Wednesday, December 7, 6:30am-9pm, using your telephone

Will you help protect Ohio families from radioactive oil and gas waste by making one phone call on Wednesday? Ohio has 226 Class II injection wells that accept 20-30 million barrels of radioactive oil and gas liquid waste every year.

Last month, Buckeye Environmental Network, Sierra Club, EarthJustice, and 30 grassroots organizations petitioned the United States Environmental Protection Agency, (US EPA) to revoke Ohio’s authority to manage Ohio’s Class II oil and gas waste injection program. The program, currently run by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), consistently fails to act against violations, allowing serious problems to continue unaddressed, posing threats to our drinking water and public health.

Ohio communities have lived with leaking class II injection wells, accidents, blowouts, and spills for years. And, Ohio does not have a way for impacted residents to file a formal complaint.

Please help protect Ohio families by taking five minutes to call US EPA Administrator Debra Shore on Wednesday.

As disturbing as it was to see the Proud Boys and their fringe groups marching through Clintonville in camo with long rifles slung over shoulders, it is equally as absurd.

One US military veteran on the Columbus Reddit page perhaps said it best.

“The mismatched gear and overall sloppiness of the ‘boots and utes’ of Y’all Qeada never fails to trigger me as a veteran,” they wrote. “How big of a snowflake do you have to be to be triggered by drag queens?”

Another head-scratcher was to see the Columbus police a bit too chummy with the Proud Boys. True, the police were following new “keep-the-peace” protocols, but Canadians would deem this absurd because their nation officially designated the Proud Boys a terror organization in 2021.

The Ohio Legislature must not pitch billions more taxpayer dollars down the atomic rat hole.

Instead—-without spending a single cent—-it can make the Buckeye State the hugely profitable world capital of wind power.

It can be done with the simple deletion of a single sentence in the Ohio code.  

It can quickly and simply, without public subsidies, open the door to billions in private investment, creating millions in revenues and thousands of new jobs for the entire nation, with Ohio at the Heart of it All.

Investment in nuclear power has a long, sorry history.  Throughout their existence, atomic reactor projects have come in years late and billions over budget, with delivered power costs far in excess of original promises.  

The latest case in point is the Vogtle Project in Georgia, two reactor construction efforts that wasted $12 billion in federal loans and are now scheduled to open years behind schedule, at a cost more than double original promises.  Under no circumstances will Vogtle ever compete with solar, wind, battery or efficiency technologies.

Where I live, the seasons change fast. We’ve barely put away our jack-o’-lanterns in Kansas City when a cold wind blows in from the prairie, bringing down leaves — and soon after that, ice storms and snow.

But no matter how cold it gets, we always look forward to seeing family and friends over the holidays. We all want our homes to be filled with joy, comfort, and the people we love the most.

But many of us will miss someone at the holiday table, because our country’s overdose crisis now touches almost every family and community. Overdoses took over 108,000 lives this year, more than any year on record. Overdose deaths affect all of us — whether we are Black, brown, or white, and whether we live in a big city or a small town.

Every one of these deaths is a tragedy. It’s also a tragedy that so many lives could have been saved with effective and proven treatments like buprenorphine, a form of Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT), the gold standard of care for opioid use disorder. But outdated laws stop providers from prescribing this lifesaving care.

In its continuing private interest- and large public institution-dominated efforts to avoid the popular democratic reforms that remade almost all US cities in the second half of the nineteenth century and even more in the early twentieth-century Progressive Era, Columbus, Ohio (which continues to need its state’s name to be recognized) created “area commissions” and “district organizations” in the early 1970s. It was one of many anti-public dodges to avoid representative democracy and maintain private interests, often bought and sold with mayors’, city councils’, and major departments’ participation. This is the well-known Columbus Way.

These are strange entities, full of contradictions, pursuits of self-interest, and both active and passive deceptions. The only serious commentary I have found is a few pages in geographer Kevin Cox’s Boomtown Columbus: Ohio’s Sunbelt City and How Developers Got Their Way (2021), the only scholarly documented study of Columbus in print.

Cox highlights the complications and contradictions: