Salem's own climate criminal!

The head of the "First University in the West" is on the board of Oregon's most destructive polluter, the one foreclosing any hope for survival for millions of the world's poorest people. Still, it is profitable, so there's that. Image via Wikipedia

Wow -- just checked out the list of PGE boardmembers for the first time and was shocked to find that the boss at Willamette, M. Lee Pelton, sits on it. How serving on the board of a coal-burning utility squares with educating young people for the future is hard to imagine. If we don't stop burning coal pronto the future for Willamette grads is going to be mighty grim indeed.

Do you think Willamette U. lets students loading up with huge debt for their education know that the head of their school is a leader in the fight to destroy their future prospects and to further impoverish and immiserate the world's poorest peoples? Or is this really just another example of how elites are trained today, carefully taught to keep moral concerns out of the way of serving the best-paying corporate masters?

UPDATE: There is ever less room for people to hide from responsibility by claiming "We didn't know." PGE knows what burning coal is doing to the world: radically destabilizing the climate and setting billions up for starvation, disease, pestilence, and war.

Your Chance to Comment on Oregon's Filthiest, Most Dangerous Power

This is the logo of the company that wants to keep burning coal, thereby condemning your children to live in a world of climate chaos, floods, droughts, starvation and disease.

Go here to send this letter (which you can edit as you wish) to be submitted to PGE as part of its mandatory public comment on its integrated resource plan (the jargon for its long-range planning):

I am writing to comment on PGE’s Integrated Resource Plan and its failure to put an end to pollution from its coal-fired power plant in Boardman, Oregon. PGE's Boardman plant is the dirtiest power plant in the Northwest. Its emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury emissions are polluting 12 national parks and wilderness areas in the Pacific Northwest – as well as the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. Air quality studies have shown that up to 50% of the Gorge haze on smoggiest days comes from the Boardman power plant.

The Columbia Gorge is a national scenic treasure that deserves the strong air quality protections. In your vision for the future, please put an end to dirty coal and outdated technologies that are altering the global climate and polluting the Columbia Gorge.

Smarter solutions exist. Rather spending over $500 million to retrofit a dirty coal plant, I am asking that PGE prioritize energy efficiency and renewable energy investments that will reduce our reliance on dirty coal and will clean up air quality in the Columbia River Gorge.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on PGE's Integrated Resource Plan.

Nice piece on Afghaninam (Obama's Vietnam)

Here.

Readings on Health Care

Image via Wikipedia

If you want to really understand the sad -- deplorable, actually -- state of health care in Salem, Oregon, and the US, you need more than your own impressions and the messages the corporate media want to feed you. Here are a few of the best things out there:

1. Dr. Atul Gawande's "The Cost Conundrum" New Yorker article
   
   
2. Dr. Nortin Hadler's "The Last Well Person: How to stay well despite the health care system"
   
   
3. Dr. Jerry Avorn's "Powerful Medicine: The benefits, risks and costs of prescription drugs" and, last but not least
   
   
4. Shannon Brownlee's "Overtreated: Why too much medicine is making us sicker and poorer."
   

Well observed

A ghost bike, a monument to yet another rider killed by a car. Image by drburtoni via Flickr

The very good "Breakfast on Bikes" blog has a good piece on the unfortunately situated Kroc Center.

The "conservatives" threaten to push America into the abyss of corporate control

Image by vj_pdx via Flickr

The Rights of Corporations

That does not mean that corporations should have no rights. It is in society's interest that they are allowed to speak about their products and policies and that they are able to go to court when another company steals their patents. It makes sense that they can be sued, as a person would be, when they pollute or violate labor laws.

The law also gives corporations special legal status: limited liability, special rules for the accumulation of assets and the ability to live forever. These rules put corporations in a privileged position in producing profits and aggregating wealth. Their influence would be overwhelming with the full array of rights that people have.

One of the main areas where corporations' rights have long been limited is politics. Polls suggest that Americans are worried about the influence that corporations already have with elected officials. The drive to give corporations more rights is coming from the court's conservative bloc — a curious position given their often-proclaimed devotion to the text of the Constitution.

