The lower estimates of the leak so far.

Radio show host Thom Hartmann spoke with John Wathen last week about the Gulf Oil leak.   John Wathen is a photographer, activist, and videographer  from Waterkeeper.org.

What is going on in the Gulf?  On Saturday, BP removed the cap from the gushing oil well in order to get ready for the installation of a new, better cap (so they say).  The old cap will be swapped with a new cap that might even capture all the oil — if we lived in a perfect universe.  According to BP, this one should fit better and things are expected to go well because the weather in the Gulf is finally cooperating.   There is now real hope that they can install this better cap and stop the leak within the next 2-3 weeks.  According to the Washington Post:

For a day or two, the damaged wellhead will gush anew — with the estimated 15,000 barrels of oil a day that had been captured by the old cap now flowing freely. But if all goes well, said BP senior vice president Kent Wells, additional ships and a sturdier cap with a tighter seal will be in place in four to seven days.

“Things going well” is not what has happened so far.  Maybe things are about to change?  Meanwhile, BP continues to spew dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico, causing incredible health risks to every one who lives down there.  More on that below.

John Wathen has been making videos showing the devastation from the oil leak.  His video of whales and dolphins dying was broadcast on cable news channels two weeks ago.  In  his interivew with Hartmann, Wathen stated that the oil leak is a “disaster of epic proportions.”  He said it’s something that you can’t describe in words or video, no matter how dramatic those videos are. He said they flew for several hours and never flew over clean water.

Hartmann complained about the media not covering this topic enough, but I disagree with that.  CNN has been parked in the Gulf for several weeks and so have other media, even mainstream media.  The media has done a decent job reporting this so far, which surprises me, but I could feel their interest waning a bit in the last few days.

Wathen said the oil spill, what we are seeing now, is mild in comparison with what’s coming. He said all that we are really seeing is the light sheen around the outer edges of the main slick.  There are 100 miles of oil still coming out there if they stop it today. They are not going to stop it period, he said. When asked why, he said “This thing has way too much pressure on it.  I don’t think that there is technology available that can actually put a plug in this thing and make it stay.”

When BP filed for the original permit for this oil field, the Macondo, they estimated that the [...]

Here’s a great-sounding transportation project.

It relies on clean energy and think of all the jobs it could create.  This is not from the government, though projects like this should be funded or subsidized by the government because this is part of our infrastructure.  It’s from a group called Interstate Traveler Company, LLC.  Here is their website.

What is the Interstate Traveler Hydrogen Super Highway? It is a collection of vital municipal utilities bundled into what we call the Conduit Cluster providing a first of its kind full integration of solar powered hydrogen production and distribution system supporting a high speed magnetic levitation ( MagLev ) on-demand public transit network built along the right of way of the US Interstate Highway Systems, and any other permissible right of way where such a machine would be of benefit.  The Hydrogen Super Highway, also known as the HyRail, is accessed by Traveler Stations that are built within the right of way of the Interstate Highway within the land locked real-estate of the clover leaf interchanges providing maximum ease of access for people who live anywhere near the Interstate Highway.  The HyRail is much more than just a high speed rail system.

We should be building something like this all across the country.  Why aren’t we?  I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these numbers, but this is from the video page:

This project will create 30 million jobs all across America in every county &state.  [If only that were possible!]

At a price tag less than TARP I, $650 billion, this project will not cost American taxpayers anything, because it will be privately funded, and it will generate a handsome R.O.I. of 12-1/2% for its Investors…not to mention the Billions of Tax Revenues the system will generate for each City, County, State and Federal governments through “Right of Ways” usage revenue.

This High Speed Mag Lev Train is 100% Solar & Hydrogen powered and produces much more power than it consumes.  Each mile of rail produces over 1 Megawatt of Electricity using Solar Thin Film embedded into the rail system.

Once fully deployed across America’s entire 54,000 miles of Interstate, the system will produce the equivalent power of 20 Nuclear Plants per year, yet, it will provide 11,000% more jobs per Kwh.   The excess electricity is then converted to Hydrogen and transported throughout the rail system in piping that delivers it across the country to the gas stations to fuel our fleet of vehicles.

Ecosocialism and ecofeminism might be new phrases to some people, but they are growing movements in the United States. The U.S. is a latecomer to these topics in many respects because Ecosocialism is already an established movement in Europe and Australia and elsewhere. But finally the U.S. is starting to catch up. The video below was recorded at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit that was held at the end of June. It was a workshop titled Building  Ecosocialism and led by environmentalist Joel Kovel.  Described as,  “Meeting at USSF in which ecosocialist activists discussed commoning, ecofeminism, the destruction of capitalism, strategy, convergence.”  (I have to admit to lack of familiarity with “commoning”.)  Here is just one of many websites about ecosocialism.

Ecosocialism is a growing movement because many people are asking themselves the question “What kind of world do we want to live in?”

