Category Archives: evil polluters

Drought Causes Drillers To Go Deep – And in some cases guess

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Water is a utility issue, an environmental issue, an energy issue and a residential issue. So it makes sense to cover it here. Next week I turn to the energy policies of the Presidential candidates.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2019013218_apusdroughtwellwitchers.html

Originally published Wednesday, August 29, 2012 at 5:14 AM

In drought, drillers offering even water witching

Well driller Randy Gebke usually uses a geology database and other high-tech tools to figure out where to sink new water wells for clients. But if asked, he’ll grab two wires, walk across the property, waiting for the wires to cross to find a place to drill.

By DAVID MERCER

Associated Press

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —

Well driller Randy Gebke usually uses a geology database and other high-tech tools to figure out where to sink new water wells for clients. But if asked, he’ll grab two wires, walk across the property, waiting for the wires to cross to find a place to drill.

Gebke is water witching, using an ancient method with a greater connection to superstition than science.

Thousands of wells have gone dry this summer in the worst drought the nation has experienced in decades. Some homeowners are spending as much as $30,000 to have new ones drilled, and Gebke said most potential customers in his area expect water witching to be part the deal.

“Over 50 percent of the time in that conversation, they ask do we have a witcher on the crew,” he said. “And my response is, `We have a witcher on every crew.'”

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Praying For A Hurricane – How sad is that

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This drought is so severe that it will take more then a hurricane to end it.  Two or three hurricanes maybe, but this one no way.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/tropical-storm-isaac-could-bring-welcome-rain-to-midwest-but-unlikely-to-break-drought/2012/08/28/3066b0a4-f0e0-11e1-b74c-84ed55e0300b_story.html

Tropical Storm Isaac could bring welcome rain to Midwest but unlikely to break drought

By Associated Press,

OMAHA, Neb. — The remnants of Tropical Storm Isaac could bring welcome rain to some states in the Mississippi River valley this week, but experts say it’s unlikely to break the drought gripping the Midwest.

Along with the deluge of rain expected along the Gulf Coast when Isaac makes landfall, the National Weather Service predicts 2 to 6 inches of rain will fall in eastern Arkansas, southeast Missouri and southern Illinois.

Those areas are among those hard hit by the drought that stretches from the West Coast east into Kentucky and Ohio, with pockets in Georgia and Alabama. The rain that falls inland likely will ease but not eliminate drought, because those areas are so dry, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center.

Arkansas rancher Don Rodgers said his area is short 17 inches of rain this year. He said even a couple of inches from Isaac would make a significant difference because he would have water for his cattle and might be able to grow some forage for this winter.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Utility Companies Are Struggling Against Global Warming – Since they helped cause it you would think they would have a plan

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But that would mean that monopoly utilities were smart and they are not. Now that the problem has been shoved in their face by the warming up of the sun, they want to talk about it. Great.

http://www.pgecurrents.com/2012/08/07/climate-change-comes-to-the-power-industry/

August 7, 2012
Climate Change Comes to the Power Industry

By Jonathan Marshall

With temperatures setting new records across the country, and over half of the continental United States now experiencing serious drought, global warming is no longer just a prediction of climate scientists. It’s a reality, here and now.

Though every sector of human activity is feeling the impact, electric utilities are feeling them especially keenly, as they struggle to keep up with peak summer demand for air conditioning. At the same time, heat and drought threaten to curb their ability to generate and transmit power in the first place.

As Matthew Wald reported in his Green blog, one power plant in the Midwest was recently curtailed and another shut down altogether because river water levels dropped too low for their cooling intake valves. This was no fluke. A number of Texas power plants reduced their output in 2011 due to water shortages. Three years earlier, many more plants throughout the drought-stricken Southeast came close to shutting down.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Fukushima Update – Mutated butterflies…oh my

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I was going to put up a piece by a woman in Austin today about recycling electronics and then start in on global warming and the drought here in Illinois but then this popped up. I mean it is the biggest nuclear disaster of this decade and the effects of the radiation are going to be with us for thousands of years. So just like the Ukrainian wolves that we have been watching, the Japanese butterflies bear watching too.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57492524/report-mutated-butterflies-found-near-fukushima/

August 13, 2012 10:52 PM

Report: Mutated butterflies found near Fukushima

Disaster in Japan

(CBS News) A group of scientists in Japan made a surprising discovery by finding large numbers of specimens of pale grass blue butterflies that had mutated.

