Environment

Noted climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institute for Science at Stanford has finally popped the question. In an article entitled “One Known Way to Cool the Earth” on the February 16, 2015 USA Today opinion page, Caldeira writes: “There is basically only one way known to cool the Earth rapidly.” He explains the method “…is to reflect more of the sun’s warming rays back to space.”
  What will it take to do this? According to Caldeira, only “A small fleet of airplanes could do what large volcanos do – create a layer of small particles high in the atmosphere that scatters incoming sunlight back to space. Cooling the Earth this way, could be fast, cheap and easy.”
  The reality is that the U.S. government has been spraying for well over a decade and a half in plain view while attacking anyone pointing it out. They’ve been making a chemical haze of clouds and putting a sunscreen in the sky. Small white planes, some of them associated with Battelle Memorial Institute, have been creating clouds in a criss-cross pattern in the sky.

Our Earth is being destroyed by fracking and nukes.

These two vampire technologies suck the energy out of our planet while permanently poisoning our air, water, food and livelihoods.

The human movements fighting them have been largely separate over the years.

No more.

In the wake of Fukushima, the global campaign to bury atomic power has gained enormous strength. All Japan’s 54 reactors remain shut. Germany is amping up its renewable energy generation with a goal of 80 percent or more by 2050. Four U.S. reactors under construction are far over budget and behind schedule. Five old ones have closed in the last two years.

In New England and elsewhere, as the old nukes go down, safe energy activists shift their attention to the deadly realities of fossil fuel extraction.

None of those coal/nuke burners can compete with the rising revolution in renewable energy. Throughout the world, similar outmoded facilities are shutting down.

In 2001, Ohio deregulated its electric markets. But the state’s nuke owners demanded nearly $10 billion in “stranded cost” handouts so the obsolete Davis-Besse and Perry reactors on Lake Erie could allegedly compete with more efficient technologies.

Today, despite the huge subsidies, renewables and fracked gas have completely priced them out of the market.

A planet run by King CONG—Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas—cannot be sustained.

But to get beyond it, our Solartopian vision must embrace more than just a technological transformation.  It also demands social, political and spiritual transcendence.

From Fukushima to global warming, from fracking to the Gulf disaster(s), it’s clear the fossil/nuclear industry is hard-wired to kill us all. Its only motivating force is profit; our biological survival has no part in the equation.

Unrestrained corporate power is the Ebola virus of our global ecological crisis. Rooting it out will demand a whole new level of resistance.

The worldwide march for the climate this weekend is focussed on moving us to a Solartopian energy supply, a green-powered Earth.

But those who march must also focus on the real core problem: the nature of the modern corporation.

As currently structured, the corporation’s sole mandate is to make profit. Its insatiable need for more and more money, and its immunity from the consequences of its actions, are unsustainable in any sense.

Its fossil fuels heat our planet. Its atomic reactors threaten us all.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the United States is a full blown oxymoron when it comes to protecting U.S. residents from the danger of increased exposure to ionizing radiation. That’s the kind of radiation that comes from natural sources like Uranium and the sun, as well as unnatural sources like Uranium mines, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power plants (even when they haven’t melted down like Fukushima). The EPA is presently considering allowing everyone in the U.S. to be exposed to higher levels of ionizing radiation.  

TOLEDO OH – Ironically, although this city is affixed to the shore of a Great Lake, we’ve given a new meaning to what a “dry” town is. We learned it’s one thing to go without beer; quite another to go without water.

For three days, some 500,000 people avoided almost all bodily contact with water that came out of their faucets. No drinking, cooking, dish-washing, teeth-brushing. Boiling didn’t help. Bathing was OK except for small children, pets and those with compromised immune systems.

Algae blooms in Lake Erie caused by excessive phosphorus and nitrogen from sewage – from humans and animal feedlots – and large scale farming are not new. For years, algae has leached microcystin bacteria into Lake Erie, but literally overnight three days ago, the health of Lake Erie and a long-delayed overhaul of our aging water treatment plant are top priority.

In April residents from Youngstown’s Brier Hill neighborhood joined with Frack Free Mahoning (FFM) to appeal an order made in March by Richard Simmers, the Chief of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management (DOGRM) to authorize Industrial Waste Control/Ground Tech., Inc. (IWC) to operate a facility at 240 Sinter Court, Youngstown. This facility will receive potentially radioactive brine, drill cuttings, drilling mud and tank bottom sludge from shale gas fracking operations. At the location along the Mahoning River, three-fourths of a mile due west of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the company will do tank cleaning, radioactive decontamination, radiological surveys, waste storage, waste characterization, waste treatment, waste solidification and waste preparation for shipment (i.e. down-blending of radioactive frack waste.) The ODNR received the permit application on February 7th, and the DOGRM chief ordered its approval on March 6th. Unfortunately ODNR did not release the information to the public until April 10th, after the 30-day public comment period had expired.

New Mexico orders United States to protect people and environment

Plutonium and other radioactive elements were accidentally released from the only U.S. underground nuclear weapons waste storage site in New Mexico on Valentine’s Day 2014. More than three months later, investigators think they’ve found an underground container that failed – and that there are hundreds more like them, both underground and above ground, at different sites in New Mexico and Texas. Investigators haven’t yet said exactly what caused the underground failure in February, or whether more than one underground waste container failed, but there have been no reports of further failures among the hundreds of now suspect containers, all of which are thought to contain a dangerous combination of nitrate salt and other chemicals.