WANT MORE KUNSTLER?

Anyone who was intrigued by James Howard Kunstler's article in the previous entry might want to take a look at his website.  He is the author of quite a few books, the first two of which are about what we have done with what he calls in one title "the geography of nowhere,"  strip malls and other catastropic results of the mobile society.  He's quirky, passionate about what matters to him, and he has lots of good links on his site.  His blog is there too, called  (forgive me, AOL Overlords, I am about to commit unveiled indecency)  Clusterfuck Nation.  Forgive me again, but I think it's a great name for what's happening in this here place at this here time in our history.  Next, I'm going to look up some of his books and read them.  He may be extreme, but the time for moderation is swiftly running out the drain.

THE LONG EMERGENCY

Don't know if this will surpass the character limit, but I'm going to try.  From The Rolling Stone, for your reading pleasure, kind of a summary of Kunstler's new book:  The Long Emergency.  Is he an alarmist?  a realist?  somewhere in between?  He's not alone in his predictions.  A little long, but thought-provoking and scary

The Long Emergency

Posted on March 26, 2005

By James Howard Kunstler
The Rolling Stone

 
   Thursday 24 March 2005

What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?

    A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

    Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

    It has been very hard for Americans - lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring - to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life - not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense - you name it.

    The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

    The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.

    The United States passed its own oil peak - about 11 million barrels a day - in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.

    The US peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.

    Some "cornucopians" claim that the Earth has something like a creamy nougat center of "abiotic" oil that will naturally replenish the great oil fields of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been no replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of America or any other place.

    Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.

    It will change everything about how we live.

    To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the US chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.

    Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.

    We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changedconditions.

    No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

    The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax.
We are not going to replace the US automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants.
Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.

    Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables"
are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local and small scale.

    Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are currently run. What's more, these schemes are predicated on using oil and gas "inputs" (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels.
This is a net energy loser - you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother with the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.

    Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological drawbacks - as a contributor to greenhouse "global warming"
gases and many health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury poisoning to acid rain. You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.

    If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than we were in the 1970s.

    The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict.
Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies, the US has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

    And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world's second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China's surging industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places - the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia - and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the US military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the US could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world's remaining oil in the process.

    We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that "the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary."

    Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

    Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

    The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are.
Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

    Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

    The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels"
won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

    As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower - and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

    The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

    America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.

    The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities'
problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.

    Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.

    I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.

    The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

    These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope - that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive sideto stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom.
Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.

    Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James Howard Kunstler, and reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

SORT OF SORRY, BUT I JUST COULDN'T HELP IT

CONFIDENT AND "IMPISHLY FUN"?

WEEKEND ASSIGNMENT

We interrupt all this gloomy stuff to bring you my entry into John Scalzi's weekend assignment.  Although it sounds as if he's closed off his linking to entries.  Today's entry about this assignment sounds very final.  Nonetheless, I'm doing it.

Weekend Assignment #52: Congratulations! Hollywood is making a movie of your life, and you get to choose any actor you want to play you -- yes, even if they're dead (the things they can do with special effects!) Who do you choose and why?

Extra credit: Name the musician/band who will play the theme song to the movie.

 Yes, it's Kathy Bates, my absolute first choice to play me in the movie of my life.  Lots of reasons that's she's the perfect choice.  We're about the same age, and we both look it.  That is to say, we both look our age, and seem to be pretty comfortable with that.  She's a fantastic actress, can play anything from wildly kooky to psychotically scary, to genuinely downhome normal.  All of which would be necessary when playing Me. Her acting style is natural and easy, always believable.  She has always been one of my favorite actresses, and I know she'd do Me justice, in fact she'd most likely make my life much more interesting than it has actually been. 

For the soundtrack, I think I'd like Taj Mahal.  Bluesy, funky, sometimes up and sometimes down, always danceable. 

 

OBLA DI, BLA DA

Because of general depression, exhaustion, and symptoms of returning flu, I haven't been - still am not - capable of any heavy duty journaling here.  But, life goes on, as best it can.  The daffodils are blooming, the birds are very very busy in our yard, nest building is well under way. 

And, in case you think I've neglected or forgotten the eaglets in all my dark despair - here's some neat stuff.  The OspreyCam is also online now at Blackwater, and the pair is busy doing the same thing the cardinals, wrens, sparrows, bluejays and robins in my yard are doing - nest building.  This nest is a good deal larger and more visible than my yard birds are making - and it's growing every day by leaps and bounds.  The EagleCam is still askew, but sometimes the birds wander into view anyway.  As they get bigger and older they'll do more wandering around looking for bits of food.  If you visit the eagles, be sure to click on the link for the eagle weblog.  There lots of interesting info to learn about these birds.  There is also a contest for naming the three chicks - put on your thinking caps!

"AMERICA'S FINEST NEWS SOURCE"

From today's "Onion," the satirical newspaper that's often closer to the truth than the NYT is:

EPA To Drop 'E,' 'P' From Name
WASHINGTON, DC—Days after unveiling new power-plant pollution regulations that rely on an industry-favored market-trading approach to cutting mercury emissions, EPA Acting Administrator Stephen Johnson announced that the agency will remove the "E" and "P" from its name. "We're not really 'environmental' anymore, and we certainly aren't 'protecting' anything," Johnson said. "'The Agency' is a name that reflects our current agenda and encapsulates our new function as a government-funded body devoted to handling documents, scheduling meetings, and fielding phone calls." The change comes on the heels of the Department of Health and Human Services' January decision to shorten its name to the Department of Services.

In the "What Do You Think?" section of same fine online journal, check out this link, for a twisted cynical chuckle.

BACK TO THE OLD GRIND

On the way home from D.C. last night we were listening to a program on WETA, the DC NPR station, called "Speaking of Faith." They were talking with Thich Nhat Hanh, and people who were on a retreat with him.  This monk is one of my personal gurus, when he speaks, I listen.  But he said this thing - a very hard thing - on the program last night.  He said you should not hate your political leaders, you should try to help them onto the path of compassion and rightmindedness, and support them on their path.  Well.  Was he talking about OUR political leader of the moment?  And for another three years plus?  I'm afraid this is way beyond my spiritual capacity.  WAAAAYY beyond. 

