Friday, September 13th, 2013
MARK CLAYTON, Staff Writer - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: This report I found astonishing. I really had not fully appreciated how dangerous a small segment of old carbon energy has become, and what a stranglehold carbon corporations hold on the U.S. Congress. That this situation continues, and these plants remain operational, is a measure of the madness that controls our lives and well-being.
Fifty US power plants emit more greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels than all but six nations, says a new report.
The study by Environment America paints a bulls-eye on the nation’s biggest coal-fired power plants, suggesting that reining in a relatively small share of America’s 6,000 electric generating facilities could have a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
The report comes as the Obama administration is preparing the nation’s first-ever greenhouse gas emissions regulations for US power plants, which could be released as soon as this month. The administration’s goal is to have power plant emissions regulations in place by 2015, and the new study provides a window into which plants could face steep federal fines unless they slash emissions or close.
RECOMMENDED: Think you know the odd effects of global climate change? Take our quiz.
Of the country’s 6,000 coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar electric-generating facilities, a small sub-group of mostly coal-fired power generators produces more than its share of the nation’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions compared with the electricity it produces, the report found. The ’50 dirtiest’ power plants generated nearly 33 percent of the US power sector’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2011 but only about 16 percent […]
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Thursday, September 12th, 2013
TOM PHILPOTT, - Mother Jones
Stephan: There are alternatives to the monoculture chemical based industrialized agriculture that is ruining our soil and degrading our health. Here is one farmer who shows how it could be done. Just one guy with some sense, who is no longer enthrall to Big Ag. We will see whether his approach becomes a trend.
Chatting with David Brandt outside his barn on a sunny June morning, I wonder if he doesn’t look too much like a farmer-what a casting director might call ‘too on the nose.’ He’s a beefy man in bib overalls, a plaid shirt, and well-worn boots, with short, gray-streaked hair peeking out from a trucker hat over a round, unlined face ruddy from the sun.[1]
Brandt farms 1,200 acres in the central Ohio village of Carroll, pop. 524. This is the domain of industrial-scale agriculture-a vast expanse of corn and soybean fields broken up only by the sprawl creeping in from Columbus. Brandt, 66, raised his kids on this farm after taking it over from his grandfather. Yet he sounds not so much like a subject of King Corn as, say, one of the organics geeks I work with on my own farm in North Carolina. In his g-droppin’ Midwestern monotone, he’s telling me about his cover crops-fall plantings that blanket the ground in winter and are allowed to rot in place come spring, a practice as eyebrow-raising in corn country as holding a naked yoga class in the pasture. The plot I can see looks just about identical to the carpet […]
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Thursday, September 12th, 2013
, - Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: In my view Obama's greatest and most historic failure, what will rank him as a failed president, is his unwillingness to hold the people who crashed the economy accountable. This tragic failure cannot be laid at the feet of the Republicans. Obama owns this. Here is the latest on that trend.
The US Treasury said Wednesday the government’s massive response to the economic crisis five years ago paid off, avoiding a catastrophic breakdown of the financial system.
In a report marking the anniversary of the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers - which snowballed into the worst crisis since the 1930s - the Treasury defended deploying hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to save other banks, major financial institutions and auto companies.
‘Without the government’s forceful response, that damage would have been far worse, and the ultimate cost to repair the damage would have been far higher,
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Thursday, September 12th, 2013
Emily Schwartz Greco, William A. Collins, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: Given Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and, now, Fukushima you would think ending nuclear was a no-brainer. But corporate profits cannot be denied in the U.S.. They are the first priority. The end of nuclear will only occur when it stops being profitable. Americans simply can't seem to marshal the political will to stop nuclear on the basis of common sense.
The first thing to remember about nuclear power is that it’s not safe. Just ask Japan.
The second thing to remember is that nuclear power isn’t cheap. Connecticut draws half its juice from nuclear reactors and has the second-highest rates in the country, after Hawaii.
The third thing to know is that everybody lies about it. The power plant designers lie, the builders lie, the utility companies lie, the regulators lie, and the politicians lie.
Take Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the utility that ran the reactors in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture that failed after a tsunami and earthquake struck. TEPCO still won’t admit just how serious a disaster that was and continues to be.
But kids living downwind are already getting thyroid cancer, fish in the nearby sea are no longer safe to eat, and radioactive tuna are cruising the California coast. As with the Chernobyl disaster, tens of thousands of people may never be free to return home.
Meanwhile at many U.S. nuclear reactors, efficiency is declining and the risk of accidents is rising. Unlike at a coal-fired power plant, you can’t just hit the off switch if there’s a flood, drought, or power failure. All those spent nuclear fuel […]
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Thursday, September 12th, 2013
BILL TOMSON and HELENA BOTTEMILLER EVICH, - Politico
Stephan: If you ever doubted that we, as a society, don't care about our children it is time to wake up to the real world. Sure people care about their kids, and maybe their kids' friends, but kids in general, not in America. We don't really give a damn about our youth, yet we lie to ourselves almost daily about how concerned we are about them. The facts say otherwise: Seventeen million children face hunger in the U.S.., and have what sociologists euphemistically call 'food insecurity.'
We have the highest physical abuse rate of any country in the industrialized world. A child in Texas is 11 times -- 11 times -- more likely to be physically abused by a family member to the point of hospitalization than a child in Italy. Our schools suck, and our students are less literate, less mathematically skilled than most students in developed nations around the world, and most have no exposure to the arts, or chances to exercise, in spite of a growing obesity epidemic.
But this story really puts an exclamation point on it. We are prepared to spend hundreds of millions actually, to be truthful, probably billions of dollars, to push ourselves into the middle of a multi-religious non-democratic civil war in Syria. But we are going back to feeding our kids pink slime instead of food, because we don't want to spend the money to nourish them properly. I cannot adequately convey my disgust.
The only good part of this story is learning that companies such as Costco -- a chain that began here in the Northwest that is a sort of socially progressive organically oriented antipode to WalMart -- doesn't carry pink slime, and never has, and that there is at least some movement towards labelling the stuff. As with GMOs, of course, Big Ag doesn't want to label it because they believe, correctly, that people won't buy it.
Kids are going back to school and so is the ground beef filler dubbed ‘pink slime.
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