Category: Environmental

Did Sandy save Occupy?

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

“>Dumb question. Occupy was already out working in the communities that were hit hardest by Sandy. That’s why they were able to leverage those contacts into a relief organization:

Four adrenaline- and caffeine-fueled weeks later, while the question of how the occupy movement’s founding values jive with relief work is still a matter of debate, there is no question how much the mammoth, headless, volunteer-run disaster-relief organization has helped people. Since those very first days, Occupy Sandy has cooked and distributed between 10 and 15 thousand meals each day; enlisted more than 7,000 volunteers; created three major distribution hubs from which it dispatches both workers and supplies; and established dozens of recovery sites in New York and New Jersey. Perhaps most stunning, the group has raised more than $600,000 in cash for its efforts and received more than $700,000 in supplies donated through repurposed online wedding registries.


In a strange way, the storm has helped the Occupy movement, too, providing the insistently non-hierarchical, tech-savvy network of protestors with an opportunity to demonstrate the values it sometimes struggled to articulate during its Zuccotti Park chapter. When it was centered around inequality in broad, theoretical terms, OWS failed to connect with many of the “99 percent” it aimed to represent, particularly the kinds of folks who live in Gerritsen Beach, Staten Island and the other working class areas that are now ground zero for Occupy Sandy.


Post-storm, the occupy movement finds itself in a position many in these neighborhoods might find more palatable. “They’re channeling all their energy into something tangible,” says Susan Healey, a 54-year-old social worker from Bay Ridge who volunteers with the group but didn’t consider herself an “occupier” back in the Zuccotti days. Necessities and the ability to quickly dispatch volunteers to where they’re needed most are apparently worth a thousand banners.


The Occupy movement is also easier to understand in motion. During the encampment, OWS was standing against something—albeit something as widely disregarded as corporate greed. Now, the group is standing for something—or, rather, running, digging, cooking, cleaning, hoisting, and organizing for something—and much of the effort clearly stems from unassailable generosity and altruism. The good they’re doing seems to have answered any remaining questions about what Occupiers meant by standing up for the “99 percent.” It’s also a rebuke to those who dismissed occupiers as lazy, unemployed kids: Yes, many of the volunteers are young, pierced and tattooed, but, clearly, slackers they are not.


By effectively blowing away the polite outer layer that usually masks the extremity of inequality, the storm handed inequality activists an almost eerily perfect illustration of exactly what they see as wrong with our world. New York and New Jersey’s shoreline communities span the economic spectrum, from the fanciest beach resorts to low-income public housing and year-round bungalows. In Far Rockaway, for instance, where Occupy Sandy is still handing out food and clothes, more than a quarter of residents have an income of less than $15,000 a year. Similarly, Coney Island, where occupy volunteers are working out of a church on Neptune Avenue, is one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. Just a mile or two down the beach, houses can cost many millions of dollars. While residents with means have been able to pay for the supplies and help they needed, replace what was ruined, and, most important, get out of the most affected areas when necessary, a huge swath of have-nots was cast into a struggle for survival.

Superstorm

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

A lot of people tried to warn us. Here’s another one:

PHILADELPHIA — In the documentary “Shored Up,” scientists warn that with a rising sea level, a major storm could put New Jersey’s barrier islands underwater and create devastating storm surges. In other words, what happened last month when Superstorm Sandy slammed into New Jersey and New York.


For Ben Kalina, the Philadelphia filmmaker who was nearly finished putting together the documentary when the storm hit, it meant that the ideas in the film that may have sounded far-fetched – or at least, discussions of something that may happen sometime in the future – were suddenly immediate.


“Until Sandy, we were making a film about something much more meditative, really,” Kalina said. “And now the stakes are suddenly much more real.”

Earthquake

~ susie

Yes, I really did feel an earthquake late last night. Funny thing is, people from NJ were talking about it on Twitter several minutes before I felt that now-familiar rumbling through my office chair:

Livestream Climate change march

~ susie ~ 2 Comments



Live streaming by Ustream
LIVESTREAM
Livestreaming provided by We Act Radio

This Fall, Bill McKibben and 350.org are going on tour across America to build the movement we need to face the crisis of climate change.

On Nov. 18th, Bill will be in Washington DC to present the terrifying new math of climate change and unveil a plan for how we can rise to this planetary challenge.

Bill will be joined by friends from across the climate movement and beyond to explain how together we can confront the fossil fuel industry, using lessons from the most successful movements of the past century and the past year of dramatic new actions against the industry across the country.

Doors open at noon. Program starts at 1pm.

Livestream Schedule
→ Do The Math 1-3pm ET
→ March around the White House 3:15-4pm
→ Rally at the Ellipse 4-5pm

Visit math.350.org for more information about the tour and 350.org.