The trip to D.C. was wonderful.  The students enjoyed the museum, though I think some of them were a little overwhelmed.  This is my second visit to the NMAI, and it's clear that I need to go there many more times before we leave this area.  A lifetime is needed to take in all that's on offer there.  The students and other teachers went on after lunch to visit other parts of the vast Smithsonian complex of museums, but G and I began the personal portion of our trip.  It was an idyllic day and a half with my sister and niece, enjoying their company and the international eating possibilities abounding within an easy walk of their house.  The best Neopolitan pizza we've ever tasted, sublime Vietnamese food, ice cream at an Argentinian shop in Wisconsin Avenue that I may dream about until I am able to return, and perhaps a few tidbits I've neglected to mention.

But now it's back to work.  And work is, once again, countering the efforts to get William G. Myers onto the federal bench.  I refer you to two previous entries in this journal, here and here, on this subject.  The initial committee hearing passed him on, and now it will be a Senate vote.  From the League of Conservation Voters:

"Thank you again for standing up against the lifetime appointment of anti-environment extremist William Myers to be a senior federal judge. As expected, yesterday a committee voted along party lines to pass his nomination on to the full Senate for a final showdown vote.

The vote is scheduled to take place just after Easter, so we don't have much time to act!

The only way to stop this former mining lobbyist from undermining environmental laws for decades is to flood the Senate with e-mails, calls, and letters. Click here to e-mail your Senators NOW! Then call (202) 224-3121 and tell them directly.

A special request: As an environmentally-focused organization, LCV isn't usually involved in judicial nominations. But more than ever, lifetime appointments have a huge impact on environmental policy -- especially with George W. Bush starting to pack the courts with pro-polluter judges. Coordinating this massive strategy is an unexpected strain on our budget -- please consider making a contribution to LCV to help defray the costs of this mobilization. We'll use the funds to turn up the heat on Bush, Myers, and the Senate.

Myers is being nominated to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over some of the nation's most pristine wilderness areas, including California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Alaska, and Hawaii. We cannot take the risk of having a friend of the mining industry in this post. He's a danger to the Clean Water Act, our wilderness areas, and the Endangered Species Act.

Together we can send a message to George Bush that we don't want anti-environment extremists sitting in judgment of the laws that protect our air, land, water, and wildlife."

Yes, we lost the last Senate vote, but that doesn't mean we can, should, will, stop working.  Victories can, and do, happen.  If we give up then we are as bad as those we rail against  (or, at least, I rail against them.  Constantly.  Even though Thich Nhat Hanh would disapprove.  It's so good to be with my sister, we are on exactly the same wave length, and can just have a kickass time ranting, railing, raging, sometimes in Greek Chorus-like simultaneity.).  If the fight is all we have, let's make it a determined and serious one.  To the ropes, to the mat, to the barricades. So, please get back on the phones, let's barrage the Senate phone lines on this one.    

                               *********************************

And, on another subject completely (well, sort of different), I am so dumbfounded at what has just happened in Congress vis-a-vis Terry Schiavo, her family, etc.  The same people who think it's okay to kill uncounted numbers of children, women, old people, civilians of all kinds guilty of nothing, in Iraq, are willing to have an extraordinary session of Congress to pass a bill in a case that has already been decided by due process of law, having to do with one family's life/death decisions.  This is nothing but politics in its ugliest guise.  When I contemplate what has just happened I confess I come close to catatonia.  Where will it stop?  Does anyone remember the document called the Constitution? 

WAVING, NOT DROWNING (YET)

This is not a post about ANWR.  For a change.  Just a few words on my own life.  Is it just me, or has March already lasted for about twelve weeks?  How is this possible?  Spring Break is crawling towards me, and I towards it, at less than snail's pace.  This week alone seems to have contained twenty or thirty days.  But, tonight I'm going to a candlelight vigil in Lewes, with the peace group there.  They hold vigils against this mindless war every Sunday afternoon.  This is a special one, as today is the beginning of the third year of the war that was only supposed to last a short while, and then Iraquis and GI's would be holding hands, eating Hershey bars, throwing roses and dancing in the streets.

G has a function at her school tonight, so she'll be there til late.  Then we'll pack up our jeans and jammies and leave early tomorrow a.m. for Washington, D.C.  My students from the college are having a field trip there (it's actually the International Club, which is made up of ESOL students from all the levels), and I'll meet them at the National Museum of the American Indian, stay with them for the morning, eat lunch, then go to my sister's place. I'd forgotten about the field trip when I promised to come in and visit sister and niece while bro-in-law is in India.  As the NMAI was my idea (because of our visit there after Christmas, and my enthusiasm), I think I need to go along with the group for this segment of the trip.  The other teachers can handle the rest.

The rest of the weekend will be spent having a hen party with the cute/smart/funny/engaging/adorable niece, her mom (my sister) and G.  I hope we'll take some walks, eat some interesting food, maybe see a movie, and sleep.  There will also be: story reading, game playing, and art projects, I'm sure.  M (niece) has had the flu all this past week, so her energy levels might not be at their peak.  It might be mostly story reading.  And that's just okay with me.

So, this is probably it until possibly Sunday night, or Monday. Enjoy the weekend, any projects  - either real or virtual - or just resting and relaxing.  Here in DE the daffodils are blooming, just so's you know.  Life goes on.

 

BUT THE FAT LADY HASN'T SUNG YET

So, the budget resolution with provisions for drilling in the Arctic Refuge passed, the Cantwell Amendment didn't, by a margin of two votes. And I drove to my afternoon gig yelling obscenities as I listened to the news on NPR, "outrage and sorrow" indeed, John Adams has it right - in the NRDC email I've copied at the end of this post. This is only the beginning of a long battle, I'm pretty sure.  I'm particularly disappointed in Mary Landrieux of Louisiana, a Democrat who voted with the majority in favor. But there's oil under themthere offshore waters of the Gulf, and she wants her state to get in on the action.  She probably did vote for her constituents' interests, insofar as oilrigs and all the jobs they bring are important in a state with not much else going for it.