If you are born in the United States, it’s a given that you grow up with certain things drilled into your head.  One is that buying and selling, capitalism, and profits, having a job to make a lot of money, is the purpose of life on the path to the American Dream. We are told that capitalism equals freedom, and it’s the natural desire of every human being everywhere.   (This is how they sell wars to us too).

Then we are told that this system, which is built on pursuing money (a human invention) as a life goal, is the dream of people everywhere, so we must help them pursue it.  Think about how unnatural that all is.   The system is based on a cutthroat philosophy that some people get rich (those who are successful)  and some people don’t, (those who are failures) so you should try very hard to pursue this life goal of having a “good job”  (i.e., one that pays you a lot of money) is the dream of all people everywhere.   On the path to this “success” you must buy and discard and buy and discard many things, some of which are status symbols, like expensive cars and expensive clothes and jewelry, etc.

Of course a LOT of people don’t pursue jobs just for money, but those other jobs are simply not as valued in the U.S. as much because we are a super-capitalist country.  An investment banker in the U.S. is much more admired by many people than a scientist, who’s status is somewhere between garbage collector and public school teacher.  (Many right-wingers want to destroy public schools).  Look at the scorn heaped on James Hansen, NASA Scientist and climate change expert — if Americans have heard of him at all.  Look at the climate change deniers and who they hate — scientists. (Look at who they revere — religious leaders, even the most fake and perverted.)

This is all due to cultural brainwashing, in my opinion.  But eventually as people grow older they realize that other things matter a lot more than business, profits, denying science they don’t [...]

??Today environmental attorney Mike Pappantonio appeared on an MSNBC show Hardball, and said that there is no $20 billion escrow account funded by BP for the Gulf Coast victims.  Repeat.  There is no account.  The account does not exist except as a version of a  ‘moral promise’.   Unfortunately, corporations have no morals. They exist to make money, and that is their only purpose.  A moral promise from a corporation is impossible.

Pappantonio also said BP is also in talks with bankruptcy attorneys.   BP is not putting money into an escrow account, and their agreement with the Obama administration is not worth the paper it’s not written on, because there is still a legally binding $75 million dollar cap on what they legally have to pay to “clean up” the entire Gulf of Mexico.  They have already spent more than that, and  BP has said they would not be bound by that cap, but they have given us little reason to trust them.   What does this all mean?  This means that the American taxpayer,  proud American oil and gas addicts, will be footing the bill for this disaster, after the bankruptcy occurs.   There is no ethical or economic justice on the horizon for anyone in this mess.

Meanwhile, the Gulf of Mexico continues to suffer from a slow, agonizing death at the hands of BP,  and Transocean (whatever happened to them?). The A Whale ship (seen below in video) has been at least partially deployed and they are testing its effectiveness.  They report they are about a week ahead of schedule on the relief wells, which may not work.  Today there was also more talk of “imploding” the well via a very large explosion.

The oil continues to gush into the water.  Fish and other life continue to die. The environmental impact has all gotten worse instead of better, because BP is adding immense amounts of air pollution  to the disaster by burning everything they are capturing.  They are destroying everything they possibly can, including evidence of oil by their enormous use of dispersants (which continues) and by reportedly hiding the workers who have gotten sick from the clean up work, and by trucking in sand to cover up oily beaches.   BP has been hiding the scope of this disaster from the beginning.  Remember, there is no ethical or moral obligation on the part of corporations to do anything when they F up whatever, and BP so far has done what they have done due to political pressure. The political pressure urging them to do the right thing has been strongly counteracted by the right-wing politicians screaming about losing jobs.**  (see below for a parallel story).

It’s no surprise that scientists are finding growing evidence of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico near the BP oil spill area. In some areas, methane presence is as high as 100,000 times normal levels, sucking oxygen out of the water and killing off marine species, and forcing surviving animals to move from their traditional habitats.  [...]

Coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson gave a talk at TED that lays out the evidence that the oceans are slipping away from us — the compounding factors of intensive overfishing, chemical and material (think plastic) pollution, invasive species and global warming are adding up to more dead zones, more plastic continents, more devastated underwater landscapes, and more lost species.

From MNN

In the past several years I have gradually learned of the dangers to the oceans from human activity.  The biggest problem is how fast the changes are  occurring.  There is a huge amount of pollution we can see — literally, garbage — and a huge amount we cannot see.   Dead zones without oxygen, where nothing can live, are growing. These are not caused by natural effects, these things are caused by humans.  We need the ocean to support all life on earth.  People who say that the oceans are so vast, we can’t possibly harm them, are uninformed.  Oceans have definitely been negatively affected by people on a huge scale to the point where they are in serious danger,  and there is no end in sight.  Do we really think we can just keep manufacturing plastic and generating garbage and toxins and dump it all  into the ocean, into infinity?  This is what we’ve been doing.  Worse, our CO2 emissions are making the oceans more of an acid bath than a place to take a bath, or fish.   The ocean acidification is actually beginning to frighten ocean research scientists, it’s so bad.  This can’t keep happening.

