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The RASP Act

I tried to joke about this (R-A-S-P-E-C-T), but it’s really just pathetic:

OrwellLawmakers from at least four states have introduced model legislation from the right-wing group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) seeking to prohibit state funding for the Environmental Protection A

gency’s efforts to fight climate change.

On Thursday, Missouri state lawmaker Tim Remole introduced a resolution mimicking the text of AFP’s Reliable, Affordable and Safe Power (RASP) Act. Remole’s resolution “seeks to prohibit state agencies from using state money to implement EPA rules and guidelines,” specifically the EPA’s efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Nearly identical resolutions have also been introduced in Florida, Virginia, and South Carolina in 2015. Each one says the proposed limits on carbon emissions from power plants “will not measurably alter any impacts of climate change,” “conflicts with a literal reading of the law,” and would “effectively amount to a federal takeover of the electricity system of the United States.”

Why are people so intent on making Orwell look like some kind of naive piker? We’re talking working nights and weekends to make it happen. If we just call it this, then it will be fine? Alternatively, if we ban people from using these words, we can be confident that none of it is happening? People! The man wrote about this more than sixty years ago.

Model legislation indeed.

 

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Engineering Catastrophe

I don’t know – you pick whether it’s a noun or verb. The effects are horrible either way:

Tar-MatMillions of gallons of oil flooded the Gulf of Mexico every day — for 87 days. The biggest accidental oil spill ever. Five years later the effects of the Deepwater Horizon blowout still endure

. A new study confirms a massive undersea oil mat near the unlucky oil well — Macondo 252 — that blew on April 20th, 2010. Considering this tar mat is the size of Rhode Island, the Gulf is clearly still feeling the af

fects of the catastrophe five years on. Gulf sea turtles stranding more frequently, dolphins killed, observed oil slicks hundreds of kilometers in length after the well was “capped” — a depressing list of unknown length.

Will it ever be possible to safely drill oil wells 35,000 feet into the seafloor through 4,000 feet of water from a unanchored floating 32,000 ton oil rig? You’ve got to hand it to the oil companies, the engineering is ambitious. But given the demonstrated risks to our greater resources, will it ever make sense?

Rhode Island. A tar mat the size of Rhode Island. Should there be drilling of more wells, as described above? Is further evidence needed? If you were attempt, for whatever reasons, to remain unemotional about this and look only at the evidence and reach a decision – including evidence of how you arrived at work this morning – what would the decision be? Asking for a friend.

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Do Whales Need Ice?

It’s not a trick question, though at first the proposition can seem off-putting, if not unrelated. In the Chukchi Sea and the adjacent Beaufort Sea, off Arctic Alaska, bowhead, beluga, and grey whales are commonly spotted, while fin whales, minkes, humpbacks, killer whales, and narwhals are all venturing into these seas ever more often as the Arctic and its waters continue to warm rapidly.  Sounds harmless, rightbelugachukchi_small?

The problem, however, is that the major oil company Royal Dutch Shell wants to drill in the Chukchi Sea this summer and that could, in the long term, spell doom for one of the last great, relatively untouched oceanic environments on the planet. Let me explain why Shell’s drilling ambitions are so dangerous. Just think of the way the blowout of one drilling platform, BP’s Deepwater Horizon, devastated the Gulf of Mexico. Now, imagine the same thing happening without any clean-up help in sight.

You might have heard about “the sixth extinction,” the way at this moment species are blinking off at a historically unprecedented rate. The Arctic seas of Alaska, however, still are sanctuaries not only for tens of thousands of whales, but also hundreds of thousands of walruses and seals, millions of birds, thousands of polar bears, and innumerable fish from more than one hundred species, not to mention all the uncharismatic sub-sea life that eludes our eyes but makes up the food web — phytoplankton, sea urchins, sand dollars, and sea cucumbers, to name only a few. Think of the Arctic Ocean as among the last remaining marine ecological paradises on the planet.

Sometimes the question is not, ‘When will we learn?’ but ‘Will we learn?’ From the looks of current thinking on public education, the trends are not encouraging.

