech hosted by the Associated Press, President Obama recalled what a lot of people have forgotten, if they ever knew.
“Cap and Trade”, recently a demonized punching bag in the ongoing circus of the Republican presidential primary, is actually a Republican idea.

The Hill:

President Obama reminded Republicans Tuesday that cap-and-trade has GOP roots in a rare public reference to the embattled environmental policy.

“Cap-and-trade was originally proposed by conservatives and Republicans as a market-based solution to solving environmental problems,” Obama said during a fiery speech at a luncheon hosted by The Associated Press.

“The first president to talk about cap-and-trade was George H.W. Bush. Now you’ve got the other party essentially saying we shouldn’t even be thinking about environmental protection. ‘Let’s gut the EPA.’ ”

A detailed history of the Cap and Trade idea was published in the Smithsonian magazine in 2009, – here are a few highlights:

Smithsonian:

John B. Henry was hiking in Maine’s Acadia National Park one August in the 1980s when he first heard his friend C. Boyden Gray talk about cleaning up the environment by letting people buy and sell the right to pollute. Gray, a tall, lanky heir to a tobacco fortune, was then working as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, where environmental ideas were only slightly more popular than godless Communism. “I thought he was smoking dope,” recalls Henry, a Washington, D.C. entrepreneur. But if the system Gray had in mind now looks like a politically acceptable way to slow climate change—an approach being hotly debated in Congress—you could say that it got its start on the global stage on that hike up Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain.

People now call that system “cap-and-trade.” But back then the term of art was “emissions trading,” though some people called it “morally bankrupt” or even “a license to kill.” For a strange alliance of free-market Republicans and renegade environmentalists, it represented a novel approach to cleaning up the world—by working with human nature instead of against it.

Despite powerful resistance, these allies got the system adopted as national law in 1990, to control the power-plant pollutants that cause acid rain. With the help of federal bureaucrats willing to violate the cardinal rule of bureaucracy—by surrendering regulatory power to the marketplace—emissions trading would become one of the most spectacular success stories in the history of the green movement.

Continue reading “Cap and Trade. One Great Republican Idea.”

Poll of the Day: American Priorities

 ScienceDebate.org:

Alternative energy is weighing heavily on voters’ minds. Fifty-three percent of all likely US voters rank developing alternative energy as a top US spending priority, second only to paying down the federal deficit. This is about twice the number of voters that think the government is not spending enough on national defense or space exploration. Funding science and math education came in fourth, just behind investing in roads and bridges, and scientific research was fifth.

The survey reveals deep concerns among Americans about their country’s ability to maintain leadership in science.  Just forty-two percent of likely voters believe the United States will remain the world leader in science just eight years from now, and eighty-five percent are concerned that an uncertain future for science funding in the US will cause scientists to leave their jobs or move to other countries.

The poll was conducted online by JZ Analytics (John Zogby, Senior Analyst) in partnership with Research!America and ScienceDebate.org.  There were 1005 respondents for a margin of error of +/- 3.2%.

Graph of the Day: Cape Wind to Save New England $7.2 Billion

I posted graphs the other day demonstrating the downward pressure PV solar is having on electric rates in Germany.  There is similar evidence showing the price dampening effect of wind energy. Charles River Associates, a New England consulting firm, has projected what the savings to consumers would be over 25 years of operating the planned Cape Wind offshore wind project.

This is not surprising, considering that history shows that wind energy has exceeded expectations in terms of price and performance whenever it has been seriously deployed.  A friend sends this little tidbit showing the price of electric power in the US Midwest:

source: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/

Note: Iowa has a higher penetration of wind power than any other state – around 20 percent.

If you want to know why the Koch brothers and the Fossil Fuel industry are running a hate campaign toward renewables thru the Foxis of Evil and other proxies, look no further.

Cape Wind press release below.

Continue reading “Graph of the Day: Cape Wind to Save New England $7.2 Billion”

Heartland: The Leading Edge of Ignorance

The Heartland Institute is attempting to mine a rich load of ignorance in America’s, well, Heartland.

Like the Joe Camel campaign, and cigarette ads that Heartland has so enthusiastically defended for decades,  the recent spate of proposed laws  aimed at undermining science education targets the most vulnerable population.  They are meant to destroy the idea of objective fact, institutionalize a Fox News alternative reality, and render young people more ignorant, more angry, more compliant, and more helpless to even understand what is being done to them.

Pollack in NYTimes: Canary in the Ice

ClimateCrocks advisor Henry Pollack’s Letter in the NYTimes today:

Re “Weather Runs Hot and Cold, So Scientists Look to the Ice” (front page, March 29):

Nature’s best thermometer and most unambiguous indicator of climate change is ice. Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it crosses the threshold from solid to liquid. It just melts.

The continuing loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is indeed affecting the weather beyond the Arctic. The canary of climate change is crying out, and ever louder.

HENRY POLLACK
Ann Arbor, Mich., March 29, 2012

The writer, professor emeritus of geophysics at the University of Michigan, is the author of “A World Without Ice.” 

The metaphor of the canary in the coal mine is apt for threat of global climate change.

The question is, how many dead canaries do we need to find before someone gets the message?

Republicans for Environmental Protection Throw in the Towel on “Republican”

 My slightly altered version of the Republicans for Environmental Protection logo (above) turned out to be prescient.