In June, during the 2nd or 3rd wave of anger and disgust over the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the journal Science came out with an extensive report on the oceans.  You can only read it here with a subscription, but some points of it are below.  The ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill is just one more human activity adding to the inevitable collapse of the oceans unless we do something to change very quickly.

I really don’t think our politicians understand what is at stake here.  In June, 2010, the journal Science reported that ocean acidification is unprecedented.  The current condition of the oceans is unprecedented.  From Science:

By spewing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and tailpipes at a gigatons-per-year pace, humans are lowering the pH of the world ocean. The geochemical disruption will reverberate for tens of thousands of years. It’s less clear how marine life will fare. With nothing in the geologic record as severe as the ongoing plunge in ocean pH, paleontologists can’t say for sure how organisms that build carbonate shells or skeletons will react. In the laboratory, corals always do poorly. The lab responses of other organisms are mixed. In the field, researchers see signs that coral growth does slow, oyster larvae suffer, and plankton with calcareous skeletons lose mass.

In seawater of the pH that may prevail [...]

*I would love to hear from anyone who was there!

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

El Universo Futurista

June 24 – 25, 2010
Fundación Proa
Buenos Aires, Argentina

El Universo Futurista Program (PDF)

The main topics tackled will be the interdisciplinarity of Futurism, its international diffusion, its connections with the other European avant-gardes, as well as Marinetti’s and Benedetta’s visit and lectures in Buenos Aires in 1926.

Giovanni Lista “Ideas, temas y desarrollo del futurismo italiano”

Rodrigo Alonso “La utopía tecnológica del futurismo”

Pablo Gianera “La conquista del ruido”

Juan Manuel Bonet “Marinetti y tres escritores españoles”

Debate: Giovanni Lista y Juan Manuel Bonet

Gonzalo Aguilar “La literatura futurista”

Sergio Baur “Buenos Aires, contexto cultural”

Cecilia Rabossi “Filippo T. Marinetti en Argentina”

Jorge Schwartz “Filippo T. Marinetti en Brasil”

Debate final con los participantes del coloquio

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The ship seen in the video above is called the A Whale, and it’s ready to suck up water and oil and separate them on board, as it was built to do. It’s no surprise to many that it’s sitting idle nearby in the water, while the government decides where to put it. It is massive, 3 football-fields long, and 10 stories high, and here’s what it can do. The ship was modified after the BP explosion to scoop up 21 million gallons of oily water per day. So why is it sitting around? Its sheer size. The place it would do the most good is where the oil is “fresh”, and that area is already over-crowded. So let’s move some boats around and get this thing operating. Is that rocket science?  Read more here.

Congress is not without ideas of its own. Rep. George Miller has come up with some interesting legislation.

Congressman George Miller will be introducing an amendment that would ban BP from offshore leases.  At this point, BP’s best bet would be to transition their money to researching how they can make those big profits from renewable energy.  Only then would they really deserve the title they have already been using, “Beyond Petroleum”.

BP Would Be Barred From Offshore Leases Under Bill

June 30 (Bloomberg) — BP Plc would be barred from new U.S. offshore oil and gas leases for as long as seven years under legislation being drafted by Representative George Miller, who cited the company’s safety and environmental violations.

BP “has a flagrant history of taking risks to boost profits that has resulted in deaths of workers, destruction of the environment and economic chaos in local communities,” Miller said today in an e-mailed statement. Miller plans to offer his bill as an amendment to legislation that would overhaul drilling rules.

President Barack Obama’s administration and lawmakers are considering penalties that would limit BP’s U.S. operations. In addition to BP’s Gulf spill, Miller cited a 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery that killed 15 workers and a 2006 pipeline leak that dumped 200,000 gallons of crude at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, as reasons for his legislation.

“Serial violators ought to face consequences, and one of those consequences should be denying” BP and oil-producing companies “with this kind of record the right to drill in America’s offshore waters,” Miller said in the statement.

The U.S. also may revoke BP’s status as operator of producing wells in the Gulf, such as Thunder Horse, or of leases at Prudhoe Bay, David Pursell, a managing director at Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. LLC, a Houston investment bank, said this month. Congress also is weighing measures to bar BP from contracts with the Department of Defense and Environmental Protection Agency.

Administration [...]

Climate change science is nothing new, but the level of hostility to the scientists and others who talk about it is. Decades ago, in 1969 no less, aides to President Nixon were warning him about climate change and what it would mean to national security.

Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan . . . urged the [Nixon] administration to initiate a worldwide system of monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, decades before the issue of global warming came to the public’s attention.

There is widespread agreement that carbon dioxide content will rise 25 percent by 2000, Moynihan wrote in a September 1969 memo.  “This could increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit,” he wrote. “This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter.“

Moynihan was Nixon’s counselor for urban affairs from January 1969 — when Nixon began his presidency — to December 1970. He later served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations before New York voters elected him to the Senate.   Moynihan received a response in a January 26, 1970 memo from Hubert Heffner, deputy director of the administration’s Office of Science and Technology. Heffner acknowledged that atmospheric temperature rise was an issue that should be looked at.

