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White House edits CDC climate testimony – Yeah, again!

Byoliveridley

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Turns out that the Emperor did not want anyone to know what the possible health effects of climate change were going to be.

White House edits CDC climate testimony – Yahoo! News:

It was eviscerated,’ said a CDC official, familiar with both versions, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the review process.

The official said that while it is customary for testimony to be changed in a White House review, these changes were particularly ‘heavy-handed,’ with the document cut from its original 14 pages to four. It was six pages as presented to the Senate committee.

So, is there any point in blogging about this story about the Emperor and his politburo wielding the censor pen on yet another government report? No, because like million other stories like the one above, nothing comes of it. Nobody loses anything, the press does not understand that this behavior is unprecedented and more representative of 1960s USSR than the so called leader of the free world. The people who read about it could not care less. This is small fry compared to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (call it torture), “private military contractors” (call them mercenaries), “extraordinary rendition” (state sanctioned kidnapping, disappearing, whatever you call it), etc. This country has apparently been outraged to boredom. Where does the “editing” (censoring) of a government report even register on this list of outrages?

Seriously, the Democratic party has been the most undistinguished of opposition parties. Yes, they supposedly control the Senate and Congress, but they don’t. In this weird undemocratic and archaic presidential system, you can only succeed if you have 60% of the Senate, 67% of the Congress or the president on your side. So, functionally, the Democrats are still the opposition party and do not seem to understand that as the opposition party, they need to oppose, manufacture outrage (in this case, no manufacturing necessary), and keep yelling continuously. Some shrillness is indicated here. Yes, they have some power that comes from the majorities, but the power needs to be used. They have to keep sending bills that the president will veto, they have to keep subpoenaing the politburo members so they can refuse to testify, and they have to keep repeating that they’re outraged, I tell you, outraged!!

Oh well, I come from the famously fractious politics of India, so none of my rants are going to make sense. If you want outrage, here you go… Mind you, this is the member of the coalition that rules India exerting pressure on it’s ally, not even the real opposition who only yesterday called for the PM to resign because “a resurgent nation like India should not be led by a helpless and sad leader” – Ouch, take that!! All this over a nuclear deal with the US where India gained all kinds of concessions for essentially building a nuclear arsenal on the sly and against the wishes of the international community.

The democrats needs a master class on opposition politics from the BJP.

Picture Courtesy Ristocrats

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    Men – An Endangered Species due to Endocrine Disruptors.

    Byoliveridley

    Why, it’s a girl, how surprising!!

    Man-made chemicals blamed as many more girls than boys are born in Arctic | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

    Twice as many girls as boys are being born in some Arctic villages because of high levels of man-made chemicals in the blood of pregnant women, according to scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap).
    The scientists, who say the findings could explain the recent excess of girl babies across much of the northern hemisphere, are widening their investigation across the most acutely affected communities in Russia, Greenland and Canada to try to discover the size of the imbalance in Inuit communities of the far north.

    In the communities of Greenland and eastern Russia monitored so far, the ratio was found to be two girls to one boy. In one village in Greenland only girls have been born.

    Why are the upper latitudes especially vulnerable? Two reasons, firstly, atmospheric currents carry pollutants from the Mid-Latitudes (i.e the US, China and Europe) to the higher latitudes of the Arctic. Secondly, the pollutants they measured, PCBs, are persistent and stable (which is why they were used in the first place) and accumulate in the fat tissue of animals. So, predator fish on top of the food chain (the large oily ones) tend to accumulate a lot of these compounds. When you live in the Arctic, you tend to eat a lot of fish. So, these people are getting slammed.

    I tell you, Children of Men is not as far fetched as it sounds! Though I think the high levels these people accumulated in their system may not be representative of the rest of the world (vegetarian diets, for instance would be lower in persistent pollutants unless you consumed a ton of milk products), it is still a very scary story.

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    Canada to stop asbestos mining and stop defending it.

