Midwest Moves on Clean Energy

The Midwest Governors Association has put together the Midwest Energy Infrastructure Accord, signed by governors in the area as well as Ontario officials. Those familiar with energy issues in the Midwest know that there are both great opportunities for clean energy in the region as well as great traps and pitfalls in the move towards a regional sustainable energy system.

It’s heartening to see the Midwest taking steps on its own to reduce wasted electricity and move towards a new infrastructure based in renewables and in creating jobs for the future.  Even more so, this agreement recognizes that successful energy policy will be regional, and require cooperation between states trying to become cleaner and responsible for their GHG production. By inviting the industries of clean energy openly, and making steps to become national leaders in the push for a new energy infrastructure, this Accord, if nothing else, lays out the policy steps to move forward. Now those policies just need to be implemented. It may not be perfect, but it is a clear sign that our state leaders recognize the problem.

You can see the Accord here.

*As an aside, it is worth noting that this accord results from two years of planning after Govs Pawlenty (MN) and Doyle (WI) initiated a regional energy and climate initiative to reduce the impact of the Midwest on climate change in 2007.  In the wake of the release of this accord comes the news that “Pawlenty changes course on cap-and-trad,” despite championing the idea for the Midwest two years prior. I wonder what might have changed?

Protecting Minnesota’s Waters

I wrote this editorial for a class, and thought, since it is just sitting here, why don’t I throw it up on Crit/Eco. So here it is.

Protecting Minnesota’s Waters Once More:

Minnesota has shown its commitment to clean water. We recognize the importance of protecting our natural resources, and as a result passed the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment last November to honor and value our waters and wetlands.

Today, another threat to our water, wetlands and wildlife moves closer to becoming a reality. Several companies, the furthest along of which is the PolyMet Mining Corporation, now propose to open sulfide mines—metal extraction from rocks embedded with sulfide bearing ores—throughout the Arrowhead. Such mines would be the first of their kind in our state. Long have iron ore mines operated in the region, but sulfide mining presents a much more serious problem than rust. Sulfide mining means sulfuric acid and  damage to aquatic ecosystems and wildlife as well  pollution of drinking and recreational waters.

Despite the water protections of the Clean Water Act, which this week the New York Times has shown to be significantly and comprehensively ignored nationwide, this pollution will find its way into the natural systems. It has happened in New Mexico, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota and elsewhere. The examples are readily available, yet we continue along a path that will lead to the destruction of the very resources we have declared our intent to protect.  It would be devastating, for example, to see the mistakes of the Brohm Mine of Deadwood, South Dakota reoccur in Minnesota’s beloved Boundary Waters and Superior National Forest.

After a year of operation, the Brohm mine was ordered by the state of South Dakota to cease its operation due to major cyanide leaks. It was permitted to reopen and spent a decade spilling sulfuric acid into nearby waters. When the location was mined out, the operation closed. S.D. Gov. Bill Janklow sought to hold Dakota Mining financially responsible for cleaning up their mess.  The company’s president, Alan Bell, filed for bankruptcy. The site is now a Superfund site, and taxpayers across the U.S. are left with the bill. Shortly after the bankruptcy, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bell was appointed to board of the Polymet Mining Corporation.

Residents should find Little common ground in the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment Minnesota has adopted, and these proposed sulfide mines. The people of Minnesota have shown we are willing to look beyond ourselves for the good of our state and the future. We must come together once more to keep sulfide mining out of Minnesota.

Racism or Health Care Debate?

The move to Missoula is half complete (1 of 2 have arrived), and has taken up all the time I have had for the past weeks. Now that I’m here, however, I will try to boost production, which is tricky, because I don’t have the internets at my apt. Anyway, here’s a quick note.

I have been reading today about all of the terrible behavior  surrounding the health care town hall meetings and protests throughout the U.S. Krugman has an OP-ED at the Times. Roger Simon asks what happened to Post-Racial America? That’s two among too many. We’re burning effigies now? Comparing our president to Hitler? Stirring the pot of racism (for that is what the Birther movement is founded on, it has become clear to me, as well as much of the anti-Health care push. Pure racism).  God forbid someone have an agenda that they believe will benefit America. God forbid we respect each other without making death-threats to our elected officials. This is recognizing that many do oppose Obama’s health care plan with genuine disagreement, and hope to see it fail. That is nothing like the problems I am addressing here.