In a report in the Scientific Reports journal, the scientists said their research concluded that “that artificial radionuclides from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant caused physiological and genetic damage to this species.” The scientists said their findings were not expected.

“It has been believed that insects are very resistant to radiation,” lead researcher Joji Otaki from the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, told the BBC. “In that sense, our results were unexpected.”

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Refineries Shut Down All Over The Country – Is this a coincidence

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Come on. 4 refineries in a 4 state region are effected at the same times by “disasters” that would be easy to contrive. In 2 of the biggest markets in the country, the Great Lakes Region and California. Can that be an accident? Looks highly suspicious to me. One thing is for sure everybody is loving those rising gas prices besides the drivers and President Obama. Maybe that is what they are after, defeating Barack Obama and electing one of their own, Mittens Romney.

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/fire-is-latest-pollution-1494592.html

Fire is latest pollution problem at Chevron plant

National / World News 12:06 p.m. Thursday, August 9, 2012

By JASON DEAREN

The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — A massive Chevron oil refinery fire that sent hundreds of people rushing to hospitals and is pushing West Coast gas prices higher was just the latest pollution incident at the facility that records show has increasingly violated air quality rules over the past five years.

The refinery is one of three such facilities near San Francisco that rank among the state’s top 10 emitters of toxic chemicals, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory.

Chevron’s Richmond refinery — the scene of Monday’s fire that shrouded the area in black smoke — has been cited by San Francisco Bay area regulators for violating air regulations 93 times in the past five years.

The number has increased from 15 violations in 2007 to 23 in both 2010 and 2011. The refinery is also the state’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to state regulators.

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Go there and read. State Fair starts today so I may be gone  for a couple of days. More tomorrow.

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Koch Brothers Mouthpiece Changes His Tune – So Global Warming is actually real

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That is the bitch about science. Over time it is always right. The Catholic Church was very slow to get this. RJ Reynolds eventually got it but it cost it billions. All of the asbestos people eventually got it too. But the Koch Brothers were just gona prove them wrong. I do not know whether it is endemic  to capitalism but this “prove them wrong” phase is what the space exploration crowd is experiencing right now. Call it the Buck Rogers phenomena but private companies will fail to develop space much like Climate Change needed to stop 30 years ago.  30 years from now the space people are going to be wondering what happened to their dreams…if any of us are still left alive.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/29/koch-funded-climate-scientist-i-was-wrong-humans-are-to-blame/

Koch-funded climate scientist: I was wrong, humans are to blame

By Jonathan Terbush
Sunday, July 29, 2012 14:16 EDT

The founder and director of a climate change study project funded heavily by the Koch brothers, who last year reversed course and said he believed global warming was real, has gone one step further, writing in a weekend op-ed in the New York Times that he is now convinced the phenomenon is caused by humans.

In a piece titled, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic,” Richard A. Muller, a University of California, Berkley physicist who founded the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature study (BEST) wrote that his, “total turnaround, in such a short time,” was driven by a new report from the group that concluded for the first time that global warming is a man-made problem. That revelation brings Muller essentially full circle from his stance a few years ago, when he criticized other global warming studies as flawed and questioned whether the Earth was even warming abnormally, dangerously fast at all.

“Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted,” Muller wrote. “I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes.”

The BEST study, he wrote, found that the Earth had warmed by about two and a half degrees over the past 250 years, with the bulk of that spike occurring in the past 50 years. Moreover, he found that, “essentially all of this increase” was likely due to greenhouse gas emissions, a point climate change believers have accepted as fact for years.

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Go there and crow. More tomorrow.

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The Hottest Year Ever Recorded By Science – I was gona continue the solar meditation

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And in away this is a solar earth issue, just not one that involves pollution free power generation. It has always amazed me how good a source of news Rolling Stone has become. It was the home of Hunter S. Thompson too.

http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/3_215_high_temperature_records_broken_or_tied_in_the_us

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math

Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe – and that make clear who the real enemy is

July 19, 2012 9:35 AM ET

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world’s nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn’t even attend. It was “a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,” the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls “once thronged by multitudes.” Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

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Go there and read. More next week.
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The Keystone XL Pipeline Is A Very Bad Idea – So why is the Springfield Chamber of Commerce backing it

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I have no idea how much Keystone and the Koch brothers gave to the Springfield, IL Chamber but it must have been a bunch because they hired someone to coordinate their support for the project. The first I knew of it was an Editorial published in what is left of the State Journal Register. So this posting and the next are in part my preparation for writing a counter Editorial.

