The Storytelling We Need to Rebuild Belief in Government

/64 Comments/in , , , , , , , /by

After Trump spent a year destroying government, there have been several attempts in recent days to tell the story of what Trump took away with his assault on government. This is a story we need to tell, and tell far better, in the new year if we want to hold Trump accountable and not just reverse the damage he did, but use his destruction as a way to rebuild better.

Consider this WaPo story, “The year Trump broke the federal government.”

It tells the stories of hundreds of Federal workers, including those who left and those who stayed through the DOGE and Russ Vought massacres. It is great! But it also only mirrors the full story (and potentially buried in a holiday weekend).

It very poignantly captures the cruelty of Trump’s firings, such as this anecdote about a woman killing herself just after Elon Musk’s Five Things emails started.

In Virginia, the family of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services worker Caitlin Cross-Barnet checked her into a mental health facility. She was struggling with despair after a difficult hysterectomy, and because she felt Trump was unraveling the government. In daily calls to her husband, she asked about changes to the federal workforce. Six days after the “What did you do” email, she killed herself.

While it describes many benefits shuttered, it doesn’t describe what happened to the people affected by these losses.

What happened, for example, when those working a suicide prevention line could no longer offer their clients privacy?

Veterans who called to confess thoughts of suicide could hear people speaking in the background.

What happened when LGBTQ+ veterans stopped showing up for counseling appointments?

The psychologist’s LGBTQ+ patients stopped showing up to their appointments.

What is the impact of rising rates of mental illnesses among service members, now left neglected in the wake of another firing?

Another morning gone with no chance to turn to his studies of rising rates of mental illness among service members. Or his proposals, languishing for almost a year now, on how the government could drive those down.

What happened when the government fired a bunch of people focusing on educational access for Native Americans (even while moving health experts to Indian Health Services)?

Her job was helping administer grants to support Native American students. Then she remembered. She’d once served as president of an affinity group for Native Americans and Alaskans at the department.

You might ask what happened to the people Erica Hagen might be harmed in advance of her firing.

She thought about all the frozen programs she had helped oversee: One treating and preventing HIV. Another educating children in rural areas. A third reducing plastic in the oceans.

But a number of people have told the story of what happened with Marco Rubio cut USAID, both in sheer terms — the hundreds of thousands who’ve already died and the 14 million who may one day die, but also the children dying of hunger in Kenya or the cholera outbreak in South Sudan.

What happened to those who might benefit from sustainable energy programs that got cut?

At the Energy Department, one worker prepared memos arguing that his projects would cut costs for American homes and businesses. Someone decided to cancel many anyway. So he, like other employees, began deleting: Any mention of “carbon.” “Sustainability.” The word “green.”

What about FDA inspections that didn’t happen? Who got sick?

A Food and Drug Administration staffer couldn’t purchase dry ice or environmental swabs, nor pay the highway tolls that safety inspectors incurred driving for work.

One I’m self-interested in, as a former Great Lakes resident, what happened when they cut the carp program?

In the Midwest, union leader Colin Smalley watched his Army Corps of Engineers unit dwindle. Among the departed: An employee so knowledgeable about rock blasting that the government brought him back the first time he tried to retire. A staffer who was spearheading a novel project to stun invasive carp with electric shocks. How, Smalley asked his wife, could they ever replace someone who knew how to electrify rivers?

The answer, I think, is that this is one of the few things Gretchen Whitmer won by normalizing Trump.

The story describes how Trump’s cuts delayed efforts to prepare Colorado  for fire season — ostensibly something Trump cares about. But did it exacerbate fires or did we get lucky?

In a Colorado branch of the Forest Service, one man was designated purchaser for the entire office. Anyone who wanted to buy horse fodder or irrigation pipes had to wait until the man returned from weeks-long firefighting trips. The new system meant staff were a week late buying chainsaw fuel, delaying the thinning of flammable forest brush. “In 15 years, I have never seen us so unprepared for fire season,” the local fire management officer told staff at a meeting, according to one worker in attendance.

The nation’s parks and forests are rotting from neglect. What does that look like?

In Lander, Wyoming, three Forest Service retirees noticed fences tilting over, docks slipping into lakes, mountain roads caving inward from water pressure.

Like the USAID cuts, this is story that is already getting told elsewhere; it is a story that is generating a lot of localized anger.

This great video from Molly Jong-Fast, which includes a bunch of great regulators — like Lina Khan, Alvaro Bedoya, Doha Mekki, and Elizabeth Wilkins — who got fired addresses many of these impact questions.

I’m a big fan of all these people and Khan (who’ll have a platform working for Mayor Mamdani) can explain the import of regulation to anyone. All of these fired experts are exceptional at explaining how overturning regulation harms people, like construction workers or taxi drivers or renters or chicken farmers.

But imagine a video that started from one or another harm that mentioned repeatedly — such as the harms, including encouraging suicide, caused by bots and AI. That’s a story that would resonate with mothers, as opposed to primarily Democrats who want to strategize how to reverse Trump’s destruction.

To be sure: at 39:00, Wilkins talks about how important story telling is. She describes that we need to explain all this in terms of villains. “Tell the story of who is the bad guy in this story, who is the hero of this story.” But we also need to invite every American into the story, because they’ve lost something from Trump’s assault on government.

One (very) simple example really resonated with me, at least. In a piece explaining the value  of NCAR to Americans in advance of Trump’s assault on it, It’s just a list of eight things that are not (as Russ Vought targeted) “climate alarmism.”

In accessibly wonky terms, it translates some of the things NCAR does — like making flights safer — into things people care about.

