The world has not tamed the nuclear beast and we should be concerned.
Later this month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), a group formed 70 years ago by some of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, will decide whether to update their Doomsday Clock which says, “It is 5 minutes to midnight.®”
The clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies in the life sciences.
This may seem alarmist. So why should Iowans worry when most don’t think about nuclear weapons at all, yielding to the cacophony of radio, television and Internet noise?
Iowans don’t need to freak out, but they do need to be aware and concerned.
In 2009, President Obama announced pursuit of a world free of nuclear weapons in Prague. Things have gone another direction under his leadership.
“I note the United States does not support efforts to move to a nuclear weapons convention, a ban, or a fixed timetable for elimination of all nuclear weapons,” said Adam Scheinman, U.S. delegate to a Dec. 8, 2014 international conference on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons in Vienna, Austria.
Jaws dropped in the room where people from around the world had gathered to hear the witness of Hibakusha, people who had survived the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a tone-deaf statement.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the administration plans to spend $355 billion over the next 10 years to modernize our nuclear arsenal, and a trillion dollars over the next 30 years. This is an absurd waste of taxpayer dollars on weapons that should never be used.
The Doomsday Clock is a reminder that we can’t afford the luxury of an incremental approach to nuclear disarmament.
The warehouse called me off this afternoon because of the weather. It created an opportunity to work my long to-do list and that’s positive, even if I’ll miss the income.
While driving home across Mehaffey Bridge Road on Sunday the front end of my automobile started vibrating at speeds above 35 miles per hour. Slowing down, I made it home safely.
The two brothers at the auto shop in town agreed to check it out Monday morning. I dropped the car off and walked the three miles home in an ambient temperature around seven degrees below zero. The walk was invigorating and needed.
They found one of the brake calipers had gotten stuck and was causing the vibration. It was a quick repair and I picked up the finished vehicle just as Monday’s snow started to fall.
I had to go to the county seat today, so I shoveled the driveway and ventured out. Between four and seven inches had fallen and the light, powdery snow made for quick removal.
After my meeting I picked up a few groceries, got a haircut, and headed home to weather the cold. The next warehouse shift is not until Friday, and as I mentioned, it’s an opportunity to get things done.
Between the warehouse, the car repair and the long walk home is another topic: consumer credit.
Because of the way we transitioned into a post-career life, we have credit. We have a line of credit against our home at a very low interest rate. We have credit cards to take the bumps out of monthly cash flow. Instead of creating immediate stress, the car repair went on the credit card and when income exceeds expenses, we’ll pay it down. These two financial tools make funding cash flow doable and to some extent, life easier.
Using credit is also a precarious thing to do.
There is the presumption of being able to pay it off, something not always possible. A lot depends upon getting the jobs and hours needed to generate income. Then there is the interest, an expense in its own right. Middle class people should get and use credit in a way that serves sustainability and nothing more. That’s what I try to do.
What else can working people do? What we always do. Keep working toward a life with a newer car, predictable income and less need for credit. However, if we get there, we will continue to take long walks on cold days.
Having bit my tongue for several years about the state of our electorate, 2015 will be a time of writing about our politics and society in a process of working through ideas, to determine a path by which progressive ideas can gain more solvency in government.
Meeting so many people since 2012—in politics, in retail sales, in farm work, and in writing—my understanding of how society works, and the attitudes of people who live in it has grown. Society is not what I thought—at all.
My formative years began when in 1959 I secured a card for the public library bookmobile that stopped near our house. I read biographies about people important to the growth of our culture. There were a lot of them, although the names I remember are the Ringling brothers, Thomas Edison and George Washington Carver. I gained an understanding that through personal industry, thrift and good ideas, a person could create things that mattered in society and made life better.
I wasn’t the only person who learned this as the ideas grew from the founders and persist. Matthew Josephson articulated this American idea in his 1934 book The Robber Barons.
In a brief cycle, the laissez-faire political philosophy of a Jefferson, having given free reign to self-interest, would stimulate the acquisitive appetites of the citizen above all. These, whetted by an incredibly rich soil, checked by no institutions or laws, would determine the pattern of American destiny. The idealism of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and his Inaugural address of 1801, would be caricatured in the predatory liberty of the “Valley of Democracy” where, as Vernon Parrington has said, Americans democratic in professions, became “middle class in spirit and purpose;” where freedom came to mean “the natural right of every citizen to satisfy his acquisitive instinct by exploiting the natural resources in the measure of his shrewdness.”
