Climate Sunday: Water Everywhere, Except Where We Want it

 

The UN convened a global conference on water--which is something absolutely basic to life on earth. I shouldn't actually have to say something as dull as "Water is important to life" but apparently, this kind of true thing isn't obvious to everyone. I have it top of mind at the moment because thousands of gallons of latex-related chemicals just got dumped into the Delaware Rive late Friday and we are finding out now that we probably want to drink bottled water here in Philadelphia. 

Water is necessary to the entire food chain, and we threaten to tip weird chemicals into it all the time. Even from fracking and oil spills and whatnot. And that's a real problem, Because we're already overtaxing our aquifers, and have been for a while. And we really can't afford to fuck up our drinking water.

So says the CSO of PepsiCo. They bottle a lot of water and soft drinks and looking at a timeline of TWO THE FUCK YEARS! for half the world to be in scarcity for drinking water is very uncomfortable. It's their business, and they are looking at the logistics of transporting water to where it isn't. 

This isn't just about thirst-quenching, though--it's about agriculture. Right now, Argentina is having an insane drought. Just a total loss on all major crops, with devastating effects for feeding livestock (this is a glimpse from last year). Some can say there's no obvious relationship to global climate change, but some areas have gotten wetter--like the floods of Pakistan, and the barrage of atmospheric rivers that have buffeted California. And it is devastating. In California, crops are wiped out by flooding and a whole lake appears where once was farmland.  So while we lose a Lake Mead in one place, and a Lake Tulare comes back--but no one can plan for that happening in a whole minute!

It's really no joke--the Great Salt Lake is not so much, and the Great Lakes themselves are becoming Meh Lakes. And the solutions to this problem aren't going to be easy at all.

Combine this with the realization that increased CO2 isn't actually going to be the monster bonus to global greening, and you have a potential agricultural nightmare. Some crops never start, some drown. And don't get me started on what is happening to our pollinators, because if I start thinking about the problems of the birds and the bees, I won't sleep tonight. 

Anyway--we should probably ship chemicals very carefully, use fossil fuels less, conserve water religiously and not be greedy arseholes as a society. It's literally life and death. Like, literally.  Because you can't drink oil and you can't eat coal. 

While We Wait for Trump's Arrest, The IPCC Report is Dire

 

I never wanted to spend my senior years on a dying planet, but that's what it looks like to me. The supposed leadership of the most industrialized countries are doing the very least to curb global warming, and have even decided, it seems, to promote the short-term benefits of fossil fuel usage for their electoral cycle (yes, I'm criticizing Biden over the Willow project). 

We're looking at the results of climate change in the eye all the time--take the weird winter of California's discontent: that isn't some freak global cooling, but a predictable weirding of the weather because patterns are disrupted. But we are still stuck with the effects of warming in the usually cooler places. We can see the devastation of our ecosystems in the deaths of fish due to heat waves in Australia. The southern hemisphere has been through it this past season. 

Climate change isn't predicting the future, but describing our present, now. And we are still jaded and in denial. Lives will be lost if action is not taken, but a look around social media indicates that loads of people still believe climate science is some kind of hoax. A conspiracy theory. 

I'm just a D-list blogger--I don't expect what I say to gain any traction and actually, my climate-related posts aren't even the ones that do any numbers. But what I do know is, changing people's POV via messaging and "flooding the zone" can be done--because the denialists have been doing it all this time. Solutions exist and funding them (like actually just fully comping changeover to solar energy or heat pumps) are within the reach of government actions. (Programs totally exist and are inadequate for many homeowners.) 

We can do more, and more aggressively. The political will has to be there, and the idea that the fossil fuel industry and the denialist-propagandist complex (like Fox News, who are known liars) needs to be called out for being the problem that they are. 

I think we still have the opportunity to make a better future. But that opportunity can't be pissed away--it must be vigorously and intelligently seized. 