As a child, I remember hearing news stories about commercial airplanes crashing due to wind shear. Microbursts, which are localized downburst of sinking air associated with thunderstorms, were often the culprit. The Low-Level Wind Shear Alert System developed by NCAR researchers has helped to virtually eliminate microburst-related wind shear crashes. Such advances, along with Terminal Doppler Radar, are examples of the R&D machine at work for our benefit even as you may not realize it as your plane takes off or lands safely. Additionally, many of the computer algorithms used to alert pilots and airline managers about turbulence were developed at NCAR. Likewise, NCAR’s aircraft icing products have been a staple in the aviation industry and distributed by NOAA’s Aviation Weather Center.

Regular fliers are already outraged by the continued enshittification of air travel, including Crash Sean Duffy’s reversal of consumer protection rules imposed by Pete Buttigieg.

Here’s one aspect, turbulence, that Trump is actively planning to make worse.

Again, I think all of these are really good stories. I’m just looking ahead — not to elections, or even to what Khan will do as a key aide to the Mayor of New York — but to ways we can better tell stories about what Trump took away, about what Trump stole from the American people, so we can hold him accountable.

Share this entry

NOAA: The Biggest Little Agency in America

/52 Comments/in , , , /by

What We are Quietly Losing in All the Tumult

Last week the ghouls of DOGE came to gut NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) by firing all the probationary employees, because they were the easiest to fire. It was terrible, but it won’t be their last visit.

I wanted to take a moment to focus on this small and amazing agency because in all the chaotic headlines, outrageous speeches, and feral conduct, it’s easy to miss how consequential the Trumpist destruction of NOAA will be, if no one can stop it. Americans, and to a degree the whole world, depend on the nerdy, devoted folks at NOAA to keep the fish biting, the crops abundant, the land peaceful, and their homes and businesses safe and dry.

I’ve often thought of them as some of the wonderful unsung heroes of the federal government. I learned about NOAA in college. We worked with their oceanography data, pulled down from a satellite to a 486 computer into our little marine science lab in 1993. All their data, then as now, was freely available to anyone in the world. Scientists, students, and even enthusiasts still dig into their archives all the time, and the people at NOAA often look for ways to make their data more useful to anyone who wants it. It has made life easier on this planet in uncountable little ways we’ll never know about.

I don’t want to focus on the most famous parts of NOAA, the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, not because they’re not important. They are incredibly important: key to saving lives and property, and keeping people informed during emergencies. But these are the two parts of NOAA you most likely already know about. The National Weather Service is the best forecaster and weather analysis agency on this little blue marble we call home, and we see its work every time we look at local news and weather. NWS data populates the various apps on our phones, sends out warnings, and appears on our local news stations.

You also probably know about the National Hurricane Center. That’s the website and associated services that we turn to in hurricane season, to watch and wait to see the fates of the gulf states and the Eastern seaboard every year. It is the high drama of global weather. It attracts the news, storm chasers and media audiences.

Hurricane season, unlike tornadoes, storms, or the long slow violence of climate change, has a ready-for-TV narrative. The danger forms over the sea and creeps nearer and nearer to where people live, and no one is ever quite sure how it will turn out until the danger hits land. This part of weather forecasting even has its own mediagenic hero squad — the hurricane hunters who fly through the eye and eye wall of hurricanes in beefy planes, letting NOAA gather data that can’t be gathered any other way.

You probably know that NOAA has weather satellites. NOAA operates 18 satellites in total. Some track American and global weather, but they also track fires, desertification, drought, heat, tree cover, and more values besides — across the whole world.

But there’s so many more parts you may not know.

In the US, NOAA sent up around 76,000 weather balloons a year equipped with radiosondes, a instrument that gathers and transmits data for NWS upper air network, they’re creating a long term archive of weather, also gathering data that can’t be gathered with cameras in space. They’re even keeping track of cosmic rays as part of the radiosonde telemetry. In theory, that means the first signs of a cosmic event like a supernova could reach earth via NOAA first. Either way, their data is invaluable for many other federal agencies, as well as the public, and private businesses. But with the cuts that have already happened, not as many of those balloons are going up.

NOAA has always worked hand in glove with their more famous cousin, NASA. Though NOAA looks inward more than outward to space, as NASA does. Between the two of them, they run most of the USA’s non-military satellite and sensor systems, gathering data — but also making it public.

But in many ways, NOAA has more to do than NASA, or even many other more famous parts of the federal government.

So Much More Than A Weather Forecast

NOAA’s job is to keep you alive. We get this when it’s hurricanes, tornadoes, flash floods — that kind of thing. But they help the global system in so many more ways that are less obvious. NOAA’s satellite data plays an important role in precision agriculture, where farmers use satellite data and weather information to time and place their crops for the best possible yield. It’s good for the farmers, but also it’s good for the global food system, Data for farmers makes agriculture predictable and efficient, keeping prices low and cupboards stocked around the world. In a globalized food system, that means less political unrest, less war, and more healthy children.

NOAA is the agency that monitors and studies El Niño, more precisely known at ENSO, which is a climate pattern in the equatorial Pacific ocean that affects much of global weather. This information is used all over the world to plan for crops, water allocation, typhoons, hurricanes and more. They study the AMOC,( Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). This part of the global water circulation is of particular concern right now. If it fails (due to climate change) the Eastern Seaboard could drown and much of Europe could freeze. We don’t know how likely that is or what we could do about it, but NOAA is working the problem.

The NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) division of NOAA (pronounced “nymphs”) uses both ship and satellite surveys to monitor and protect fisheries, to keep them healthy and commercially viable. This is a global task, because fish don’t really care about your country’s EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) or other applicable human laws. NMFS tell people to stop fishing sometimes, and tell them where to fish at other times, using surveys, satellite data and other fisheries studies. This is about making sure that we can feed ourselves, and that the fish will be there next year, too. Fisheries management isn’t just a resource management task — it’s peace-building.

Fish and seafood account for 6.2% of the world’s protein consumption, and it’s often all the majority of protein in poor coastal communities. When fisheries are stressed or even collapse, conflict inevitably follows. Like increasing crop yields, protecting fisheries makes the world a little more peaceful. NOAA even monitors the Mississippi’s levels and behavior, safeguarding the cheapest and easiest trade route to the majority of the country. (the Mississippi is maintained by the Army Corp of Engineers, but this relationship between the agencies is just one of the many ways American infrastructure reaches out and finds the hand of NOAA there to help.)

NOAA is studying microplastics in whale guts, how to save coral reefs (and therefore also prevent another kind of fisheries collapse), saving sea turtles, and oyster bed restoration that could help preserve food and infrastructure on both of our coasts.  They generate heat maps to help people survive the growing threat of dangerous heat events. They monitor the oceans to help enforce the Marine Mammal Protection Act, protecting cetaceans (along with other marine mammals) from habitat destruction and human interference.

Even if you didn’t like whales, (and go get a therapist if that’s true, because who hates a whale?) they are a keystone species, and without them a lot of fisheries around the world would collapse. Whale poop is the great fertilizer of the global ocean. We know that, in part, because of NOAA research.

All of this, plus educational programs, ecological science, all your weather prediction, hurricane monitoring, and tornado warnings, for .11% of the federal budget. It’s one of the wonders of the data world. But the cost isn’t why DOGE and the Trumpists will want to destroy NOAA. There’s very little waste, fraud, and abuse here. There’s very few things that could even be mistaken for waste, fraud and abuse, even if you squinted as hard as you could.

What NOAA has is a truth the GOP doesn’t want anyone to see. NOAA is one of the foremost research agencies in the field of Climate Change. They collect much of the vital data, but also tell the story of anthropogenic climate change, well, and deeply, with receipts.

Here is NOAA’s mortal sin: their message is comprehensive, clear, and backed up with many, many studies. NOAA is easy to access for anyone in the world. This little slice of the federal government is telling on our crimes against nature, and the GOP doesn’t like that.

Without miraculous intervention, NOAA may be doomed in the coming weeks and months. I hope, and expect, that the people at NOAA are archiving its vast trove of potentially civilization-preserving records they’ve collected over the decades, to keep it from being destroyed by this insane GOP. I also hope companies and other governments will scoop up these people and get them back to their work — the work of preserving our comfortable Holocene civilizations on Planet Earth.

Science isn’t Transactional, and Data Doesn’t Make Deals.

Climate Change doesn’t care about the GOP’s political goals. This agency may end up dying for Trump’s insane vision of how the world works- and the damage is already arriving. There simply is no room in the Republican version of the world for forces beyond their control. But at this point, climate chaos is baked into the world as we have made it. Not all the might of the United States can win this fight with facts.

They have already fired the probationary workers, and anyone else who was legally vulnerable. The weather forecast part of NOAA’s mission is already being damaged. The Trump regime will be back to enact a political murder, trying to stop a global climate crisis by killing the messenger. But more fucking around has never made for less finding out, a fact that Trump will be demonstrating to us for years to come.

Share this entry

The Miami Collapse [Updated!]

/257 Comments/in , , , , /by

Will not be overly long on this, but have been saddened and fascinated with the Champlain collapse in Miami since news of it first surfaced. Here is a New York Times report. Here is an absolutely harrowing tick tock, with video and photos, from The Washington Post. Seriously, make sure to look at the WaPo piece.

The Champlain South building just pancaked. The World Trade Center buildings had the instigation of jet fuel laced missiles flying into them, this did not. Nor did the Hard Rock collapse in New Orleans, which was under construction and never certified nor occupied. This is different. Only four are reported dead as of this posting, but nearly 160 missing, so the number will definitely grow. Rescue efforts well underway, but it seems bleak.

This Champlain building was the “south” one. There is a “north” one that is seemingly siamesed and of the same design, materials and construct. The local mayor wants to evacuate it. And, that would be no problem, frankly I’d already be gone if I lived there.

But the problem with water in Miami and the Florida coast has been foreshadowed for a very long time. The sea level is rising. The ground is wet. This building was, apparently, built to code only 40 years ago and was in the process of “repairs”. But would “repairs” have stopped this? Am inclined to think no. So, then, what is the status of all the other buildings in that line of the relevant water table?

Also, pools belong in the ground, not on decks.

Since it is “Infrastructure Week” yet again, maybe some thought ought be given to water tables, both growing in places like Florida, and shrinking in places like Arizona and California.

UPDATE: Am going to add in this comment from Pete, and I think it exactly right:

“I am not a structural engineer nor a geologist, but I have lived in Southeast FL all of my 70 years and witnessed the ever higher and closer together high rises along the coast and even more inland Miami since the 70s on.

I think it is important to know the geology of the Florida peninsula:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Florida
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Platform

Forget the underlying Florida Platform which would be bedrock that most might think of. It’s 10,000 feet down and you aren’t drilling down that far and filling up a hole that deep with concrete and rebar. So you drill into the karst limestone layer for which the record drill depth is a recent 170+ feet for a newer 57 story building in Miami adjacent to Biscayne Bay.