With minimal modification, Josephson’s language could describe attitudes of an electorate that in the same year brought us U.S. Senator Joni Ernst and Representative Dave Loebsack. It elected State Senator Bob Dvorsky and State Representative Bobby Kaufmann. It is a spring which nurtures dichotomies: people worked long hours to elect President Obama while others fly the confederate flag; row croppers manage the land with chemicals while others restore it to prairie; consumers are more connected to the world, while seeking small enclaves to live their lives in isolation. The picture isn’t clear, but clarity is coming.
Josephson describes what so many people want to get to—satisfying our acquisitive instincts through exploitation of a world that hangs in a balance because of human activities since the dawn of the industrial revolution. This is a bankrupt idea in light of what we know about the interconnectedness of our lives, but it persists, driven by a social setting in which church, family and work play a pronounced role.
The rest of understanding will come. While beginning the new year I plan to spend more time in the garage, yard, garden and kitchen while continuing my work in sales, writing and other odd jobs assembled to sustain us financially. Hopefully that will be a sustainable framework for exploring these ideas.
There is everything to gain and nothing to lose as we sustain our lives in a turbulent world.
LAKE MACBRIDE— We hear a lot about income inequality and for me, those able to amass wealth should be congratulated—then they should pay a fair share of taxes. Neither happens with any regularity.
Feigning moral outrage at the wealthy getting wealthier isn’t possible for me. There are no massive scale opportunities for vertical integration of businesses like the railroads, steamship lines, oil companies and telegraph like there were in the Gilded Age. Investors like Warren Buffet vertically integrate segments of their business, and reap substantial profits for doing so, however theirs is a portfolio of diverse and far reaching business activities. The failure of any one wouldn’t matter much in the broader scope of their enterprises. That Buffet et. al. are skilled businessmen goes without saying. Let them have their loot and plunder, I say.
For the rest of us, the plight of the rich only matters when it impacts us directly. For the most part, it doesn’t. If a percentage of each consumer purchase filters back to some palatial estate, as long as we can afford basic necessities, what does it matter? We won’t be going backward from industrialization. The benefits of manufacturing particularly, whether it be home construction materials, food, clothing, transportation or modern health care, are worth more than the antiquated idea of doing everything by and for ourselves. We should be self-reliant, but take advantage of labor saving products and devices with reason.
When it comes to sustainability, there are paths though the seven stages of man that yield respect, viability and a light footprint on the earth among the small percentage of people who own the vast majority of wealth. We don’t want to admit it, but we are peasants all, and that is a tough life, but not terrible.
Next up on my reading list is The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson.
Written in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash, the initial chapter is rich in a way today’s narratives about social and financial matters are not. There is a lot of information I didn’t know or had forgotten. I look forward to reading the book in what is normally one of the coldest months of the year.
We know part of the story.
In a direct line from the industry and frugality of founding father Benjamin Franklin, a group of men seized the opportunity of an expanding frontier following the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. They made their mark converting an agrarian economy to one based on discovery, exploitation and manufacturing using natural resources that were part of the commons.
“Shortly before or very shortly after 1840 were born nearly all the galaxy of uncommon men who were to be the overlords of the future society,” wrote Josephson. This coincides with the settlement of Iowa after the Black Hawk War, and indeed my life and those of my forbears touched the industrialization of the country. Everything from my great, great grandfather buying land in Minnesota from the railroad, to the method of land surveying, to living along U.S. Highway 30 where the Rockefeller trust anonymously bought land at every intersection they could. Their fingerprints remain on much of how we live our lives.
Today, some revere the wealthiest in our society. I am willing to give them their due, but that’s it as our post-Sept. 11, 2001 country approaches what can be called living a plantation life.
In the 1962 forward to The Robber Barons, Josephson wrote about revisionists who would change the contemporary popular dislike of the robber barons. “This business of rewriting our history—perhaps in conformity to current fashions in intellectual reaction—has unpleasant connotations to my mind,” Josephson wrote. “Recalling the propaganda schemes used in authoritarian societies, and the ‘truth factories’ in George Orwell’s anti-utopian novel 1984.”
Little has changed since the 1960s, except the rich continue to get richer, as they run out of resources to exploit in our global village.