Keystone Problems

 

U.S. pipeline regulator reviewing special permits after Keystone oil spills -source https://t.co/QOLs8JNV2O pic.twitter.com/Ghi2ZJkKLk

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 21, 2022

This is the third spill in five years. It's spilling into Kansas Mill Creek. 

Operators were alerted to an issue with the pipeline on Dec. 7. As of Friday morning, TC Energy says, 4,125 barrels of oil from the creek have been recovered of the estimated 14,000 barrels (about 588,000 gallons) reportedly lost in the spill.

Aerial footage of the leak from Nebraska Public Media shows the leak has affected a nearby pasture and residents' farmland.

Many initial details, like the cause for the spill, are still not clear. What is known is the type of oil that was being transported through the pipeline: tar sands oil, also called diluted bitumen.

Because it's tar sands oil, it's thick and hard to clean up. (It's not easy to convert to gasoline for this reason, too.)

Republicans have been blaming Biden for cancelling further work on the project and claiming it had anything to do with higher energy costs this year (it doesn't--at all)--but this hammers home why this kind of pipeline is a problem: we don't eat or drink oil, and this kind of spill can damage farmland and poison water. For years, my objection to it has been that it runs too close to the Ogallala aquifer, right in the nation's breadbasket. 

Anyway, when Republicans want to start in on Keystone XL--the pipeline that runs through the US to ship Canadian oil for export and complain that Democrats hate cheap energy, I think my response is something along the lines of what my dad told me when he despaired of the sloppy condition of my room. He said, "Only a sick animal shits where it eats." 

That probably won't make a dent in the hard heads of people who doubled-down on "Drill here, drill now" after the Deepwater Horizon spill. But I don't know how much more obvious the keystone problems have to be.

Labor Day: Is It A Crime?

 

The $7.25 minimum wage can’t pay all the bills in any state https://t.co/wTk5JHdYNQ

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) September 7, 2021

We talk sometimes about "working for a living", so I just want to interject that working doesn't always provide a living. It provides the barebones of existing, maybe feeding oneself and ones' kids, inadequately, going into soul-disrupting debt at times, relying on various kinds of assistance at others.

Puerto Rico Is Incognito on FEMA's Website

There's something to be said for the Trump Administration's response to the devastation in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria, but FEMA's website does not care to say it. 

FEMA spokesman William Booher noted that both measures are still being reported on a website maintained by the office of Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, www.status.pr. According to that website, which is in Spanish, 9.2 percent of the island now has power and 54.2 percent of residents have access to drinking water. Booher said that these measures are also shared in news conferences and media calls that happen twice a day, but he didn't elaborate on why they are no longer on the main FEMA page.

“Our mission is to support the governor and his response priorities through the unified command structure to help Puerto Ricans recover and return to routines. Information on the stats you are specifically looking for are readily available” on the website maintained by the governor's office, Booher said.

Maybe it's just me, but that sort of seems like the Trump Administration would prefer not to make notice of how slow things are going. See, in Trump's photo op the other day, he was in a place that wasn't as terrifically impacted by the storm, and wasn't really directly confronted with the full extent of the privations these folks were experiencing. I can't 100% say why Trump's response to Puerto Rico's situation was different from how he responded to Hurricane Harvey in TX or Hurricane Irma in FL, but there seems to be a difference. And if there was measurable good being done there by FEMA and other US agencies in the aid effort, I know, that I know, that I know, that Trump would be ready to witness their good deeds, and would be happy to spread that word.

But that is not what is happening. It is almost like FEMA already knows this story is not going to be a great success story regarding government effort, just like Oxfam knows that they need to step in to make sure pressure is put on to ensure government effort is coordinating with NGO relief agencies to do all they can.

I just feel like doing right by Puerto Rico in the first place would have been the best play if the Trump folks were so concerned with appearances. But there I am, giving shits.

If It Was About a Pipeline *You* Didn't Want?