So, now go back to this site and send a thank you to your senators if they voted against the resolution, or a letter of disappointment in them if they didn't.  We need to keep up the barrage of public opinion on this, because it ain't over til it's over. On the front page of this site is a list of things you can do, choose the appropriate one and go there.  On the letter of disappointment page there is a list of the senators to whom we say "shame on you."  The usual suspects, and you probably already know how your own reps voted.  I'm lucky to live in a state with two Democratic senators, who usually vote as I'd hope to have them do.  Although Biden did just vote for the Bankruptcy legislation.  Well, how could he not.  Every credit card company that matters is headquartered in Wilmington, haven't you noticed?  That's a Big Money source Delaware could not afford to lose. Yep, that's who runs the world, Big Money, we are but their lackeys and servants.

And, from the NRDC, this email tonight:

Dear NRDC Member,

As you may already know, our campaign to save the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge suffered a major setback in the U.S. Senate today.

The Senate is about to pass a budget resolution that calls for oil development
in the refuge. An amendment that would have stripped the Arctic drilling
provision from the budget bill was defeated by only two votes, 49-51.

This fight is far from over, however. To become law, the Senate budget bill
must still be "reconciled" with the House budget bill -- something Congress has been unable to do the past few years. You can be sure that we will be battling at every opportunity -- and there will be several -- to remove Arctic drilling from any budget that actually winds up on President Bush's desk.

I am not going to soft-pedal today's defeat. It is distressing that pro-oil forces, significantly strengthened by last November's election, were able to pass this terrible bill in the Senate, where we've blocked them before. It is a sad day indeed when the White House and Senate leaders are able to bypass public hearings and debate by tying the fate of America's great wildlife refuge
to the federal budget bill, where it does not belong.

I want you to know one thing: we fought our hardest to defend the Arctic Refuge in the U.S. Senate. Our legislative staff worked day and night to win over critical swing votes. They were aided by the more than 450,000 emails and faxes you sent to Congress. In the last few days, thousands of our supporters in 10 key states flooded their senators' offices with anti-drilling phone calls. And an outpouring of contributions enabled us to run hard-hitting advertising in the most critical states.

We gave it everything we had. But in today's vote we just could not overcome a White House that was shamelessly trumpeting the need to sacrifice the Arctic Refuge for the sake of America's energy security and national security -- an argument that is as erroneous as it is destructive to our natural heritage.

Congress must still pass two different budget measures to complete its assault on the refuge, and I can assure you that we will battle every step of the way as these bills play out over the months to come. That's why, in the wake of this most recent setback, I would urge you to convert your outrage and sorrow into action. We're going to need your redoubled commitment to our cause in the fight ahead. I know we can count on you.

Thank you for all you've done.

Sincerely,

John H. Adams
President
Natural Resources Defense Council

YES, 'FRAID SO. MORE ON ANWR

The vote will probably be today, so I add a little more info to the fire.  A couple of people noted in their comments to the previous ANWR post that their senators (from places like PA and TN) are not likely to be on the side of the angels, or, rather, the caribou and muskoxen.  These are exactly the senators who need to hear our voices.  They are supposed to represent their constituents' interests, the theory goes. They certainly need to hear, loudly and clearly, what those interests are.

From salon.com's "War Room," a daily compendium of current political news, as important to me as a multivitamin, the news that Kerry has entered the ANWR fray:

The Bush-Kerry tundra turf war

There's a Bush vs. Kerry rematch this week over the tundra turf of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

At the request of the Bush administration, Republicans in the Senate have tacked a provision onto a budget resolution which would open the refuge to drilling. Since budget resolutions can't be filibustered, now the advocates of opening the refuge only need 51 votes to let oil companies into the still-pristine land of muskoxen and caribou.

Sen. John Kerry has joined Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., in a campaign to try to strip the Arctic drilling provision out of the budget resolution. The senators believe they have the votes to succeed in doing so, but the forces working to pry open the Arctic for drilling are just as confident that they have the votes to pull it off.

Meanwhile, the Bush adminstration's new line on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge isn't just that the country needs the relatively small amount of oil under it, but that the sprawling machinery for extracting it won't really trouble the wildlife living there. (Really.) Bush's interior secretary, Gale Norton, in an Op-Ed piece in Monday's New York Times argued that drilling technology has improved so much, that the caribou and muskox will barely notice it at all.

A scolding from the Times editorial board casts a shadow on Norton's sunny notion: "Where Ms. Norton sees undisturbed tundra, [environmentalists] see hundreds of miles of pipelines, roads and drilling platforms, which would fragment wildlife habitats and corrupt a wilderness that, according to recent polls, a majority of Americans wish to leave undisturbed. We have expressed such reservations ourselves. But what troubles us most about President Bush's fixation on drilling is what it says about the shallowness of his energy policy."

Whatever the cost to wildlife, the Times says, the limited amount of oil there wouldn't do much to fix our energy problems, adding: "Any number of modest efficiencies could achieve the same result without threatening the refuge. Simply closing the so-called S.U.V. loophole -- making light trucks as efficient overall as ordinary cars -- would save a million barrels a day. Increasing fuel-economy standards for cars by about 50 percent, to 40 miles per gallon, a perfectly reasonable expectation, would save 2.5 million barrels a day."

But if you think that Bush administration and the Republican controlled Congress is likely to go for either of those ideas, we've got a caribou-friendly drilling platform to sell you.

-- Katharine Mieszkowski

And, this piece from Truthout's Environmental Page is worth reading:

ANWR on the Brink - Again
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 14 March 2005

It's just one wildlife refuge in Alaska, but it seems to have Washington, D.C. tied in knots. A million and a half acres of wilderness in the far north, with a small puddle of oil beneath its surface - who would think that a place like that could be responsible for the turmoil in Washington that it is causing?

President Bush went on the stump last week in Ohio, calling for the opening of the refuge to oil development, stating it would "create thousands of jobs" and reduce oil imports. He said we need to drill there "for the sake of national security," to end our dependence on foreign oil. He called on Congress to pass an energy bill that includes the opening of ANWR.