The founders of this nation knew just what they were doing when they drew a line between legally created economic entities and living, breathing human beings. The court should stick to that line.

Standing up for those who can't stand up for themselves

Will Farrell and friends stand up for the real victims of the health insurance debate: insurance company executives.

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Why the era of economic growth is over

Study that graph. (Y-o-Y . . . "Why, Oh Why" you might pronounce it --means "year over year.")

What the graph should show but doesn't is oil price. According to the conventional economic wisdom, plummeting demand for oil means plummeting prices ... not prices fully at 50% of their all-time peak.

What's going on? Why, oh why, is the world and particularly the US in such a state? Well, it's actually simple to understand, once you know that economic "growth" is simply a shorthand way of saying "measuring, in monetary units, of using more energy and materials." Given that, and given that our economic chefs assumed that there was a limitless energy supply when devising the recipe for everything grown, mined, made, or moved in this country, the consequences of reality seem abrupt and painful: energy is actually quite finite, and the kind of energy we're most dependent on --- cheap oil --- is now starting to decline in availability.

In other words, "demand" is recorded as declining because the powers-that-be cannot bring themselves to admit that the world would be quite happy to use lots more oil, except that it's not there (since only a infinitesimally small amount of oil is stored, demand always equals supply ... the graph above should be labeled "supply rate" rather than demand).

Bottom line, the minimum price needed to keep the oil flows from plunging happens to be above the price that causes economies built on cheap oil to collapse. The only way to square that circle and maintain the conventional wisdom blinders is to pretend that "demand" is down and to ignore that the high prices for oil in a reduced demand market seems to suggest that the law of supply and demand has been repealed. Either way, the catastrophic effects are the same: fewer jobs, more poverty, more hunger, more social unease as the post-peak-oil hangover kicks in.

The result for Salem: we're in the new era where "growth" and big new infrastructure projects -- the third bridge, new elementary schools, to name just a few -- are finished. All public investments from here out need to be aimed at reducing our reliance on fossil energy not increasing it or servicing those parts of our system that were built when we thought the party would last forever. (Hat tip to the Goal One Coalition blog for the graph.)

Whoa -- who knew?

Image by Dale Gillard via Flickr

Did you know that Salem has a Mac Store in Lancaster Mall?

UPDATE: Well, that was disappointing. The Applecare folks sent me to this Mac store to swap my defective mouse, but the Mac store wouldn't make a swap ... all they would do is ship it to Apple (just like I could) and I would be without a mouse at all while waiting -- at least if I go through Apple they send me the replacement before asking for the other one back. I realize that this store is not an Apple-owned store, but it seems that they ought to be able to use my Applecare case number and accept my return. When I was in the store I decided to buy the Parallels software there to thank them for the service --- guess I'll just buy it online instead, since there was no service other than to tell me to go to Bridgeport.

It's not (just) the heat, it's the acidity

Just what does it take to wake people up? If only Osama Bin-Ladin was dumping acid into the oceans to acidify them and destroy the base of the food chain and starve billions of people and destroy countless species.

From the always-excellent Desdemona Despair blog:

Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the air, the result of burning fossil fuels like oil and coal, mean more carbon dioxide is being absorbed into the ocean, making ocean water more acidic. Because calcium dissolves in acidic water, that poses a threat to corals, plankton and other life forms that use calcium to form a shell or skeleton.

In a book published this year about the oceans, Mitchell tells the story of Colorado-based marine ecologist Joanie Kleypas, who, when she realized the implications of ocean acidification, ran to the bathroom at the scientific conference she was attending and threw up.

"We are changing the chemistry of the global ocean," Mitchell said in an interview.

"Without all those creatures in the ocean living and doing what they're meant to do, we can't survive." …

Photo above is the PGE's Boardman Generating Plant, one of Oregon's two biggest emitters of CO2, mercury, nitrous and sulfur dioxides, along with radioactive materials and other heavy metals. When the oceans acidify, the glaciers are gone, and droughts and floods are starving people across the globe, Oregonians can always take comfort in knowing that we always put PGE's profits before public health or providing future generations with a livable planet.