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Moral Illusions

Prague_castle

Discussions about morals can make people uneasy, especially Americans, who believe their/our morals are beyond reproach. But if we can step back far enough from issues of the day, especially those that seem to make no sense, to be moral contradictions of intractable disagreement, we might begin to make sense of why we can’t have stricter guns laws, or can’t manage to quite take care of the poor or allow immigrant children an education or protect drinking water from polluting industries. It is disfunction of the kind of obviousness we can recognize in other societies, communist Czechoslovakia, for example. And when Václav Havel spotted it, we could be like, well yes, duh:

Though the hated state security organs had infiltrated deep into society, even into the ranks of the dissidents, Havel forbade a witch hunt to root them out. In his first address as president, he sternly told his listeners that they were as corrupt as the regime that had just been overthrown:

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves.

It is rare for a leader to attack the moral illusions of his audience, and rarer still to resist the validating temptations of self-righteousness.

That is rare, and it’s at least as rare for people in a country to be able to recognize the nefarious effects of their own system – the guarantees, the openness, the fidelity to ideas that bypass human concerns in ways we castigated in communist regimes, but defend to the hilt under capitalism. We have to consider the moral depravity of the latter, because if that is off limits, then we are no better than the worst party apparatchiks and informers.

 Image: author photo from old town Prague, near the astronomical clock.

 

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ISIS as Islamic Reformation?

Unpacked take on the Islamic State phenomenon as a microcosm of the Protestant religious wars that ripped apart Europe for centuries:

negra13_Goya

The problem set that we face with ISIS has several components. Among the biggest is that this is a problem internal to Islam. As a result Muslims have to resolve it for themselves. In many ways what we are watching in real time is the Islamic equivalent of the Reformation, counter-Reformation, and then the splintering within the Reformation that led to hundreds of years of struggle, conflict, and warfare in Europe. A lot of it had to do with which version of Christian theology and dogma was supposed to be correct and followed, but a lot of it used that as a motivating factor so elites and notables could control resources. Ultimately they became so intertwined, that even into the 1990s in Northern Ireland or the Balkans they could not be easily teased apart. The other big one for me is that America and its Western allies cannot really resolve this problem set. Even if we were to go in with overwhelming force and just decimate ISIS it would not resolve this dispute, which is multifaceted and internal to Islam.

Read the whole thing, for sure. It’s a response to/critique of a long read in The Atlantic on the same subject. Are these in any way analogous? Even considering it outs the struggle into a different context.

Image: Pilgrimage to St. Isidore’s well, Francisco Goya, 1819-1823, Museo del Prado. Also known as The holy office. The holy office is another name for the inquisition.

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Turning CO2 into Rock

No, not that kind. Rock cylinders, and burying it. Dateline: Iceland:

10CARBONIn a test that began in 2012, scientists had injected hundreds of tons of water and carbon dioxide gas 1,500 feet down into layers of porous basaltic rock, the product of ancient lava flows from the nea

rby Hengill volcano. Now the researcher, Sandra Snaebjornsdottir, a doctoral student at the University of Iceland, was looking for signs that the CO2 had combined with elements in the basalt and become calcite, a solid crystalline mineral.

In short, she wanted to see if the gas had turned to stone.

“We have some calcites here,” she said, pointing to a smattering of white particles in the otherwise dark gray rock samples. “We might want to take a better look at them later.”

Ms. Snaebjornsdottir and her colleagues are certain that the process works, but the cores — eventually hundreds of feet of them — will undergo detailed analysis at a laboratory in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, to confirm that the calcites resulted from the CO2 injection.

Let it be. Shine on you crazy… cylinder. CO2 me like a Hurricane. Living in the City. First, we take CO@ and put in the ground, then we take Berlin. Fiction Romance, with CO2 rock cylinders.

See. Easy.

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Public Art Wars

Now this is how you do it, when you can do it. Seattle’s The Stranger.CapHillPSA

The Paid poster is part of #CapHillPSA, a collection of posters made by local artists addressing the issue of public safety on Capitol Hill. A press release suggests the campaign was intended by organizers Courtney Sheehan and Yonnas Getahun to “demonstrate the role art can play in shaping personal reflection and community action.” As the name suggests, it’s less an art show and more a propaganda campaign, as demonstrated by Ken McCarty’s red-and-black poster displaying a close-up of the barrel of a handgun with the words “STOP THE VIOLENCE” printed on top. It’s purely political, a simple message that wouldn’t be out of place in a church basement or a school hallway.

Most of the work in #CapHillPSA demonstrates a bit of political cartoon DNA tossed in too, with a plucky juxtaposition between words and pictures. Christian Petersen’s poster reads “ALLDICKHEADS-SHOULDFUCKOFF,” with a smiley face in place of the o in “should.” Meng Yu’s poster shows a popped-collar douche rendered in soft neon colors, with the words “Welcome to the neighborhood AGRO BRO” drawn over his turquoise hair. A couple of the works, like Jite Agbro’s gorgeous moody moonlit landscape or Shogo Ota’s prickly hairy-chested figure wearing a vicious-looking spiky bustier, are a little more ambiguous and a lot more visually rewarding.