I guess the thing that strikes me as ridiculous about the conflict with the water-protectors who protested against the Dakota Pipeline which was just denied access is that these people were basically talking about what should be allowed in their own backyards. Maybe Speaker of the House Paul Ryan thinks it is a shame that they wanted to keep access to clean water and not to have the pipeline run through land their ancestors were buried in. Maybe, even after his share in the pipeline is sold, Donald Trump still feels that way, too.

But for now, the rights of local people are being respected. And that is, I would think, a good thing. And I don't really think government should muscle in and override their rights, any more than they should take away their right to protest or physically abuse them while they exercise that right. Some people think differently. But I would want them to think about how they would feel about the water their kids drink, or how they would feel about a pipeline running through their parents' graveyard.

It just isn't that more complicated than that. It's about a time and a place, and how these people said this isn't the time and place for this pipeline, right here. It isn't about weirdly hating on energy or business or wanting some special right. It was about their location. Energy companies don't have more of a right to a place because of money. People have rights and among them, the right to petition their government for redress of grievances. And if you find that problematic, you go consult with the founding fathers. See where they are buried, and consider whether a pipeline needs to run through their graves and how you would feel about that.

Climate Sunday: Know Your Class War

One of the things that is horrifying and galling about the water crisis that has poisoned the residents of Flint, MI, is that is should have been prevented. There is no way that officials in Michigan could not have known that the Flint River was polluted, or been able to do appropriate feasibility studies to determine if that water even could be treated adequately to be safe for drinking. But this particular story has an even uglier facet to it--Flint isn't alone.

Actually, a lot of communities have drinking water that is substandard or at-risk. Vox has found that there is lead poisoning in communities throughout the country. And it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of the communities that have contaminated water are poorer communities--they are all-around more exposed to contamination, and remediation of pollution is expensive.

But lead isn't the only contaminant--there's pathogens (like the E.coli and Legionnaire's disease that may also be contaminating Flint's water), arsenic, radon and more. Some contamination is very area-specific, like the uranium in the groundwater used by thousands of Navajo nation people, or areas whose water can be jeopardized by coal ash spills.

So while the crisis in Flint is the most visible story about unsafe drinking water, and one of the more egregious cases of how the people there came to be drinking poison, keep in mind that people in St. Joseph, LA and Firebaugh, CA also have water they simply can not trust. And while there are ways to fix the infrastructure to provide these people with safe water--the resources to do it are not to be had locally, and this dynamic perpetuates poor health outcomes.

Jeb Bush Makes Me Feel Bad

Jeb Bush has secured the crucial "Jeb Bush's mom" endorsement https://t.co/7nxhoNBLOo

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 23, 2016

This week, Jeb Bush seems to have brought his mom around to supporting his campaign, which is great, because she wasn't that excited before, to be honest. This surely means Jebmentum is on its way. Or not.

See, I think the guy has a "unforced error" problem that is going to be insurmountable. Take the water crisis in Flint. Now, Marco Rubio ducked and said he didn't really know about it, and Donald Trump ducked and said he didn't have anything to say about it. But here is Jeb Bush:

“I admire Rick Snyder for stepping up right now. He’s going to the challenge, and he’s fired people and accepted responsibility to fix this,” Bush, a former Florida governor, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Yep. "Heckuva job, Rick Snyder." After a year and a half or so of covering it up and ignoring it, the Michigan Republican is finally getting around to spreading the blame between his administration and anybody else he can point at. And Jeb calls that leadership. But when you're happy to tout getting an endorsement from your mom, maybe a participation trophy does look like a major award.

Climate Sunday: Finger-Pointing, anyone?

The above Tweet from MI Gov. Rick Snyder is in response to statements made by the candidates at tonight's Democratic debate. (I've screen-capped it instead of embedding, as one does when a rapid-response might just be too rapid and could be deleted.) It might make Gov. Snyder's day if we just let bygones be bygones and forget about who poisoned whom, but believe it or not, some people still think accountability is part of the process of making things right. Hillary Clinton used her time to bring up the issue at the end of the debate, and Sen. Sanders stated that the governor should resign.

