Suburban Guerrilla

Watch Are U.S. Nuclear Plants Ready for a Fukushima-Like Meltdown? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

And just to bring this Fukushima report a little closer to home, there are 23 of G.E.’s flawed Mark I reactors right here in the good old U.S. of A. Add to that the increasing incidence of earthquakes in unexpected places (caused by the injection of fracking waste fluid into the ground), and we’ve got a “no one could have known!” just waiting to happen here.

Maybe someone should do something?

Yes, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima was sparked by the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, but a Japanese parliamentary report said Thursday the disaster that followed was man-made, and suggested more plants were susceptible.

That last bit is probably the most disturbing angle of the 641-page report, which said Tokyo Electric Power Company didn’t take the damage to its nuclear power plant seriously enough quickly enough, and which “accused Tepco and regulators at the nuclear and industrial safety agency of failing to take adequate safety measures, despite evidence that the area was susceptible to powerful earthquakes and tsunamis,”The Guardian’s Justin McCurry reports. Tepco has argued that the tsunami was a “once-in-a-millennium” event, for which they couldn’t realistically prepare, The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi writes.

The scary thing, though, is that the report found that it could have been the earthquake itself, not just the unusually large tsunami, that damaged the plant and sparked meltdowns in three reactors. “By suggesting that the plant may have sustained extensive damage from the quake — a far more frequent occurrence in Japan — the report in effect casts doubts on the safety of Japan’s entire fleet of nuclear plants,” Tabuchi wrote.

In the end, the report concluded that the disaster was “profoundly man-made” and could have been prevented.

Bookmark It

Continue Reading

I feel so much better now, don’t you?

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling, and energy dependence are overblown.

In a speech Wednesday, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will be able to adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. And dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said.

Tillerson blamed a public that is “illiterate” in science and math, a “lazy” press, and advocacy groups that “manufacture fear” for energy misconceptions in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

[...]

Bookmark It

Continue Reading

Once again, looks the other way when a disaster occurs.

Bookmark It

Continue Reading

Ah, who the hell cares? Can’t we all just go live on the moon?

Bookmark It

Continue Reading

Because who would think that throwing together genetically-modified strains of various strange things with the food supply would be a problem?

(CBS News) ELGIN, Texas – A mysterious mass death of a herd of cattle has prompted a federal investigation in Central Texas.

Preliminary test results are blaming the deaths on the grass the cows were eating when they got sick, reports CBS Station KEYE.

The cows dropped dead several weeks ago on an 80-acre ranch owned by Jerry Abel in Elgin, just east of Austin.

Abel says he’s been using the fields for cattle grazing and hay for 15 years. “A lot of leaf, it’s good grass, tested high for protein – it should have been perfect,” he told KEYE correspondent Lisa Leigh Kelly.

The grass is a genetically-modified form of Bermuda known as Tifton 85 which has been growing here for 15 years, feeding Abel’s 18 head of Corriente cattle. Corriente are used for team roping because of their small size and horns.

“When we opened that gate to that fresh grass, they were all very anxious to get to that,” said Abel.

Three weeks ago, the cattle had just been turned out to enjoy the fresh grass, when something went terribly wrong.

“When our trainer first heard the bellowing, he thought our pregnant heifer may be having a calf or something,” said Abel. “But when he got down here, virtually all of the steers and heifers were on the ground. Some were already dead, and the others were already in convulsions.”

Within hours, 15 of the 18 cattle were dead.

“That was very traumatic to see, because there was nothing you could do, obviously, they were dying,” said Abel.

Preliminary tests revealed the Tifton 85 grass, which has been here for years, had suddenly started producing cyanide gas, poisoning the cattle.

“Coming off the drought that we had the last two years … we’re concerned it was a combination of events that led us to this,” Dr. Gary Warner, an Elgin veterinarian and cattle specialist who conducted the 15 necropsies, told Kelly.

What is more worrisome: Other farmers have tested their Tifton 85 grass, and several in Bastrop County have found their fields are also toxic with cyanide. However, no other cattle have died.

Bookmark It

Continue Reading

This piece from Common Dreams is news of a sort, but few environmentally conscious citizens will be surprised by it:

… Everyone knows that we are facing an unprecedented environmental crisis– right?

Wrong. This news seems never to have gotten to America’s Republican legislators. In the face of these huge and escalating threats, the GOP majority over the last year has voted no fewer than 247 times (nearly once a day for every day the House was in session) to weaken environmental protections that have been in place for decades and to defeat needed legislation.

This according to a report released on Monday by Representatives Henry Waxman, a member the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and Edward Markey a member of the Committee on Natural Resources. They have called the 112th Congress the most anti-environment ever…

Common Dreams is a fine organization, but the blandly satirical tone of the piece is annoying. It’s not as if the current crop of wing-nut Republicans hasn’t heard the “news” regarding climate change, threats to fresh water and food supplies, and so on. For a variety of reasons, they simply don’t care.