Protect your town and your neighborhoods, and its weirdness, any way you can. I think the publication’s title is actually a comparative adjective, for what its worth.

 

 

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The book of life*, a continuing SAGA

“I’ve got kids. There is no certainty,” he said with exasperation not recently occurred to him. “Is that what I explain to them?”

Cover_froese            “Yes,” came the calm reply.

We’ve all seen them, the little openings to nowhere that occasionally slash the side of a new roadway or a newly-widened old one. They’re usually placed in front of cow pastures or other open space, then the bit of formed concrete suddenly gives way to dirt, grass, a ditch then a fence. Many, many of these will now go abandoned, giving a certain circular echo to the once-presumed opportunity in the emptiness. What they are – what they were – are placeholders for a future entrance to a development that is not there yet but one day will be. The one day that’s coming when we will call these relics ‘green markers’ or ‘option stops’ or some such term indicative of the serious moment that crops up when we temporarily get post-irony, again. ‘Starting in the low 300’s’ indeed.

Some might say that one day is here; no one made the announcement but this dog whistle sounds a lot like the trillion-dollar insurance company investment we and our adjacent progeny all just made. These little ciphers in the road to our past should be memorialized as markers for our stupidity, little DOT-sanctioned homages to the greed that once controlled how and where we once lived. I use the past tense because they are over. Finit-O®.

Though this is the end to neither greed nor stupidity. So stipulated. It is only the end of the way this powerful combination once dictated how we lived. Suburbs, gated enclaves only accessible by private vehicle and situated far from an interaction with and vulnerability to other people – also known as life – are things of the past.

Yes, come and play Finit-O®, that fun game where we bid farewell to an entire set of tenets and beliefs predicated on short-term individual comfort but revealed as the path to long-term collective agony, celebrated with curb openings to non-existent suburbs and lionized beneath crumbling gates to exclusivity and literal isolation. And these are not just funparks but monuments to serve as a constant reminder of the greed and stupidity that permitted us to forget our priorities in good times, to elect and re-elect those for whom pillaging earth and man was a preference. Ah, look familiar? That’s because it’s already been different for a while as we’ve entered the end of the beginning of the end… of the beginning. (Almost had you there! Everyone wants to KNOW.) We’re even becoming wise to many of the shades of green.

So… who’s in charge of this grand transition, you might ask? Mobile one to home base – come in, home base.

*I was looking for something from 2008 and found this, which I enjoyed and hope you do, too. I think it’s part of one of the columns, or perhaps clutter form the cutting room floor.

Oh, and RIP (1/20/15) Edgar Froese (the image is from the cover of his 1974 album, Aqua) and Happy Birthday to Virginia Woolf (1/25/1882).

 

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The Nation’s Racial Divisions at the Time

mlk01_JaarChilean artist Alfredo Jaar produced this work in 1995, and however it hits you will produce the best sketch of your feelings about where we stand as a country, right now, on our continuing struggles with race.

The artist found it unimaginable that so few whites would attend Dr. King’s funeral:

How could Americans of all racial backgrounds not have mourned the death of the great civil rights leader?

“When I started looking at the shocking absence of white faces, I couldn’t believe it,” Jaar said, “so I started looking for a way to represent this in a graphic and almost funny way. I did not want to preach to people. This was a way for me to express my outrage to what these images reveal.”

How, indeed. In too many ways, the distance between these dots has only grown, even if there are more of them.

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No So Gently Lapping at Your Chamber Door

The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2014 was the highest among all years since record keeping began in 1880. The December combined global land and ocean average surface temperature was also the highest on record.

And:

The acceleration of the rate of sea level rise over the past couple decades is even higher than scientists had thought, according to a new study that uses a novel method to estimate the global rise of the oceans.

The reason? The rate of rise across the 20th century has actually been overestimated — by as much as 30 percent — meaning there’s been a bigger jump in sea level rise rates from the beginning of the 1900s to now than previously thought.

But you know what? VousetesCharlieSelmaGotRobbedAllCountryMusicSoundsTheSameAmericaDoesn’tTortureElCapitanBokoHaramDukeSCOTUSIslam Gas prices are down.