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The need to change is becoming more obvious than ever

The world is edging closer to the final moments after which everything will be forever changed. Grand delusions, perpetuated over decades, will finally hit the limits of reality and collapse in on themselves.

We’re over-budget and have eaten deeply into the principal balances of all of our main trust accounts. We are ecologically overdrawn, financially insolvent, monetarily out past the Twilight Zone, consuming fossil fuels (as in literally eating them), and adding 80,000,000 net souls to the planet’s surface — each year! — without regard to the consequences.

Someday there will be hell to pay financially, economically, and ecologically as there simply isn’t any way to maintain these overdrafts forever. Reality does not renegotiate. Its deal terms aren’t compromisable.

For those who have the neural plasticity to actually see what’s happening around us, the changes are already here, blatant and frightening. Younger folks, with their fresher eyes and fewer ties to the past, can see them a lot easier than their elders.

The prosperity enjoyed by the past few generations — especially the Baby Boomers — was stolen from future generations. All the while, they pretended as if their borrowing-heavy standards of living were the result of sheer genius and intelligence; like trust fund babies who mistake being born on third base for hitting a triple.

Young people have sussed this out; and are now pulling back from many of the principal occupations of their forebears — like marriage, babies and buying homes and cars. This perplexes older folks, who are beginning to find themselves increasingly at odds with the generations following after them.

Humans can be very very smart, but the flip-side of our ingenuity is our capacity for self-delusion. We’ve very consistently preferred to look past our faults. That can work for a while, but eventually an incomplete view will lead to a complete disaster.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Environmental Nightmare! Dozens Of Highly Toxic Substances Have Been Found In Tap Water All Over America

July 14, 2017

Environmental Nightmare! Dozens Of Highly Toxic Substances Have Been Found In Tap Water All Over America

After reading this article, you will never look at tap water the same way again. Most Americans have generally assumed that the water coming out of our taps is perfectly safe, but the Flint water crisis and other similar incidents are starting to help people to understand that there are some very dangerous substances in our water. In particular, I am talking about things like arsenic, lead, atrazine, perchlorate and a whole host of pharmaceutical drugs. According to an absolutely stunning NRDC report, close to 77 million Americans received their water from systems “that violated federal protections” in 2015. And even if you get your water from a system that meets federal standards, that still does not mean that it is safe.

Let’s start by talking about arsenic. Earlier today I came across an article that talked about how levels of arsenic in the water at some schools in the San Joaquin Valley “exceed the maximum federal safety levels by as much as three times”…

Reef-Sunset Unified School District Superintendent David East is worried about water. Not because of the drought—record rains this past winter ended five years of dry times. Rather, East, whose district encompasses the small towns of Avenal and Kettleman City on the San Joaquin Valley’s west side, is worried about the safety of the water that the 2,700 students in his school district are being given to drink.

That’s because arsenic levels in the drinking water at some schools in the San Joaquin Valley exceed the maximum federal safety levels by as much as three times. And arsenic is not the only threat to schoolchildren. High levels of pesticides, nitrate, bacteria, and naturally occurring uranium also contaminate groundwater in many rural parts of the state.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Where did all the oil go? The peak is back

April 25, 2016

Where did all the oil go? The peak is back

Solar power has grown exponentially and the target of 50 percent renewables by 2028 to avoid a 2C world is achievable

An extensive new scientific analysis published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy & Environment says that proved conventional oil reserves as detailed in industry sources are likely “overstated” by half.

According to standard sources like the Oil & Gas Journal, BP’s Annual Statistical Review of World Energy, and the US Energy Information Administration, the world contains 1.7 trillion barrels of proved conventional reserves.

However, according to the new study by Professor Michael Jefferson of the ESCP Europe Business School, a former chief economist at oil major Royal Dutch/Shell Group, this official figure which has helped justify massive investments in new exploration and development, is almost double the real size of world reserves.

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIRES) is a series of high-quality peer-reviewed publications which runs authoritative reviews of the literature across relevant academic disciplines.

According to Professor Michael Jefferson, who spent nearly 20 years at Shell in various senior roles from head of planning in Europe to director of oil supply and trading, “the five major Middle East oil exporters altered the basis of their definition of ‘proved’ conventional oil reserves from a 90 percent probability down to a 50 percent probability from 1984. The result has been an apparent (but not real) increase in their ‘proved’ conventional oil reserves of some 435 billion barrels.”