There is an intellectual case to be made about the social problems of income inequality, but who believes what politicians and media pundits (or even academics and social scientists) say? Some of us would rather consider the riches in our own lives than seek justice from the wealthiest people. We are a long way from reaching a tipping point in public opinion that would yield a different result.
The American public is asleep on the importance of income inequality to their lives. Just as the continuing resolution to fund the government passed two weeks ago without notice, people don’t seem to care as long as their lives continue as expected most of the time.
Income inequality is not good, but it has been with us for a long time—going back at least to the Peasant’s Revolt in 14th century England.
The lesson is we had better take care of each other because the rich don’t care as long as their wealth increases. That is advice upon which we can sustain a life.
LAKE MACBRIDE— People don’t connect the dots between lower gasoline prices and the shale oil boom.
Yesterday I filled my gas tank for $23.70, with the per gallon price in the mid-$2.40 range. That’s not low compared to when I commuted to Eldridge and fueled at Walcott for $1.02 per gallon for what seemed like months. Neither is it like when I was young and gas wars yielded prices below $0.30, enabling me to top off my tank for a buck or two. However, we are now below $3 per gallon with the prospect of going lower, so prices seems low in a short-term, relativistic way.
There is no doubt that the revolution in shale oil production through hydraulic fracturing is causing the lower oil and natural gas prices in the U.S. The shale boom is replicable world-wide (at least to some degree) because shale is a common and abundant form of sedimentary rock. In some ways, the game changing of shale is just getting started, even though it began in the 1940s.
When I was in my 20s, we thought shale oil was inaccessible. Hydraulic fracturing is a technology that revolutionized exploration, development and production of shale oil. In light of higher oil prices, it became profitable. Some credit goes to politicians, but most credit goes to the oil companies who persistently lobbied for a relaxed regulatory environment with anyone who could be influenced from the president on down.
What does this mean besides lower gasoline prices? Three things seem most important.
The arguments for and against hydraulic fracturing are reasonably accessible.
“Hydraulic fracturing is highly controversial, proponents advocating economic benefits of readily accessible hydrocarbons, and opponents concerned for the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing including contamination of ground water, depletion of fresh water, degradation of the air quality, the triggering of earthquakes, noise pollution, surface pollution, and the consequential risks to health and the environment,” according to Wikipedia.
There is plenty of meaning in the existential fact of hydraulic fracturing and use of its products. What is less discussed is the impact on climate change, and the impact on renewable energy development.
While shale oil production is booming, 2014 will be the warmest year on earth since record-keeping began, and a clear departure from the climatic conditions in which the industrial revolution emerged. It’s hot and getting hotter world-wide. The climate has changed and is changing.
It is a scientific fact that man-made pollution is contributing to the warming planet. Natural gas is a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide when burned. While part of domestic carbon emission reductions during the last ten years have come by switching from coal to natural gas for electricity generation, there are problems.
Methane released as a byproduct of hydraulic fracturing operations is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Methane leakage would reduce the value of the air pollution reduction realized by shifting electricity production from coal to natural gas. Some say methane leakage could negate any gains made in CO2 reductions from switching from coal to natural gas.
As a fossil fuel, natural gas should be viewed only as a so-called bridge fuel, although the clear and present danger is that it will be perceived as a destination fuel and become a permanent fixture in our energy mix.
That raises the third issue. There is a broader economic impact that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) spelled out in a Dec. 10, 2014 article. Not only is gasoline cheap in a shale gas development scenario, it is impacting the U.S. energy mix, and nuclear power and renewables are taking the hit.
The basic argument about bridge fuels is that the shale boom and its products can act as “bridge” fuels, curbing emissions while non-fossil energy sources such as renewables and nuclear energy are ramped up.
As we have seen in Iowa, new nuclear power has become financially untenable unless its excessive costs can be passed along to rate payers.
Not only are new nuclear power plants imperiled because of the economics of the shale boom, existing nuclear plants have been as well. “While cheap gas is not the only culprit eroding the profitability of nuclear energy, it is the straw that is breaking the camel’s back,” wrote BAS.
What’s more important is the economics of shale gas are suppressing development of renewable energy. As we have seen in Iowa, without government subsidies of renewable energy, production of new renewable capacity languishes. In the current political climate, it is uncertain whether renewable energy subsidies will continue, and for how long.
While the economics of wind and solar may be reaching parity with fossil fuels in some markets, we are not there yet, and the subsidies are essential to continuing development of alternatives to fossil fuels.