Bookmark It

Continue Reading

From Take Part:

A nation of 1.3 billion people, China surpassed the United States as the world’s leading greenhouse gas polluter in 2007. But scientists and policymakers alike have questioned whether data on carbon emissions in China is reliable enough to tell the full story.

A paper published yesterday in Nature Climate Change validates those concerns. China’s carbon emissions could be 20 percent higher than previous estimates, the study suggests, indicating that climate change may be occurring at an even more rapid and dangerous pace than previously thought…

The implications of this finding for global climate change are tremendous—the implications for policy perhaps even more so. The study’s authors warn that reliable national statistics are imperative for “global negotiations about future emission targets.”

Rather than addressing the inconsistencies in their data, the Chinese government earlier today argued that the climate crisis has been caused by developed nations, and that China has already taken appropriate steps to deal with climate change.

Obtaining accurate information on emissions isn’t just a problem in China, experts say.

“Much of the world does not have in place the capabilities and procedures for accurately reporting emissions of greenhouse gases,” wrote Rick Piltz, the founder and director of Climate Science Watch, in an email to TakePart. “This is something that must be improved over time as one important component of developing climate policy and implementing international agreements.”

Rather than addressing the inconsistencies… Isn’t it amazing how certain individual governments — not just China — would rather defend their abuse of the ecosystem than make corrections that could benefit the entire human race? Meanwhile, average temperatures around the world keep rising.

Bookmark It

Continue Reading

Dr. Paul Ehrlich was ridiculed many times over the years for his book, The Population Bomb, in which he argued that the rapidly growing world population is a major threat to our survival. Ehrlich underestimated the amount of people ecosystems can support, but I can’t understand why anyone would argue with his general thesis. From The Raw Story:

Climate change, population growth and environmental destruction could cause a collapse of the ecosystem just a few generations from now, scientists warned on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The paper by 22 top researchers said a “tipping point” by which the biosphere goes into swift and irreversible change, with potentially cataclysmic impacts for humans, could occur as early as this century.

The warning contrasts with a mainstream view among scientists that environmental collapse would be gradual and take centuries…

The factors in today’s equation include a world population that is set to rise from seven billion to around 9.3 billion by mid-century and global warming that will outstrip the UN target of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

The team determined that once 50-90 percent of small-scale ecosystems become altered, the entire eco-web tips over into a new state, characterised especially by species extinctions.

Once the shift happens, it cannot be reversed.

Bookmark It

Continue Reading

How will members of Congress who are owned by Big Oil respond to calls for a “greener” military? This one’s a no-brainer, as they say on sports-talk radio:

… The House GOP included a measure in the defense authorization bill this month prohibiting the Defense Department from buying alternative fuels if they cost more than “traditional fossil fuel.” And the Senate Armed Services Committee last week followed suit with an “even tougher” provision mirroring the House version but also exempts DOD from clean energy standards…

Bookmark It

Continue Reading

This is certainly reassuring, isn’t it? We have all the water in the world, and we can feed people indefinitely!

These days the Colorado River — which starts in the Rocky Mountains and cuts through much of the Southwest — isn’t what it once was. The water of the river has been dammed and divvied up, with more than 40 million people in the region now depending on it for irrigation and municipal supplies. But persistent drought along with the growth in the West has reduced the river’s flow, to the point that these days it usually dries up before it reaches what had been its mouth on the Pacific coast of Mexico. We’re draining the river dry.

And this year is likely to be worse than most. The Southwest is still recovering from a historic drought that lasted much of the previous year, setting off wildfires and severely damaging agricultural output. Snowpack across the Colorado River Basin — important because melting snow in the spring helps feed the river — was less than half normal levels, which made for a terribly dry spring. Water levels at Lake Mead — the man-made reservoir created by the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas — was barely half full at the end of April, and is expected to drop another 14 ft. this summer. By mid-April 61% of the lower 48 states were listed by the U.S. Drought Monitor as being in abnormally dry or drought conditions. Already wildfires are sweeping across New Mexico. The West is set to burn this summer, once again.

But what’s really scary is what long-term changes in water availability and water use could mean for our ability to feed ourselves. That’s the subject of a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which researchers from the University of Texas and the U.S. Geological Survey looked at the level of groundwater depletion in the Central Valley and in the High Plains of the Midwest, home to the country’s breadbasket. They found that during a recent intense drought between 2007 and 2009, farmers in the southern half of California’s Central Valley depleted enough groundwater to fill all of Lake Mead — a rate of depletion that is utterly unsustainable.

Bookmark It

Continue Reading