What America would look like without the EPA

Pretty much like Shanghai:

For the seventh day this month, Shanghai officials have warned children and the elderly to stay inside in a city where 24 hours exposed to the off-the-charts pollution would have hazardous consequences to one’s health. Hundreds of flights and sporting events have been cancelled, while face masks and air purifiers sold out in stores. All week, the pollution level hovered at “heavily” and “severely” polluted, according to Shanghai’s Air Quality Index, at up to 31 times the recommended levels. [...]

Officials have ordered vehicles off the road to curb air pollution, so far removing roughly 30 percent.

Since that didn't work so well, Shanghai's "environmental authority took decisive action to address the frequent air-quality alerts: It adjusted standards downward to ensure that there won’t be so many.

That's pollution, not ordinary fog. Beijing doesn't usually look much better. This is your world without environmental regulations.

Broken planet

In news that never makes it to BigTV last week, BigOil is still polluting the Gulf of Mexico:

As Coast Guard crews were scouring the Louisiana coast looking for damage from Tropical Storm Karen this week, they made a startling discovery: A tar mat weighing 4,100 pounds, presumably remnants from the devastating BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010.

Not as impressive as the 40,000 pound mat they found earlier but the ongoing damage is adding up.

Mats and balls of tar have continued to wash up on gulf shores, despite the more than three years that have passed since a rig explosion left oil spewing into the gulf’s waters and spawned the worst environmental disaster in U.S.

But despite the lasting impact that BP’s oil spill has had on the region, the company discontinued its regular searches for remaining oil earlier this year.

Worse yet, nobody really seems to know what the long term damage will be:

The scope of damage from this tar isn’t entirely clear. What is known is that tar from the Deepwater spill contains the bacteria Vibrio vulnificus — which causes a deadly type of seafood contamination — at a rate 100 times higher than surrounding waters. On top of that, a combination of these tar balls and the dispersants that were used to clean up the spill can hold carcinogenic pollutants that are soaked up by human skin.

And after Fukishima, the Pacific is in even worse shape. Seriously, read this whole story of a man who sailed through thousand of miles of it. The ocean is broken:

"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.

"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.

Dangerous garbage at that. Big enough enough to sink small ships. We are literally killing this planet and nobody is reporting it with the urgency it deserves. [graphic via]

Google Energy

A bit of good news from a corporate behemoth. Using their megabucks to make a commitment to healing the planet, Google has sunk over $1 billion into renewable energy. Analysts say Google is "the only company other than energy businesses and financial institutions that has taken large ownership stakes in major stand-alone power projects."

The Internet search giant's efforts to transform the world's use of power and fossil fuels have included a $200 million investment in a Texas wind farm and the purchase of a company that makes innovative flying wind turbines. It has invested $168 million in a solar project in California and is funding the development of an offshore grid to support wind turbines off the Atlantic coast.

In total, it has an ownership stake in more than 2 gigawatts of power generation capacity, the equivalent of Hoover Dam, said Rick Needham, Google's director of energy and sustainability.

Google even has a subsidiary, Google Energy, that's authorized by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to sell wholesale electricity that it generates from its power assets.

Nice to see a corporation as big as Google making an investment in future technology instead of deliberately fomenting climate disruption in order to bleed every last cent in short term profits.

Cult of irrationality

Dear "serious" news channel: This is not helping:

On Friday, CNBC anchor Joe Kernen described climate science as a “bona fide cult” of “enviro socialists” in an interview with the former CEO of Shell Oil.

The two of them yukked it up over this "foolishness." The CEO laments we're "not dealing with the real problems." I assume by that he means, his profit margin is simply not obscenely high enough yet. He'll never get that gargantuan bonus without it.

It's not surprising CNBC would be in the pocket of BigBusiness but ye gods, they're working against their own self-interest when they promote denialism like this. It's irrational.

CNBC has long-misrepresented climate change to its viewers, including Larry Kudlow and Rick Santelli. In fact, a study from Media Matters found that over half of CNBC’s climate coverage miscasts the science.

Meanwhile, that "cult" of climate scientists may not have all the solutions, but 97% of them sure as hell have identified the problems. So what do these short-sighted idiots on CNBC expect to do with all the money they make on fomenting denialism? By the time they extract every last penny of value from ravaging the enviroment, the planet won't be habitable anymore. They'll have nowhere to spend it.

What climate disruption?

I know these things aren't unprecedented but extreme weather events do seem to be more severe and happen more frequently as our climate changes.

SANTA ROSA, N.M. -- A massive thunderstorm turned a summer day into a winter wonderland in Santa Rosa, New Mexico on Wednesday by dropping more than a foot of hail around town.

The hail, some of which was golf-ball and paint-ball sized, according to a report from the Guadalupe County Communicator, damaged some roofs and skylights as it fell non-stop for 20 minutes.

"I have lived here all my life and I have never seen this," Guadalupe County Manager George Dodge told The Communicator as he drove around the city surveying the damage.

They had to use snow plows to clear the streets. In July.

Aftermath in Moore, Oklahoma

My sense of empathy is so strong, when these tragedies strike it literally hurts me. At the moment I'm feeling as stunned as the victims must be. I'm too overwhelmed for words. So all I got are these photos.

A teacher hugs child at Briarwood Elementary school after the tornado. [photo via The Oklahoman]



And another survivor amidst the rubble. [photo via]



Meanwhile as reported first at CQ:

The tornado damage near Oklahoma City is still being assessed and the death toll is expected to rise, but already Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., says he will insist that any federal disaster aid be paid for with cuts elsewhere.

Sadly, that's not the worst reaction I've seen tonight.

Peak climate disruption

If we still had a functional BigMedia, this would be leading the nightly newscasts. Instead they'll be doing wall to wall coverage of BENGHAZZZZZZzzzzzzi, while our planet Earth burns.

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

The far north of this continent has been in a heatwave for weeks, while here in the south it's been the coldest spring since I moved here seven years ago. There are wild storms sweeping across the globe on a daily basis. Climate disruption is a far greater threat to our way of life than whether the State Department edited the talking points on a stupid memo. Yet, mark my words, every damn newscast and bobblehead pundit on TV will be parsing the difference between extremist and terrorist all weekend long. This real news won't make the cut.