And the corporate media continues to use the false Con talking point, to no one’s surprise. The Washington Post, Con apologizer extraordinaire, and MSNBC report it this way:
Document: Rice approved harsh tactics in 2002
They weren’t harsh tactics. They were torture. The Bush “administration” did their level best to argue that illegal techniques were fine and dandy, but the bottom-line definition never changed.
Further, the corporate media continues to treat this as a “he-said, she-said” kind of story, which is morally repugnant. No Washington Post employee would sumbit to these “harsh tactics” being performed on them and continue to report on them in this fashion. I’ll feel pity for failing newspapers when they employ more journalists.
Former NSA head and Sec. of State Rice should be investigated for war crimes. The Bush “administration’s” Cons attempts to temporarily redefine laws for themselves needs to be fully and publicly investigated. Otherwise, they’ll happen again and again.
Moving forward toward a greener future includes not only renewable energy and energy efficiency but efficiency in general. We are a very wasteful society – largely because there was little downside to generating the waste when infrastructure was first put in place. As more of us have swelled the size of society, that waste has become more important. I wanted to share some results I read about in this Climate Progress water efficiency post, which started out about Santa Clara, California water conservation efforts and moved onto larger studies and examples.
The results have been impressive: a savings of 370,000 acre-feet of water in 13 years. (A typical household uses one acre-foot of water per year).
But perhaps even more significant have been the energy savings and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions: 1.42 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and 335 million kg of carbon dioxide, which is equal to taking 72,000 cars off the road for a year.
That’s right: water efficiency translates to energy savings.
In early March, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on the Energy and Water Integration Act of 2009 sponsored by Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). The bill’s main emphasis is to study the impact of energy development on U.S. water resources, but it also calls on the Department of Energy to periodically assess the energy consumed in the delivery, treatment, and use of water.
That study is important: if nobody knows the extent of a potential problem, it’s harder to come up with potential solutions like crafting legislation to promote water conservation efforts. We know governments at every level offer varying tax credits for energy efficient windows, new water heaters, solar paneling and geothermal systems. Similar credits don’t yet exist on a large scale to assist consumers who want to buy water efficient items like dishwasher, clothes washers, faucets, toilets, etc. To boost energy savings nationally; to reduce as much demand on fossil fuel plants as possible; to reduce our GHG pollution, water conservation measures should join energy efficiency measures as programs that need to be supported.
More information [emphasis mine]:
In “Energy Down the Drain,” a 2004 study of the hidden costs of California’s water supply, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pacific Institute found that the “end use of water–especially energy-intensive uses like washing clothes and taking showers–consumes more energy than any other part of the urban water conveyance and treatment cycle” and that “significant amounts of energy” can be saved through conservation. For example, one of their case studies found that if San Diego provided its next 100,000 acre feet of water through conservation instead of transporting it from northern California, the energy savings would be enough to supply 25 percent of San Diego households.
Separately, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if just 1 percent of American homes replaced old toilets with water-saving ones, it would reduce energy consumption by 38 million kWh, enough to electrify 43,000 homes for a month. This of course translates into financial savings. Implementing just a few water efficiency measures could save up to $170 annually on water and sewage bills, which on average are about $500 annually for an American household. If each U.S. household had seven water-efficient appliances, it would save $18 billion annually, according to the EPA.
In contrast to projects that might be more popularized, such as solar panels and geothermal, water conservation projects are cheaper and return their cost faster. That should make them more marketable in the short term, especially in our current recession.
In its publication “Water Efficiency for the Home,” the Rocky Mountain Institute offers some examples: In 10 years, an efficient showerhead will return 10-40 times its cost in saved energy alone, and inexpensive replacement faucets can reduce indoor water use by 3-5 percent and pay for themselves in less than a year.
[...]
Case in point: In a December 2008 study, the Alliance for Water Efficiency found that a $10 billion stimulus that focused on retrofitting homes with water-conserving appliances and fixtures, installing smart outdoor irrigation systems, and improving commercial and industrial water applications could create between 150,000 and 220,000 jobs and generate as much as $28 billion in economic output.