I think there is a point to removing Snyder from the office because what he knew and when he knew it is an important part of solving the crisis. That the water was discolored and smelled bad and wasn't safe was brought up long before he was apparently bothered to do anything about it. It might even seem to some people like nothing got done because somebody didn't want to accept the blame, as if addressing it meant taking responsibility for it. Oddly enough, being responsible enough to take care of the well-being of one's citizens when one is governor is what that leadership position is all about.

And considering this disaster to be about "political statements" is clearly missing the point by a mile.

The Least the Governor of Michigan Could Do

Michigan governor calls in the National Guard to help with the water crisis in Flint: https://t.co/jd1JjxpZat pic.twitter.com/I9LLwCTmJG

— The Root (@TheRoot) January 14, 2016

Calling in the National Guard to distribute water to the people in Flint, MI who do not have drinkable tap water, is a bit behind the beat and the least he could do. The people of Flint have had their water prices jacked-up by Detroit before the switch to the corrosive and polluted Flint River water source, and have enjoyed the benefits of funky, yellow, e coli-laden, lead-contaminated, and now possibly Legionnaire's disease-tainted water ever since. And they are being asked to pay for the privilege of being poisoned.

You couldn't call what is happening to these people "government", let alone "emergency management". I'd call it "depraved indifference" to the people Governor Snyder is supposed to be answerable to, and there should be a better answer than passing out bottled water at this late date. These folks need their water bills forgiven, they need a new water supply, and for the damage done to their kids, there needs to be a monetary settlement because the damage from lead to the children of Flint is not reversible and will impact their long-term cognitive health.

And every other governor or would-be governor of any state should look at this episode in future as the reason why you do not save pennies at the expense of human health and safety. It's an appalling mess.

Something Rotten Leaking in California

The above video is an infrared image of the plume of methane leaking from the Aliso Canyon natural gas leak, which was discovered in late October and has been spewing 110K lbs of methane per hour, making the worst environmental disaster in the US since 2010's BP oil spill.  The leak smells because of mercaptan, which has a rotten-egg odor and can cause nausea and dizziness, causing thousands of people to evacuate the area.  There are apparently several difficulties in capping the leak, which can make it take at least three more months to be resolved.

Methane is a particularly active greenhouse gas, which makes this mess pretty troubling--but you know me, I can always envision something worse. As you all know, California has been having a serious drought, causing aquifers of groundwater to be pumped like mad. What's less discussed is the way this is causing ground subsidence--in other words, California is sinking. This is causing some infrastructure to break down--which can include pipelines.

It's the same kind of infrastructure damage that I wonder about regarding the connection between fracking and earthquakes.  It's not reassuring, the things I think about.

Climate Sunday: Cherry Blossoms and Daffodils

Yep, that's the National Mall today! Fall-blooming blossoms going strong in the warmth. https://t.co/VTxrTLH8En pic.twitter.com/OdHVZJCbrX

— Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather) December 9, 2015

We are enjoying a particularly mild December here in the East Coast. Just yesterday my dad had to mow his lawn. Fall-blooming cherry blossoms are still going strong in DC. Buffalo, NY just had its first little bit of snow, the latest snow has started there since 1899. We're not alone. All of the lower 48 states have had higher-than-normal temps, and daffodils have bloomed in the UK. It's weird, but it's sort of a pleasant-weird for many of us. Looks like I'll be in shorts for Christmas Eve instead of dashing through the snow. I can deal with that.

But as you've probably guessed, I know this pattern is largely to do with current weather conditions, and isn't necessarily "proof" of global warming. (Although the last five years having all been records pretty much is.) And, as you've also probably guessed, I'm just starting on a pleasant note before launching into my weekly warnings and portents.

Climate Sunday: Mike Huckabee's Sunburn Edition

They believe climate change is a greater threat than Islamic extremism, that a sunburn is worse than a beheading. It's nonsense! #DemDebate

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) October 14, 2015

Welcome to another edition of our Sunday Climate Round-up, this time named after Mike Huckabee's go-to "hot take" on how terrorism is scarier than...a sunburn, which is what absolutely no one who is discussing climate change is seriously talking about, ever. But I'll bite, because I've hit this one before, poll your friends and neighbors and see who can admit to having had a really terrible sunburn. Go on to see how many of them have had a skin lesion looked at or removed.