It is important that we extend our reach beyond personal or family budgets and do what is right about the shale boom. That means developing the political will to finish a transition to a fossil fuel free world.
Easier said than done, but the price society will pay for failing to do so is much higher than what we see at the gas pump.
Congress put an unexpected gift under the Christmas tree the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has become.
The U.S. is poised to give a foreign mining company 2,400 acres of national forest in Arizona that is cherished ancestral homeland to Apache natives. Details of the proposed land deal can be found here.
The giveaway of Apache burial, medicinal, and ceremonial grounds is currently within the bounds of Tonto National Forest. Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of the Australian-English mining company Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, is to be the beneficiary of Congress’ largesse at the expense of Apache natives.
News of the land provision in the NDAA was kept under wraps until late Tuesday, when the bill was finally posted online. The land deal appears on page 1,105. The bill passed the U.S. House on Thursday 300-119. The bill now goes to the U.S. Senate where it is expected to pass during the lame duck session.
The Resolution Copper website describes the deal as “developing an Arizona copper resource to benefit the world. Located near Superior, Arizona, the project hosts one of the world’s largest untapped copper resources.”
“Since time immemorial people have gone there. That’s part of our ancestral homeland,” Terry Rambler, chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe said, referring to the overall area in question. “We’ve had dancers in that area forever—sunrise dancers—and coming-of-age ceremonies for our young girls that become women. They’ll seal that off. They’ll seal us off from the acorn grounds, and the medicinal plants in the area, and our prayer areas.”
Rambler said whether Rio Tinto’s economic assertions are true or not, it may not matter.
“It seems like us Apaches and other Indians care more about what this type of action does to the environment and the effects it leaves behind for us, while others tend to think more about today and the promise of jobs, but not necessarily what our creator God gave to us,” he said.
This year Congress named the NDAA the “Carl Levin and Howard P. ‘Buck’ McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015” after the retiring Senate and House Armed Services Committee chairmen. Arizona Senator John McCain is said to have been instrumental in getting the mining deal added to the law.
“The Resolution Copper project has the potential to utterly transform these communities (near Superior, Arizona),” wrote McCain in an article in AZCentral. “At full capacity, the mine could create as many as 4,000 jobs and produce roughly 25 percent of our nation’s domestic copper supply. Arizona as a whole will likely benefit from tens of billions of dollars in increased economic activity over the lifespan of the mine.”
This is who we have become as a nation. Exploring for and producing every last resource on the globe, regardless of long standing and legitimate concerns, for the sake of jobs.
Where will the copper go? It will be traded on the world market. One of the buyers is expected to be the country with the biggest shopping cart. Today’s that’s China. Another indicator of the times in which we live.
The government favors the military, and since the NDAA is expected to pass each and every year, what better place to hang an ornament of interest to the richest corporations in the world? The goal is economic development, but at what cost? Politicians like John McCain don’t answer that question.
LAKE MACBRIDE— The idea of a forty hour work week and regular, scheduled workdays, including a Friday until Sunday weekend, was blown up a long time ago.
Beyond reason, I continue to long for le weekend, as elusive as it has become. Longing overcoming reality in a way common in the consumer enclaves where life often finds us.
Any more, I work every day, and enjoy almost all of it.
The unfinished work of my generation has been reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons. What has changed is the weapons systems have aged, support structures have become calcified, and each year we understand new ways nuclear weapons could be the end of everything we know about life on Earth. Whether by design, by accident, or madness, a nuclear explosion would have devastating consequences for humanity and must be avoided at all costs.
“There have been two conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in the last year and a half, in Oslo, Norway, and in Nayarit, Mexico,” Gunnar Westberg wrote on the IPPNW Peace and Health Blog. “At the latter 146 states participated. The conclusion was that any use of nuclear weapons would have such severe humanitarian consequences that they must be abolished completely.”
There will be a third conference in Vienna Dec. 8-9. The good news is two of the nine nuclear states will be in attendance for the first time, the U.S. and U.K. The rest of the news is the U.S. is committed to a methodology for arms control based upon enforcement of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Therefore, besides many chats over Viennese pastry and coffee, only limited work toward abolition seems possible.
In my early sixties, I can still work on nuclear abolition. But what about after I am gone? When living memory of the dawn of the nuclear age and its aftermath recedes, what then?
Our descendants will be left with an aging nuclear complex, the purpose of which has been in doubt for decades already. If current government operations continue, it will continue to be five minutes until midnight.