$10 billion can create over 150,000 jobs and generate $28 billion in economic output. Those are incredible numbers. Does the private sector have $10 billion sitting around? If it does, is it willing to pony it up to create those jobs and that economic output? If it is, why hasn’t it done it yet? No – the only entity that has the money and the incentive to put it on the table is the government. Anti-Obama-ites can mock and disparage the government all they want, but they don’t have access to those kinds of funds (or if they do, they’re unwilling to do something similar, which works out to about the same thing in the end). Obviously, they don’t have the interest in generating those jobs either. Those hypocrites who let the Bushies spend trillions of dollars occupying sovereign nations and are now “angry” at Obama spending money on America don’t want solutions. To them, it’s ideology over country. That’s why I’m glad Climate Progress, realists in the Senate, the NRDC, the Pacific Institute, a science-based EPA, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Alliance for Water Efficiency and many others exist. They’re doing the heavy lifting to make this country greater and help solve our water and climate crises.
I’m interested in thinking though what would happen if people vanished from the globe. The History Channel is going to begin airing a series on the subject starting April 21, 2009: Life After People.
For another interesting take, I recommend reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, a book I enjoyed reading.
I find this interesting: Chryler LLC has chosen A123 Systems Inc. of Watertown, MA. to supply lithium-ion batteries and other equipment for electric cars it hopes to have in showrooms beginning in late 2010. This news came just two months after GM was reported to have rejected A123 for LG Chem Ltd. to manufacture the batteries for their Volt. I have to say, Chrysler deserves some kudos for this decision. A123 is an American company – so this decision means American jobs are secured in the attempt to keep Chrysler alive. Chrysler made as many bad decisions in the past few decades as GM and Ford. It’s nice to finally see a good one.
We didn’t have to wait long for the response from the fossil fuel industry, which provided this choice quote:
“The proposed endangerment finding poses an endangerment to the American economy and every American family,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute.
No Jack, it doesn’t. Your industry’s lack of foresight and greed-driven actions have endangered the American economy and every American family. Your industry decided not to build refining capacity, ensuring that Americans would suffer under horrendous price spikes, as we saw last year.
We’ve known for 30 years the potential dangers of allowing GHG pollutants to continue to be spewed into the atmosphere, but your industry ensured that little meaningful action be taken during that time to do anything about it. Now, tipping points are being crossed. Widespread, intense droughts are afflicting millions of acres of land worldwide. The globe’s average temperature continues to warm decade after decade. And still your industry is falsely arguing that no action should be taken, lest your members’ shareholders receive less than record profits quarter after quarter.
It’s also a good example of what the tea-baggers really gathered for on Wednesday: they were anti-Obama and anti-government, not anti-taxes. Banks loot their pockets more than the government does (at least they get something out of paying taxes – what do they get from paying overdraft fees?), yet what were they protesting?
Two very big news stories broke this week regarding the EPA. In the first, the EPA, under direction from the pro-science Obama administration, will look into whether CO2 should be regulated according to the Clean Water Act. Back in January, the EPA determined that CO2 should be regulated according to the Clean Air Act (ending years of delay under the Bush “administration”). Now, they will look into how much more acidic CO2 emissions are making the oceans. As CO2 dissolves in the oceans in increasing quantities, the chemisty of ocean water is altered. More acidic water doesn’t allow organisms at the bottom of the ecosystem to form their external shells. If that happens on a large enough scale, the world’s oceanic ecosystems could collapse. Since a majority of the world’s people live off of the oceans’ bounty, that would have a deleterious effect on global society’s. Getting the EPA to regulate these pollutants based on scientific information (and not pre-conceived ideological answers) is good, overdue policy.