They are still doing that, except now the Pentagon and others worried about coming wars for resources are also chiming in and trying to warn the President too. In directly correlation to this, the anti-science noise is growing louder. They are also trying to sabotage scientists in anyway they can. Remember the hacked emails?

Dr. Michael Mann

Happy Independence Day — now if we only had some independence from climate change deniers.  At least Michael Mann and his science graph known as the “hockey stick”  got final exoneration from Penn State.

“An Investigatory Committee of faculty members with impeccable credentials” has unanimously “determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.”

Reported by CLIMATE PROGRESS and DemocracyNow.org

Penn State Panel Clears “Climategate” Scientist

An investigative panel at Pennsylvania State University has cleared a scientist linked to the so-called “Climategate” controversy last year. The scientist, Dr. Michael Mann, was among the authors of emails stolen from the computer system of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Deniers of global warming had claimed the stolen emails provided evidence of an effort to silence academics who have questioned or downplayed human-driven climate change. In its probe, Penn State said it found no evidence Mann manipulated scientific findings on global warming.

And from Climate Progress, they point out that few [...]

Coal Mines, Wastewater Systems, Landfills to Report Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest of New York City's 14 wastewater treatment systems (Photo by Victoria Belanger)

Maybe we don’t need Congress to address climate change at all. The Supreme Court already re-emphasized the legal power of the EPA to regulate air and water quality. so they are moving ahead with what needs to be done.

WASHINGTON, DC (from ENS) – Four major categories of industrial facilities will have to report their emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases under a final rule issued for public comment Monday by the U.S. EPA.

The rule will bring underground coal mines, industrial wastewater treatment systems, industrial waste landfills and magnesium production facilities under the national mandatory greenhouse gas reporting program.
Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest of New York City’s 14 wastewater treatment systems (Photo by Victoria Belanger)

Methane is the primary greenhouse gas emitted from coal mines, industrial wastewater treatment systems and industrial landfills and this gas is more than 20 times as potent at warming the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas.

The main fluorinated greenhouse gas emitted from magnesium production is sulfur hexafluoride, which has a much greater warming potential than methane, and can stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years. Magnesium producers must also report emissions of other fluorinated gases such as the refrigerant gas HFC-134a and the fire suppressant gas FK 5-1-12, as well as emissions of carbon dioxide.

These four source categories will begin collecting emissions data on January 1, 2011, with the first annual reports submitted to EPA on March 31, 2012.

The EPA says that data from these sectors will provide a better understanding of greenhouse gas emissions and will help EPA and businesses develop effective policies and programs to reduce them, the agency said in a statement announcing the final rule.

Ethanol producers, food processors and suppliers of coal will not be required to report their greenhouse gas emissions at this time, the EPA has decided.

In a separate proposed rule, EPA is requesting public comment on which industry-related greenhouse gas information would be made publicly available and which would be considered confidential.

Under the Clean Air Act, all emission data are public. Some non-emission data, however, may be considered confidential, because it relates to specific information which, if made public, could harm a business’s competitiveness.

Examples of data considered confidential under this proposal include certain information reported by fossil fuel and industrial gas suppliers related to production quantities and raw materials.

EPA is committed to providing the public with as much information as possible while following the law.

The greenhouse gas reporting program requires suppliers of fossil fuels or industrial greenhouse gases and large direct emitters of greenhouse gases to report to EPA.

Collecting this data will allow businesses to track emissions and identify cost effective ways to reduce emissions. EPA is preparing to [...]

Futurist Fashion Today

July 4, 2010
3:30pm
Fundacion Proa (Buenos Aires)

Winding down the exhibit The Universe of Futurism, this last weekend closes with the spectacular show Futurist Fashion Today. Fundación Proa has invited to the event Professor Andrea Saltzman (FADU-UBA), along with her Fashion Design course, to reflect on Futurist fashion. The product of this proposal is a fashion show with work from more than 400 students from the course’s first, second and third years.

The show Futurist Fashion Today works on the concept of movement and the revolutionary ideas set forth in the Futurist fashion manifesto, published in 1914. From a contemporary vision, this work, which focuses on historical material, actualizes and expands on the most significant aspects of fashion design and the relevance of body language. Fashion accompanies life; it serves as a document of an era.

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Roseate Spoonbill by Bill Stripling, courtesy of the National Audubon Society

Two diaries on a progressive website, Daily Kos, include some wonderful photos of endangered animals impacted by the ongoing and growing Gulf of Mexico oil leak.  There are lots of photos there, and seeing them makes it even harder to imagine the potential loss of these animals.   Oil Impacted Creatures – A Photo Diary by Haole in Hawaii and  Oil Spill Threatening Endangered Birds: DK Greenroots by FishOutofWater.  They are definitely worth a look.  Pilot whales, pictured below, are said to have a brain as complex as humans, or nearly so. 

