Daily Quick Read - September 4, 2019

“We have to make better choices”

Humanity is standing on the brink and I hope John Kerry is right.  He rightly calls out the “neanderthals” who are stuck with the status quo and remain resistant to the doing the hard work of saving the environment.  Wonder if anyone is listening to John Kerry?

The former US secretary of state John Kerry has warned that humanity risks marching off a cliff unless governments take immediate action to fight the climate emergency.

In a keynote address to the Global Table food and agriculture conference, Kerry made veiled swipes at the Australian government’s lack of climate and energy policy. He also weighed in on the heated debate about the massive Adani coalmine proposed for north Queensland.

“We just can’t sit on our asses and leave the political process to neanderthals who don’t want to believe in the future,” Kerry told the audience in Melbourne. “We have a dearth of leadership, but this will turn.”

“We’ve got a whole bunch of people running around trying to save the status quo – when the status quo is actually feeding a lot of jobs that don’t make sense.”

He said the transition to carbon emission-neutral economies would create better jobs and noted that the fastest growing employment opportunities in the US were for solar power and wind power turbine technicians.

He contrasted the growing US solar workforce of 300,000 people with the declining coal workforce of 50,000. Two years ago 75% of new electricity coming online in the US was renewable energy compared with 0.2% coal.

Kentucky Government Works for Crooks

I think John Kerry unfairly maligns Neanderthals.  After all, they couldn’t help being what genetics made them.  On the other hand, you have coal company executives and Kentucky politicians. They’re just a bunch of lowlife crooks out for themselves.

Near Cumberland, some miners have blocked a rail line, freezing a train loaded with coal for over a month. The company they worked for, Blackjewel, is the very model of a modern major company, at least in this country. It shut down operations and dove into bankruptcy at the beginning of July. Because it is a modern American corporation and, therefore, doesn't have the social conscience god gave a Gaboon viper, Blackjewel went out of business without "fulfilling its salary obligations," as the term of art puts it. More simply, the miners saw their paychecks bounce.

Interestingly, there is a law in Kentucky that requires a company that shuts down suddenly to post a bond ensuring that its employees get paid. More interestingly, according to an investigation by the Lexington Herald-Leader, no coal company founded in Kentucky over the last five years ever has met that obligation upon shutting down—including, obviously, Blackjewel.

Moreover, the Republicans in state government, led by Matt Bevin, the most unpopular governor in the country, tried recently to eliminate the requirement entirely. The attempt failed in the Kentucky House, but more than a few people suspect that the attempt was made at least partly to bail out Blackjewel.

LDS and H2O

What if the people who don’t care about your health and safety are the same as the people who claim to be your spiritual guides?   The cozy relationship between the LDS church and the Utah state government makes it easy for the government to turn a blind eye to health concerns in the state.

The camp’s amenities included self-service mess halls, flush toilets and showers, even one of those challenge courses, where we participated in exercises such as the “trust” fall, where our religious leaders taught us that God would always look after us.

We prepared traditional meals on the camp grills or provisional gas stoves and bonded by cooking “friendship stew,” a surprisingly palatable dish made with random canned goods supplied by the campers. We giggled, ate candy and haggled over extra shower time while we waited in line to fill our water bottles at the tap beside the camp pavilion.

None of us ever dreamed that the water might be unsafe.

Cancer is a Poor Person’s Disease In Texas

In Texas the state government has a very cozy relationship with the petrochemical industry.  The needs of the industry certainly outweigh the rights of citizens, particularly lower income citizens, to healthy air.

Many of the primary sources of pollution in Greater Houston converge in east Harris County. The Houston Ship Channel passes through the area, major highways intersect it, and petrochemical plants and refineries border its neighborhoods.

Juan Flores has lived with this reality for most of his life in Galena Park, east of Houston. He is raising a family there.

“I’m in the point of my life when if stuff smells, I don’t smell anything anymore,” he says as he stands by the ship channel, surrounded by smokestacks and massive chemical storage tanks.

The state is considering changes that could increase levels of a toxic gas believed to be responsible for some of the highest cancer risks in the country — particularly in east Harris County, where its production is concentrated.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is proposing raising the acceptable threshold for long-term exposure to ethylene oxide from 1 part per billion to 4 parts per billion. The agency says the proposed new standard is a level that “any person could breathe during the course of a lifetime and not experience a significant increased risk of adverse health effects.”

Prolonged exposure to higher concentrations of ethylene oxide can irritate the eyes, nose, and lungs. It can also damage the brain and nervous system and cause lymphoid and breast cancer.

The toxic gas can linger in the air for weeks, according to the EPA, and can be spread to other neighborhoods with prevailing winds, especially at higher temperatures.

Cooking In Las Vegas

The city and state governments are working to try and mitigate the worst effects of increasing heat in Las Vegas.  Can renewable energy and tree planting have any meaningful impact on the increase caused by global warming in the middle of a desert?  As, in Houston, the impact is the greatest on the poor, the elderly and children.

Las Vegas is the fastest-warming city in the United States, its temperatures having risen 5.76F since 1970. A June study of coroner data by the Las Vegas-based Desert Research Institute found a correlation between heatwaves and heat-related deaths in southern Nevada, both of which, they say, are on the rise. And a recent Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report warns that without global action to reduce carbon emissions, the city will probably experience 96 days of heat above 100F by the end of the century, including 60 days over 105F, and seven “off the chart” days that would break the current heat index.

The city’s poorest residents are most at risk. Fans and cooling systems can save lives, said Jill Roberts, the coroner office investigator, “but some people just don’t have the funds to fix their air conditioning or have working equipment”.

Hundreds of homeless people living in the city choose to camp in storm drains rather than sleep above ground – another dystopian irony to the city’s reputation for glitz and glamor. Those who dislike the tunnels often have to work hard to stay cool. Marcy Averett, 49, and her husband spend 15 hours a day collecting recyclables. But each day before they set off, they buy ice.