Global reserves have been further inflated, he wrote in his study, by adding reserve figures from Venezuelan heavy oil and Canadian tar sands – despite the fact that they are “more difficult and costly to extract” and generally of “poorer quality” than conventional oil. This has brought up global reserve estimates by a further 440 billion barrels.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canadians conflicted about 3 Es: Environment, energy and the economy

March 14, 2016

Canadians conflicted about 3 Es: Environment, energy and the economy

EKOS-CBC poll suggests 56% more worried about the economy than the environment

Alberta produces the most greenhouse gases of any province in the country, and has for more than a decade.

Alberta produces the most greenhouse gases of any province in the country, and has for more than a decade. (CBC)

Justin is still working as an oil well cementer in Lloydminster, but his income is down by 50 per cent and the family is dealing with a painful readjustment of their future.

“For the first time in three years, I actually didn’t pay a bill,” said Leanne. “We didn’t have the money to pay it, so I pay a little on this one and all of that one, and the next month, I’ll pay the rest of that one and just try to keep up.”

Justin and Leanne Mills are struggling to pay their bills as work dries up in Alberta’s oilpatch

‘We don’t have a big truck, or a big house, or fancy things and we’re still having trouble getting by.’– Justin Mills, oilwell cementer

Their struggles are one side of the conflict gripping Canadians right now as tension grows between the importance of the environment and the economy. A new CBC EKOS Research poll suggests the country is conflicted between the two priorities, especially when discussing the future of the oil and gas industry.

Leanne has been trying to get pregnant for four years and after a string of miscarriages, she began fertility treatments that cost $600 a month. But, with their drop in income, they can no longer afford the treatments.

EKOS poll Canadians worried about economic issues

“I turned 40 last November and when we spoke to our doctor last, I said that we might not be able to do this for a while,” Leanne said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Moral economy: a different way of thinking about the future

January 24, 2016

Moral economy: a different way of thinking about the future

The current economic system has ‘wealth extraction’ masquerading as ‘wealth creation’ to the long-term detriment of everybody, even the super rich. New thinking is needed.

Coal shovels at work in Randolph County, Illinois c. 1970. Katy McClelland/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)You know something is grotesquely wrong when the 80 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population, when the combined wealth of the 1000 richest people in the UK is nearly five times the size of the annual NHS budget, and when unending growth is assumed to be possible in a finite, rapidly overheating planet. But conventional approaches to economic matters can’t explain what is wrong.

To understand these problems we need a radically different approach that goes back to basics. Most basic of all is this: the point of economic activity is simply to enable us to live well. Economies are systems of provisioning—ways of providing us with the wherewithal to live a decent life—and of course some ways of doing this are much better than others. Provisioning involves two kinds of relations:

Relations between people, whether as buyers and sellers, employers and employees, lenders and borrowers, landlords and tenants, citizens and governments, or as providers and beneficiaries of unpaid work.
Our relations to the environment, as all material wealth ultimately depends on this. Looking after the environment should make economic sense, degrading it does not.

No one ever got rich or poor outside these two sets of relations. ‘Moral economy’—unlike mainstream economics—focuses on these and examines whether they are fair or unfair, functional for provisioning or not, and sustainable or unsustainable. Particularly at this time of economic and environmental crisis, it can provide us with signposts to a different way of doing things.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Looming Environmental Disaster In Missouri That Nobody Is Talking About

January 3, 2016

The Looming Environmental Disaster In Missouri That Nobody Is Talking About

Since we first highlighted the potential for a “catastrophic event” in Missouri three months ago, there has been little mainstream media coverage. However, as Claire Bernish via TheAntiMedia.org notes, residents near the smoldering fill have expressed increasing frustration with the quarreling agencies offering few answers for an increasing number of health issues, like asthma. For now, it’s startlingly apparent no one knows exactly what’s happening with the West Lake and Bridgeton Landfills – though the smoldering below the surface doesn’t cease and floodwaters continue to rise.

What happens when radioactive byproduct from the Manhattan Project comes into contact with an “underground fire” at a landfill? Surprisingly, no one actually knows for sure; but residents of Bridgeton, Missouri, near the West Lake and Bridgeton Landfills — just northwest of the St. Louis International Airport — may find out sooner than they’d like.