Now think about how many of your friends and neighbors have been beheaded. Statistically, it is way more likely for a US American that everyone you know has had sunburn, and a few of them have had something suspicious scraped. Skin cancer is pretty scary. But you are less likely to know someone who was beheaded by terrorists--which isn't to minimize the threat of terror at all, only to put it in perspective.

Shade Balls!

"Shade balls" kind of sounds like the slang the kids would use these days, as in "When that girl talked shit about my outfit, I was casting shade balls at her at night."

But, no! This is a thing where plastic balls absorb the sunlight instead of the water in a reservoir which should reduce evaporation. It also should cut down on bacteria growth in the water (some aquaculturists working in gardens with koi ponds add a kind of ink to reduce algae blooms, so I get that principle) and nothing from the plastic itself should leak into the water. At first I wasn't 100% on how this would work because it seemed to me that if dark-colored balls absorbed solar heat, that heat would redistribute along the surface area of each ball transferring it to the water causing more of an evaporation effect. But smarter people than me apparently worked out that the surface absorbs the heat, but the water-side is protected. If this works how the smart folks say, call me impressed!

I'm not terribly impressed by some arguments of some people, which seem to hinge on the idea that California should have built more reservoirs to catch the water that the state is currently not getting.  I prefer to believe that if people accept that climate change is real, they can deal with it using real solutions, instead of bitching about what might have been without actually presenting any solutions at all. I really don't see professional blame-redistributors as innovative in that necessary sense.

Still Mad About the BP Spill

 

Deepwater Horizon oil spill contributed to high number of Gulf dolphin deaths

They are also dying because of the pipeline spill in California. 

Our petroleum addiction is no good for other living things. (It's also not so great for us.)

Climate Monday--10 Million Gallons of Oil on the Seafloor

Or you can look here. Basically, the Gulf of Mexico has so much oil still there--not to be pumped, and not really to be cleaned up either. Tar balls still wash up from time to time.  But it isn't going to just go away.

I think deep oil drilling is pretty dumb considering what we are already doing to the oceans in terms of acidification and overfishing. We really don't need to be spilling more oil down there, too. And I am very critical of Obama for allowing it to continue--regardless of the pressure. Because the reality--the sea covers most of the Earth, and is a bigger ecosystem than we enjoy on land. But even so, us land animals need the sea ecosystem to be functional to enjoy our existence. Our disrespect for the oceans is messing with sea birds, polar bears, seals, whales, dolphins, and our own fishing communities.


And I would bet the stupid and well-paid among us would still like to lick corporate ass for the pleasure of the environmental abuse.

Climate Sunday: Something in the Water

Former Governor Mike Huckabee, who I don't heart, believes that "most of us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a sunburn.”

That's statistically disprovable, I am pretty damn sure. I myself have had +/- 100 sunburns over the course of my red-headed, freckled life, and exactly zero beheadings. A poll of all the people I have ever known personally would result in several sunburns for them and zero beheadings. All the people I know have some kind of SPF product in their medicine cabinets, and exactly zero things to prevent beheadings.

I am calling bullshit.

While it is true that Islamic extremism is very bad I will go out on a limb and say that the way we impact the environment and the way that the environment can impact us is way, way...badder.  Take a look at this pretty picture:

This algal bloom is potentially toxic. It's the result of dumping phosphate-laden fertilizers in the water. This would kill fish. It affects an ecosystem and a way of life.

Oil is spilling into the Yellowstone River. Into the Black Sea.  Fracking wastewater is spilling in North Dakota. We are poisoning water we could use. We are spoiling our ocean ecosystems.  We need to find better ways to do things. If Huckabee doesn't notice all the ways we're doing it wrong, sorry--he simply isn't right for president.