This is not an environmental issue. But it is, in that they all are. Some sort of peacable world (not world peace) is required before mainstream cultural environmental change can occur. Racism fundamentally disallows this, it seems. At least any concerns that are not related directly, such as economics and poverty, equal justice, and available and affordable healthcare.

Motivate Me

This is another rambling, musing series of thoughts.

There is always a question of motivations when people take up a cause. Why do we have an altruistic impulse to help others or work for the greater good of humanity? I don’t know. But what I’m much more interested in is why so many individuals immediately doubt the motivations of others. I am guilty of this; most of us probably are.

Motivating principals. Where do they come from? Why, over the past 7 years have I undergone a process of further appreciation for, and desire for, and political will for environmental issues? At the same time, others have found their causes elsewhere. Poverty, Darfur, Animal Rights, Health Care, whatever it may be, they all require individuals to put others before themselves.  Why do we do it? And, again, why are we so skeptical of others who are committed to their cause?

It’s about as hard to answer these questions as it is to convince someone else that your cause is more important than theirs.  Instead, I guess we should start celebrating altruism where it presents itself, instead of being cynics, or debating the value of someone else’s cause.

Of course, this too won’t work. Too many people are altruistically, sincerely working to better the lives of others by increasing domestic energy production, or opening further protected land for prospecting, etc. Essentially, working against one’s cause. Now there’s the pickle. We’re working against each other, sincerely. And I think, as you do, that I am right and you are not. Alas, what to do then?

Obama Land Management

In the past week, there have been two decisions made by the Obama Administration regarding protected land in the US. The first involved the Clinton Administration’s Roadless Rule, the second involving the Grand Canyon National Park area. The decisions seem to have little in common, and reflect the difficulty which people are having pinning down Obama’s Administration.

First, Tom Vilsack, the Agriculture Secretary, has “approved a plan to open up to logging a stretch of forest on Revillagigedo Island in Tongass National Forest in southern Alaska. The decision was the first since Vilsack’s promise in May to personally review requests to cut down trees in roadless areas of National Forests.” Roadless Wilderness areas are few, though the acreage counted may seem colossal (about 58 million acres).

The second ruling came from Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, who announced that “his department is temporarily barring the filing of new uranium mining claims on about 1 million acres near the Grand Canyon.” In the decision, the land will be protected for at least 2 years, as the value of mining v. preserving it is investigated. However, this ruling does not protect from uranium mining claims that are already filed.

Politicking aside, managing the demands of land use throughout the nation must be incredibly, incredibly difficult.  I don’t mean in any way to suggest that the current administration has failed to uphold the values of a positive land ethic. But it remains important to view such decisions side by side to try to form a picture of what is being done to the land in the long run of Obama’s time in the white house.

A few thoughts on the American Psyche

I’ve been considering lately the American Psyche as it relates to the natural world. These are very preliminary thoughts on what I hope will be eventually be a well-thought project (likely…), but it helps the mental organization to get them down on paper (internets). Excuse the generalizing, and know that I’m not sure how long the stated views will remain my opinion. I am working through them regularly

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Humans have no problem holding antithetical values together. This is no surprise. Our Constitution was written by slave holders. It’s part of the ability of the mind to separate our ideals and hold them pure, while in the practicality, we don’t have any problems acting counter to our values. This is true, I am thinking, in our relationship to the earth because we are Puritans, and because we are nature-worshipers.

Puritan and colonial Americans held the new world in hostility. They had to. Nature was danger; venturing into it was venturing into the abyss, and could cause one to never come back. It would have been foolish, really, for a group of people who essentially lived in garden nation to come to the wilds of the American Continent and view it in any other manner. In the wild was Satan, and Satan was to be destroyed. These statements are pretty obvious. But they left in the American mind a palpable hostility towards nature that lingers today. There was no question in the Puritan society that the physical world belonged to their new society, and it was theirs to do with as they pleased. (remember: “Voted, that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; Voted, that the earth is given to the saints; Voted, that we are the saints.”) This is one part of our Natural World View.