And that conundrum isn’t the only issue for the area. Contradicting reports from both the government and the landfill’s responsible parties, radioactive contamination is actively leaching into the surrounding populated area from the West Lake site — and likely has been for the past 42 years.

In order to grasp this startling confluence of circumstances, it’s important to understand the history of these sites. Pertinent information either hasn’t been forthcoming or is muddied by disputes among the various government agencies and companies that should be held accountable for keeping area residents safe.

* * *

West Lake Landfill was placed on the National Priorities List in 1990, giving the Environmental Protection Agency regulatory authority through its designation as a Superfund site. However, the area wasn’t a planned radioactive waste storage site. Uranium processing residue leftover from the World War II-era Manhattan Project was originally dumped there, illegally, by a contractor for former uranium processing company and General Atomics affiliate, Cotter Corporation in 1973.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Bizarre Explanation For Why The U.S. Has Avoided Bombing ISIS Oil Wells

November 30, 2015

The Bizarre Explanation For Why The U.S. Has Avoided Bombing ISIS Oil Wells

Why hasn’t the U.S. bombed the oil wells that ISIS controls into oblivion by now? Would you believe that it is because the Obama administration “didn’t want to do environmental damage”? Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell has publicly admitted that we have purposely avoided damaging the main source of income for ISIS, and his explanation for why we were doing this is utterly bizarre. But at this point what could the Obama administration say that would actually make sense? Everyone now knows that ISIS has been making hundreds of millions of dollars selling oil in Turkey, and that this has been done with the full knowledge and complicity of the Obama White House. This is potentially the biggest scandal of the entire Obama presidency, and yet so far the Republicans have not jumped on it.

If you or I even gave five bucks to ISIS, we would be arrested and hauled off to Guantanamo Bay. And yet Barack Obama is allowing ISIS to funnel massive quantities of oil through our NATO ally Turkey, and he is not doing anything to stop this from happening. It is a betrayal of the American people that is so vast that it is hard to put into words.

By now, virtually everyone on the entire planet knows exactly what is going on. For example, Iraq’s former National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie shared the following on his Facebook page on Saturday…

“First and foremost, the Turks help the militants sell stolen Iraqi and Syrian oil for $20 a barrel, which is half the market price.”

Until Russia started bombing the living daylights out of them, an endless parade of trucks carrying ISIS oil would go back and forth over the Turkish border completely unmolested.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Haunting Legacy of South Africa’s Gold Mines

November 13, 2015

The Haunting Legacy of South Africa’s Gold Mines

Thousands of abandoned gold mines are scattered across South Africa, polluting the water with toxics and filling the air with noxious dust. For the millions of people who live around these derelict sites, the health impacts can be severe.

The name is derived from “happy prospect” in Afrikaans, and once upon a time, life and the gold haul were both good at the Blyvooruitzicht Gold Mine, 50 miles west of Johannesburg. But two years after the mine’s owners abandoned it because it was unprofitable, sewage runs in the streets of the old mining village, tailings impoundments cover nearby towns in dust, and illegal miners rule the abandoned shafts.

“I’m just going to take one or two potshots at them to keep them at a distance,” says Louis Nel, head of security at the now-abandoned Blyvooruitzicht.

Dean Hutton/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Mining waste piles from the closed Blyvooruitzicht gold mine line a roadside in South Africa.

He raises his shotgun and shatters the afternoon calm with several blasts. A few zama zamas — illegal miners whose title means “We try! We try!” in Zulu — run for cover.

Blyvooruitzicht is but one of thousands of abandoned mines scattered across South Africa, many from the gold industry. With recently shuttered mines adding to the massive impact of those left derelict years ago, the country faces a growing environmental, health, and social crisis created by a withering gold industry and inadequate oversight.

South Africa’s Department of Mineral Resources, or DMR, holds a list of 6,000 “derelict and ownerless” mines, which became the government’s problem over the years when the former owners disappeared. While the DMR slowly rehabilitates those mines— at a rate of about 10 per year — companies continue to walk away from operations such as Blyvooruitzicht, and both mining companies and the government are slow to accept responsibility.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Breaking: Trans-Pacific Partnership Ignores Climate, Asks Countries to Volunteer to Protect the Environment

November 5, 2015

Breaking: Trans-Pacific Partnership Ignores Climate, Asks Countries to Volunteer to Protect the Environment

In March, the White House was touting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on its blog stating:

“Through TPP, the Obama administration is doubling down on its commitment to use every tool possible to address the most pressing environmental challenges.”