Climate Sunday: Water, Water Everywhere, nor any Drop to Drink?

One of the things I try to be consistent about regarding my appreciation for the environment and my real desire that we don't completely screw it up is: we need certain things like water, air and food to live--so let's actually not fuck with them so hard. Funny thing about this is, those are the things that are most directly getting screwed up. Prime example--3 billion gallons of oil industry wastewater got dumped into the California aquifer. That water is used for drinking and irrigation. Agriculture is highly important in California because they serve a lot of our food needs. And the sad thing about the timing is--California is experiencing a major drought.

There's some jaw-dropping stupid involved in screwing up the already compromised water supply of a state that provides a hell of a lot of our food. But this is the mentality we've got since somebody decided to push for the "Halliburton loophole", that made contaminating freshwater supplies with whatever crap fossil fuel industry folks thought was okay (thallium? arsenic? you betcha!) completely legal.

If I dropped arsenic in your soda, I'd go to jail. Oil companies can put who the hell knows what in the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people and it does not mean squat.

Now, there is some push back. In my own state, activists have suggested oil company folks drink their own supply and see what they get from it. But I'm afraid that bubble-headed anti-regulationists (well-funded by the Koch Brothers, and others) are looking to get into office and unleash even more dirty water fuckery.

I sure would like to think we're smart enough as a people to not vote for more dirty water in this country.

Climate Tuesday: Like I was Saying, People are Missing All of the Points

So, the takeaway from Naomi Klein's book, if I just boiled it down to the simplest message is, "For crying out loud, not everything has to come down to the Almighty Buck!"

So here's another example of people who seem to be missing all of the points in the extractivist quest to mine for gold in...the dumbest places.  So here we go--West Virginia.

I like West Virginia, it's a beautiful state. The Ohio River is lovely, and its water serves the thirst requirements and more for over 3 million people. So, of course, oil companies are looking at that stream of liquid life and thinking,

"Hey, could there be natural gas under there?"

Yep. The state that just recently had water services to 300,000 residents interrupted by a chemical spill wants to play River Roulette. Sad to say, the governor there is a Democrat, albeit I guess a pitiful one. Which is a reminder that stupidity in the pursuit of petrodollars is not a partisan issue--it's a problem all over.  Fossil fuel royalties are no way to plug a budget hole if it's a stopgap at best and poses more serious clean-up problems down the road. This is the kind of short-term political thinking that makes things worse.

Climate Sunday: Time for a Revolution

There has been a kind of lazy thinking regarding climate change regarding the cost, and as part of my Climate (mostly) Sunday posts, I've often tried to track how the idea that converting our economy to a more sustainable and egalitarian track was proper and necessary.

Oil isn't the future once you've met peak oil--when tar sands or dilbit or whatever you want to call it means more effort and money is put into extracting more polluting fuels. It isn't even the future when you realize burning it is harming the atmosphere. Coal isn't the future when mountaintop removal dumps arsenic into groundwater, and high-sulfur coal produces sickening levels of particulate pollution. Fracking isn't the answer when groundwater is polluted and local farms and residences experience sickness.

The climate science deniers hedge their bets with the refuge that doing something about climate change will cost a lot anyway, so why be out of pocket just for the sake of trees and polar bears and poor people? The answer is that not addressing climate change will cost plenty in the long run. Denialists are basically screwing themselves. It's possible that addressing climate change could very well be beneficial to growth--if we get serious, creative, and on point.

I don't think we have time to waste--I'm enough of a cynic to believe that tipping points are real, and that we could reach a point of no return--but this can not mean that we don't try.

So I have very little time for people who want to blame climate scientists for "being in it for the money".  Seriously? I mean, seriously? Then you can't say addressing climate change is also communism. Sorry. The future might have to be local action, clean energy, water protection, and sustainable food systems. In other words, getting a better quality of life by not supporting pollution and destructive business practices.

And surprisingly, the only ones really hurt by that would be the people disproportionately benefitting from the current tilted and earth-damaging system.

Something has to give.