    Byoliveridley

    Canada’s long and sorry saga of exporting death (asbestos) and defending it loudly and proudly in international fora is over and I needed to mark this happy day on the blog. The newly elected provincial government in Quebec, the Parti Quebecois have followed through on their campaign promise to finally end this small “industry” employing a few workers. Canada will no longer produce asbestos, or fight the listing of asbestos as a toxic substance.

    It is going to take $50 million in government funds, a fraction of the cost of one fighter jet, to transition the workers away (if they get the money, not the mine owners). That’s it, why were we exporting death to India and other countries for this, I don’t know.

    Canada’s many conservative and liberal governments fought hard for years to preserve the industry, using techniques lifted from tobacco propaganda, or today’s climate change challenges. I leave you with the ruling Canadian government’s response: Finely tuned to appeal to everyone who likes mesothelioma, cancer and death.

    “Mrs. Marois’s decision to prohibit chrysotile mining in Quebec will have a negative impact on the future prosperity of the area,” (Industry Minister) Mr. Paradis said in a statement.

    That about sums it up. But, it is a good day for public health, nevertheless.

    Citing PQ pressure, Canada to cease defending asbestos mining – The Globe and Mail.

    Featured image courtesy wikipedia used under a Creative Commons license (a micrograph of asbestos fibres causing lesions in the lung).

  • Environmental Disaster, Local Edition

    Byoliveridley

    newsobserver.com | Apex fire spreads toxic gas

    APEX – Fire crews have not begun to fight a fire at a hazardous waste plant that has spread a cloud of dangerous chlorine gas across Apex this morning, forcing more than 15,000 people to evacuate.Officials say they planned to send a hazardous materials crew in at daybreak to evaluate the fire. In the meantime, they’ve been letting it burn, out of concern that pouring water or foam on it would make things worse, said town manager Bruce Radford. The rain that started falling around 7 a.m. “doesn’t make anything better,” Radford said.

    The fire that followed a series of late-night explosions at Environmental Quality Co. just east of downtown has closed all Apex schools and school bus routes that start inside the Western Wake town. In addition, the Wake County Public School System said bus transportation elsewhere in Western and Southwestern Wake County would likely be delayed this morning. Green Hope High School in Cary, which is being used a shelter for evacuated residents, will also be closed.

    Officials urged people to evacuate an area bounded by U.S. 1, N.C. 55 and U.S. 64 highways in Apex and unincorporated areas. Police are blocking roads into the center of town, and Radford urged everyone to stay away.

  • Hindu Terrorists – No Oxymorons

    Byoliveridley

    The revelation that a militant section of the Hindutva network was behind the September 29 bomb blasts in Muslim-dominated Malegaon in Maharashtra and Modasa in Gujarat has shattered the myth propagated by the Hindutva campaign that only Islamist fundamentalism breeds terrorism. Indeed the Sangh Parivar’s loaded argument has been that while all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are Muslim. Saffron rabble-rousers have had no compunction in lobbing this charge at the Muslim community as a whole. While it has become almost an article of faith with the parivar to link Islamist fundamentalists with terrorism, today, with the arrests of radical Hindu activist Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and four others, among them a retired Major, the Sangh and its affiliates find themselves warding off the same accusations. Prima facie, the case against the Sadhvi and her accomplices is serious. The Anti-Terrorism Squad of Maharashtra, which has been on the trail of Hindutva terror since 2006, has charged them under the Indian Penal Code for murder as well as under sections of the Indian Explosives Act, 1884, and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967.

    via The Hindu : Opinion / Editorials : Hindutva’s terror link

    Note: Sadhvi means saint! Terrorist accused saint, now that is an oxymoron we can believe in.

    Seriously, what has this so called Hindutva movement come to? Ban them all!

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    Pollution vs. Development? Hardly!

    Byoliveridley

    It’s clean air vs. TV in poor India village – International Herald Tribune

    Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China and elsewhere have become a favorite way to make electricity. They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world.

