Climate change

 

Some people have rich fantasy lives

I was listening to Colorado Public Radio yesterday. The news segments focusing on regional topics spent a fair amount of time discussing the Trump administration's decision to roll back regulations on clear air requirements for coal burning power plants. In addition, federal lands will once again be open for leases for mining.

Naturally, there are a fair number of people in the Colorado coal industry now doing the happy dance. In the bizarro alternate universe in which they live, they believe the glory days of coal mining are about to magically return. It's odd how people can be given information but be unable to understand its implications.

First, there was a lot of talk about how new access to federal land would give western coal a competitive edge. It's cheaper to mine on land leased from the Bureau of Land Management than it is to try to negotiate leases or purchase agreements for private land. Translation: the coal industry has become so marginal that if it doesn't get subsidized by the government it can't make a profit. If you need welfare to survive, your industry is not particularly competitive.

Second, there are no new coal burning power plants being built. Whatever the domestic market for coal is right now, that's basically it. Coal mines have closed not because they lacked access to ore but because the market for that ore was saturated. The electrical power industry has figured out that natural gas is a lot easier and cheaper to work with. In fact, not only are no new coal burning plants being built, existing ones are being converted to burn gas or biomass. Further, despite the best efforts of the fossil fuels industries to slow down wind and solar power generation, both areas are still growing. Bottom line: there are fewer buyers for coal, at least domestically.

Third, one of the optimistic notes sounded by the coal people was the export market. Well, good luck with that one, guys, when the Current Occupant of the White House is busy ticking off most of the world. It's going to get harder and harder to export anything when other countries respond to Trump's protectionist policies by throwing up barriers of their own. Plus, of course, other countries that do use coal are much more grounded in reality than the U.S. is. Their politicians actually believe in science, which is why China now leads the world in manufacturing solar panels. They're working hard at moving away from coal, and they're not alone.

But, hey, one of the coal mines in Colorado just added 20 people to its payroll -- twenty! -- so obviously massive growth in mining is just around the corner.

Maybe we need to invest in face masks

Not long after we arrived here in Safford, Arizona, I noticed that a few of the little old ladies out for their morning constitutionals were wearing face masks. It baffled me a bit. After all, I've known people who regularly wear face masks during cold and flu season if they're going to be someplace where there are a lot of people, but walking around an RV park by yourself? It was a bit of a mystery.

Not anymore. It's been a bit breezy since we arrived here. Nothing dramatic, but the wind does seem to blow some every day. And then yesterday it went from a bit breezy to let's rip the tumbleweeds lose and topple any Yugos that might still be on the road. Couple that with the fact Safford is basically a farming town sitting in a river valley full of cotton fields, and the cotton has now been harvested. When you go from thousands of acres of cotton to thousands of acres of bare, dry dirt and the wind blows? I'm a tad surprised there's any paint left on local buildings and vehicles. Those face masks are now making perfect sense.

 

All that cotton is grown using irrigation, of course. This is, after all, the desert. My personal opinion is that there shouldn't be any farming going on at all that requires irrigation, water being a finite resource, but cotton doesn't strike me as being quite as much of an abomination as the pecan and pistachio orchards or the vineyards. When you grow a seasonal crop like cotton, you're using a lot of water for part of the year. When you plant trees, you're watering year round. Why anyone would think that planting orchards in a desert, especially orchards of trees that are not a natural desert species, is a good idea is a mystery, but way too many people are doing it.

Yet another reason to despise politicians

Listening to the news this morning I'm hearing quite a bit about the Keystone XL Pipeline project. This is a project that involves building a pipeline to transport Canadian crude oil extracted from the tar sands in northern Canada down through the United States to a refinery in Texas where the crude will be processed and then shipped to overseas markets. The oil industry and its paid hacks in Congress -- mostly Republicans but with a few Democrats, too -- have done a lot of posturing about what a boon this pipeline would be for the American economy. It would add jobs (a grand total of 35 to 40 permanent positions), it would help reduce the cost of gasoline, it's environmentally benign, . . . all the usual bullshit.

Because the pipeline crosses an international border, the project has been subject to review by the United States Department of State as well as to the other usual reviews pipeline projects have to undergo. It's been tied up for years, basically since the Bush administration departed. In fact, it's been tied up for so many years that the Canadian oil companies may be abandoning the idea -- there have been several news reports recently that pipelines are under construction and close to done that will transport the Canadian crude to a Canadian port city and the Keystone pipeline will be rendered unnecessary. My instincts tell me that's what President Obama's game plan has been: stall long enough that the Canadians come up with an alternative, which would get the Democrats off the hook. They would have avoided directly pissing off Big Oil and at the same time done enough of a balancing act to be able to keep telling the environmental activists, "see, we're tree huggers, too."