Pilot Whale

The following cartoons sum up some of the politics around the oil leak and the frustration of all of us who can only sit and watch and wait.  You can find more cartoons like this here.

A new directive from the EPA on what to do with recovered BP oil, toxins and waste from the oil leak was released today.

Today, the U.S. Coast Guard, with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agreement, issued a directive to BP on how the company should manage recovered oil, contaminated materials and liquid and solid wastes recovered in cleanup operations from the BP oil spill.  The U.S. Coast Guard, along with EPA, and in consultation with the states, will hold BP accountable for the implementation of the approved waste management plans and ensure that the directives are followed in the gulf coast states. While the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida are overseeing BP’s waste management activities and conducting inspections, this action today is meant to compliment their activities by providing further oversight and imposing more specific requirements.  More information on the directive here.

What if BP doesn’t comply?  They have already refused to do what they have been ordered to do by the EPA.  EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson will visit the Gulf states tomorrow on her sixth trip there to see how things are going. Well, if she’d watch TV news, she could figure that out.  I’ve been amazed at how the mainstream media is relentlessly pursuing this story, and I know it’s surprising the government too.  On one of his trips to Louisiana President Obama mentioned that the government would be working on this long after the media forgot about it.  It seems like the media won’t be forgetting about it, and that’s the way it should be.  Until this leak is plugged, this should be the #1 story on all newscasts in the country and it should be the #1 priority of President Obama.  Remember, he actually said at one point that it was.

If you want to see a heartbreaking video about why that is and what we are losing,  see the video here.

More interesting than how the EPA is gradually taking control of the situation after all this time are new energy proposals.   Below are two videos of energy proposals from a real scientist, not a politician.  The scientist answered a call for ideas put out by  Andrew Revkin of Dotearth.    The scientist is  Burton Richter, a “recipient of the  1976 Nobel Prize in physics, Richter was a signatory on a letter from 34 Nobel laureates to Obama last year pushing for a big and sustained rise in the  federal investment in energy research.”  He told Revkin he was “unaware of any response from the White House.”  Don’t let that discourage any people with great energy ideas from contacting the White House — it’s the Senate where good ideas go to die.  Here is the energy presentation by Mr. Richter, and below that some more basic information about him and his ideas on new energy legislation.  Also, he’s a Nobel prize winner*.

Part 1

Part 2 is next.

Part 2

His latest book is [...]

“We’re not just trying to kill everything in the Gulf of Mexico, but everything that flies over it as well”.

Those are the words of the videographer, “Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen”, the man who made this video.  He is associated with the Waterkeeper Alliance.  Please spread this video  around and make sure people see it. Even the most hardened oil fanatics might be stunned at the damage to everything this oil leak — still a gusher — is doing to the wildlife, the air, the marshes, the water.  This is the biggest crime, or act of war, ever done to this country by anyone.

This video shows dolphins struggling and wildlife deaths towards the end — hundreds of dolphins and at least one whale, that are dying as they swim in the oil in the Gulf.  Imagine their panic when they realize the sky is burning and the water, their habitat, has been totally poisoned.  There is no where they can escape to.   It’s just heartbreaking to imagine what they must be going through.  Dolphins  and whales are very intelligent animals and they are suffering and dying for our oil addiction.  This is BP, murdering dolphins, whales, pelicans and sharks and everything else in the Gulf that used to live and thrive there.  They have used so much dispersant to break up the oil to cover their own butts it’s not even clear whether most of the oil can ever be collected.  It must be harder and harder for even the cheerleaders of oil to justify the use of it,  given how dangerous getting it has become.

John Wathen says, “There has to be something better than putting all of this toxic smoke into the atmosphere”.  He’s right.  Why are they burning it, and why aren’t there ships collecting it to dispose of it?  Because they want to sell it, and the price of oil is too low to make it worth BP’s while to actually collect it.  Besides, if they did collect it, refine it and sell it, it would end up in the atmosphere anyway.  That’s the life cycle of oil, polluting from the beginning to the end.

In my opinion, this oil “accident” and its aftermath is no less than an act of hostility, an act of war on the part of British Petroleum,  than if they had bombed Louisiana outright.

It’s time for retaliation on the part of the United States.  We should seize their corporation, and seize all their assets before they can hide any more of them.  Seize their equipment, every last boat and skimmer, and force their engineers and rig workers to stop the leak and fix this problem. That would be so much more justified than the war in Iraq ever was.

Whoever posted the link for this video wrote:

This was the most emotionally disturbing video I have ever done!
A flight over the BP Slick Source where I saw at least 100 Dolphins in the oil, some dying. [...]

A pelican takes off from Cat Island as Coast Guard conducts tour of area oil clean up efforts in the waters outside of Venice on Sunday, June 27, 2010.

