Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN, - ProPublica
Stephan: Here is an example of how short term greed defeats long term needs in the context of the water trend. Until we recognize that wellness must take precedence over profit, this sort of thing will continue, a poison pill for our children or grandchildren. Water is destiny.
Mexico City plans to draw drinking water from a mile-deep aquifer, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. The Mexican effort challenges a key tenet of U.S. clean water policy: that water far underground can be intentionally polluted because it will never be used.
U.S. environmental regulators have long assumed that reservoirs located thousands of feet underground will be too expensive to tap. So even as population increases, temperatures rise, and traditional water supplies dry up, American scientists and policy-makers often exempt these deep aquifers from clean water protections and allow energy and mining companies to inject pollutants directly into them.
As ProPublica has reported in an ongoing investigation about America’s management of its underground water, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has issued more than 1,500 permits for companies to pollute such aquifers in some of the driest regions. Frequently, the reason was that the water lies too deep to be worth protecting.
But Mexico City’s plans to tap its newly discovered aquifer suggest that America is poisoning wells it might need in the future.
Indeed, by the standard often applied in the U.S., American regulators could have allowed companies to pump pollutants into the aquifer beneath Mexico City.
For example, in eastern […]
No Comments
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
GREGG LEVINE, - Truthout.org
Stephan: The issue of nuclear waste is little discussed today. But its challenges are, if anything, more pressing than ever. The problem with nuclear power has always been the waste it produced. It is lethal for tens of thousands of years. To place it in some context, if Caesar had powered Rome with nuclear power, the waste dumps he created would still kill you and poison the land, and continue to be deadly for 10s of thousands of years beyond your life.
Do you know of anything in human history that has been maintained perfectly for just the 2,000 plus years since Caesar? The argument advanced in defense of nuclear power is that the solution lies in the near future; it will happen. But no one can say when, and the tons of radioactive waste just keep building up. And remember every time an event happens, as we can see in Chernobyl and Fukushima, it never really ends.
This report presents a good history of the industry. Note the role, as a young officer, played by Jimmy Carter, who is by training a nuclear engineer. It is easy to see why uniquely he has been the one president to turn away from the nuclear industry.
On December 2, 1942, a small group of physicists under the direction of Enrico Fermi gathered on an old squash court beneath Alonzo Stagg Stadium on the Campus of the University of Chicago to make and witness history. Uranium pellets and graphite blocks had been stacked around cadmium-coated rods as part of an experiment crucial to the Manhattan Project – the program tasked with building an atom bomb for the allied forces in World War II. The experiment was successful, and for 28 minutes, the scientists and dignitaries present witnessed the world’s first manmade, self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction. They called it an atomic pile – Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1), to be exact- but what Fermi and his team had actually done was build the world’s first nuclear reactor.
The Manhattan Project’s goal was a bomb, but soon after the end of the war, scientists, politicians, the military and private industry looked for ways to harness the power of the atom for civilian use, or, perhaps more to the point, for commercial profit. Fifteen years to the day after CP-1 achieved criticality, President Dwight Eisenhower threw a ceremonial switch to start the reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, which was billed as the first […]
No Comments
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
SHINEY VARGHESE, Senior Policy Analyst - Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Stephan: This should come as no surprise. Owning water is going to be incredibly lucrative. More valuable than petroleum. Water rights are going to become a major focus. This report presents the relevant issues.
Writing in National Geographic in December 2012 about ‘small-scale irrigation techniques with simple buckets, affordable pumps, drip lines, and other equipment
No Comments
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
ELIZABETH ROYTE, - Ecologist
Stephan: Here an aspect of the food trend that is just beginning to emerge: The intersection of food and fracking. It is not a pretty picture.
In the midst of the US domestic energy boom, livestock on farms near oil-and-gas drilling operations nationwide have been quietly falling sick and dying. Elizabeth Royte reports
While scientists have yet to isolate cause and effect, many suspect chemicals used in drilling and hydrofracking (or ‘fracking
No Comments
Monday, January 28th, 2013
WENONAH HAUTER, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: More and more is coming out about what has happened to the American food system. As with the illness profit system, once again greed trumps all other considerations, and national wellness is of little concern. I urge to try to grow at least some of your food, and only shop along the periphery of supermarkets, avoiding prepared foods. No one is going to look out for your health but you.
The following is an excerpt from Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, published by The New Press and reprinted here with permission.
In 1963 my dad bought a ramshackle farm with rich but extremely rocky soil in the rural Bull Run Mountains of Virginia, forty miles southwest of Washington, D.C. Today it is on the verge of suburbia.
He grew up in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, rode the rails, and eventually, in his late fifties, found his way ‘back to the land.
No Comments