    The headline sucks, clean air vs. TV is not really the choice here. Is the implication that third worlders somehow need to make this a “choice”? It’s not as if the rest of the world has to make this “choice”! They do seem to have both. This is a situation where poor choices are made because of poor infrastructure. Other than the headline, it is a good article because it makes all the right points:

    1. Lack of infrastructure – No centralized power to remote areas
    2. Well meaning, but poorly executed subsidies – Cheap Diesel and Kerosene
    3. Subsidy induced corruption – Diesel/Kerosene pilfering
    4. Top down approaches to development – Throw the money, pay no attention to local experts, don’t follow up, then blame the lazy villagers!
    5. Competition for scarce resources with developed countries – Germany will outpay India for photovoltaics every time.

    Biomass burning as an alternative to diesel?

    Given the popularity of generators, perhaps the most promising alternative is a new type like the one at the edge of the village that contributes much less to air pollution and global warming. It burns a common local weed instead of diesel, costs half as much to operate, emits less pollution and contributes less to global warming.

    The main material is dhaincha, a weed commonly grown in India to restore nitrogen to depleted soils. The dhaincha grows 10 feet tall in just four months, with a three-inch-thick green stalk. Wood from shrubs and trees is used when there is not enough dhaincha.

    I am not a big fan of biomass burning, but using a weed that can be replanted repeatedly seems fairly harmless, especially compared to burning diesel.

    The project has succeeded partly because it has the active backing of one landlord family, the Sharans. Family members have gone on to successful business careers in big Indian cities and in Europe, and have dedicated themselves to helping their home village.

    Local involvement, especially by authority figures goes a long way in rural India.
    China does suggests another way forward.

    China has tried another approach: supplementing an expansion of electricity from coal-fired power plants with cheap rooftop solar water heaters that channel water through thin pipes crisscrossing a shiny surface.

    Close to 5,000 small Chinese companies sell these simple water heaters, and together they have made China the world’s largest market for solar water heaters, with 60 percent of the global market and more than 30 million households using the systems, said Eric Martinot, a renewable energy expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

    Not so hot during the monsoon, I guess! I remember a friend of mine having a solar heater in their home in the 1980’s. Their company used to make them, so it is old technology, with price being the prime barrier. It will work as a supplemental source, not as the prime source.

    Clearly, the wider availability and ubiquity of consumer electronics, and electricity-dependent agriculture has outpaced India’s, and to a lesser extent, China’s power infrastructure. It is easy to make a billion television, it’s not quite so easy to keep them powered!

  • Why land use is critically important for climate change

    Byoliveridley

    That’s the argument from a new paper published in Science today, written by Princeton University’s Tim Searchinger and others. The upshot? Clearing out forests to use the wood for bioenergy clearly has an environmental cost, but that’s simply not accounted for in any of the prevailing climate-change programs. Kyoto, the European cap-and-trade plan, and the House climate bill all treat bioenergy as carbon-neutral; nobody counts the effect of disappearing forests.

    via Environmental Capital

    In my long blog post earlier this morning, I briefly alluded to the fact that proposed Canadian climate change legislation explicitly excludes land use. Well, bad idea! I am surprised this is being trumpeted as a major new finding, hasn’t it been obvious for at least the last few years that biofuel carbon neutrality is very dependent on how land use patterns change?

2 Comments

  1. All this over a nuclear deal with the US where India gained all kinds of concessions for essentially building a nuclear arsenal on the sly and against the wishes of the international community.

    indeed. Do you have any input on the value of nuclear energy for India? Absent from any of the ‘discourse’ around the nuclear deal is talk of merits and demerits of nuclear energy itself, especially its impact on the environment…

  2. I don’t like nuclear power. Waste disposal is a problem, it is not carbon neutral. It has a higher carbon footprint than renewable energy, though not as much s fossil fuels. Uranium mining is pretty destructive on the environment.

    It’s also hard to get a handle on operating costs because nuclear plant operations (especially in India) tend to be shrouded in secrecy. No clue if it is actually economically viable or not. But India’s pretty serious about getting 25% of its energy from nuclear power by 2050. No idea where they’ll put the waste. If a country with as much free land as the US is having trouble siting nuclear waste disposal sites, where’ll we put it?

    And living under the shadow of a nuclear power plant is scary stuff. I guess I was far enough away from Kalpakkam growing up in South Madras, but 60 km ain’t that far!

    Oliver Idley (Thanks!)

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