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for May was the warmest on record, at 1.24°F (0.69°C) above the 20th century average of 58.6°F (14.8°C).

According to NOAA, the global temperature for May was the warmest on record.  The oil geyser in the Gulf continues.  But finally, the politics of a possible climate bill this year are shaping up and it looks like it may even come together late this year.   First, here is the text of the single paragraph in Obama’s speech after the G20 yesterday where he mentions climate change and energy:

“The G-20 leaders renewed our commitment, made in Pittsburgh, to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. The United States has laid out our plans for achieving this goal, and we’re urging our G-20 partners to do so as well. This would be one of the most important steps we can take to create clean energy jobs, increase our energy security and address the threat of climate change.”

That was it.  (You can read the entire speech here).  He did try to get world leaders to agree to stop their subsidies for fossil fuels, which amounts to encouragement and financial backing of the very thing that is causing global warming.   Leaked draft language (PDF) obtained by ClimateWire indicated that leaders may weaken the language on fossil fuels, but reportedly, the word “voluntary” was removed.  (See post below).

Tomorrow, President Obama is getting down to work on energy and climate for real, meeting with actual lawmakers.  (Half-gov  Sarah Palin and her persistent “Drill Baby Drill” message were not invited.)  Bill McKibben, the guru of 350.org, sent out his thoughts today on this upcoming meeting with senators regarding the “energy bill”.   He writes:

“We learned earlier today that President Obama will convene a meeting at the White House tomorrow with a group of key senators to hammer out an energy and climate proposal to take to the floor of the Senate in the next six weeks.  ??Whatever that proposal contains, it won’t do everything that we need–but it might at least get us started.  The danger is that Senators will just do the easy stuff, and remain too timid to seize this moment to pass truly far-reaching legislation.  So it would be very useful to call your Senators and make the following points:

1) We need a bill that puts an economy-wide cap on carbon–all carbon, from utilities and factories and cars and anything else that burns coal, gas, and oil. And we need those caps based on science–they have to start us on the route back towards 350 and towards a safe climate.

2) We won’t be fooled by a bill that merely addresses the need for [...]

Protestors carry a large black piece of plastic symbolizing an oil spill as they take part in the 'Hands Across The Sand Miami' event sponsored by several groups protesting offshore oil drilling, which they say presents danger to oceans, marine wildlife fishing industries and coastal economies in Miami Beach, Florida June 26, 2010.

President Obama met with Senators today to talk about climate change and energy.  According to The Hill,

Leading Senate advocates of climate change legislation emerged from a White House meeting proclaiming President Barack Obama offered firm support for including greenhouse gas curbs in the broad energy package slated for Senate debate this summer.

“The president was very clear about putting a price on carbon and limiting greenhouse gas emissions,”  Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said outside the White House after the 90-minute meeting between Obama and a bipartisan group of about 20 senators.

The Senators felt sure the Obama was very clear about a price on carbon.  But Obama himself wasn’t as sure.

Obama told the senators that “he still believes the best way for us to transition to a clean energy economy is with a bill that makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses by putting a price on pollution.”

But the White House statement then adds: “Not all of the Senators agreed with this approach, and the President welcomed other approaches and ideas that would take real steps to reduce our dependence on oil, create jobs, strengthen our national security and reduce the pollution in our atmosphere.”

Read more here. Why would he welcome “other approaches”?   This is Obama’s biggest fault on this issue — he welcomes ideas that are not supported by science.  Does anyone else remember when Candidate Obama and was saying we need to transition off oil and fossil fuels and put a price on carbon and base our energy policy on science, not politics?  Maybe I dreamed the whole thing.  I continue to be disappointed in Obama’s lack of strong, urgent leadership on climate change and getting us off coal and oil.  It’s not that it can’t be done, so something else is holding him back, and it’s  green, and flat, and occasionally crisp.  See hint on the right.

Senator Voinavich did his part and represented the official Republican line on climate change legislation today:  They will obstruct it, dismiss it, and do whatever it takes to block it.  Dear Republicans, isn’t it about time you did something good for your country, instead of trying to block everything that would be helpful to current and future generations? We are getting really weary of this obstruction.  According to The Hill:

Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) said Tuesday that the White House meeting President Barack Obama hosted with a bipartisan group of senators demonstrated that broad climate change legislation is probably dead.  “I believe today’s meeting at the White House sent a clear [...]

This very interesting  column about clean energy and farmers appeared in a local newspaper this weekend, written by a farmer.  It’s an opinion piece with a unique perspective a lot of people don’t think about — how farmers are natural advocates of renewable energy.   I don’t agree with the writer’s enthusiasm for switchgrass, but he makes other good points.  He’s advocating green jobs, renewable energy,  how it will make sense for  farmers to transition to cleaner forms of energy.

Cows and windmills. Photo taken in southern Minnesota by ST.

Clean energy. That’s some kind of city thing, isn’t it? Nope. Clean energy is a farmer thing.  . . .

