Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for September 24th, 2008

Wall Street’s crisis shows need for Fair Elections

Posted in Campaign Finance, tagged , , , , , , , on September 24, 2008 |

Make no mistake about it, we face an economic crisis of enormous proportions. But the rush to bail out Wall Street firms with a “hair on fire” urgency rings so hollow when you consider how much the American people have already gone through. Millions of people have lost their homes to foreclosures. Many are being forced onto the streets, as tent cities are popping up in major cities. But nothing happened to fix the sub-prime mess, brewing for two years now, until Wall Street had a cash-flow problem.

The biggest problem seems to be that the government is now moving, not because they are inclined to make public policy for the good of the American people, but because their campaign donors have asked them to. You can see campaign finance’s fingers in the presidential race as well, as Wall Street donors dominate the upper echelons of each candidates’ major fundraisers and both candidates flounder and walk the thin line between offending their donors and offering real leadership.

As a seeming palliative to the financial crisis, the House introduced yesterday HR 7022, the Fair Elections Now Act, “To reform the financing of House elections, and for other purposes.” This bill would provide full optional public financing for congressional elections. It’s companion bill in the Senate has been mired in Congressional inaction. We can see how quickly Congress can act when it (more…)

Read Full Post »

Letting Go of Ethanol

Posted in Global Warming, tagged , , , , on September 24, 2008 |

I’ve been wanting to write a piece arguing that just because ethanol isn’t a complete solution to global warming and oil prices, it is still an alternative to oil and therefore good. Unfortunately, I can’t honestly say that because ethanol isn’t even a partial solution; it’s just a bigger problem.

I really wanted to like ethanol because corn is good.  And I really wanted to quote Hardin from his 1968 article in Science magazine where he said: “. . .we can make a rational decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that only perfect systems are tolerable.” I love the quotation, however, I sadly cannot honestly say that it applies to ethanol. In my mind I hear that blind Native American in the Oliver Stone film U-turn.

I’m generally wary of arguments purely rooted in economics, so I wanted to address some of those. But it turns out there’s pretty much no good argument in favor of ethanol and if there were one, I wouldn’t want to make it.  Turns out, according to Nobel prize winners and writers for Science and world news sources, ethanol has a pretty big carbon footprint when you take into account the carbon emissions released from burning forests to plant crops for use as diesel fuel. Turns out the amount of nitrogen needed to grow corn or switchgrass for fuel emits atmospheric nitrous oxide in levels that are worse for the planet than ozone. Turns out that the production of corn-based ethanol results in “dead zones” in our water sources, like a huge swath of the Mississippi. Turns out that people starve in-part because selling the crops for fuel rather than food reaps more profit. Turns out that hungry people are rioting around the world. Turns out that the nitrogen reaction used to grow the corn is produced using natural gas, which is not only a non-renewable carbon-based resource but which, in Texas, dictates prices on the energy markets. Yes, ethanol from sugarcane works for Brazil, but who knows what the lasting effects of massive deforestation will be and should we encourage the potential loss of more?

I asked a friend of mine why U.S. and E.U. legislators aren’t doing less to prop up the crop-fuel industry, like halting the subsidies and mandates, and doing more to find real solutions to global problems in the face of the evidence. He said, “They don’t want to find solutions. They want to sell corn for high prices.”

(more…)

Read Full Post »

Abandon All Hope…

Posted in Coal, Diesel, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2008 |

…ye who enter the Turk plant.Turk Site

Last Thursday in Hope, Arkansas there were two meetings. One was widely attended, the other was not… mostly because hardly anyone had heard of it.

They hadn’t heard of it because it snuck in under the wire, with barely (if at all) the proper notices and alerts. It was a quorum court meeting, and on the agenda was a motion to approve a bond issuance “not to exceed” $185,000,000. Aside from one dissenting voice of sanity, the motion was passed.

It was passed without allowing anyone to comment, and upon only one reading.

Hempstead County and Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation are now investors in the Turk Coal Plant, meaning residents and taxpayers are now on the hook for nearly 200 million dollars.

Why do they need this public backing? Coal’s dirty little secret is that it is on the way out, and everybody knows this. Power plants are constructed with a budget to pay off the cost of the plant over 20 or 30 years. Coal will soon become so economically unviable that these plants will be forced to close, leaving taxpayers and bondholders to pick up the check. How incredibly irresponsible.

Meanwhile, across town at the University of Arkansas Community College at Hope, I and a few hundred other people were cramming ourselves into the library to listen and submit comments to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ). They were holding a public hearing regarding mercury and other HAPs that the Turk plant will be emitting.

Employees from the plant were there, wearing florescent yellow t-shirts that said “Support Turk” on them. I wonder how many of those “employees” were contractors: temporary workers who don’t even live in Hempstead County, or possibly even Arkansas. Adding evidence to my suspicions was a documentary film maker present at the hearing who had filmed most of them leaving the plant earlier that day.

There was one local employee of SWEPCO who did give comments, and spoke at length about how much they all needed the plant because he had six kids and he needed his job with SWEPCO to take care of them.

He got the loudest applause of anyone the entire evening.

This same, poor, hard-working employee so concerned with supporting his kids has no concern for the destruction coal is wrecking on the futures of those same children. And not just the future of their health, but their economy too. Carbon legislation is going to happen during the next president’s term, and it will make coal so expensive that many coal plants will have to be shut down. Why, then, are we building new coal plants?

(Read the Entire Original Post on Coal Block)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This reminded me a lot of a BBC special I saw about Chinese coal plants and how the people knew the coal was making them sick but felt they needed the jobs.  Watch it below.  ~~Citizen Andy

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/MoBv9FC7WAM]

(BBC report on a coal plant in China)

Read Full Post »