But the U.S. Geological Survey has concluded that there are probably only 3.2 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil in ANWR. That amounts to just a six-month supply for the U.S. The price for that oil is the spoiling of a pristine wilderness that is a vital nursery for one of the largest remaining caribou herds and a home to polar bears, arctic foxes, white wolves and migratory birds.

Since coming to office, Bush has tried hard to get Congress to open the refuge and has been rebuffed more than once by the Senate. Yet with Republican victories last fall, he may now have the votes he needs - if he can avoid a filibuster.

The filibuster is the Republican bete noir, the only thing that stands between them and total domination of all three branches of government. Senate Majority leader Bill Frist has threatened to remove the 200-year-old senate rule that allows a minority to use endless debate to block voting. Doing away with the filibuster would mark a radical change in the Senate and is being dubbed "the nuclear option."  Read the rest of the article here. 
(It's a link, really, even though it's not blue.)

ANWR PART II, READ IT AND WEEP

If you haven’t read this entry, please start with it. This second part of the ANWR posting deals with the administration’s renewed efforts to get into the Refuge and drill for oil there. Because this was defeated in Congress in July they are resorting to a sneaky backdoor method to get what they want in the White House, as a boon to the oil industry, a major source of financial contributions to the party and the president’s campaign.

From PlanetArk, the Reuters environmental news site, this is the story:

Senate Tries New Strategy to Win Alaska Drilling

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's aim to open an Alaskan wildlife refuge to oil drilling was included in a draft Senate budget resolution on Wednesday, improving its chances of passage after repeated filibusters, a senior Republican senator said.

The White House and Republican leaders want to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a vast pristine area on Alaska's north coast, to boost domestic supplies of oil.

Moderate Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have blocked ANWR legislation for years, citing concerns about the impact of drilling on wildlife such as caribou, polar bears and migratory birds.

But this year, by attaching legislative language to a broad federal budget measure, Senate Republican leaders believe they can push through ANWR drilling. Under Senate rules, budget bills cannot be filibustered or talked to death.

Pete Domenici of New Mexico, the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, said the ANWR drilling measure was included in the Senate Budget Committee's draft budget bill released on Wednesday.

"All we're going to do in this budget resolution is do it the old fashioned way," Domenici said. "If you want to win, you get 51 votes."

Ending a Senate filibuster on other bills requires 60 votes.

However, Sen. Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, said he would offer an amendment to strip the language from the budget bill. Something as controversial as ANWR drilling should not be included in a broad bill to fund the entirefederal government in fiscal 2006, he and other critics said.

"It's a back door way to try and get drilling in the Arctic wilderness," Feingold said.

In a speech in Ohio, President George W. Bush urged Congress to open 2,000 acres of the refuge to oil exploration. "Developing a small section of ANWR would not only create thousands of new jobs, but it would eventually reduce our dependence on foreign oil by up to a million barrels of oil a day," Bush said. "Congress needs to look at the science and look at the facts and send me a bill that includes exploration in ANWR for the sake of our country."

The US government has estimated that 10 billion to 16 billion barrels of crude oil could be pumped from the refuge. "That's the same amount of new oil we could get from 41 states combined," Bush said.

The Senate Budget Committee's draft budget bill estimated some $2.5 billion would be collected in fees from energy companies that would pay the government to lease ANWR tracts to hunt for oil.

That is based on the assumption that the federal government can lease at least 400,000 acres in the refuge, and collect fees of $4,000 to $6,000 an acre from energy firms. Some Democrats have questioned those assumptions, noting that a series of northern Alaskan lease sales brought in an average of less than $40 per acre in the past four years.

While the Senate moved forward with the administration's oil drilling plan, the House Budget Committee's draft bill for fiscal 2006 did not include a provision for ANWR drilling. "We're sort of agnostic on that particular policy," said a House Budget Committee aide.

However, other lawmakers on the House panel could try to amend the budget bill to add the drilling language. The full House has overwhelmingly approved opening the wildlife refuge to oil companies in the past two years.

Re Domenici’s interest in using this rat’s ass method of passing an unpopular policy, here he is in a previous life making his views known on the use of exactly the same tactics:

"Years ago, the same Senator Domenici spoke out against using the budget as a Trojan horse to force through policy proposals that fail to win support on their own merits. It’s a shame that Senator Domenici has turned his back on the Senate’s tradition of full and fair debate " (article from Environmental News Service, Senate Budget Committee Advances Arctic Drilling)

The NRDC sent out an alert to its members, which included an article from The Washington Post, from which I include this snippet:

The debate is over the environmental impact and benefits of drilling in a small portion of the 19 million-acre refuge. Drilling would occur within about 1.5 million acres of the coastal plain. Bush said yesterday that all of the refuge's oil could be reached by drilling on 2,000 acres. Opponents disputed that and said drilling would mar the environment and provide little benefit.

Government models suggest that if opened, the coastal plain of the refuge could produce nearly 10 million barrels of oil a day in 2025. The reduction in imports would be modest, according to data from the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration. With oil from the refuge, the agency's models indicate the United States would import oil to meet 65 percent of its needs in 2025 vs. 68 percent without it.

So, in twenty years we’d see a difference of 3% in imported oil. Well, that’s certainly worth opening up the only remaining unspoiled wilderness on this continent to oil drilling, wouldn’t you say?

And here’s the Wilderness Society’s take on all this, in case you haven't been listening thus far:

Sneak Attack Threatens Arctic Refuge And Our Democratic Process
Wilderness Society Shines a Spotlight on Stealth Budget Maneuver

Washington , DC – The pristine natural beauty and unique wildlife of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are facing a renewed attack from oil industry allies in Congress. But this time, it's a sneak attack. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans oppose drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge, some members of the House and Senate are quietly pulling out all the stops to try to pass a highly controversial drilling proposal. They would do so by attaching the drilling measure to the upcoming budget resolution, a backdoor maneuver designed to bypass both popular sentiment and a lack of support for the measure in Congress.

.......