Limestone is the sinkhole gift that keeps on giving especially in central Florida – just ask Jim White,

Furthermore, in a pique of insanity places like Surfside as well as the Las Olas area of Ft. Lauderdale – about 40 miles North – are actually partially soft fill reclaimed wetlands. Ft. Lauderdale circa the 1920s That’s right – the build site is a lot of man made land.

I would not and cannot say that is relevant here, but in Las Olas settlement and the rising sea level coming UP through the porous land causes constant water main failure, sewage line failure, and flooding. Flooding due to water being forced UP is a major increasing problem in Southern Miami Beach.

It is reported that Champlain Towers, built in 1981, had been “sinking” mm per year since the 1990s.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9723841/Map-report-predicting-condo-collapse-reveals-Miami-Beach-spots-risk-collapse.html

As in most major disasters it’s not just one error but a series of errors and missed opportunities to avert the disaster that get missed – or ignored.”

Share this entry

Light Cycles

/6 Comments/in , /by

In 8 minutes, 18 seconds light travels from the sun to Earth. In that time, roughly 25 million in national debt accrues. Somewhere around 157,806 tonnes of CO2 is released into the atmosphere. 113,046 years of global human experience goes by in 8 minutes, 18 seconds. Around 900 people die — a Jonestown Tragedy, if such a thing could be a unit.

Here is how to make the modern world:

Begin with light, born billions years ago at the heart of the sun. It wanders for untold time around the vast interior of our star, bumping into this and that in a world of unfathomable heat and pressure. A very small bit of that light, called a photon, meanders its way slowly past the solar surface, and starts a frenetic journey 93 million miles aimed at us. It experiences no time in all of its existence, but for us, it takes 8 minutes and 18 seconds to reach the atmospheric skin of our world. It avoids scattering in our atmosphere, or bouncing off the water back into space, or striking dead land, and instead falls on the outstretched leaf of a plant. Plants have always been the mechanism of transformation, the way sunlight energy is banked on Earth. Photosynthesis absorbs the moment of light out of the free flight between worlds and turns it into a chemical instrument.

Take crushed Jurassic ferns, the algae, the microscopic floating forests and creatures of the Devonian sea, the Carboniferous forest, and everything since, save them from being eaten by bacteria. Cook and compress them for an incomprehensible time under geologic weight, stored deep underground. Strings of hydrocarbons in their decayed bodies draw together into tighter, longer, and more pure clumps of blackened sunlight. This is fossil fuel, the borrowed and condensed light energy of past eons. Let it rest for hundreds of millions of years.

Wait for the rise of humans, who search out this stuff with an insatiable lust. And the rest — our civilizations, the mechanisms of our lives, from the machines of the industrial revolution to the construction of the LA freeways, the painting of Guernica, landing on the moon, and the building of Beijing — all of that happens in a geological eye blink.

For a half a billion years the Earth banked sunlight this way,letting the corpses of fallen life slowly simplify towards being only: hydrogen, surrounding and bound to carbon, and the energy of the sun thusly contained. It seems simple, but there’s a reason societies are addicted to it, it’s amazing stuff. The energy density of fossil fuel is such that a teaspoon could run an iPhone for a couple of months. We stare impatiently at a pump, tap our feet, glance at the time, while moving more energy in 3 minutes than our ancestors would harness in their lives. We are greedy for this energy. We use our best science to pull it out of the ground, borrowing the past’s light to make more of our world, and more of us to inhabit it. We betray each other for it, kill each other, despoil our land and sea for it. Dale Pendell, the mad and brilliant philosopher/poet of drugs, commented on fossil fuels in his book Pharmako/Poeia, namely, the practice of huffing them. In all of his Pharmako series, spanning a range of drugs that baffle, bless, and destroy the mind, the fumes of fossil fuels were the only substance he ever seemed to condemn. Whatever the high may be, he explained the practitioners of huffing don’t have the faculties left to speak of it. Fossil fuels, the normally ecumenical Pendell explained, always lead to irrevocable destruction of mind and body.

But if we are addicted to this thing that kills us, what we do with it is amazing too. We make the old sunlight into batteries, light and light switches. We move giant steam turbines with it. Plastic is made of ancient sunlight. We use it to make fertilizers and feed billions. We pour it into planes, we spoon it into our children’s mouths, we cover their heads with Devonian sunlight to keep their skin safe from new sunlight. The way we use fossil fuels is very human; we have always burned the past to make the future. But we didn’t create this situation, we found it. We can’t create or destroy anything in this equation; we move it around to the benefit and detriment of the momentarily extant creatures. The past Earth is our creditor, with the constant and rich deposits that got us into this mess. The Earth built this wealth for billions of years. Then we came along, the trust fund species that’s hooked, not listening, and blowing the family fortune on a suicidal bender.

Though as an energy source unsustainable, the process by which nature banks energy is by no means halted. Undoubtedly with the passage of sufficient time, plenty of our bodies, our children, dogs, cats, and houseplants will become part of the rich, anonymous hydrocarbon slurry. There’s nothing we could do that would really change that in the long run. We’re just digging it up and burning it much faster than it forms.

We love to talk of innovation, consumption, excess, and even entitlement when it comes to our energy use. But in truth, physics puts us in our place. We will never create a technology that can consume or create energy, only ever more ways to move it around. With every move a price is paid to entropy, the ultimate accounting of loss, the ebbing away of vital heat. With every transformation of energy, Mr. Entropy takes his fee, and moves infinitesimally closer to the quietude of universal death. The tax he puts on fossil fuels is immense.

