Fighting cancer with aromatherapy and astrology

Allowing coal burning in Oregon while trying to figure out a way to address climate disruption from runaway greenhouse gas emissions is like trying to combat advanced lung cancer by having the victims breathe in the scent of baking cookies while consulting their star charts.

We have no choice if we want to have any hope of not condemning ourselves to a risky climate crapshoot. We must replace Boardman's coal burners with a natural gas turbine or two and a concentrating solar power generator. Or we can keep sniffing those brownies and hope for lucky stars.

Just as Boardman was a first for Oregon, it can be part of another first, a state putting the long-range good of its people ahead of the profits of its utility investors.

Will Oregon Close the State's Only Coal-Fired Power Plant?

The Boardman coal-fired plant is the single largest and most polluting site in Oregon, and citizens here have affixed their bull's-eye smack dab on its soaring smoke stacks.

While outsiders may think of Oregon as a green utopia, with its environmentally friendly urban populace and New Age ambiance, it's undoubtedly not that groovy when it comes to the issue of coal.

Over 40 percent of the state's energy comes from the burning of this precious black rock, half of which is pumped out of the Boardman Power Plant each year. No coal-mining operations exist in the state, so all of the coal set ablaze in Boardman is dug up and transported from places like the majestic Powder River Basin, which straddles the high-plains border of northern Wyoming and southeastern Montana.

In recent years, studies have shown that the Boardman plant contributes to regional haze and visibility impairment in the Columbia River Gorge, a national scenic area, as well as 14 national parks and wilderness areas in Washington and Oregon.

The U.S. Forest Service has even demonstrated that Boardman contributes to acid fog and rain in the Columbia Gorge. . . .

"Shutting down coal plants saves lives -- immediately. This is not about our grandchildren. It's about the here and now," says Ted Nace, director of CoalSwarm, an environmental project of the Earth Island Institute that seeks to shut down coal plants in the U.S. "For example, particulates from power plants alone are killing 24,000 people each year in the United States -- that's 240,000 lives lost per decade due to this moribund industry."

While debris from coal-fired power plants may be killing tens of thousands of people every year, the smoke that billows from these structures are also the primary source of that great global warming menace, CO2.

James Hansen, who serves as the director of NASA's Institute for Space Studies, argues that the U.S. should phase out all coal-fired power plants by 2030. Indeed, the coal plant fleet in our country is old, with over half being built before 1965 . . . .

PGE's proposed energy plan is controversial to say the least. It includes two new gas-fired power plants and over $500 million worth of pollution-reduction upgrades for the Boardman facility. Environmentalists say this money would be better spent if it was invested in renewable-energy sources. In late September, concerned citizens stormed a public hearing on PGE's plan, and they voiced numerous objections.

"It would normally be very difficult to justify shutting down a coal plant," Steve Weiss, a policy analyst with the NW Energy Coalition, told the Oregonian after the meeting. "But when you're talking about having to put a half-billion into it, it changes the equation. If they go forward and put all this money into the plant, they'll never close it down, and if they're forced to, it will cause a huge economic hardship."

. . . "To allow PGE to make an ongoing investment in fossil-fuel generating resources begs the question of what happens if we continue to confront the tipping points of climate change that are lining up in its path?" Lloyd Marbet, executive director of the Oregon Conservancy Foundation, writes in a letter to PGE. "Will PGE be allowed to make this investment and then expect to be publicly bailed out, with taxpayer dollars, if the future it paints fails to unfold and the requirement is imposed in a crisis to shut these generating plants down or severely curtail their operation?" . . .

"This is a historic turning point for our country, and Oregon can lead the way," adds Cesia Kerns of the Oregon Sierra Club. "[We] should be proud and inspired by the notion that our state could lead the country in freeing ourselves from coal and building a new, clean energy economy -- but it will require citizens to raise their voices in favor of alternatives to Boardman, and pressure Portland General Electric to do the right thing by phasing out Boardman by 2014."

Failure to plan is planning to fail

On the irrationality of failing to plan for peak oil.

UPDATE: Jeff Rubin has an excellent concise explanation of why we're not running out of oil . . . we're just running out of oil that we can afford. And that is before even considering the environmental havoc that follows from trying to maintain an auto-dominated carburban culture. If Robert Rapier is right that $5 gas means a rush to embrace liquid fuels from coal then there's no hope for a stable climate future.

Excellent idea for more affordable housing/reducing sprawl

Backyard cottages OK'd in Seattle

Backyard cottages will be allowed in single-family zones throughout Seattle under an ordinance approved unanimously by the City Council Monday. . . .

Height limits would be set at 22 feet for most cottages. If a lot is more than 50-feet wide -- or 40-feet wide and adjacent to an alley -- units could be 23-feet tall. Units could not exceed 800 square feet - or 60 percent of the primary residence -- whichever is smaller.

The peak of a cottage roof could not be more than 15 feet higher than the peak of the primary structure. That provision is intended to prevent backyard cottages from looming over nearby structures in neighborhoods built on a slope.