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is home to over 250 unique animal species, including polar bears, grizzlies, musk oxen, wolves, and millions of migratory birds. The US Fish and Wildlife Service called the refuge’s 1.5 million-acre Coastal Plain – where oil drilling is proposed – the "biological heart" of the refuge. To the Gwich’in Indians of Alaska, who rely heavily on the refuge’s caribou herd for their food and culture, the refuge is known as the "sacred place where life began."

"There are some places that are just too important and too wild to sacrifice to oil drilling," said Jim Waltman, Wildlife Refuge Program Director for The Wilderness Society. "There are safer and smarter ways to address this problem, starting with making our vehicles more efficient and investing in renewable sources like wind and solar."

It’s interesting to go to the ANWR’s own webpage and read some of the issues at stake in this controversy. It has been a controversy since it first became known that oil lay beneath the Coastal Tundra Plain, but every effort to drill for that oil has up until now been defeated.

Potential Impacts of Proposed Oil and Gas Development on the Arctic Refuge's Coastal Plain: Historical Overview and Issues of Concern

Topics on this page:

History of the Arctic Refuge as it relates to Oil in Alaska
How much Oil is in the Arctic Refuge?
The Unique Conservation Values of the Arctic Refuge
Potential Impacts of Oil and Gas Development on Refuge Resources
List of Reports

Well, there you have it. This is all slated for action next Wednesday. We still have time to make our voices heard. The NRDC has this page where you can make your shout, with a simple clicking on a link. The ANWR is one of the NRDC’s BioGems, they are anxious to see it remain as such for future generations.

One more link for taking action, which I "borrowed" from Robin's wonderful posting on this same issue:

Arctic Hotline for Capitol Hill: 1-888-894-5325 or go to http://capwiz.com/awc/dbq/officials/ and click on your state to get the direct number for your Senator.  You can call the Capitol Hill switchboard at (202) 224-3121

·       Ask your Senator to vote “Yes” on the Cantwell amendment to keep drilling in the Arctic Refuge out of the budget.

ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, PART 1

FROM THE REFUGE BROCHURE:

"This is the place for man turned scientist and explorer; poet and artist. Here he can experience a new reverence for life that is outside his own and yet a vital and joyous part of it." [William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice, 1939-1975]

Untamed Country

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a vast and beautiful wilderness, one unique in North America. Unique because it has a full range of arctic and subarctic ecosystems. Unique also because the systems are whole and undisturbed, functioning as they have for centuries, largely free of human control and manipulation.

Inupiat Eskimos and Athabascan Indians live in this place, following their ancestors who survived here for generations.

A Northern Frontier

One of the world’s most remote natural areas, the Arctic Refuge is a frontier--perhaps America’s last--like those that helped shape America’s distinct cultural heritage. Here conditions exist like those that once surrounded and shaped us--as individuals and as a Nation.

"This wilderness is big enough and wild enough to make you feel like one of the old-time explorers . . ." [Lowell Sumner, Refuge Founder]

This post also begins with an attitude of gratitude, for the action taken years ago  (during the Eisenhower administration, oh for the Republicans of yesteryear!)  to set aside this piece of Alaska. It was set aside by Executive Order in 1952,and became a National Wildlife Refuge in 1960.  Today that Refuge is under continuing attack by the current Republican administration, in its lunatic endeavor to extract the small amount of oil present there. This endeavor was vetoed by Congress last July, but that was by no means the end of it. I said in an earlier post that I planned to journal on the backdoor efforts now underway to pass an energy bill that would allow oil drilling in the ANWR.

Because I think if more people knew what an incredible place the ANWR is, more would mobilize to stop this oil drilling, I have decided that the best way to begin is by showing a little of  the amazing place that is the Refuge. I may finally exceed our 25,000 character limit in this post, and it may turn into a two-parter. Start by going to the Site Index for the official ANWR webpage. Look at all the things you can read about, read some of them now, bookmark the links and set aside a long period of time to read more of them. Then go to the photo album called Journey through the Refuge, to see a collection of pictures that may incite you to make an immediate airline reservation to Fairbanks.

Well, maybe you don’t have the time to go read all that stuff, or look at those pictures. It is, after all, the weekend. You have those Weekend Things to do. Okay, then, just read these few little facts and figures from the Webpage itself:

• 180 bird species from four continents have been seen there.
• It is home to 36 species of land mammals.
• It protects most of the calving grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd, the second largest herd in Alaska.
• It contains all three species of North American bears (black, brown, and polar).
• Nine marine mammal species live along its coast.
• 36 fish species inhabit its rivers and lakes.
• The Nation's northernmost breeding population of golden eagles occurs there.
• It is used by two different caribou herds.
• It has no known introduced species.
• Its coast is a major migration route for several waterfowl species.

Are you a birder? Then check out this link to the birdlife for the Refuge.   Do you love, care about, care for, hope to protect wildlife? Here’s a link to the list of animals inhabiting the Refuge.

 NOW are you making your plane reservation?  I certainly wish I were.  And it is one of my lifedreams to get to these unspoiled areas of Alaska, the ANWR and Denali in particular.  However, I'm 61 years old, the financial ability to retire is pretty shaky - we're unlikely to have many big trips in our aging future.  So I may never make those plane reservations to Fairbanks.  If no other living human ever got there, I'd still want the unspoiled wilderness to be there. I'd like to die knowing the planet still had caribou and black bears roaming the mountains and tundras.

The area where drilling is proposed is the Coastal Plain Tundra, an area the National Fish and Wildlife information describes thusly:

"The terrain of the 1002 Area includes mostly foothills and low relief coastal plain, with few lakes and ponds; areas to the west have extensive wetlands, including large lakes. The distance from the mountains to the coast in the Refuge also is several times smaller than it is farther west. This relative compactness of habitats provides for a greater degree of ecological diversity than any other similar sized area of Alaska's north slope.

Those who campaigned to establish the Arctic Refuge recognized its wild qualities and the significance of these spatial relationships. Here lies an unusually diverse assemblage of large animals and smaller, less-appreciated life forms, tied to their physical environments and to each other by natural, undisturbed ecological and evolutionary processes."  (Emphasis is mine.)