 

 

In 8 minutes, 18 seconds, around 2,000 babies are born. 45218 barrels of oil are imported into America. We pay $3,074,824 for that 8 minutes, 18 seconds. During that time, more energy will hit the Earth in the form of solar photons than we use in a year.

 

 

 

 

No one is sure how much biomass goes into the earth to become more fossil fuel these days, though as we deforest and burn the world, it lessens. It might be as much as Somalia’s energy use every year, around 200 gigawatts. Every year we take 12 terawatts back out of the earth, most of the energy use of everything else, according to Saul Griffith, a MacArther Genius and expert on energy generation and consumption. He has an air of palpable frustration when he talks about fossil fuels. “It’s absolutely a Ponzi scheme against our kids,” said Griffith.

Right now we act like we are desperately running out of cheap energy, and we fight like starved children over fossil fuel, while we are bathed so constantly in the raw energy that made it we can barely imagine it being useful. “There is a shitload more than we need. 86,000 terrawatts hit the surface every year, and we’re too stupid or too lazy to use it,” said Griffith. A single day’s light brings us around 48,000 times as much energy as we use that day.

We don’t capture much of it, and in America, little is planned to change that. Our energy infrastructure is 30, 40, or in some places, 50 years old, and often meant to be replaced a decade or more ago. As we extend the lifetime of those old plants, we artificially lower the cost of energy. “It’s an infrastructure debt we’re ignoring,” says Griffith, “You can only get this far into monetary debt by using energy badly.”

Through heroic measures we can change all this. For a mere 4 trillion dollars, says Griffith, we could achieve energy independence in America. That seems like a lot of money, and it is. But such an effort is not without precedent, if we eliminated fossil fuel subsidies and instituted a jobs program with the money saved, subsidized the education we need, we could be well on our way in a few years, gradually lessening our dose, taking in something more pure, more healthy.

The estimate for the world is much harder to get. Sampling between different countries’ studies on energy independence, and Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi’s plan for full renewables by 2050, it’s perhaps 80 to 100 trillion dollars. This is still a bargain, because we would still have a world we can comfortably inhabit. Money at this level is not a real thing. It’s just human time and resources, focused on a goal.

The estimates for what we spend globally to subsidize the fossil fuel industry vary from $200 billion (OECD) to $5 trillion, (IMF), and none of those figures include what we pay for it. The more renewable energy caduceus cult build, the less we have to pay for fossil fuels, the less we have to dig them out of the ground.

Building a new system of energy for the world is the work of a generational at least, but right now we are living through a global pandemic of unemployment, and in particular youth unemployment. They are the people with the most to lose in a future of energy crisis, climate change, extinction, and shitty air. Nearly 75 million young people are unemployed, a huge portion of them near the very deserts from where we could get our best solar energy.

We could use our last hit of fossil fuel to build a new energy miracle. We could clean up our mess, and employ our world in a meaningful shared project while we’re at it.

We could end the Ponzi scheme before it kills our children. We could bask in the sun without the 100 million year wait. The sun would support us, for billions of years, paying all of our bills. The sun could make us rich beyond our mere dreams. But we don’t, because we believe it’s too expensive, too unrealistic a project. As if the rest of this was realistic. We keep burning the trust fund while the world around us slowly dies of it, drowning in a poisonous soup of hot air and acid oceans. We are making a choice every day we wait, about who we are and what we choose to be. It’s a terrible choice, but not without its own glories.

At the end of his meditation on the huffing of fossil fuels, Pendall concluded: “The ecologist Howard Odum once quipped that the evolutionary purpose of human beings was to release all the carbon locked up under the ground back into the biosphere. If true, our mission will soon be accomplished. That it be a suicide mission in no way detracts from its grandeur or heroism.” Ours is an amazing suicide,  we’ve done so much so fast. I don’t, I can’t, regret that humanity has made civilization. But right now, it’s still a suicide mission.

In 8 minutes, 18 seconds, you can listen to most of American Pie. A person can walk .42 of a mile at a normal human pace. That person can look around them and see more energy falling on their world than they could use in their lifetime. In any 8 minutes, 18 seconds, waiting for the next rain of photons from the ever-giving sun, any one of us could decide this world is worth saving.

My work for Emptywheel is supported by my wonderful patrons on Patreon. You can find out more, and support my work, at Patreon.

Sources

https://www.treasurydirect.gov
https://www.ipcc.ch
http://www.ecology.com/
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fossil-fuel-subsidies-cost-5-trillion-annually-and-worsen-pollution/
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15105.pdf
https://www.oecd.org/environment/support-to-fossil-fuels-remains-high-and-the-time-is-ripe-for-change.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_walking_speed

With much thanks to Simon Quellen Field

 

 

Share this entry

Friday: Fusion

/7 Comments/in , , , /by

In this roundup: Dakota Access Pipeline news, Hawaiian sovereignty and other indigenous peoples news, the death of space art, and fusion jazz.

Read more →

Share this entry

Thursday: Another Grungey Anniversary Observed

/35 Comments/in , , , /by

In this roundup: Recalling 25 years of Nirvana’s Nevermind, petro-pipeline-economic challenges, lead poisoning, anthrax, and cops gone wild. Read more →

Share this entry

Tuesday: Change of Pace

/12 Comments/in , , , , /by

I need a break — a change of pace after the last several day’s nonstop doom-and-gloom observing what has become an American version of the Day of the Dead. Add the nauseating bullshit misogynist circus piling on the “church faint” by a post-menopausal woman wearing too much clothing in humid weather while recovering from pneumonia. It’s unrelenting ridiculousness which can only be broken by the injection of dark humor.