Two hundred years later (give or take), there was a fierce push against this Puritan impulse. It was piloted by Emerson and Thoreau, most notably, and today is generally called Transcendentalism. It was a philosophical, religious movement more than anything, in my opinion, and it changed the way many Americans viewed the world they lived in. Instead of Nature representing the Satanic of the unknown danger that it once had, Nature became the divine. It was the source which individuals must return to. Loved, not feared, the wild became idol.
Then came the industrial revolution.

I am positing, then, that the Modern American Mind views nature through the remnants of these worldviews. In the practical, physical, day to day life of the average American (a phrase I dread using), our Puritan urges remain, because we are afraid of the unknown, and want our lives to be easier, and the belief that the world is ours to use has not gone anywhere. To argue it has, I think, is delusional. But we don’t want to think this, or at least don’t want to think that we think it. In our minds and hearts, often, is that Emersonian religious fervor for the idea of American Land. The pride in American Wilderness in our nation is strong; it has long been, in the nation’s early years, what set us apart from the old world. Today, we don’t want to deal with the facts that contradict our love of the land, though the facts are what most clearly contradict it.

There were, and are, as always, exceptions to what I’m saying here. Individuals like Thomas Morton and William Bartram and others were always there, espousing the values of a different kind of land-ethic (in Morton’s case, very different). But these men, and the other men and women around them, only, I believe, point to the strength with which their views remained outside the dominant American Mind.

A few thoughts to fill the time

Our pending move to Missoula, Montana now consumes nearly all of my free time. Thus, blogging has been backburnered. But I have a moments to share a few thoughts I’ve been kicking around.

1) How much value is there in the debate over climate change? I don’t mean in congress or government. I mean in daily conversation. If you don’t trust the science that claims Global Warming is occurring, is it worth our time to fight over it? I’ve had this argument many times and am starting to think that it’s useless.

2) What’s the end goal? Sustainable future, sure. reduction of CO2 emissions. Yep. Protection of Wilderness and Natural Resources. check. But is there a single goal? Are these all the same thing? I can’t tell anymore.
I think that, what we should be fighting for is a greater, more philosophical endgame. It’s more than furthering the human/non-human relationship, though that is a great part of it. But I think, beyond even that, our goal should be human desire for all of these things. I want Wilderness. Not just parks. Much more than preserving nature, I want people to want to preserve it. Then (and only then?) can we really preserve the wild.

3) Reading is as good a way to learn to love the world as getting out to see it. This is a recent discovery, and one that I am not fully sold on. But I think that I think it. We imagine the world the way we like to see it, whether we see it in person or not. That’s why the human imagination is stronger than say, Forests. If we couldn’t imagine a string of houses when we looked at a forest, we’d have more forest. But we can also look at a string out houses, and still imagine the forest. We imagine the world the way we want to, and because of that, we don’t need to see nature to love it, and want to preserve it.

4) Remembering the above point is key to the success of the environmental project. It is not going to succeed with endless advising to return to the earth and live off the grid, etc. (though I think those things are important). It is going to succeed by showing people, even people in the suburbs (gasp) that imagining the earth in a productive way is valuable to them.
And it is.
I’ll be back to regular posting as soon as possible. Moving is stressful.

Climate Legislation passes the House

Here are two quotes from the NYTimes online today:

“”The bill contains provisions to protect consumers, keep costs low, help sensitive industries transition to a clean energy economy and promote domestic emission reduction efforts,” the White House in a statement of support for the legislation.”

“This “amounts to the largest tax increase in American history under the guise of climate change,” said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.”

The House narrowly passed the climate change legislation that has been floating about Washington, causing all kinds of fighting, in-fighting, and outcasting. It passed 217-205. Huffington Post sums up the intentions of the bill well: “The climate change bill would reset drastically the way the U.S. government approaches the issue of regulating pollution. Instituting a cap and trade system, the bill aims to cut America’s production of greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020, and 83 percent by 2050. The legislation also includes provisions to create alternative energy sources and cleaner technologies, as well as more efficient building standards.” The success of any such bill remains to be seen, as well as the form the bill will take in the Senate.

