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No Fracking Way!
18 AprThey’re at it again.
The New York Times informs us that “Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats.” The wells are being drilled to tap reserves of natural gas contained in deep rock formation. The chemicals are injected along with water and sand to release the gas. The process is known as hydraulic fracturing, aka hydrofracking, aka fracking.
Frankly, this sounds like one of those deals where they don’t really know what they’re doing. So you try this and that and, if it works, it works, and you keep on trying:
Some ingredients mixed into the hydraulic fracturing fluids were common and generally harmless, like salt and citric acid. Others were unexpected, like instant coffee and walnut hulls, the report said. Many ingredients were “extremely toxic,” including benzene, a known human carcinogen, and lead.
Instant coffee and walnut shells! Shall we try a little castor oil? Maybe a little ipecac? How about some eye of newt? Toe of frog? Then comes the wool of bat and tongue of dog.
Maybe dance a little jig while they’re at it.
Throttled by the military-industrial complex
14 AprIke got it right
And he saw it and called, yes in 1960 when he left the Presidency. But James Ledbetter informs us on Blogginheads.tv, that he was aware of the problem much earlier. Here’s an excerpt from a speech he gave in 1953:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
Will ever escape the grasp of this terrible logic, which continues to impoverish us?
The New Octopus
Big Coal Kills a Town
13 AprWhich is what Big Coal does. Kills mountains and towns and poisons the rivers and the skies.
Dan Barry of The New York Times tells the story of Lindytown West Virginia:
But the coal that helped to create Lindytown also destroyed it. Here was the church; here was its steeple; now it’s all gone, along with its people. Gone, too, are the surrounding mountaintops. To mine the soft rock that we burn to help power our light bulbs, our laptops, our way of life, heavy equipment has stripped away the trees, the soil, the rock — what coal companies call the “overburden.”
Now, the faint, mechanical beeps and grinds from above are all that disturb the Lindytown quiet, save for the occasional, seam-splintering blast.
Wouldn’t you know it, Massy Energy’s been at work.
Severity of Fukushima on Par with Chernobyl
12 AprWill it break the scale? The New York Times reports:
But at a separate news conference, an official from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that the radiation release from Fukushima could, in time, surpass levels seen in 1986.
“The radiation leak has not stopped completely, and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl,” said Junichi Matsumoto, a nuclear executive for the company.
Sunday Links
10 AprThe Atlantic: Japan Earthquake: One Month Later, 41 photos.
BBS: “New York is a major loser and Reykjavik a winner from new forecasts of sea level rise in different regions.”
Knight Foundation: Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril, and Potential of Networks. A Webinar on 20 April at 2 PM EDT. Download full report (PDF). “Rapid advances in digital media and technology are changing how we connect to information and each other. The way we engage in public dialogue, coordinate, solve problems—all of it is shifting. New networks are emerging everywhere. It’s exciting—and frightening. What is this new network-centric world? What does it mean for community change?”
LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art: “New York graffiti legend Lee Quinones has organized a team of street artists to do a new mural on the exterior wall facing Temple Street. Scaffolding is up now, with a couple of images in progress, and work is expected to be completed next week, before the April 17 opening of the “Art in the Streets” exhibition at the Geffen.”
Discussion of David Brooks oped at Marginal Revolution: Brooks says Dems are unwilling to ask voters to pay for the programs they want. “Until they find a way to pay for the programs they support, they will not be serious players in this game. They will have no credible plans and will be in an angry but permanent retreat.”
Thom Hartman, at Common Dreams: “With or without a government shutdown, Republicans have already won the debate on our nation’s budget. Why? Because the corporate media is on their side. Make the wealthy pay their fair share.”
Green Blog: “According to Gore nuclear energy is not the answer to our problems because it’s dirty, too expensive, unsafe and that it poses a threat to world peace.”
Where'd the oil go?
8 AprA mashup of video coverage of the ‘end game’ of the Gulf Oil disaster. These people obviously don’t know what they’re talking about, or are deceiving themselves and everyone else.
Courtesy of ChangingTheEndgame.
Radioactive Currents off the Coast of Japan
6 AprMother Jones has a nice article about radioactivity off Japan’s coast, with lots of helpful graphics.
The good news is that the powerhouse of the Kuroshio Current—a humongous western boundary current like the Gulf Stream—appears to be forming a kind of firewall keeping the contamination away from Tokyo’s coast and funneling it east.
In conclusion:
Whatever pathways the Fukushima poisons take, they will certainly alter the springtime blossoming of Japan’s ocean, starting with the phytoplankton and working up the foodweb.As for the effects on the rest of the world ocean, it’s a matter of how much, how far, and for how long Fukushima’s newborn radionuclides go sailing.
Art and Civil Society in Tokugawa Japan
6 AprWith an extension to graffiti in late 20th Century
I first published this in The Valve back in 2007 under the title “Tokugawa Blogging: Best of 2006.” I’m republishing it here because it relates to the role Transition Teams are playing in moving our societies to a new, more sustainable, and more human way of life.
Back in September of 2006 I was looking through the current issue of Science and saw a book review (requires subscription) entitled “Through Art to Association in Japanese Politics” by one Christena Turner. Given my interest in manga and anime, the title caught my attention. That Science was reviewing a book on such a topic, that really caught my attention. So I read the review, of Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Amazon.com) by Eiko Ekegami.
According to Turner, Eikegami argued that
Japanese sociability is characterized by an extensive repertoire of practices for handling the problem of how to interact with strangers. Somewhere between friends and enemies lies the domain of strangers. Somewhere between intimacy and danger lies the domain of civility. “The degree of ‘strangership’ may be an indication of the degree of civility in a given society,” she claims. Civility permits ordinary people to be confident in interactions with those of unknown or different backgrounds, making it possible to form social bonds in the absence of friendship or kinship.
This is important because modern democracies requires a civil realm where individuals can form voluntary associations “outside the realms of both the political institutions of the state and the intimate ties of the family.” Ikegami argued
that networks of people engaged in interactive artistic and cultural pursuits created the bonds of “civility without civil society” that prepared the population of pre-modern Japan for its strikingly rapid transformation into one of the first and most successful modern nations outside of the West. Art created politics when participation in aesthetic networks taught people technologies of association among strangers that eased the transition toward institutions of a modern political economy.
That had me hooked. Not only would this book serve as “deep background” for my interest in manga and anime – “deep” because it’s about a period, roughly 1600 to 1850, well before the emergence of those forms – but it also promised to be a volume that argued for the social value of art on an empirical basis, as opposed to asserting ideals. Since I’d already argued that it was music that made apes into humans, I was eager to read a more empirical, less speculative, argument broadly, if only loosely, consistent with that. Finally, it seemed that Ikegami’s argument might be generally useful in thinking about how social networks function in the larger society.
Truth and Traditions 