I like this young director Almog Avidan Antonir’s body of short works, including this little zombie love story. Looking forward whatever he might have next up his sleeve.

The Dakotas

  • Lawmaker unintentionally makes armed law enforcement drones legal in North Dakota (Independent-UK) — Way to go, dude. Legislator submitted a bill to outlaw armed drones; wretched police union got to the bill with revisions and now law enforcement can use drones armed with non-lethal force. North Dakota is now the first state in the U.S. to legalize armed drones. Want to bet law enforcement is already preparing to use this technology against pipeline protesters?
  • South Dakota Yankton Sioux filed suit against U.S. government over pipeline (Indian Country Today) — While media focused attention on North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Yankton Sioux in South Dakota filed against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Though the planned pipeline runs through tribal treaty lands, the government did not complete an environmental study or a consult with the affected tribe — same complaint in South as in North Dakota. The pipeline company, Energy Transfer, did not use tribe members to identify any challenges during planning of the pipeline route.
  • Trespass charges against journalist Goodman blows off First Amendment and Justice Dept. (Committee to Protect Journalists) — CPJ’s Carlos Lauria said the warrant issued for Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman is “a transparent attempt to intimidate reporters” covering the NoDAPL protests. Morton County’s warrant ignores Justice Dept’s joint statement with Interior Dept halting pipeline construction, in which the departments said, “we fully support the rights of all Americans to assemble and speak freely. …” Goodman clearly identified herself as a reporter.
  • Oil producers whine about pipeline delays interfering with cheap oil (Fortune) — These guys are just not catching the cluestick. It may take shareholder activism to wake these morons up about the end of fossil fuels and a need for entirely new business models instead of forcing oil pipelines through.
  • Standing Rock: a new civil rights movement? (Guardian) — Op-ed looks at the birth of a new movement where environmental and civil rights activism join forces to protect indigenous people and Missouri River — the longest river in the continental U.S.

Flint Water Crisis

  • Former state epidemiologist not talking about possible plea deal (MLive.com) — Corinne Miller, now retired, was arraigned in August on felony misconduct and misdemeanor neglect of duty. Miller suppressed action on children’s blood lead levels and told Michigan Dept of Health and Human Services employees to delete emails related to the blood lead data.
  • Water bill moves forward in Senate (The Hill) — Emergency funding for Flint and its lead-contaminated water system closer to passing as part of a $9.4 billion bill for water-related infrastructure and clean drinking water. The bill also includes assistance for Louisiana’s flood recovery. Money for Flint’s aid may be paid by cutting the Energy Dept’s Advanced Vehicle Manufacturing Technology loan program.
  • Water filters still needed by Flint residents through end of year, possibly longer (Detroit Free Press) — There’s no clear end to the water crisis, even though funding may soon be available. Thresholds for lead levels have not yet been agreed upon by state and federal officials. The amount of damage to the city’s water system continues to complicate recovery efforts.

Still Picking on Volkswagen

  • VW engineer plead guilty to conspiracy, wire fraud and violating Clean Air Act (Jurist.org) — The record of engineer James Robert Liang’s June indictment was unsealed on Friday, revealing he and co-conspirators designed, implemented, and lied about emissions controls technology which evaded emissions standards. One interesting bit of new information is the involvement of an unnamed third-party engineering company partially owned by Volkswagen, referred to in the indictment as “Company A.”
  • Awkward: Liang to be sentenced during North American International Auto Show (Detroit News) — Four months from now, smack in the middle press week for Detroit’s 2017 NAIAS, VW engineer Liang will be sentence in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan. This op-ed notes Liang’s plea hints at a much-larger conspiracy in VW pursued by investigators. Somebody had to sign off on this design, at a minimum. And somebody had to tell Bosch what and how to make the non-compliant electronic controls units.

Longread: Rakoff on Fiss and rights under a War on Terror
United States District Judge Jed S. Rakoff looks at a collection of essays by legal scholar Owen Fiss, written over the last 13 years while the U.S. the so-called “War on Terror.”

Toodles!

Share this entry

Tuesday: In a Season of Crime

/2 Comments/in , , , /by

Ride the train, I’m far from home
In a season of crime, none need atone
I kissed your face

— excerpt, Sue (or In a Season of Crime) by David Bowie

Bowie left us an amazing parting shot with his 25th and final album, Blackstar. The cut featured here is a free jazz/jazz-rock fusion work which sounds off-kilter or out of sync, the lyric melody not tracking with rhythm — until one looks at the lyrics as a story of confusion told at the same time as a driving lyric-less and inevitable story beats on at the same time.

Seems like an unintended metaphor for our general election politics.

Back to School, Fool
Guess who’s back in town? A bunch of Congressional lame ducks back from vacation — I mean — work in their districts where they glad-handed at county fairs between bites of deep-fried Twinkies and kissing babies for campaign photo ops.

Get back to work and produce funding for Zika research AND birth control, damn it. Your continued intransigence is costing lives — short, ugly, painful, deformed lives on which you are pitiless and merciless, you fundamentalist let-them-eat-cake hacks. It’s only a matter of time before somebody in your district ends up Zika-infected and pregnant after vacation trip to someplace warm like Miami — or mosquito-bitten during during their day job like lawn care or construction or mail delivery. Researchers are working incredibly hard with the limited funding they’ve had; there’s only so much they can do with inadequate funding. And birth control MUST be available to all who need it. Planned Parenthood can and does hand out condoms, you pathetic slack-handed weasels. Fund them.