The measure prohibits the construction of cottages on lots less than 4,000 square feet or located in a shoreline district. Also, the owners of the primary residence would have to live on the property for at least six months of the year.

"I think this legislation strengthens our neighborhood," said City Councilman Tim Burgess, adding it would help people provide housing for family members or to offer low-cost rental units. "That's a positive way to create affordable housing in our city."

WORD: Insurance parasites and the razz-ma-tazz of distraction

Awesome op-ed by a doc in the Big O. Excerpt:

Tobacco only affected the 40% of the population that smoked when the cigarette-cancer association began in the 1950s and the 20% of us who still do. The health insurance industry, on the other hand, affects every one of us. Its monopoly of health care financing extracts $500 annually from every citizen for its own administrative costs (not entirely devoted to lobbying and profit -- let's give the industry some credit), causes 45,000 annual deaths from inadequate access to health care (that's as many as die in automobile accidents), and precipitates most bankruptcies in the U.S. The money spent by our health insurance industry on administration could extend essential health care to every American. But we don't discuss that, do we?

Our health insurance industry succeeds as well in this century as the tobacco industry did in the last. Witness the congressional "reforms" -- all variants on a theme: Make every citizen buy our insurance. And if our price is too high, make our government buy it for them. All hail this great victory for free enterprise. But what about our health?

American spending on health care outstrips every other nation on earth, yet we lead in not one significant measure of public health. Can it be that our doctors, nurses and hospitals are that bad? Or is that we pay for them through private insurance? Our health insurance industry would have us believe our problem stems from spending too little on their profitable insurance, not spending too much.

The most brutal evidence of the insurance industry's success is the intensity with which all of us debate perennial unsolvable social challenges -- the role of government in private lives, how America's free enterprise system makes us special, whether tax dollars should fund abortion, whether people who work should provide free services to those who don't, how illegal immigrants sap our country's strength, the evil of socialist programs in foreign countries, the insidious threat of death panels, and the inherent inefficiency of any government to run anything. In short, the health insurance industry successfully diverts our attention from the root problem--that our method of financing health care through for-profit private insurance is driving our families and government into financial ruin.

So here we are, fighting not with the insurance industry but with each other: healthy against sick, insured against uninsured, libertarians against liberals, employed against jobless. Fear runs amok. Medicare recipients fear reduced benefits. Employers fear compulsory medical entitlements. Unions fear for their negotiated benefits. And everyone fears skyrocketing policy costs and decreasing access to physicians. We are paralyzed with terror.

Meanwhile, health insurance executives dab their collective brows, having successfully diverted us from realizing that their industry created and sustains our dilemma.

Can we escape this maelstrom?

Yes. With the health insurance industry spending $1.4 million daily on distractions, it takes grit to stay on target. But we must. We must demand our elected officials address the only three questions that matter: "What have you done to provide essential health care to all regardless of ability to pay, employment status or medical condition? What have you done to reduce costs? What have you done to improve our health? Everything else is irrelevant.

Can we stop the health insurance industry from killing Americans in this century faster than we stopped the tobacco industry in the last? Let's hope we don't have to wait another 50 years to find out.

Speaking of a broken system dominated by the health insurance leeches, an on-point documentary on the subject (intro video clip above):

Thursday, November 12, 2009
Salem Progressive Film Series: Health, Money and Fear
Doors open 6:15 p.m., film begins at 7:00 p.m.
Grand Theater, 191 High Street NE Adults $3, Students $2
America spends more than twice as much money on health care per person as other countries, yet gets much less in return. An ER physician looks at reasons for this and offers several prescriptions to cure the problem. For more information: http://www.salemprogressivefilms.net or 503-588-8713 or 503-779-5288.

Crucial graphs

Amazing set of graphs (pdfs) from the International Federation of Health Plans. (H/t, Ezra Klein, WA Post.)

Maybe President "Big Coal" Pelton will introduce the speaker!

Too funny -- a philosopher speaking at Willamette U. law school to inquire about whether we have any obligation to the future. Maybe Willamette President M. Lee "Big Coal" Pelton -- who sits in a very comfortable chair on the board of PGE, Oregon's top polluter and greenhouse gas emitter -- will introduce her and stay to argue that, no, our only obligation is to maximize the return to our shareholders (since that is, after all, PGE's position).

Wreaths to beautify and to build community

You can order online or send your check for $30 to Brenda Lawrence, 2086 Cottage St. SE,
Salem, OR 97302 by November 20.

Pickup is on Saturday, Dec. 5 at First United Methodist Church, 600 State St. in Salem, 8 a.m. - Noon.

For those who like eating regularly

Nope, that's a corn field, not a rice paddy. Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Dmitry Orlov has an excellent piece warning about most serious threat posed by climate disruption: the fact that all our knowledge and ability about growing our food was formed in a period of climate stability:

Thus, you don't have to think that humans caused climate change, or that humans can stop climate change before it is too late, but my feeling is that either you will agree that strange and dramatic climatic changes are afoot, or you just haven't done your homework. On this issue, I just don't see that there is any room for legitimate debate. The evidence is in.