This morning, the second piece of big news came out: the EPA is expected to announce today that six greenhouse gases are pollutants and harmful to human health. Doing so would allow the EPA to regulate CO2 emissions, but the article states that the Obama administration is going to use the announcement instead as leverage to get Congress to pass legislation to regulate the emissions and set up a cap-and-trade system instead. Before I get into the policy stance and what I think the consequences will be, I want to set the stage with the following:
Potential health impacts from warming, EPA scientists said in their recommendations, include:
longer and more severe heat waves;
increased smog in some areas;
dangerous flooding caused by stronger storms;
and diseases, including malaria and dengue fever, related to flooding and warmer weather.
Look, it sounds really good that Obama wants to increase leverage on Congress. But I honestly don’t see how this convinces ConservaDems or Cons to change their stance on the subject. They’re still going to be under tremendous pressure from corporate lobbyists to gut cap-and-trade – either by setting the cap way too high or by allowing far too many allowances to the heaviest polluters. The only way I see CO2 being regulated to the degree it needs to be to alleviate future impacts after a flawed cap-and-trade plan is established is for the EPA to assume the responsibility it’s been given. Unfortunately, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has now gone on record as saying her agency would not act alone. Would they act after a flawed bill is enacted, since technically Congress would have acted? I don’t know.
Congress, especially the Senate, is filled with climate change deniers. They’re going to trot out their tired talking points about how the EPA is going to base their decision on junk-science and liberals are running around like Chicken Little trying to destroy our economy. I will of course keep watch for a Republican like Snowe to publicly support and vote for a good cap-and-trade, but that doesn’t account for Sens. Bayh, Landrieu, Nelson(s) or Sen. Specter from joining their science-hating colleagues. How much will they give away to the Cons in return for what will be a no-vote anyway?
There remains a great deal of work to do on everybody’s part. This problem won’t be solved today, despite the urgency many of us feel to do so. Two very good steps were taken this week. I applaud the Obama administration and the EPA for them.
One method of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere involves phytoplankton: they remove CO2 through photosynthesis. An experiment was conducted in the southwest Atlantic ocean to provide additional iron to phytoplankton, which use it to grow, in order to remove more CO2 than usual. The idea being if enough phytoplankton can be encouraged to grow (over a large enough area and given enough time), the phytoplankton would eventually die off and sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking their ingested CO2 with them. They would act as a sort of super-charged carbon sink. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite work out the way the experimenters had hoped (I had to edit some of the article – I thought journalists had higher standards than bloggers):
The amount of biomass in the test area doubled, which scientists determined during marathon 36 hour sampling sessions.
The scientists created more plankton, but the plankton didn’t perform as the scientists had hoped. Instead of dying and sinking to the bottom of the ocean, the additional plankton were eaten, first by copepods, then by ampipodsamphipods. As the carbon moved up the food chain some of [it] was released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
The scientists concluded that fertilizing the southwest Atlantic was not a good way to lock away carbon dioxide, but that ocean fertilization needs additional testing before it’s discounted.
Such is the role of science: test a theory to see how robust it is. In this case, the outcome didn’t match expectations. Be that as it may, I prefer solutions that reduce the amount of CO2 emissions going into the atmosphere in the first place. I think geo-engineering concepts are potentially dangerous. After all, emissions of GHGs is really a big geo-engineering project and we’re finding out just how extensive our activities really are, aren’t we?
The top-down driven “protests” yesterday, orchestrated by the richest Cons in America, and dutifully manned by small numbers of Fox-watching sheep, put on display the exact reason why Democrats in Congress are wasting their time expecting the Cons to come to the negotiation table in good faith. The Cons running the Republican party want to destroy the Democratic Party. Not figuratively, they want to literally kill the Democratic Party using violence. They don’t want to negotiate. They want to dominate – whether they’re in the majority or the minority. Their worldview is the only valid worldview. There is no room for anything else. There is no cause for diplomacy and discussion.
Think about that. And think about how they used to tell you with a straight face that when Republicans won, “the adults were back in charge.”
[...]
Think about that when they tell you they demand a say in how we fix health care, rebuild our economy and protect working peoples’ rights to build better lives for themselves and their families. While you were working for these changes back home, they were feeding the rump end of their “base” in the hopes that they’d spike any and every deal.