Politico:

Republicans for Environmental Protection is dropping the “Republican” — after 17 years of trying to demonstrate that a group can comfortably exist in today’s GOP while championing causes like global warming and opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The group’s new name is ConservAmerica, a name that’s supposed to represent “the inherent connection between conservation and conservatism” while appealing to an audience that has grown less party-affiliated.

“We’re seeing more and more independents out there,” said David Jenkins, the group’s vice president for governmental and political affairs. “Messaging through a Republican frame doesn’t reach those people as well as reaching them through a conservative frame.”

Still, Jenkins insists that Republicans — and conservatives as a whole — haven’t really abandoned the environmental cause, despite what people may be hearing from talk radio hosts and many of the GOP’s elected officials. Jenkins doesn’t think the party’s membership has changed that much since 2008, when it nominated John McCain as president.

“The radicals on talk radio want to define conservatives as much more of a libertarian type of frame,” he said. But he added, “If you see polling with Republicans on environmental issues, whether it’s fuel economy standards or clean energy, you’ll see the vast majority of Republicans are in favor of those things.”

The group also is keeping REP’s green elephant logo.

But some who largely agree with the group’s green goals say the Republican Party’s ideological shift is real — and a big problem for ConservAmerica.

“Under either name … they face a fundamental challenge that the pro conservation party of Roosevelt, Nixon, Schwarzenegger and McCain has become the climate science denial party of Romney, Santorum and Limbaugh,” said Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

“Changing its name is unlikely to alter the Republican party culture where denial of climate science has become another litmus test,” Weiss added.

Republican Meteorologist: Keep Track of who the Deniers are Today..

Paul Douglas’ powerful Op-Ed piece of last week, pointing out that science is neither liberal nor conservative,  went seriously viral, pushing Douglas into the ranks of the strongest voices calling the GOP back to reason.  He follows up with this addendum.

Paul Douglas

My recent Op-Ed gave me a chance to summarize how I feel about the politicization of climate science in recent years – how it’s become a bizarre litmus test for conservatism.

As I describe in the piece, my “belief” in climate science had nothing to do with Al Gore, and everything to do with what I was seeing with my own two eyes: on the weather maps, and out my window.

I’m not running a popularity contest. Q Ratings were important when I was in local broadcasting, but no more. This issue is too important, and I’m hoping I can encourage other moderate voices out there to step out from the shadows and speak up about your concerns. Contact your politicians. Assume nothing. D.C. is hopelessly deadlocked on climate science and (clean, carbon-free) energy policy.

I have no idea what it’s going to take to move things along and start a rational national dialogue (without shouting at each other and the name-calling…I swear we’re still in 7th grade, with slightly better wardrobes), but the status quo is not good for our country.

If this keeps up we’ll be buying all our wind farms, solar panels and hybrids from China and other countries that (amazingly!) aren’t still “debating the science.”

Are we really going to drill and mine our way to prosperity – indefinitely? I have nothing against drilling and tapping the resources we have, so long as it’s not the only way forward.

The trolls can rant and rave all they want – I don’t care. Do me a favor and keep track of who the (professional/persistent) deniers are today. Let’s come back in a few years and see what they have to say – what excuses they have for ignoring the science and putting our kids at risk. That should be interesting.

Here is a link to Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth Blog in the New York Times.  Shawn Otto posted the full Op-Ed at his Neorenaissance Blog, which can also be found at Huffington Post. (Ed: it was also reposted at ThinkProgress.)

And to those of you who have e-mailed, tweeted, texted and called in your support and encouragement, thank you.

I’m no meteorological martyr or Paul Revere – but I’ve seen enough evidence to make a call on this one. It’s either the greatest scientific hoax ever perpetrated on the people of Earth or the climate scientists are correct. Call me crazy but I think it’s possible to lean to the right, and still care about the environment andsound science. If that makes me a “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) then I wear the badge proudly. The forecast calls for more rinos.

US Military Forges Ahead with Climate Security. Deniers Still Looking for WMDs.

Scientific American:

The U.S. military’s elite forces have always pushed the envelope. And this summer will be no exception, as the Navy deploys SEALs with $2 million of new gear on missions to save hostages, combat pirates, and counter terrorism around the world. What sort of next-generation weaponry, armor, ortransportation will the funds provide?

None.

The cash will pay for solar technology, enabling the SEALs to power up equipment and purify water while on the move, and even refrigerate medical supplies and food.

“It’s really the first step in the Navy’s effort to make the SEALs net-zero energy and net-zero water (use) down the road,” said Thomas Hicks, the Navy’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy.

Making the SEALs into a leaner, greener tactical force is one of many such steps being taken by all branches as the U.S. military reduces its environmental footprint. The Army is targeting net-zero energy use at several bases, and the Navy and Air Force are experimenting with running jets on biofuels that use wood waste and algae and less petroleum. In Afghanistan, patrols now carry eco-friendly solar blankets and LED lamps.

Connecting the military’s fossil-fuel and overall energy use with risks to our nationalsecurity hasn’t been easy in this political environment, especially with the presidential election looming. Congressional Republicans have repeatedly questioned and criticized the Armed Forces’ new-energy strategies, portraying initiatives as political favors to clean-energy businesses.

But current and retired military leaders insist the policies are essential. The efforts protect soldiers and help them carry out missions. They also help curb climate change and its potential to intensify military conflicts.

(National Security  Part 2 video below)

Continue reading “US Military Forges Ahead with Climate Security. Deniers Still Looking for WMDs.”