Farmers usually have one main source of income: selling the plant or animal products we work so hard to produce.

Here in Minnesota, that means corn, soybeans, wheat, potatoes, alfalfa, milk, cattle and hogs, to mention just a few.  Raising crops and animals is what farmers love, and that’s never going to change.

But farming is a tough business. And there’s no reason Minnesota farmers can’t enjoy a second, third, or maybe even fourth income stream, grounded in the clean energy economy. Sometimes without increasing costs much, if at all.  I’ll start with an example close to my heart. Manure from cattle, hogs or other animals may not look like an income stream. But in the right circumstances, there’s cash in what used to be an unavoidable nuisance.

Here’s why. Animal manure produces methane. There are two things about methane, both of which can translate to money for farmers.  First, methane is a fuel — if you can capture it, you can burn it to generate electricity, for your own farm or beyond.  Second, if it’s not burned, methane is a potent pollutant.

Everyone’s heard about carbon dioxide being a heat-trapping gas. But methane is, too — except it’s about 25 times more powerful. Which means that, if we can just get the clean energy economy going, people will pay you to keep the methane from going up into the air.

So you’re making money twice — once from producing electricity and again from avoiding methane emissions.

Full disclosure: I lead a company that works with farmers to figure out if methane capture will work for them.  Maybe you don’t have a large animal operation. But your land may be perfect as a site for wind turbines.

Minnesota ranks ninth among the states in wind energy potential, which means that there are plenty of Minnesota farmers — especially in the western part of the state — who could benefit from leasing their land to wind developers.

Thanks to smart state laws, there are already 60 wind farms in operation across Minnesota. With a strong federal clean energy law, though, many more of our farmers could turn small corners of their land into a year-round cash-producing business.

Oh, and by the way, those enormous roofs on livestock production [...]

Copenhagen didn’t amount to much. Maybe the next world climate conference will.

COP 16 & CMP 6 – Launch of host country website
Cancún, Mexico — The sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) and the sixth Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP) will be held in Cancún, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December 2010, together with the thirty-third sessions of the subsidiary bodies and the fourteenth session of the AWG-KP and twelfth session of the AWG-LCA.
The official host country of Mexico’s website is now available online.
Visit the website

COP16 will be in Cancun.  It’s not actually correct to say it’s near Tulum, as the website advertises,  but if you are going to COP16 you should try to visit Tulum even though it’s quite a ways down the coast.  I visited Tulum in 2007.  The Mayans in general are a cautionary tale about what happens when you misuse the land for farming and diverting water, etc.  Cancun itself is frighteningly overdeveloped on the ocean side, with resorts everywhere.  If there are any mangroves left there, they must be hiding them. In fact, much of the coast from Cancun down to Tulum is what I would call overdeveloped, and as everyone knows, that’s not exactly great for the ecosystems and the environment.  Tulum was a Mayan fortress, or a walled city, and mainly occupied around AD 1200.   The walls and location were to ward off invasions that would come from the sea, and obviously they were unsuccessful.  The Spanish eventually abandoned Tulum in the 1600s.

The photo below is one I took of Tulum on the sea edge, with some ruins in the back left area.  This area of Mexico is unbelievably gorgeous and [...]

The largest protest so far against the Toronto-area G8/G20 summits heads south on University Avenue from the Ontario legislature on Saturday afternoon. People were marching in support of a variety of causes, including the environment. (Timothy Neesam/CBC)

This is about how regular people have so little control over their own future, and little to say about whether the human race survives or not. It’s long and convoluted, but there are some interesting bits in it. In Obama’s speech at the end of the G20 today, he said that nations agree that fossil fuel use has to end and that they all have to work to get climate change stopped.  However, he didn’t elaborate.  There was a G20 “Climate agreement” and a document that I haven’t seen yet. It reportedly called for reductions in the use (or subsidies) of fossil fuels voluntarily, and President Obama pushed them to remove the “voluntary” wording, supposedly making it mandatory.  Even if it is mandatory, it’s still not an official climate agreement, and there is no way of enforcing it that I’m aware of. When I find the text of it, I will reprint it here.

Unfortunately, calling for governments to  keep on growing and spending and consuming and supporting bank health might sound good to people in America, and it’s what all the leaders did, but this is just more propping up a broken capitalistic system that’s falling apart, instead of inventing a new and more equitable economic system for everyone. That system should be based on renewable energy and ending hunger and poverty. Instead, they want to save all the banks. Everything world leaders and Obama and our Congress is doing amounts to putting Bandaids on an unsustainable system.

What we need right now is a better system, one that phases out constant consumption, waste and corruption, and takes all the money out of politics.  Money in politics is the main reason why we have no climate change bill. We have an economic system that feeds on itself, looping itself in with our politics, and that is bound to fail.  Unlimited growth on a limited planet will be disastrous, and we are already seeing evidence of that. It’s harder and harder to get the oil and the coal out of the ground, because there is less of it, yet we need more and more of it. Something, besides the oil rig that sank, is bound to crash and burn very soon.  From the LA Times:

G-20 climate pact erases word ‘voluntary’ from efforts to cut oil-firm subsidies

International negotiators, under pressure from the Obama administration, agree to omit the term when describing efforts to cut production and consumption incentives. Summit also focuses on arriving at a consensus on the global economic crisis.