STG if I was the president, I’d look at any way possible to trim funding to unusual projects in states with GOP senators and then declare an emergency, pull that trimmed funding to pay for subsidized birth control in the same damned states. With researchers now having found Zika infection may spread by bodily fluids like semen, vaginal fluid, saliva, and tears while documented cases mount, there’s ample grounds to write an executive order during a lame duck session.

Big Oil = Big Bully

The NoDAPL project is bad all around. There’s no good reason for it to proceed.

— The economics of oil supply and demand do not support it; the cost to proceed is simply not supportable.

— The environmental cost of this project and the oil it is intended to carry are untenable; investment of resources private and public should go toward non-fossil fuels.

— The project violates the rights of Native Americans in numerous ways and no good faith effort has been made to address them during planning, let alone now as construction begins. The current and future damage to the Sioux only exacerbates hundreds of years of abuses against their sovereign nation.

— The companies investing in this project including Enbridge cannot assure the safe operation of this pipeline given the history of pipeline leaks across this country. In Enbridge’s case, this foreign-owned corporation has already proven unreliable and opaque in pipeline operations.

— NoDAPL should not proceed for the same reasons Keystone XL pipeline did not proceed: it is not in our country’s best interest.

I don’t know how anyone can look at this bulldozing of land containing buried Native Americans and not see it as a direct, deliberate effort to erase their existence. This is accursed behavior which in no way addresses the needs for alternative energy outlined in the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Review or our nation’s need to secure its people by reducing carbon dioxide output.

Odd Lots

  • Disposal wells in Oklahoma including Osage Nation shut down after earthquake (Tulsa World) — Yet another case where extractive fossil fuel business on Native American tribal lands has been highly problematic. 17 wells were shut down by the EPA after Oklahoma’s M5.6 induced earthquake this weekend; these wells are in addition to 37 other disposal wells shut down this weekend near the quake’s epicenter. Haven’t seen yet whether another earthquake of this magnitude could set off an overdue 500-year magnitude earthquake along Missouri’s New Madrid fault.
  • U.S. district judge denies federal plan to open 1 million acres of central CA public lands for fracking and drilling (IndyBay.org) — Bureau of Land Management didn’t do its homework on environmental risks from fracking, focusing too heavily on drilling instead. Sounds a lot like Army Corp of Engineers’ slap-dash disregard for externalities when it analyzed the NoDAPL, doesn’t it?
  • OK’s earthquake insurance market already under review (Tulsa World) — Insurers have only paid out on 20 percent of earthquake-related claims since 2010; the market has also undergone consolidation and 300-percent rate increases. No word yet on how much damage this weekend’s M5.6 quake or subsequent aftershocks have caused. Hope the public lights a fire under Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner John Doak about his review of the market. It’s grossly unfair the public must bear the cost of risk created by extractive industries as it is.

Longread: Lawsuit against DMCA Section 1201
Johns Hopkins University professor and cryptographer Matthew Green filed suit against the federal government in late July to strike down Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The current law prevents security researchers from adequately investigating products. Worthwhile read — this has huge repercussions on our safety and security given how much of the technology around us is copyrighted but leaky as hell and prone to hacking.

Hasta pasta!

Share this entry

North Dakota and Feds Suppress Native American Pipeline Protesters

/13 Comments/in , /by

[top: planned Dakota Access pipeline route, via Dakota Access LLC; bottom: Keystone XL pipeline, via Independent-UK]

[top: planned Dakota Access pipeline route, via Dakota Access LLC; bottom: Keystone XL pipeline, via Independent-UK]

What’s the difference between these two pipelines? Only variations are the origin of the oil they may transport and their location as far as I can tell since they are described as competing pipelines.

Oh, and the Keystone XL pipeline was vetoed by President Obama a year ago this past February because Congress tried to ram through approval, attempting to “circumvent longstanding and proven processes for determining whether or not building and operating a cross-border pipeline serves the national interest,” according to the president.

In both cases — Keystone XL and the Dakota Access — the planned pipelines traversed Native American tribal lands and/or water systems upon which these sovereign nations relied. The affected tribes have protested the credible threats these pipelines pose to their health and safety as well as their heritage and sovereignty.

The threat is real; there have been 11 pipeline accidents since 2000 on lines carrying oil or gasoline across the Dakotas. One of those pipeline accidents resulted in roughly 20,000 barrels or 865,000 gallons of oil spilling beneath a farm in North Dakota in 2013. There was a ten-day lag after the farmer brought the spill to the company’s attention until the state’s governor heard about the accident — ridiculous, considering North Dakota is the 47th largest state in terms of population, at less than 800,000 residents. It’s not like there were a lot of people in the way. The spill covered an area equal to seven football fields and clean-up is still under way and may not be completed until some time in 2017. The North Dakota Tesoro pipeline oil spill is one of the largest in the U.S. to date.

Oil producers and pipeline owners/operators have frankly been lousy in their responsibilities to the public. It’s not just the 11 pipeline accidents in the Dakotas since 2000; it’s a rather lengthy list of them across the entire country and a lengthy track record of crappy response to the damage done to the environment. My state, Michigan, which is surrounded by the largest bodies of fresh water in the world, is also the site of the largest oil pipeline spill in the U.S. In 2010, more than 1.1 million gallons of oil spilled, much of it into a waterway. Alarms notifying the pipeline’s owner, Enbridge, of the spill were initially ignored for 17 hours, blown off as operation notifications.

Simply unacceptable.

The Native American tribes have no reason whatsoever to believe oil producers and pipeline owners/operators will act with any more care than they have to date. Further, they have no reason to trust the U.S. government about these pipelines, either. They have been betrayed and damaged again and again by the U.S. — excessive and mortal police brutality, theft of human remains, theft and mismanagement of billions in assets, the indignity of fighting to remove the name of a mass murderer from public lands, the catastrophic contamination of the San Juan River supplying water to the Navajo nation — the insults are endless.