It is also not controversial that the unusual climactic conditions are affecting the ability of farmers to grow food. I don't have to look too far to find examples: in New England, where I live, farmers are receiving federal disaster aid, because they lost over half of their crop. According to the Massachusetts congressional delegation, which petitioned for federal relief, "rain was 148 percent above normal in June, which was also the sixth coolest June on record in both Boston and Worcester, and likely the second cloudiest June on record since 1885. In July, rainfall was 200 percent above normal, with corresponding lower temperatures." "Corn growers in Norfolk County saw 83 percent of the value of their crop destroyed. In Essex County, strawberry growers could not bring more than 35 percent of their crop to market" reported the Boston Globe.

New England is by no means a unique case; everywhere you look, agriculture is under assault from the shifting climate. The barrage of strange weather makes it increasingly difficult for farmers to decide what to plant and when and where to plant it. According to the paleoclimatologist J.P. Steffensen, the stable climate that has prevailed during the previous 10,000 years is what made agriculture possible:

You can ask, Why didn't human beings make civilisation fifty thousand years ago? You know that they had just as big brains as we have today. When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, "Well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginning of a culture they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial - ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it's amazing. Civilisations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago it would have started then. But they had no chance.

Steffensen is a neo-catastrophist - a climatologist who believes in abrupt, catastrophic climate shifts. So is just about every other climatologist. They base their belief not on some exotic theory or complex computer model; in fact, they are often at a loss to explain the underlying mechanisms. Instead, they simply cannot disregard the overwhelming empirical evidence they have collected. Still, even after listening to a neo-catastrophist tell it like it is, I find no reason to think that agriculture will fail everywhere at once, and result in instant mass starvation. It seems more likely that, as agriculture becomes less and less reliable, malnutrition will become chronic in many places, resulting in high death rates, low birth rates and high childhood mortality, and an overall dwindling of the population over several generations.

Anthropoclastic climate change does not have to be a catastrophe, but it can be made catastrophic by clinging on to a failing agricultural model of food production. If we insist that farmers produce monoculture cash crops on the industrial model, we shall surely all starve. But if instead people make a concerted effort to reclaim the entire landscape, both rural and urban, for informal food production, growing edible plant species on former golf courses, parking lots, cemeteries, town greens, suburban back yards, urban rooftops and balconies, and front lawns of stately homes, then it seems quite likely that, no matter which way the climate lurches in a given year, something somewhere will be bearing fruit, enough to make it to the next season.

Wild foods can make a difference as well. Last summer, the forests of New England were full of berries that went unpicked. We did not pick any berries this year, but we did get a chance to pick some wild mushrooms, which had a fine year. As I write this, garlands of wild mushrooms are drying in our hallway. Man doth not live by mushrooms alone, but it's a start. And start we should, the sooner the better, but certainly before the shelves in the shops are bare, and so are the ones in your pantry. Mitigating anthropoclastic climate change will not be up to the politicians or the scientists or the industrialists, it will be up to me and to you.

A really scary Halloween feature

Image by Tattooed JJ via Flickr

UPDATE II: a REAL scary interview here: The Case for Deflation.

Original post: Short version of "The Crash Course." Well worth a look.

UPDATE: Bill Moyers interviews James Galbraith, son of John Kenneth Galbraith, and one of the few economists who saw through all the "magic of the market" nonsense. It's so good you have to read the whole thing over there. I couldn't find one section that stood out enough to quote separately. The whole thing is outstanding.

Cut Crime: Plant more trees and gardens

A crime-reduction tool. Image by AF-Photography via Flickr

The smart-on-crime strategy: Less paving, more planting:

Planting gardens and parks in neighbourhoods reduces vandalism, graffiti, litter and yobbish activity, research has revealed.

Even in the roughest inner-city estates, those living near gardens, parks and green spaces tend to be better behaved, healthier and live longer than those in 'urban deserts', the study found.

Professor Frances Kuo, who did the research, said being close to greenery was 'essential to our physical, psychological and social well-being'.

Tree friendly: People living near green spaces such as Hyde Park in London (pictured), are less likely to commit crime

'The relationship between crime and vegetation is very clear - the more trees, the fewer crimes,' she said.

'It actually encourages people to use the spaces outside their homes which provides a natural form of surveillance.

'In fact, the data seem to indicate that if you have a landscape where you introduce well-maintained trees and grass, people will find that a safer environment.'

Professor Kuo studied some of the poorest districts of Chicago and demonstrated that crime in neighbourhoods with trees was lower - by as much as 7 per cent - compared with those without a view of greenery, even after factors such as income and education were taken into account.

The University of Illinois professor has carried out extensive research since the mid-1990s showing the benefits of green spaces.