Reviewing the environment section of the just-released TPP, one thing becomes quite clear. Climate change is not considered one of the “most pressing environmental challenges.”

In the summary of the environmental section posted by the US government it doesn’t mention the climate but does mention the “energy revolution” under the heading of “Transition to a Low-Emissions Economy”.

TPP countries recognize that the world is in the midst of an energy revolution. The agreement includes commitments to cooperate to address issues such as energy efficiency; the development of cost-effective, green technologies; and alternative, clean and renewable energy sources.

And when it comes to Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) the language promises “reinforcements” to these commitments even though they “may lack binding enforcement regimes.”

TPP countries are signatories to many MEAs covering a wide range of environmental issues. However, these agreements may lack binding enforcement regimes. By requiring MEA implementation, TPP provides valuable reinforcements to these commitments.

And, of course, there is the part about encouraging companies to volunteer to protect the environment.

The Environment chapter includes commitments to encourage companies to voluntarily adopt corporate social responsibility policies, and to use mechanisms, such as public-private partnerships, to help to protect the environment and natural resources.

So, it appears that the TPP doesn’t consider climate change an important issue but as the world continues its “energy revolution” that countries can volunteer to protect the environment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shell’s Renewed Arctic Drilling Campaign Faces Yet Another Setback As Key Ship Forced Back To Port

July 9, 2015

Shell’s Renewed Arctic Drilling Campaign Faces Yet Another Setback As Key Ship Forced Back To Port

Is Shell finally “Arctic Ready” after its doomed 2012 campaign? The company is set to begin drilling in the Arctic within the week, and it’s already not looking good.

The MSV Fennica, an icebreaker vessel bound for the Chukchi Sea, had barely left its berth in Dutch Harbor, Alaska last Friday when it had to immediately turn around. The crew discovered a 39-inch long, half-inch-wide breach in the Fennica’s hull, FuelFix reports.

There is no word yet from Shell on how long the repairs are expected to take, or how the company intends to proceed in the event that the Fennica is taken out of service for a long period of time. Any significant change to Shell’s Arctic drilling plans could force a new review by the US Department of the Interior.

The Fennica was not only tasked with keeping ice from collecting around the company’s drill site, but also carrying the capping stack to be used in case of a well blowout or other emergency, in addition to the equipment for deploying it.

A Shell spokesperson told FuelFix that the incident does not “characterize the preparations we have made to operate exceptionally well.”

But that’s not going to stop comparisons to the company’s accident-prone and ultimately aborted attempt to drill in the Arctic three years ago.

“Shell’s terrible safety history around the world makes today’s news no surprise, but is nonetheless disturbing,” David Turnbull, campaigns director for Oil Change International, told DeSmog.

“For the sake of the Arctic and for our climate, the President should put a stop to Shell’s dangerous experiment today, before an even greater mishap inevitably comes.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Delusion of Control

June 25, 2015

The Delusion of Control

I’m sure most of my readers have heard at least a little of the hullaballoo surrounding the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si. It’s been entertaining to watch, not least because so many politicians in the United States who like to use Vatican pronouncements as window dressing for their own agendas have been left scrambling for cover now that the wind from Rome is blowing out of a noticeably different quarter.

Take Rick Santorum, a loudly Catholic Republican who used to be in the US Senate and now spends his time entertaining a variety of faux-conservative venues with his signature flavor of hate speech. Santorum loves to denounce fellow Catholics who disagree with Vatican edicts as “cafeteria Catholics,” and announced a while back that John F. Kennedy’s famous defense of the separation of church and state made him sick to his stomach. In the wake of Laudato Si, care to guess who’s elbowing his way to the head of the cafeteria line? Yes, that would be Santorum, who’s been insisting since the encyclical came out that the Pope is wrong and American Catholics shouldn’t be obliged to listen to him.