The latest insult: North Dakota’s Governor Jack Dalrymple signed an executive order to obtain more funding for additional police to deter approximately 1,500 protesters. The state has pulled water supplies used by the protesters and refused to allow portable toilets to be emptied. This follows a temporary restraining order granted to Dakota Access LLC by a federal district court against protesters’ interference with pipeline work. Native Americans have also been prevented from leaving reservation land, which may be a violation of civil rights and treaties.

Native Americans have legitimate concerns with the Dakota Access pipeline. For one, its planned route crosses the Missouri River which serves as the entire water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe; the Army Corp of Engineers (ACOE) approved 200 water crossings by the pipeline in spite of requests by the Sioux to deny construction permits. The ACOE, however, reviewed and rejected an alternate pipeline route crossing the Missouri River near Bismarck as it was deemed a threat to the municipal water supply. This looks like outright racism on the face of it; the pipeline is a threat to 92% white Bismarck, but not a sovereign Native American tribe?

Secondly, the ACOE has been asked by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to conduct an investigation and prepare a formal Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), requiring consultation with the affected tribes. No EIS appears to have been conducted to date. In addition to the health and environmental safety concerns related to the pipeline’s installation and operation, the historical significance of the area is inadequately documented. The lack of a thorough assessment means the current Dakota Access pipeline plan may disrupt an older Mandan village site where Mandan may be buried. The site has cultural and religious significance to tribes and should be protected by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation under federal law.

Dakota Access LLC is pressing for this pipeline to reduce the costs of oil. Shipping crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale reserve by rail or truck is more expensive than shipping by pipeline.

That is until ALL the true costs and externalities are added, like the spills, remediation, short- and long-term health and environmental problems are added. These costs haven’t been added to the true cost of oil and are instead a gamble which humans living nearest to the pipeline must pay if there is a failure.

[10-year monthly price of WTI per barrel via Megatrends]

[10-year monthly price of WTI per barrel via Megatrends]

While the oil producers and pipeline operators continue to hammer away at the cost of oil, the price of oil has fallen. They can’t drop the cost fast enough and deep enough to realize a return on investment. They will cut corners as much as possible as the price of oil falls — and it will, if demand for oil also falls as it has with the rise of hybrid and electric vehicles. Cutting corners means there will be greater risk the pipeline will not be adequately monitored or maintained, just as it wasn’t in Michigan.

As more and more alternative, green energy resources come on line along with the technology to use them, it will make even less sense to invest in pipelines which may not carry all that much oil. The Bakken Shale reserve is estimated at several hundred billion barrels of oil, but the amount which can be recovered readily and economically is much less than 10% of the estimated total reserve. If the oil is too expensive to extract AND competing energy resources are both cheaper and available, why build this pipeline at all? How is enabling our continuing addiction to oil in the long-term best interests of our country?

It will take some spine to do the right thing and force this project to slow down for a full EIS assessment. It will take even more spine to point out we are both at the end of fossil fuel and at the limit of our disregard for Native Americans’ lives. It can be done, however; just ask Canada’s Justin Trudeau how he did it.

Share this entry

Flint: The Legionnaires Will Be What Brings Criminal Charges

/17 Comments/in /by

In my discussions about Flint’s water crisis, I keep pointing out that Rick Snyder was largely just making a show of responding until the US Attorney revealed it had started an investigation on January 5.

The Detroit News has an utterly damning report today about the part of the story that gets less national attention: local and state officials started discussing an outbreak of Legionnaires disease back in October 2014, and national experts offered help as early as March 2015, but the state did not accept assistance offered by both the EPA and CDC until January.

Darren Lytle, an expert in Legionella from the EPA’s Cincinnati office, told his colleagues that his previous research showed that changes in water chemistry can cause disruption and “destabilize” water piping systems. Lytle “thought the incidence of Legionella must be fairly extensive for the (Genesee County Health Department) to notice and study,” according to the conference call notes.

Lytle offered to come to Flint and study the origins of the pneumonia-causing bacteria, records show.

But state and county officials appear to have never followed through with the offer for help, an EPA official said. As it did in Flint’s lead contamination, the agency stayed publicly silent about the threats to public health in Genesee County while state and local officials debated how to approach the problem, records show.

[snip]

The Legionnaires’ disease outbreak that infected 87 Flint-area residents and caused nine deaths from April 2014 through November was not made public until Jan. 13, when Snyder announced them in a hastily called press conference in Detroit. Snyder had learned of the outbreak two days before, an aide said.

In January, state health officials finally requested support from CDC’s Legionella experts 11 months after it was offered, Nordlund said.

Through that entire time period, state officials pretended they were developing a public information campaign to tell Flint residents about the outbreak. And, as the story reminds, nine people died directly from Legionnaires during that period.

Shortly after the feds revealed they were investigating, the Attorney General announced his own (very conflicted) investigation, the investigator for which, Andy Arena, claimed is the biggest investigation in Michigan history (Arena led the investigation into the UndieBomb attack while still at the FBI). It has been unclear what those investigations might find or whether anyone would be found of breaking the law. Certainly, on the lead poisoning, the state seemed to believe they were adequately testing for lead (even though, as this story notes, local authorities were far more worried about months before the state officials).

But I have to believe the Legionnaires is where people are really exposed for criminal negligence, as they let people continue to be exposed to deadly bacteria months and months after federal officials tried to help.

 

Share this entry