• 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!

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!

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.

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?