Still quoting from the website, this time the area on Wildlife in the Refuge, specifically the caribou:

"This coastal plain comprises only 10 percent of the Arctic Refuge. Yet from May to July, it is the center of biological activity on the Refuge. For centuries, animals from the Porcupine caribou herd have used the coastal tundra to calve, obtain nourishment, avoid insects, and escape predators.

The calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd include the northern foothills of the Brooks Range and the arctic coastal plain from the Tamayariak River in Alaska to the Babbage River in Canada. The most often used calving area, however, is on the Refuge coastal plain between the Katakturuk and Kongakut Rivers. Commonly, one-half to three quarters or more of the calves are born within this area.

 Newborn caribou calf

The Refuge coastal plain is very important to calving success and calf survival in the Porcupine caribou herd. There are two main reasons for this. First, fewer brown bears, wolves, and golden eagles live on the coastal plain than in the adjacent foothills and mountains. As a result, the newborn calves have a better chance to survive their first week, until they become strong enough to outrun their pursuers.

The Refuge coastal plain also provides an abundance of plant species preferred by caribou. Nutrition is very important to the pregnant and nursing cows, particularly after the long winter. The timing of snow melt and plant "green up" on the coastal plain coincides with their calving period. This gives the new mothers access to the most nutritious food when it is most important for their health and the proper development of nursing calves.

The entire Porcupine caribou herd and up to a third of the Central Arctic herd use the Refuge coastal plain when calving is completed. This essential area contains forage and a variety of habitats that provide insect relief, including the coast, uplands, ice fields, rocky slopes, and gravel bars.

Their annual visit to the Refuge coastal plain brings new life and vitality to the caribou. It is an important part of their life cycle. The coastal plain provides the caribou vital nourishment and a better chance of avoiding predators and insects. This relationship is part of the unaltered system that makes the Arctic Refuge such a wondrous place."  (All emphasis is mine.)

In the next part of this post I will talk about the current sneaky, backdoor, determined effort to disrupt this area by bringing in oil-drilling and all its attendant machinery, water usage, road building, traffic, human pollution, and so on. The more I know about people, the better I like dogs, as my mother used to say.

BREATHING A LITTLE MORE DEEPLY

Let me not, while recounting tribulations, and pointing out trials both past and potential, forget to announce victory, to celebrate gratitude when the good things do happen.  And this past week, on Wednesday, one did happen.  The "Clear Skies" act was defeated in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.  Nine senators helped kill this bill (for the time being anyway, to inject a note of cynicism) -please let them know that you approve their actions and thank them for a courageous stand against the administration's pro-industry anti-citizens' health policies.  The nine senators are: Jim Jeffords (I-VT), Max Baucus (D-MT), Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Thomas Carper (D-DE), Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Barack Obama (D-IL).  To make life simpler, here is a link where you can simply fill in a few blanks to send a free fax to your senator, expressing your gratitude for his or her action.  Please do take a moment right now to do this.  And I thank you, too.

The following snippet from NRDC elaborates on this defeat a little further: 

BILL WEAKENING CLEAN AIR ACT DIES IN SENATE COMMITTEE
Tri-Partisan Group of Senators Nix Corporate Polluter Plan

Statement by John Walke, NRDC Senior Attorney

WASHINGTON (March 9, 2005) -- In a 9-9 vote, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee today rejected a bill (S. 131) that would have weakened Clean Air Act public health safeguards and postponed deadlines for industrial polluters to significantly reduce their toxic emissions. Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R.I.) and Sen. James Jeffords (Vt.), an independent, joined the committee's seven Democrats in voting against the bill.

Below is a statement by John Walke, clean air project director, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council):

"Today senators on both sides of the aisle stood up for the American people against a corporate scheme to weaken federal law and delay the day we all can enjoy breathing clean air.

"If the Senate wants to pass an air pollution bill, that bill would have to clean the air faster than the current Clean Air Act. The bill that died today, which was crafted by industrial polluters, failed that basic test. What's more, it would have worsened global warming by locking the electric power industry into investments that exacerbate, rather than control, global warming pollution."

As a matter of fact, there were two victories for cleaner air within the past week.  The EPA passed the Clean Air Interstate Rule (known as CAIR), a plan to cut down smog and power plant produced air pollution.  From Environmental Defense:

Victory! Biggest Smog and Soot Power Plant Pollution Cuts in a Decade

In a major victory for clean air and the health of you and your family, the U.S. EPA signed into action yesterday the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR). This is the biggest cut in unhealthy smog- and soot-forming pollution from power plants in a decade, bringing relief to children, the elderly, asthma suffers and others who are especially sensitive to air pollution. Environmental Defense applauds EPA's CAIR program and thanks the over 40,000 members and activists who have written to Congress supporting it.

With over 160 million Americans living in areas with unhealthy air, this is a big win for clean air and public health. Power plants pollute air locally, but their tall smokestacks also send soot and chemicals far into the sky, where wind carries them hundreds of miles. Emissions from Ohio, for example, degrade the air quality in New York and New England.

More on CAIR's Clean Air Victory
CAIR will result in dramatic power plant air pollution reductions. The rule will:

- Cut millions of tons of smog- and particulate-forming pollution from power plants across the Midwest, Southeast and Northeast, reducing SO2 pollution by about 70% and NOx pollution by 65% by 2015.

- Prevent an estimated 13,000 deaths, 240,000 asthma attacks, and 1.7 million lost work and school days annually.

- Produce $82 billion in benefits with only $3.7 billion in costs, meaning benefits outweigh cost 20 to 1.

- Achieve cost-effective pollution cuts by capping emissions and trading credits through a market-based approached.