In a last-minute turn in global climate talks, international negotiators agreed over the weekend to adopt more ambitious plans than expected to trim government subsidies to oil [...]

A map of the world from an atlas which concentrates on population rather than land mass released last year. The Earth's population is due to hit 7bn by next year

Doomsday will be decided in 2014, not 2012, according to an Australian scientist who says that if we keep doing what we’re going, Drill-Baby-Drilling and having lots of babies, it’s the end of the human race in about 100 years.   Seriously, I wonder if we will last that long.  He also claims that attempts to stop climate change will not stop our extinction, only buy us time. Well he doesn’t have to worry about that, because the United States isn’t going to do anything about climate change, thanks to our obstructionist right-wing politicians.  Some of them are still busy denying climate change, like they deny evolution, and claim that dinosaurs lived with people.  In other words, they suffer from serious science-backwardness,  and the sheer force of it just might lead to our demise.   Here’s to “Livin’ la Vida Loca” while we still can. From the Daily Mail:

As the scientist who helped eradicate smallpox he certainly know a thing or two about extinction.

And now Professor Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University, has predicted that the human race will be extinct within the next 100 years.

He has claimed that the human race will be unable to survive a population explosion and ‘unbridled consumption.’

Fenner told The Australian newspaper that ‘homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years.’

‘A lot of other animals will, too,’ he added.  ‘It’s an irreversible situation. I think it’s too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off.’ Since humans entered an unofficial scientific period known as the Anthropocene – the time since industrialisation – we have had an effect on the planet that rivals any ice age or comet impact, he said.

Fenner, 95, has won awards for his work in helping eradicate the variola virus that causes smallpox and has written or co-written 22 books.

He announced the eradication of the disease to the World Health Assembly in 1980 and it is still regarded as one of the World Health Organisation’s greatest achievements  He was also heavily involved in helping to control Australia’s myxomatosis problem in rabbits.

Last year official UN figures estimated that the world’s population is currently 6.8 billion. It is predicted to exceed seven billion by the end of 2011.

Fenner blames the onset of climate change for the human race’s imminent demise. He said: ‘We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island. ‘Climate change is just at the very beginning. But we’re seeing remarkable changes in the weather [...]

The oil-covered beach on the left is in Florida. There goes Florida’s tourism. BP can’t possibly survive paying damages to all the businesses in Florida that rely on their tourism and fishing industries.

This could all have been avoided if we’d transitioned to renewable energy 35 years ago, when it was first being proposed. Yes, 35 years ago President Jimmy Carter knew that we needed to make the move to renewable energy and he put solar panels on the White House to get things moving. As soon as we got a Republican president, the panels were removed. What does that tell you? It tells me that the last 35 years of pollution, climate change emissions and lack of renewable energy policy was the result of short-sighted presidents,most of them Republicans. President Clinton didn’t do anything substantial to move us off oil either, despite the presence of Al Gore in his administration.

So whose ass needs to be kicked? It looks like the political ones need it as much as any. We need to find a way to kick some Presidential and Congressional ass hard enough that it gets their attention, and get the green energy revolution started. We need to let them know we are not going to take this anymore.

See this dolphin on the right? It died yesterday. It died not just because of BP, but because of U.S. energy policy, and the fact that we all drive cars that use gasoline. People at the beach tried very hard to save him, but they were not successful. According to MSNBC, he died later at an animal rescue clinic, and had probably ingested oil, or breathed it in.  This dolphin died for a tank of gas.  The story of the landfall of this oil and of this dolphin is on MSNBC.

A recent letter to the editor in the Star Tribune sums up our need for renewable energy very well. Read it below.

“Even in today’s age, technological limits

Since President Richard Nixon launched Project Independence with its goal of producing an “unconventionally powered virtually pollution free automobile within five years,” we’ve expected technology to end our dependence on foreign oil.

For President Jimmy Carter, it was a $20 billion Synfuels Project, based on Germany’s World War II coal-to-diesel program. For President George.W. Bush it was a $1.2 billion Freedom Car proposal to develop hydrogen-fueled vehicles. Then, in President Obama’s address to the nation on June 15 he said, “The time to embrace a clean energy future is now,” as he expressed his faith in energy sources like biofuels, wind, and solar.

The oil industry pursues our deep ocean deposits with faith in 400-ton blowout preventers to cap undersea gushers. Polluting coal’s dominance for electric power is to be handled by unproven carbon capture technology. Congress and state legislatures like Minnesota’s pass “tough” renewable energy standards based on faith in technological pipe dreams.

Unfortunately the laws of nature and physics [...]