Considering the doomsday threat, talk about le weekend seems futile. Better get back to work.
LAKE MACBRIDE— What is going on in Ferguson, Missouri, and around the country, over the Aug. 9 fatal shooting of Michael Brown, 18, by Darren Wilson, 28, and subsequent absence of grand jury indictments? Don’t ask. What I know is filtered by biased media—both corporate and social. The many people with whom I spent time in a real place yesterday simply didn’t mention the topic—not one time among hundreds of people.
What matters more than this emotionally charged incident is how we view people in the context of the society we construct among friends, neighbors, family and acquaintances over the course of time in a place. We create our own enclaves, and that’s where we live much of our lives, and deal with human diversity as best we can.
When a person has experienced ethnic diversity in countless settings, the tropisms regarding Ferguson make little sense. By framing Ferguson in terms of ethnic diversity, I am already opening myself up to criticism. So be it—that’s who I am and have been since my youngest days. In my defense, I tried to live the dream as best I could.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said.
It takes more than citing a quote to achieve justice.
The 2013 population of our county was estimated at 139,155 by the U.S. Census Bureau. The white, not Hispanic or Latino population was 81.6 percent, with 5.5 percent black or African-American, 5.5 percent Asian, 5.4 Hispanic, and two percent other categories. These are facts.
Most people I encounter have little cognizance of them. Neighbors whisper about what would happen to property values if a black family would move in. Among working poor, conversation is often about how “different,” and by implication unacceptable, the behavior of “foreigners” is. In the most rapidly-growing parts of the county, a homogeneous culture centered around church, school, family and work blocks out basic facts about ethnic diversity. In each scenario participants have built an enclave that by any definition includes palpable intolerance.
“I cannot exceed what I see,” 1976 Nobel laureate Saul Bellow said. “I am bound, in other words, as the historian is bound by the period he writes about, by the situation I live in.”
In terms of ethnic tolerance, the situations I call home are not the best. What’s a person to do?
At a minimum, intolerance should not be ignored. We must say something when its ugly face is raised in conversation. It’s not easy to do when a lot depends upon our continued interaction with people found in the places we live, learn, worship, shop and work. Nonetheless, we must confront intolerance personally and directly. We can all do more in that regard.
A great diversion is following incidents like those in and around Ferguson and asserting actions, opining in media, taking direct action. This is little more than a distraction from the work that must be done to challenge intolerance in the tight enclaves where we live our lives.
The work has begun for many of us. If there is a lesson from Ferguson, it is we must do better.
BIG GROVE TOWNSHIP— There was trouble last night at the cemetery, the first such trouble since I was elected township trustee.
It had to do with who could be buried in whose plot, and the trustee who coordinates plot sales and burials wanted to discuss the issue. The funeral is Friday, so no time for dalliance. We are meeting at 8:30 a.m.
Two years into my term, being a township trustee has provided a steady stream of learning about our community. There has been time to consider things, and almost no controversy—just repeated expression of wills about what should get done and how. Any conflicts that surfaced were quickly resolved.
I’m confident we will figure this one out.
Yesterday it was shown that Mary Landrieu did have 59 votes to proceed on Keystone XL, and that’s all she had. The bill overriding the executive process on evaluation and approval of the project now goes into the dustbin of the 113th Congress. It likely will be back next congress.
I spent part of the last two days transcribing testimony to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide particularly.
“I began my career as a summer intern at EPA 42 years ago under what has euphemistically become known as Russell House One,” Dianne Dillon Ridgely said. “I was a 19-year old kid. And what is most dramatic is much of what we addressed that summer—in terms of air pollution, in terms of the public’s engagement on power production—are exactly the same things, particularly in terms of coal, that we are still addressing and fighting 42 years later, and to me that is really a sad commentary.”
Ridgley is a 42-year veteran of governmental action (or inaction) on clean air and clean water, having been appointed by Presidents Clinton, Bush 41 and Bush 43 to international delegations to address environmental issues. We’re still addressing them. There is hope the EPA’s actions won’t be blocked by the 114th Congress, something the presumed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell indicated is high on his to-do list. Time will tell, but I believe we are on the right side of history regardless of what the Congress does.