DOLPHIN STRANDING, REDUX

Don't you hate it when a story disappears from sight, and you never get to hear any more about it?  This has a way of happening with all kinds of things.  So, I'm on sort of a quest to look up things I posted about in the past and see if I can update with any recent information.  I started with the most recent event, the mass dolphin stranding of about a week ago in Florida.  The only place I could find anything beyond the basic story (the one that was on AOL's news screen on Sunday) was here, in an online newspaper called KeysNews.com.  The first article, Experts to Test Female Dolphins, is interesting in that it mentions the many kinds of tests that will be performed on the creatures, and how long it will all take.  Two of the females gave birth during the past week, but both calves were stillborn.  The paragraph that proves to me once again what I have previously said about dolphins - that they are very closely connected to the best of the human species - is this one: 

           "This stranding has also allowed the researchers to watch how mothers and other members of the pod act and react during pregnancy. During the birthing in Key Largo, the very social dolphins seemed in tune with what was going on with the birth. They became much more active and, at times, even protective of the mother, as the humans attempted to help the mother with her birth."

So we won't have the results of the tests for quite a while.  By which time, no one will remember the happening to begin with, and it will fade into the timewarp of news.  If it didn't happen in the last hour, who cares?  In the meantime, however, we do now know this, also from KeyNews.com: 

Navy says it used sonar during same day as dolphin stranding

BY BECKY IANNOTTA

Citizen Staff

KEY WEST — The Navy's submarine Philadelphia used short-range sonar to help guide it to the water's surface on Wednesday, the same day 50 to 70 rough-toothed dolphins began beaching themselves off Marathon, a Navy official said Monday.

Lt. Cmdr. Jensin Sommer, spokeswoman for Navy Submarine Forces in Norfolk, said it is too early to say whether the use of sonar caused the stranding, and said the Navy is working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service, which is conducting the investigation into the stranding.

The nuclear-powered submarine was about 45 miles southwest of the stranding site when it used active sonar on Wednesday and three other days last week, Sommer said. The Philadelphia used high-frequency sonar prior to surfacing to avoid potential contact with other ships on Feb. 27, March 1 and March 2, and used mid-frequency sonar for navigation Feb. 28, she said.

Mid-frequency sonar has a longer range and produces more power than high-frequency sonar, Sommer said.

Scientists are conducting necropsies and other tests expected to take several months to determine whether the dolphins were suffering from a virus or other illness, were disoriented or injured by underwater noise or were forced to shore by some other cause.

"Every effort will be taken between the federal agencies to determine what may have caused the strandings. Until the necropsies are complete, the possible cause of strandings cannot be determined," Sommer said. "The U.S. Navy takes its role as a good steward of the seas very seriously. Navy peacetime operations and training events are designed to fully comply with U.S. environmental laws and regulations."

Attention turned to the Navy following The Citizen's front-page picture Wednesday showing the Philadelphia conducting training exercises near Key West Harbor. A 2000 stranding in the Bahamas was blamed on the Navy's use of sonar and two others in the past two years — one in Washington and one in North Carolina — are under investigation.

"It is important to note that while submarines do not routinely use active sonar while operating at sea in order to preserve their unique stealth capabilities, its use is not unusual for safe navigation under circumstances such as poor visibility, and as operational requirements dictate," Sommer said Monday.

A Navy surface ship passed through the Florida Straits on Feb. 28, but it did not use its active sonar, Sommer said.

I'm not really too surprised - how about you?  But here's a scary thing - when I was looking for information on this, Googling and so forth, I found MY OWN ENTRY from this journal last Sunday.  Yikes.  Right out there with real information, me. 

CHECKING IN

Weather notes from Delmarva:  the rain and wind have knocked our home phone lines out of commission again, so I'm at the college library reading email and checking alerts.  An amazing day that began with torrential rains after midnight which continued all morning, and now have turned into snow.  We looked out the window mid-class and saw swirling white.  The winds are gusting up to 40/50 miles an hour.  Because of this the EagleCam has been knocked awry, and you can't see much in the nest.  It does sound like the third chick has hatched, from what today's eagleblog entry says.  I was too busy yesterday to check in on them, so this is probably old news to you other eagle-checkers.  Feel free to send me updates any time you feel like it, as I will be somewhat out of things for the next couple of weeks.  Trying to survive until Good Friday, when spring break begins.

LIFE ON EARTH

If you haven’t yet read this article on the AOL opening page about a mass dolphin stranding in Florida, it’s time to read it now. If you don’t have time to read it, I’ll summarize for you: 68 rough-toothed dolphins stranded themselves on the beach at Marathon, 20 of them have died, the rest are being taken to rehabilitation. This happened one day after a Navy submarine conducted operations in the ocean roughly 45 miles away from the site of the beaching.

To quote the article : "The beachings came a day after the USS Philadelphia conducted exercises off Key West, about 45 miles from Marathon. Navy officials refused to say whether the Groton, Conn.-based submarine used its sonar during a training exercise with Navy SEALs.

But naval ships emitting pulses of sound have been blamed for at least one mass beaching. Scientists surmise that sonar may disorient or scare marine mammals, causing them to surface too quickly and creating the equivalent of what divers know as the bends - when nitrogen is formed in tissue by sudden decompression, leading to hemorrhaging."

So, the Navy refuses to say whether it used sonar or not. Hmmmm, don’t you suppose if they hadn’t used it they’d be jumping at the chance to say so? Of course they used sonar. And the fact that sonar is damaging to marine wildlife is not news, and is no secret. I urge you also to visit the NRDC’s ocean wildlife site for this article, Protecting Whales from Dangerous Sonar. Conservation groups have been working on getting this stopped for quite some time, ever since they became aware of what was happening.

Again, if you don’t have the time to read the information on the links, I’ll put some of it in right here: (and I cut out the photo on purpose, not to steal bandwidth)

Active Sonar: How It Harms Marine Life

  LFA Victory Threatened

The ink was barely dry on the historic settlement limiting use of LFA sonar when ocean advocates were confronted with a new threat. In what Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) called the greatest single rollback of marine mammal protection in the last 30 years, the Bush administration pushed legislation through Congress that exempts the U.S. military from core provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act -- leaving the armed forces much freer to harm whales, dolphins and other marine mammals in the course of using high-intensity sonar and underwater explosives. Exemptions in hand, the administration is now trying to appeal the ruling limiting deployment of LFA sonar -- a hard-won court victory NRDC stands ready to defend.