What makes all the yelling about Laudato Si a source of wry amusement to me is that it’s not actually a radical document at all. It’s a statement of plain common sense. It should have been obvious all along that treating the air as a gaseous sewer was a really dumb idea, and in particular, that dumping billions upon billions of tons of infrared-reflecting gases into the atmosphere would change its capacity for heat retention in unwelcome ways. It should have been just as obvious that all the other ways we maltreat the only habitable planet we’ve got were guaranteed to end just as badly.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stouffville Corner

May 29, 2015

A new section of my site, Stouffville Corner, aims to provide a variety of write-ups on topics I consider to be of primary importance/ interest. The aim was to have my local paper, Stouffville Tribune, publish them on a weekly/bi-weekly basis to bring the issues to the consciousness of my local community (thus the name). While the paper no longer accepts op-ed pieces due to its limited publication schedule (use to be published twice a week but now only once), I will still be offering the articles on a weekly/bi-weekly basis on my site beginning today with the introductory piece that has been accepted as a letter-to-the-editor.

Cheers…
Steve

The Oceans Are Dying

March 31, 2015

The Oceans Are Dying

I am an admirer of Dahr Jamail’s reporting. In this article, Oceans In Crisis, Jamail tells us that we are losing the oceans. http://truth-out.org/news/item/29930-oceans-in-crisis-one-woman-will-cross-the-pacific-to-raise-awareness He reports on the human destruction of the oceans. It is a real destruction with far-reaching consequences.

That fact is indisputable.

From my perspective the human destruction of the oceans is yet more evidence of the ruinous nature of private capitalism. In capitalism there is no thought for the future of the planet and humanity, only for short-term profits and bonuses. Consequently, social costs are ignored.

Capitalism can work if social or external costs can be included in the costs of production. However, the powerful corporations are able to block a socially functioning capitalism with their political campaign contributions.

Consequently, capitalists themselves make the capitalist system dysfunctional. We may have reached the point where the external costs of production are larger than the value of capitalist output. Economist Herman Daly makes a convincing case that this is the fact.

While the powerful capitalists use the environment for themselves as a cost-free dumping ground, the accumulating costs threaten everyone’s life. It appears that nothing can be done, because the oceans are “common property.” No one owns them, so no one can protect them and their contents.

What we are faced with is the most destructive force in history: the short-sightedness of humans. Humans are willing to destroy the environment that sustains them, the law that sustains them, the truth that sustains them. Indeed, humans will destroy everything that sustains life if they can raise their incomes for another quarter or another year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peak Meaninglessness

March 5, 2015

Peak Meaninglessness

Last week’s discussion of externalities—costs of doing business that get dumped onto the economy, the community, or the environment, so that those doing the dumping can make a bigger profit—is, I’m glad to say, not the first time this issue has been raised recently. The long silence that closed around such things three decades ago is finally cracking; they’re being mentioned again, and not just by archdruids. One of my readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Jay McInerney—noted an article in Grist a while back that pointed out the awkward fact that none of the twenty biggest industries in today’s world could break even, much less make a profit, if they had to pay for the damage they do to the environment.

Now of course the conventional wisdom these days interprets that statement to mean that it’s unfair to make those industries pay for the costs they impose on the rest of us—after all, they have a God-given right to profit at everyone else’s expense, right? That’s certainly the attitude of fracking firms in North Dakota, who recently proposed that they ought to be exempted from the state’s rules on dumping radioactive waste, because following the rules would cost them too much money. That the costs externalized by the fracking industry will sooner or later be paid by others, as radionuclides in fracking waste work their way up the food chain and start producing cancer clusters, is of course not something anyone in the industry or the media is interested in discussing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Opponents Of Quebec’s Arnaud Open-Pit Mine Face Threats, Hack Attacks

February 24, 2015

Opponents Of Quebec’s Arnaud Open-Pit Mine Face Threats, Hack Attacks

Tensions are running high in la Belle Province as people wait for the government’s decision on opening a controversial new mine in northeastern Quebec.

Opponents of the Arnaud mining project, a proposed open-pit mine inside Sept-Îles’ town limits, say they have been the targets of a campaign of intimidation.

For more than a year now, supporters and opponents have been publicly going head to head in the media and in the streets.

With the economy slowing down, the region desperately needs to create jobs. But the proposed project was labelled “unacceptable” for environmental reasons by the independent advisory agency, the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE), in February 2014.

Claire Hébert lived in Parc Ferland, a trailer park located about three kilometers from the site of the proposed pit in Sept-Îles when she started doing her own research into what was under the ground at this particular location.

Barium, vanadium, cobalt … all substances that are cause for concern, since they would be brought up in the first round of dynamiting and settle in fine particles on mounds of residue left over by the mine’s construction. As she pursued her research, Hébert shared her findings with her Facebook contacts through screenshots or homemade graphics.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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