So why I am disgusted with politicians this morning? Or, more specifically, why I am disgusted with the Democratic party? Because the Democrats are so unbelievably short-sighted that some of them are pushing for approving a bill that authorizes construction of the Keystone pipeline in the bizarre hope that it passing such a bill in the Senate (it's already passed in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives) will help Senator Mary Landrieu's chances in Louisiana. Louisiana has a strange electoral system that has resulted in Landrieu being forced into a run-off election in December. The planned pipeline doesn't go into Louisiana -- as planned, it terminates in Port Arthur, Texas -- so why Landrieu or anyone else thinks it would be a game changer for her baffles me. Is it supposed to be proof she's willing to disagree with Obama? It's not going to work. Based on the current political climate in Louisiana, Landrieu doesn't have a prayer of winning, especially when she was bluntly (and refreshingly) honest about the influence of racism in voters' dislike of the President. Her only hope is to somehow practice Louisiana politics as usual and engage in a whole lot of backroom chicanery and fraud to hang on to her Senate seat. Nonetheless, in the bizarre and forlorn hope of being able to keep one Senate seat labeled D instead of R, the Democrats are contemplating fucking over both the country and the President.

And just what will they gain from this? Absolutely nothing. They'll still be the minority party in the Senate, they'll have made it even clearer what a bunch of spineless, unprincipled weasels they are, and they'll have weakened further the head of their own party. It's not going to gain them any points with the Republicans. Mitch McConnell et al. already know the Democrats are invertebrates; all supporting the Keystone pipeline will do is emphasize just how powerless the Democrats are. It's not going to help with bipartisanship. If anything, it just tells McConnell he's got a good shot at passing anything and everything the Republicans feel like proposing. There will be no compromises on anything, which is what McConnell made clear years ago was his operating philosophy. 

I really need to stop listening to the news. 

Heard this on the radio this morning

Joys of rural living

We're heading down to Eagle River later today to visit the Older Daughter. We're going to do a little Christmas shopping, we're going to strategize about Christmas dinner, and I'm going to bring her an early gift: our trash.

One of the major headaches of living in a rural location is trash disposal. Back in the good ol' days, every little village and hamlet around here had its own dump, a totally unsanitary, unlined, and unsupervised landfill (usually an old gravel pit) that the locals dumped everything and anything into, from dead appliances to household garbage. Those local dumps were fun for scavengers, but an environmental hazard in the long run. Sooner or later, chemicals leaking out of that trash would find its way into local aquifers. So states started regulating dumps -- the small local ones vanished first, then the larger ones, and we're now to the point where one landfill in Ontonagon County handles trash from a multi-county area. This presents some problems for those of us who live far, far away from the landfill and have no local trash pickup.

Our personal solution, such as it is, has been to compost anything compostable, flatten metal cans and toss them into a junker that's eventually going to a scrap metal yard, wash glass bottles and eventually bring them to a recycling center, and burn anything burnable. End result is that it's taken us over a year to fill one 30-gallon trash bag with trash that doesn't fit into any of the above categories, stuff like burnt out lightbulbs and a dead coffeemaker. So today we're taking that one 30-gallon bag down to Eagle River, and it'll end up on the curb there. Alternatively, we could drive into town here and put it on the Arvon Transit & Disposal truck, but  I can never remember which days and times the garbage truck is at its designated pickup points.

I have been thinking about trash a lot lately, especially after seeing an article in the L'Anse Sentinel about a Michigan law that recently went into effect: it is now illegal to incinerate any trash other than paper outdoors . Apparently outdoor burn barrels are a significant source of toxins and carcinogens in the air -- translation: burning plastic milk jugs and styrofoam meat trays is now illegal. It hit me while reading the article that if we were to strictly observe the law, our less than 1 trash bag per year going to a landfill would climb to multiple bags per month. It also hit me that those of us who live in remote locations are going to find a loophole pretty damn fast -- and of course there is one. It is now illegal to use something like this:

Something like this is, however, totally legal:

The loophole is that while it is illegal to burn trash in what is effectively an open fire, if the smoke goes up a chimney or stack, you're fine. I cheerfully predict two things will happen if/when people start being cited for illegal trash burning: sales of barrel stove conversion kits are going to climb, and variations on a simpler mod (slapping a length or two of stovepipe on a barrel lid) will pop up pretty fast.

It occurs to me, too, that, compared to Texas, rural Michigan is pretty darn civilized when it comes to burning trash. We at least put it in barrels instead of just raking it into the roadside ditches and burning it there.