Stephan: This is the other end of the Water is Destiny Trend spectrum. Rising sea levels will produce one migration -- away from the coasts, while what happened in Williams, will spread across the Southwest and Plains states, and create another.
WILLIAMS, ARIZONA — In the northern Arizona city of Williams, restaurant patrons don’t automatically get a glass of water anymore. Residents caught watering lawns or washing cars with potable water can be fined. Businesses are hauling water from outside town to fill swimming pools, and building permits have been put on hold because there isn’t enough water to accommodate development.
Officials in the community about 60 miles from the Grand Canyon’s South Rim have clamped down on water use and declared a crisis amid a drought that is quickly drying up nearby reservoirs and forcing the city to pump its only two wells to capacity.
The situation offers a glimpse at how cities across the West are coping with a drought that has left them thirsting for water. More than a dozen rural towns in California recently emerged from emergency water restrictions that had a sheriff’s office on the lookout for water bandits at a local lake. One New Mexico town relied on bottled water for days last year. In southern Nevada, water customers are paid to remove lawns and cannot install any new grass in their front yards.
Officials in Williams jumped straight to the most severe restrictions after receiving only about […]
No Comments
PHILIP ROSS, - International Business Times
Stephan: Once again the time line collapses and this the future we will face. We are past the point of no return, and the coastal cities of the world, and large swaths of low lying land -- most of Florida, the Outer Banks, the DelMarVa Peninsula -- are doomed.
An area of western Antarctica whose glaciers have been thawing for decades has passed the point of no return, scientists warned Monday. According to new research, these glaciers have been destabilized and are floating in areas where they were once grounded.
Researchers from NASA and the University of California, Irvine, say the glaciers of the Amundsen Sea region, if completely melted, contain enough water to raise global sea levels by 1.2 meters, or 4 feet. The study, released Monday and soon to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, incorporates 40 years of observations that indicate that six glaciers in the region are melting faster than researchers previously expected.
‘This sector will be a major contributor to sea level rise in the decades and centuries to come,” Eric Rignot, a glaciologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the study, said in the statement. ‘A conservative estimate is it could take several centuries for all of the ice to flow into the sea.”
Rignot described the retreat of this sector of West Antarctica as ‘unstoppable.”
He said that because the retreat appears to be occurring simultaneously over a large area, it would suggest that the melting is triggered […]
No Comments
Dean Narciso, - The Columbus Dispatch
Stephan: Yet another story about the unintended consequences arising from Fracking. Everything about this technology is wrong. But nothing seems able to stop it because our Federal and state governments are so corrupted by carbon energy interests. It is all made possible by the Halliburton Loophole passed by the Republicans during the Bush Administration.
A Morgan County shale well being drilled in preparation for fracking began leaking on Sunday, forcing the evacuation of nearby residents.
State and federal environmental emergency-response teams and the drilling company finally contained the mess yesterday, but not before it reached a nearby creek.
The leak was discovered on Sunday, when about 10 gallons per minute of oily drilling fluid, called mud, gushed from the drill site, according to an Ohio Environmental Protection Agency report filed on Monday.
Seven residents from three houses were evacuated because of the danger that escaping natural gas might lead to an explosion.
According to a U.S. EPA report, a ‘pocket of unexpected natural gas was encountered” during drilling. That caused overpressurization and failure of the well head. One hundred barrels of drilling mud spilled from the well on Sunday, according to the well’s owner, PDC Energy of Colorado, which said some of it reached an unnamed creek near Beverly, Ohio.
An unknown amount of wet gas – a mixture containing crude oil – also escaped.
As of noon on Tuesday, 330 barrels of oil and water had been collected at the site, according to the U.S. EPA.
Drilling mud is used to lubricate the drill bits that cut through layers of […]
No Comments
JOAN MCCARTER, - Daily Kos
Stephan: Here is a much needed assessment of what the Koch brothers $125 million poured into buying elections looks like by comparison. All of this is possible because of the corruption of the Supreme Court and decisions like Citizens United.
Click through to see the graph, it is very enlightening.
The news that the Koch brothers intend to spend at least $125 million more on buying the Senate (on top of the $35 million or so they’ve already spent) is sobering. Yes, they have a losing message, and yes so far all the money they’ve spent has gotten them bupkis, but it’s still an astounding amount of money. Steven Benen quantifies just how much money it is.
Bart chart showing how Koch spending draws campaign spending by congressional committees by at least three times.
We just recently learned how much money the major-party campaign committees have in the bank for the 2014 cycle. For example, according to the most recent filings, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is responsible for supporting Dem candidates in 435 U.S. House races, announced it has $40.2 million to be used in this year’s midterms. Its GOP counterpart, the National Republican Congressional Committee, has about $31.2 million in cash on hand for the year.
On the Senate side, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has a little more than $22 million in the bank, while the National Republican Senatorial Committee has $15.9 million in cash on hand.
There will be more money […]
No Comments
LAWRENCE DAVIDSON, Historty Professor West Chest University - Consortiumnews.com
Stephan: The image people seem to have about censorship is that there is an agency that edits media copy. In some crude systems that may be true. But in a country like America the process is one of self-censorship, and self-limiting the range of opinion that gets heard. This essay has a very good take on the process.
Americans are told that other governments practice censorship and propaganda, but not their own. Yet, the reality is quite different with many reasonable viewpoints marginalized and deceptive spin put on much that comes from officialdom, writes Lawrence Davidson.
Many Americans assume the U.S. government speaks ‘the truth” to its citizens and defends their constitutional right to ‘free speech” (be it in the form of words or dollars). On the other hand, it is always the alleged enemies of the U.S. who indulge in propaganda and censoring of ‘the truth.”
In practice it is not quite that way. Washington, and many local American governments as well, can be quite censoring. Take for instance the attempt to censor the boycott of Israeli academic institutions – institutions engaged in government research that facilitates illegal settlement expansion and the use of Palestinian water resources.broadcast-networks
In this case, the fact that a call for boycott is an age-old, non-violent practice also falling within the category of free speech, is mostly disregarded. Instead we get a knee-jerk impulse on the part of just about every American politician to shut down debate, even to the point where various state legislatures threatened their own state colleges and universities with a cutoff […]
No Comments
