Category: Environmental Protection

The Greenland Ice Sheet

On By Norbert HauptIn Climate Change, Energy, Environmental Protection, SustainabilityLeave a comment

Photo by Hannes Grobe, AWI

This is the village of Ittoqqortoormiit in Greenland, photo by Hannes Grobe. Not much growing going on. No wonder the people paint their houses colorfully. Things would be pretty bleak otherwise.

Greenland is the largest island in the world, located in the North Atlantic.

Greenland B

It is mostly covered by an ice sheet, which melts back in the summers and is replenished in the winters.

Greenland A

If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt completely, the sea level around the world would rise by 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities around the world would be abandoned. The rice-growing river deltas of Asia would be under water. Here in the U.S., most of Florida would be gone, Manhattan would be largely under water, and many of our great cities like Boston, Washington, Houston, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles,  San Francisco and Honolulu would be severely affected. I cannot imagine that civilization as we know it would be able to continue.

I think it’s safe to say that if we cannot mobilize and motivate ourselves to save the Greenland ice sheet we probably cannot save our civilization.

The U.S. climate change obfuscation movement still argues that it’s not humans that are changing the climate. It’s nature all by itself, and therefore we can just go on burning fossil fuels without worry.

According to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers based on U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data, U.S. coal mining was responsible for 154,000 direct jobs and over 400,000 indirect jobs in 2008.

Interestingly, the same people in the U.S. Congress arguing that global warming is a hoax are also the ones that call it immoral that we leave debt to our descendants.

What is more immoral?

  • Not to curb coal burning and jeopardize some of the 550,000 jobs dependent on coal?
  • Directly cause the annihilation of all major U.S. coastal cities, displacing over 100 million people all within the current century?

I am sure it is hard to transition from a fossil fuel economy to a renewable energy economy. It too will create jobs, it’s not like the jobs go away, they are being moved around.

But it is harder to relocate 100 million people when our cities are flooded.

The only counter-argument the deniers have is that it’s not humans that are causing the warming, it’s nature alone. We just have to deal with the results.

Is it worth the bet?

I agree that it is immoral to leave impossible levels of debt to future generations.

I think that it is more immoral to trash the global ecosystem so far that sea levels rise by dozens of feet, if it indeed is avoidable.

I do not think it is immoral to transition jobs from fossil fuel burning to renewable energies, even if it comes with a short-term cost. It is an investment in our children’s future.

I agree we cannot do this alone. We need China, Russia, India, Brazil and Indonesia to go along with it. Note that I didn’t include Europe on that list. It seems there are very few deniers left in Europe. Somehow they “got it” already.

Maybe it’s because they’re all socialists, though.

Calls to Abolish the EPA

On By Norbert HauptIn Environmental Protection, Sustainability1 Comment

There are plenty of voices in the Tea Party and even the general Republican Party that want to abolish the EPA, either by defunding it, abolishing it altogether, or curtailing its power.

The EPA may be a bloated government bureaucracy. But if you just get rid of it, who does its job? The states? Really? Fifty states will each protect their own environment? It seems to me that would make bureaucracy 50 times as large, to do the same job, or, more likely, the job won’t get done the same way.

The EPA protects us from many different threats and looks out for the health of  the people. It may kill jobs by doing that. Let’s just take a look at one industry that the EPA is regulating, the coal industry, which is one of the most significant polluters in the world.

One of the biggest problems associated with coal-fired power plants is the coal ash, which is laced with arsenic, lead, mercury and other toxic chemicals. If these substances make it into the water supply or the general environment, they can be deadly. They certainly cause all sorts of illnesses and birth defects. The industry does not have a strategy for safely disposing the 130 million tons of ash it produces every year.

How much is 130 million tons of ash? Enough to fill a million railroad cars.

An August 2010 joint study by the Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice, and the Sierra Club reported that 39 coal ash dump sites in 21 states have contaminated local drinking water or surface water with arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals at levels that exceed federal safe drinking water standards. This is in addition to 98 coal ash sites that are polluting local water supplies that were already identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In response to these and other threats, new regulations are in the making to require an upgrade of the management of coal ash storage facilities so as to avoid contaminating local groundwater supplies. In addition, EPA is issuing more stringent regulations on coal plant emissions, including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. The goal is to reduce chronic respiratory illnesses, such as asthma in children, and the deaths caused by coal-fired power plant emissions.

[Source: Brown, Lester R. (2011-01-06). World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (Kindle Locations 2681-2687). Norton. Kindle Edition.]

Do these congressmen we have seen in the video above really believe that the fifty states would adequately regulate the coal industry and come up with a consistent plan for disposing coal ash safely?

A ludicrous thought.

You Are Here – by Thomas Kostigen

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Environmental Protection, Four StarsLeave a comment

The subtitle is:

Exposing the Vital Link Between What We Do and What That Does to Our Planet.

I learned a tremendous amount reading this book. Systematically the author walks us through exotic places and shows us the adverse effect of human activity on the planet, in areas where we’d  never expect it.

I am a skeptic. I don’t fall for fads. But let me tell you this:

  1. I am going to review my personal use of electricity.
  2. I changed my thoughts on how to do the dishes.
  3. Water use (or abuse) has a different meaning.
  4. Paper and recycling (or rather, not printing  that page of paper in the first place) has new meaning to me now.
  5. I am going to be more careful about recycling my garbage.
  6. I will watch product labels and origins more carefully.

The list goes on.

The book is very readable and written in a no nonsense style. He just makes sense.

Go the Kostigan’s Web Site and get more information and updates, and be amazed about some of the asinine negative comments.

Thank you, Chelsea, for giving me this book for Christmas. It made an impact.

 

A few days after I first published this post, I ran into this picture on MSN, which references one of locales a chapter of the book is dedicated to.