Military active sonar works like a floodlight, emitting sound waves that sweep across tens or even hundreds of miles of ocean, revealing objects in their path. But that kind of power requires the use of extremely loud sound. Each loudspeaker in the LFA system's wide array, for example, can generate 215 decibels' worth -- sound as intense as that produced by a twin-engine fighter jet at takeoff. Some mid-frequency sonar systems can put out over 235 decibels, as loud as a Saturn V rocket at launch. One hundred miles from the LFA system, sound levels can approach 160 decibels, well beyond the Navy's own safety limits for humans.

Evidence of the harm such a barrage of sound can do began to surface in March 2000, when members of four different species of whales stranded themselves on beaches in the Bahamas after a U.S. Navy battle group used active sonar in the area. Investigators found that the whales were bleeding internally around their brains and ears. Although the Navy initially denied responsibility, the government's investigation established with virtual certainty that the strandings were caused by its use of active sonar. Since the incident, the area's population of Cuvier's beaked whales has all but disappeared, leading researchers to conclude that they either abandoned their habitat or died at sea.

The Bahamas, it turned out, was only the tip of an iceberg. Additional mass strandings and deaths associated with military activities and active sonar have occurred in Madeira (2000), Greece (1996), the U.S. Virgin Islands (1998, 1999), the Canary Islands (1985, 1988, 1989, 2002), and, most recently, the northwest coast of the United States (2003). And in July 2004 researchers uncovered an extraordinary concentration of whale strandings near Yokosuka, a major U.S. Navy base off the Pacific coast of Japan. The Navy's active sonar program appears to be responsible for many more whale strandings than had previously been imagined.

How does active sonar harm whales? According to a recent report in the journal Nature, animals that came ashore during one mass stranding had developed large emboli, or bubbles, in their organ tissue. The report suggested that the animals had suffered from something akin to a severe case of "the bends" -- the illness that can kill scuba divers who surface too quickly from deep water. The study supports what many scientists have long suspected: that the whales stranded on shore are only the most visible symptom of a problem affecting much larger numbers of marine life.

Researchers have found that many humpback whales cease singing when exposed to an LFA sonar signal that is hundreds of miles distant.
Photo: Bill Lawton / NMML

 

Other impacts, though more subtle, are no less serious. Marine mammals and many species of fish use sound to follow migratory routes, locate each other over great distances, find food and care for their young. Noise that undermines their ability to hear can threaten their ability to function and, over the long term, to survive. Naval sonar has been shown to alter the singing of humpback whales, an activity essential to the reproduction of this endangered species; to disrupt the feeding of orcas; and to cause porpoises and other species to leap from the water, or panic and flee. Over time, these effects could undermine the fitness of populations of animals, contributing to what prominent biologist Sylvia Earle has called "a death of a thousand cuts."Reining in LFA Sonar

Since 1994, when NRDC began investigating rumors that sound experiments were taking place off the California coast, LFA (Low-frequency Active) sonar has been of particular concern because of the enormous distances traveled by its intense blasts of sound. During testing off the California coast, noise from a single LFA system was detected across the breadth of the North Pacific. By the Navy's own estimates, even 300 miles from the source these sonic waves can retain an intensity of 140 decibels -- still a hundred times more intense than the noise aversion threshold for gray whales. Many scientists believe that blanketing the oceans with such deafening sound could harm entire populations of whales, dolphins and fish.

NRDC's decade-long campaign to expose the dangers of active sonar won a major victory in August 2003, when a federal court ruled illegal the Navy's plan to deploy LFA sonar through 75 percent of the world's oceans. On the heels of this ruling, the Navy agreed to limit use of the system to a fraction of the area originally proposed, and that use of LFA sonar will be guided by negotiated geographical limits and seasonal exclusions; conservationists believe this will protect critical habitat and whale migrations. None of the limits apply during war or heightened threat conditions; the Navy also retains the flexibility it needs for training exercises. The pact demonstrates that current law can safeguard both the environment and national security.

Could it possibly be that our Navy was not adhering to the federal court ruling established in August 2003? Which the Bush administration immediately began working to overthrow?

It’s for such things that I put in boring lengthy posts about anti-environment judges being reconsidered for federal bench appointments – these people havethe power to destroy our forests, oceans, air, and public lands. We are fighting for our lives here, ours and the lives of the rest of the planet. There is no cause more important than this one right now. If we lose this, nothing else is going to matter.

 

EAGLE BLOG!

Okay, a note currently on the EagleCam site seems to indicate the Blackwater folks are getting worried now too.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that they have started a Weblog for this season of the eagle chicks.  They put in the first entry today.  There will be eagle info, news about the chicks and their development and so on.  This will be a great companion site for the live camera - it's all a reason to keep living, as far as I'm concerned.

Thanks for the suggestions about where to learn about putting pictures into the text of entries, not just over or below them, from my friends who left them in the previous entry.  I'll go check 'em out.  We'll see if I can figure this out, with some expert help.

STILL WITH THE BIRDS, AND A CRY FOR HELP

The EagleCam is back in working order now, so we have a choice of two places to watch the eagles, as they are still on WildCam.  The third egg still looks just like it did yesterday evening, and I am growing worried about it.  The notes on EagleCam aren't saying anything yet to indicate the Blackwater naturalists are worried, so perhaps it's just my usual premature paranoia.  But this is the egg that has had two black marks on it for quite a while.  I worried about it even before it seemed like a reluctant hatcher.  Do any of the other Concerned Eagle Watchers know anything about this?  Please send me any news I may have missed by being late getting on the Internet. 

While I'm asking for favors, here's another one.  Can anyone help me with, or direct me to, a clear Little Golden tutorial on how to get my pictures into the text on journal posts?  The only thing I know how to do is just put them above or below the text, not wrap text around them or put them to the right or left side of relevant text.  But I'm tired of doing that, and see that other possibilities exist.  There doesn't seem to be anything about this procedure on John Scalzi's journal, but it must be somewhere.  And, mysteriously, on some older entries, it seems to have happened all by itself - pictures have moved to the side of the text. I don't understand at all.  Help!  Help!