Critical/Ecological is happy that the bill passed, despite the increase in costs that will inevitably come, because C/E believes that without paying something now, we will pay a lot more than money later. It remains tricky to defend the bill to individuals who defy any tax increases (as I found out today at work when asked: “Tell me how taking my money will help me live a more green life?” Which denotes quite a different view of what this bill is for than say, the bill itself).   The bottom line is this :it will cost money to reduce our production of Greenhouse Gases.

Unfortunately, the need to cut down GHGs on a massive scale (really massive) is still too much of a debated point. If one doesn’t believe this need is real or urgent, why would one support it? There are reasons not to support it if you do accept climate change (for instance, the bill is too weak and doesn’t take big enough steps). But there is no reason to support fighting climate change if one takes the view that, as a friend put it, “I believe that global warming is a fraud based on the views of a few well meaning scientists.”

Anyway, it is the first step towards the passage of major climate change legislation. We’ll see what happens in the Senate. But today, on both sides, emotions are running high.

Iran’s Electoral Outrage.

I have found myself obsessing over the current situation in Iran over the last few days. But when I turned on my computer today (which took a while, since the power is out in our building, and I had to leave the hosue to get my internets fix), I was astounded by the news I read on the New York Times.

“The Iranian opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, appeared publicly on Monday for the first time in more than two days to call for calm as state media repeatedly broadcast a report that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had called for a high-level inquiry into accusations of election irregularities.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, previous to this story, had declared the elections fair, and Ahmadinejad the rightful winner. To publicly call for anything else is quite remarkable in itself, especially given the manner in which this inquiry was called for. “Thanks God Almighty, the elections were held well with high degree of reliability, soundness and tranquility. You too should follow up relevant issues through legal channels.”

The purpose of such an examination will be seen; but even asking for it is worth noting.  Hopefully it will be honest and consider what happened. But I fear that it might be little more than attempt to put an end to the protests taking place.

If you haven’t been following the story, I urge you to spend some time looking into it. It might be the start of something momentuous in Iran. It might not. The images are astounding; the violence stark. But the story has wrapped me up completely.

The Smoking Bill

Today, the government did something good. Something with bipartisan support, that will benefit everyone. It’s nice to know that still happens. It is hard for me to find a logical argument in opposition to today’s Senate Vote giving the FDA regulatory authority over the tobacco industry. Even if one generally doesn’t support Obama’s ‘expansion of government’ as such, can’t we all agree that government regulation of tobacco is positive?

“The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, as it is called, would empower the F.D.A. to set standards for cigarettes, regulating chemicals in cigarette smoke and outlawing most tobacco flavorings. It could also study whether to also ban menthol. Flavorings are considered a lure to first-time smokers, especially the young. Menthol is used by three-quarters of black smokers, who also have a disproportionate share of lung cancer.
The law would also further restrict marketing and advertising of tobacco products. Colorful advertising and store displays will be replaced by black-and-white-only text as part of restrictions aimed at reducing the appeal to youth to try smoking.”

Essentially the law will decrease the number of chemicals in cigarettes, lessen the quantity of nicotine (though it cannot ban it), and make concerted efforts to prevent new smokers (presumably beyond getting rid of Joe Camel).

Of course, this is a federal government program, and the FDA at that, so we can assume that the program will not run exactly as planned. Even so, can anyone, with a straightface, criticise a bill that will reduce the number of smokers, thus reducing the number of cancer patients, thus reducing the cost of health care for all?

There is of course an economic argument to be had. After all, the tobacco industry produces a whole lot of money. A whole lot. But even that doesn’t matter-today at least.  Does anyone feel bad about the tobacco folks? Maybe for the farmers. And anyway, “tobacco industry financial analysts say federal regulation, higher taxes and court verdicts are all manageable because the companies, with a market of addicted customers, can raise prices to remain profitable.”

Two side notes:
1) As a smoker, I support this legislation wholeheartedly. Hopefully quit plans will be a major initiative in this program.
2) The positive environmental impact of reducing cigarette use is unquestionable. The amount of waste that is produced in tobacco usage is quite substantial, not to mention the social and cultural impact.