My last workday at the local paper was Sunday. It will feel a little weird to be able to focus on my writing on the weekends instead of proof reading the paper. The bucket of part time paid jobs is down to three, and one of those is finished the second week in December. When the number surged to eight last summer, it was too much to juggle. Having found a bottom, the goal for next year is to keep what remains, and use it as a base. In addition, I will seek paid writing jobs and temporary positions and opportunities that can add a few C-notes to the treasury each month. What remains is that I work to support my ability to write.
Hope against hope, I want to get out in the yard and mulch the leaves, and shorten the grass. For that to happen, the snow needs to melt, the yard dry out, and half a day of warmer temperatures roll in. In these days of crazy weather, that is possible, however improbable. That’s where this Wednesday finds me.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill directing the federal government to move forward on the Keystone XL pipeline on a 252-161 vote. It was less than the number of votes needed to override a presidential veto, but Barack Obama has been holding his cards close to the chest on Keystone. What he would do if a bill reached his desk is uncertain.
According to the New York Times, the U.S. Senate scheduled a vote on the bill for Tuesday, and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) believes there are already 59 of 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster when the vote comes up. If the senate can get past a filibuster, the bill’s passage is assured, although getting 67 votes needed to override a presidential veto is less certain than it is in the the house. It’s all political theater.
Our Representative Dave Loebsack voted for the bill, reversing his last vote on Keystone XL. He sent social media atwitter with shock and disappointment framed in terms that appeared to help the authors vent frustration more than say anything coherent. I am disappointed with the vote, but what politician ever consistently voted my way?
I know a couple of things.
When people talk about “environmentalists” I no longer have a clue to whom they refer. Is a farmer who plants a buffer zone based on a government grant an environmentalist? Is a non-governmental organization’s local staff member—overly dependent upon funding sources—an environmentalist? Is a Washington lobbyist for a large NGO an environmentalist? What about members of the defense department working toward a lower carbon footprint for the military? What about my neighbors who protest building a subdivision near Lake Macbride? There aren’t real answers to these questions, and that’s the problem with vague references to “environmentalists.” There is no club to which they all belong, and fewer common denominators. The idea is actually a right wing talking point, and the frame “environmentalists” is used to demonize advocates for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and against production of electricity using coal, natural gas and nuclear fuels. Keystone XL is not a common denominator among environmentalists.
The failure of environmentalists was targeting the pipeline at all, instead of the tar sands. The tar sands is a bigger problem because of humanity’s inexhaustible thirst for oil and natural gas. This is the same problem for the Bakken, West Texas and Eagle Ford formations. Because oil and gas are in demand, there is direct financial return, subsidized by our government, in exploiting these resources. The environmental communities have been unable to adequately articulate the unrecognized costs in terms of human health of these exploration, discovery and production operations—even if a small number of people are working on it. Successful efforts have taken a targeted, NIMBY approach, like the fight against frac sand mining in Allamakee County. By targeting Keystone XL, environmentalists set themselves up for failure. As a friend wrote me last night, “there are hundreds of pipelines in this country already—what’s one or two more?”
I also know unions favor building pipelines. Ken Sagar and Bill Gerhard laid out their position in a Dec. 11 opinion piece in the Des Moines Register. Only a cynic would say that Loebsack’s vote on Keystone XL was quid pro quo for union financial and canvassing support during the 2014 midterms. It is likely more complicated than that, but it had to have been a factor. Part of being Democratic is the fact that Democrats don’t always agree. Keystone XL and Iowa’s proposed Bakken Oil Pipeline are a prime examples of that. Loebsack’s framing of the explanation for his vote makes his sympathies for the union’s legislative priority clear.
“I was skeptical of side stepping the normal processes, but the jobs attached to building the Keystone Pipeline are too important and can no longer be tied to D.C. gridlock,” Loebsack said, according to Ed Tibbetts of the Quad-City Times.
What I also know is October 2014 was the hottest month recorded on the planet since record-keeping began, according to the Washington Post. Yes, you skeptics, the world’s temperatures may have been higher or much colder in some prehistoric era. But what matters more is our civilization, and the changes produced by the industrial revolution are at risk. The underpinnings of basic facts about our lives, when the first frost comes, the amount of rainfall in a region, how we produce electricity, how we sequester carbon in the land, water sourcing, and others are all being undone.
It will take more than one vote in one governmental body to address these broader challenges. What I know is that is unlikely to happen in my lifetime unless we stop focusing on bright and shiny objects like Keystone XL.
The world has not tamed the nuclear beast and we should be concerned.
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