Needlenose

I wrote a post (currently missing from the site until I can get the ‘lost years’ reloaded) suggesting that we need to track all the various environmental insults to the ocean (e.g. warming, acidification, non-point specific run-off, eutrophication, overfishing, etc.) and chart (and map) the cumulative impacts to determine just how bad things have gotten.  It looks like the scientists are catching up to Needlenose, as you’ll note in this depressing report from a workshop on ocean stresses and impacts.  Cliff notes summary for the lazy:

• Oceanic warming & acidification are accelerating hypoxia (which, as you may recall is being caused by agricultural and sewage runoff)
• Decline of the ocean is as bad, or worse than the ‘doomsayers’ have been predicting
• The cumulative effects are worse than previously understood
• The cumulative stressors are reducing the ability of ocean life to adapt to the ‘big changes’ of warming & acidification
• Ecosystem collapse is well underway, accelerating and spreading
• We are running out of time to take useful action

But enough of this dreary talk!  Let’s go back to our ordinarily scheduled programming to cover more on Weiner’s weiner!

I ditto Ian Fletcher’s call for import tariffs to level the playing field against unfair overseas competition.  But I don’t think his suggestion to use a tariff to make up the difference in the price of goods due to China’s currency manipulation and to compensate for other country’s foreign export rebates goes far enough.

The Capitalist Tools want us to compete by rolling back 100 years of labor reforms and eliminating environmental protections, basically a race to the bottom for the other 98% of the population so that our hard-working children and prisoners can breath the same smoggy air and drink the same polluted water enjoyed by labor in China and S.E. Asia.

To hell with that!  Let’s keep our high standards, and instead hit foreign goods with ‘carbon,’ ‘pollution’ and unfair labor practices tariffs.

Sure, the prices of goods will rise as manufacturing shifts back to well-paid North Americans…but at least we’ll have jobs and some money with which to buy them!

Sounds like a movie title, huh?  The pic you see isn’t some hillbilly gravel road - it’s a marine waterway chocked with dead marine life – result of the persistent de-oxygenated ‘dead zone’ around the Mississippi mouth in the Gulf of Mexico.  Mostly this zone results from the run-off of fertilizers from our massively over-fertilized and massively subsidized agribusiness farms in our country’s bloated midsection.  But it was perhaps exacerbated by microbial activity as the little critters use up the extra oxygen to break down all that oil from the BP disaster.

Another day, another ecological nightmare, huh?  And all so very preventable.

*Update 9/27/10* Continuing fish die-offs in and around the Delta in the Gulf of Mexico.

carcass of a fish leaks oil when poked. yum!

Tell me this ain’t so…another rig in the Gulf of Mexico just exploded.

Just in case you forgot why nuclear energy is so bad, here is an unpleasant reminder from Chernobyl – the wildfires are near the contaminated area – a burn in the region could release radioactive ash.

Just as BP shuts down the undersea gusher, some drunken redneck smashes his boat into a small wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico.  What are the odds that this could happen?  Well they have a lot of boat-driving drunken rednecks down there in the Gulf, and a lot of wells and pipelines…

The People’s Republic of China has surpassed the U.S. in energy usage.  Seems like only yesterday when CMike was berating me for negatively comparing Chinese output of CO2 to that of the U.S.  That’s a first-place we really didn’t need

Could BP have finally stopped the oil gusher?  Looks plausible in the ROV cam:

BP Oil Spill Cam

*Update 7/19/10* Uh oh, seepage detected…

*Update 7/19/10 7:27P PT* and oil leaking out of the cap

*Update 7/21/10* The oil spill in China is now deemed twice as bad as originally thought.

For years it’s been trendy to argue that in pricing fuels it’s important to use  ’true (or full) cost accounting’  to adequately compute the total cost of fuels.  Alternative fuels, through this reasoning, don’t look nearly so bad in comparison on a cost basis once you add in environmental costs, cleanup costs and the like to the cost of fuel.  The usual public policy conclusion is invariably that the greenshades sharpen their pencils to compute externals, and the government then add those externals to the cost of the fossil fuels in the form of a tax.

So I’ve been reading about this true cost of accounting for nearly 3 decades and while there has been a lot of accounting done, gubbermint has sat on its ass and delivered nothing in the way of the tax.  In fact, under the Shrubya Reign of Error, they larded the fossil fuel industry with massive additional subsidies in a hellish ‘false cost accounting’ variant that could only have been concocted by a coterie of cthonic cretins on K Street.

The BP oil disaster, however, points to a novel approach for implementing at least a portion of applying ‘external’ costs – forget fossil fuel taxes that lily-livered  Congress will never pass – instead, make the fucking companies pay directly for their messes!

For example, the various oil companies could start with a supervised safety review of the other offshore wells currently in production as well as the 27,000 abandoned wells just in the Gulf of Mexico whose capping were most likely never supervised and which may be decaying as I type.  How about forcing the coal companies to put out the millions of tons of coal burning in thousands of coal seam fires around the world that are spewing noxious chemicals and carbon dioxide with zero benefit to anybody?  Or nuclear power plants paying for permanent storage of the 64,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will stay radioactive for up to 250,000 years?

We don’t need technology breakthroughs in alternative energy.  We need to eliminate the unbelievable corporate welfare the industry currently enjoys in subsidies, we need to force the companies to clean up the messes they have already created and to have plans to prevent and correct future messes, and we need to invest in conservation and modern grid infrastructure to properly use the power we do produce.

But first we need to break the link between the conservatives and the fossil fuel companies, otherwise we’ll keep circling the drain, faster with each turn of the spiral.

*Update 7/15/10* Could Congress actually be taking action to investigate those 27,000 abandoned Gulf Wells?  Or is this just more ‘look concerned’ bullshit?