In partnership with Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

Google being evil

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Hey Google, don’t be evil! This is exactly the kind of thing we were afraid would happen without strict net neutrality rules — and lo and behold, here it is: The search engine is helping the gas lobby support fracking by stacking search results with pro-fracking ads that look like search results. And as this Truthout article says, it’s having a negative effect on how peer-reviewed fracking research is perceived by the public:

For more than 17 months, Robert Howarth, an ecology professor at Cornell, has had a Google problem. Howarth is the chief author of an important paper on the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial method of obtaining natural gas. The paper concludes that the practice is not a clean way to extract domestic energy, as many allege, and has an even greater carbon footprint than coal. The paper’s conclusions poke holes in some of the most common talking points used by supporters of fracking and made major headlines, including a large and prominently placed article in The New York Times in April 2011. Howarth, along with one of his co-authors, Anthony Ingraffea, and activist actor Mark Ruffalo, were ranked by Time as among the 100 “people who matter” in 2011.

The paper also got the attention of the gas lobby. Most notably, America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA). Soon after the paper was released, Howarth and others noticed a disturbing phenomenon on Google. Every time Professor Howarth’s name was placed into a Google search engine, the first thing that appeared was an ad from ANGA, devoted strictly to hampering the credibility of Howarth’s research. The page was listed as an ad but at a quick glance, it simply looked like the top search result. As of the time of this writing, late October, the ad still displayed that way.

The ad, and the ability of industry to use Google ads for these purposes, raises important questions about the role that Google and other prominent search engines will have on important political and scientific discourse. Do Google and other companies have a responsibility to the public to consider the way their search engine can be used to advance the interests of certain industries? This method naturally empowers wealthy industries to dominate Google search results given their massive resources and vested financial interests in the way in which science is discussed in the public sphere. And the company does ultimately answer to shareholders and not to the public at large. Given this reality, what can we expect from Google and other corporate giants of the Internet world when it comes to providing valuable information that serves the public?

The content of the ad includes attacks that Howarth is “not credentialed to do the kind of chemical analysis required for this field of study,” his research is “not well documented” and his conclusions “extreme.” They also argue that the vast majority of scientists are skeptical of Howarth’s conclusions.

In an interview with Truthout, Howarth meticulously refuted the statements in the ad, saying they are “very misleading” and argues that, contrary to what is portrayed in the ad, “many more scientists agree with and support our research than disagree with it.” Howarth claims the ad has been alarmingly effective at shaping the debate on the issue and disrupting his career.
Continue reading “Google being evil” →

Ugh

~ susie

We’re going to have to get used to this sort of thing, since no one at the top seems to feel any sense of urgency about global warming. But hey, how about that Petraeus sex scandal?

BP to pay record fine

~ odd man out ~ 3 Comments

This is good, but when will ex-CEO Tony Hayward and other BP big shots be held personally accountable, i.e., charged with crimes? From Huffington Post:

BP said Thursday that it will pay $4.5 billion in a settlement with the U.S. government over the massive 2010 oil spill and will plead guilty to felony counts related to the deaths of 11 workers and lying to Congress.

The figure includes nearly $1.3 billion in criminal fines – the largest such penalty ever – along with payments to several government entities.

A person familiar with the settlement said two BP employees will also face manslaughter charges over the deaths of 11 people in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that triggered the massive spill. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter on the record and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Another storm

~ susie

But probably not a big one, and probably it will stay out to sea:

The Atlantic is quiet, with no threat areas to discuss. An area of low pressure is predicted to develop just north of Bermuda on Wednesday, and the GFS model predicts that this low could become a subtropical cyclone as moves north-northeastwards out to sea late in the week.


The long-range models are in increasing agreement that a Nor’easter will develop near the North Carolina coast on Sunday, then move north to northeastwards early next week. High winds, heavy rain, and coastal flooding could affect the mid-Atlantic coast and New England coasts next Monday and Tuesday due to this storm, but it appears likely that the Nor’easter will stay farther out to sea than the last Nor’easter and have less of an impact on the region devastated by Sandy. Ocean temperatures off the coast of North Carolina were cooled by about 4°F (2.2°C) due to the churning action of Hurricane Sandy’s winds, but are still warm enough at 22 – 24°C to potentially allow the Nor’easter to acquire some subtropical characteristics. I doubt the storm would be able to become a named subtropical storm, but it could have an unusual amount of heavy rain if it does become partially tropical. The Nor’easter is still a long ways in the future, and there is still a lot of uncertainty on where the storm might go.

Flood insurance

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Lots of things go into making the program inadequate. One of those things is that the premiums are based on flood maps that haven’t been updated in decades. I saw this as a reporter. The state leg required updated stormwater reports for each watershed (passed the law in 1987), but counties refused to update them because the developers didn’t want them to do it. And so on.

This is an opportunity to update the program, and I hope the feds don’t fall apart under the weight of the politics. If anything, these storms are going to get worse, and we need to start moving people out of harm’s way.