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/rkistner/a_native_people_fight_a_dantes.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+switchboard_rkistner+%28Switchboard%3A+Rocky+Kistner%27s+Blog%29

Rocky Kistner’s Blog

In Canada’s Tar Sands, a Dante’s Hell Threatens People Nearby and Across the Globe

In Canada’s western province of Alberta, Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s community—the Lubicon Lake Nation—has endured a withering toxic tar sands oil assault, an Armageddon against nature few Americans are fully aware of. Here in the once pristine sub-Arctic, tar sands mining operations level vast swaths of boreal forests near native lands, as pipelines burst and spew corrosive chemical-laced tar sands oil into rivers and lakes.

The Lubicon are used to living in harmony with nature. But tar sands mining has brought a deadly discordance to their environment. Melina has watched family and friends battle unheard of cancers and respiratory ailments; she’s listened to local fishermen and hunters complain about unusual lesions and tumors festering in their catches and prey. She’s reacted in disbelief as her government has sponsored airborne sharpshooters to gun down mighty Canadian wolf packs—a zero sum game that is killing one species to try to save another—as dwindling herds of caribou flee their disappearing forest homes and may be gone forever in the not so distant future.

For members of the Lubicon Lake Nation, it is a nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions. Their verdant land of abundant wildlife is metastasizing into pock-marketed battlefields of a thousand Verduns. Melina and other community leaders have not sat idly by as the environmental carnage unfolds around them. She has testified before Congress, spearheaded Greenpeace protest actions, and worked tirelessly to get the word out about the devastation in her community.

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Go there and see the video. Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Global Warming Strikes – If its not the home of the sage brush revolution burning

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Then its the ocean rising. More on that tomorrow.

http://news.yahoo.com/vicious-wildfires-spread-colo-tourist-centers-201636170.html

Vicious wildfires spread to Colo. tourist centers

Associated PressBy THOMAS PEIPERT | Associated Press – 1 hr 37 mins ago

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Flames forced thousands of Colorado residents from their homes over the weekend and disrupted vacation plans for countless visitors as smoke shrouded some of the state’s top tourist destinations, including majestic Pike’s Peak and tranquil Estes Park.

Colorado is having its worst wildfire season in a decade, with more than a half dozen forest fires burning across the state’s parched terrain. Some hotels and campgrounds are emptying ahead of the busy Fourth of July holiday.

One of the newest fires, a blaze near Colorado Springs, grew to more than 6 square miles Sunday after erupting just a day earlier and prompting evacuation orders for 11,000 residents and an unknown number of tourists.

The fire sent plumes of gray and white smoke over the area that obscured at times Pikes Peak, the most-summited high-elevation mountain in the nation and inspiration for the song “America The Beautiful.”

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Go there and read. Pretty depressing though. More tomorrow.

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XL Pipeline Will Not Help The US – And when a 16 yr. old girl points it out

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They TRASH her. I posted this mainly because her points are valid. But read the comments. These are seriously brutal comments, by trolls, aimed at a 16 year old girl. This is what the energy business has sunk too.

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/06/keystone_xl_pipeline_wont_bene.html

Keystone XL pipeline won’t benefit American families or the environment

Published: Sunday, June 17, 2012, 5:00 AM     Updated: Sunday, June 17, 2012, 12:35 PM

By Emilie Winn

As a 16-year-old high school student, I am deeply concerned about the long-term effects of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline on my and subsequent generations. This pipeline would transport tar sands 2,000 miles from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Producing synthetic oil from tar sands generates around three times the amount of greenhouse gases as regular oil production. TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline proposal, was ordered by the government to dig up 10 sections of the Keystone I pipeline after testing showed that the steel used was possibly defective. The company plans to use steel from the same manufacturer for the Keystone XL pipeline. In addition, the Keystone I pipeline has seen 12 spills in a single year. The idea of this level of error at a much higher magnitude is horrifying.

One of the most cogent claims made about the proposed pipeline was the number of jobs it would create, which many supporters estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Yet data from the U. S. State Department and TransCanada itself has shown the project would provide up to 6,500 jobs during production and leave only hundreds of permanent jobs. The effect Keystone XL would have on unemployed Americans has been largely fictionalized. For the Keystone I pipeline in South Dakota, a shockingly low 11 percent of construction jobs were taken by South Dakotans. The majority of jobs that such projects create are taken by immigrants willing to do menial labor for low pay. And the vast majority of jobs are temporary.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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