Think about how wise it is to seek “compromise” with vipers who will, the moment they don’t get their way, turn and hiss, “Revolution! Secession!“
Cons don’t believe in democracy. They don’t believe in the American Way. They would rather Democrats in Congress and President Obama to fail on every issue rather than yield one inch on any issue. They’re anti-American secessionists. Sarah Palin showed us that last year when it came to light her husband belonged to a secessionist movement in Alaska. Governor Perry in Texas showed us that last week when he called for states to draw a line in the sand and be able and ready to tell the federal government to go shove it. When Democrats control things at the federal level, the Cons are all about “states’ rights”. When the Cons are in control at the federal level, they’re all about federal amendments to stop state initiatives they don’t like and aren’t in a position to change. They’re phony. They throw temper tantrums. But they sure as heck don’t want to work within the process to push their agenda. Democrats who think they’ll do so risk their entire agenda, which is supported by a majority of Americans.
Anything that would delay a program to bring 1 million plug-in hybrids to the market gets attention by the corporate media. This MSNBC article does what hundreds preceding it has done: it casts such an effort in a very negative light, relying on every pro-fossil fuel talking point to disparage plug-in vehicle technologies. It’s more than unfortunate that corporate media outlets continue to parrot talking points rather than engage in some real journalism.
Here is the secondary lede, word for word:
Technology still to expensive and automakers haven’t committed to plan
Well, that’s that then. Except it isn’t. I’ll start by pointing out that the corporate media’s overwhelming journalistic integrity over that of say, bloggers, doesn’t quite explain why simple spelling errors aren’t caught. What they meant to say was the technology is still too expensive. Unless ‘still’ and ‘expensive’ became verbs since I went to grammar school.
In any event, the article goes into a tiny bit of detail on how much battery technology would add to the price of a car. What it doesn’t do is report on any battery technology advancements that have been made in the past few years. Is it enough to drive down the price of large-scale battery technology? Well, it won’t happen tomorrow, obviously. But interestingly, that lede hides a lot of harm that the automakers have purposefully done to ensure battery technology remains expensive.
How many battery technology patents does GM and Ford hold? More than a few. They’ve held them for years (in some cases decades) now. Why haven’t they employed them in a larger-scale effort? Because their executives saw no reason to allow cars to be weaned off of fossil fuels. While sitting on those patents, those same automakers also spent millions on lobbying to ensure that fuel economy standards remained the lowest in the industrialized world. Those two things didn’t happen in two separate vacuum chambers. There were part of a coordinated and idiotic business strategy that most people recognize has failed spectacularly.
Battery technologies that will allow sub-15 minute recharges are being researched and developed. Battery technologies that push the maximum range of a vehicle are being researched and developed. Where are this information and more in this pro-failed-industry article? Nowhere to be found. It will take a President who isn’t beholden to fossil fuel corporations to change the heavyweight auto manufacturer’s way of doing business. Without that effort, the so-called Big 3 will (would have already) fail(ed). There are plenty of start-up companies out there who are looking to expand the marketplace of plug-in hybrid vehicles.
The article notes that it took 8 years to get 1 million hybrids on U.S. roads. The article fails to note that during that time, gasoline never got higher than $2 per gallon. Energy realists recognize that sub-$2 gas will become a rarity in the near future. Prices are more likely to remain higher in the future as the scarcity of oil becomes more apparent. If it costs $4 per gallon (or more), auto manufacturers won’t be able to make plug-in hybrids fast enough to satisfy demand, as Toyota and Honda discovered last year with their respective hybrid brands.
Is 1 million plug-in hybrids by 2015 an audacious goal? Absolutely, it is. That was one reason to set it. Even if it isn’t explicity reached, moving down that path will become a critical factor in our efforts to deal with climate change, national security and our economy. The demand is there – it has been present for a long while. The outdated major auto manufacturers have prevented sustainable progress toward Obama’s (Americans’) goal for many years. It’s no wonder they’re failing. Other companies will step in to meet that demand eventually. And it will happen despite the corporate media’s attempts to sabotage it.
