154, 212, 369, 379, 381, 428, 431
EXPLOITATION OF COAL, OIL AND NUCLEAR ENERGY TO BE PHASED OUT WITHOUT LOSS OF CORPORATE REVENUE OR JOBS
No matter what the level of human responsibility for adverse climate change or deadly radiological sources, when compared to other factors such as natural under-sea volcanoes or naturally occurring radiation, it still remains, aside from overriding economic concerns to phase out dirty energy without penalizing the world wide economic network, that we need to act responsibly and aggressively to phase out man-made poisons in our environment, particularly the toxic by-products of coal, oil and nuclear fission, in conjunction with a reasonable implementation of clean energy alternatives.
The world's leading science journals report that atmospheric greenhouse gases have reached levels not seen for millions of years. Glaciers are melting ten times faster than previously thought, the Rio Grande no longer consistently makes it to the ocean, and species are vanishing as a result of climate change. In California, we are in the midst of a fifteen year drought that has become progressively worse in recent years. If this drought continues at its present pace for another ten years, Lake Mead will be dry, leaving 4,000,000 citizens of the greater San Diego megalopolis without water. Marine life is losing the struggle to survive as the oceans are awash with heavy metals like Mercury, and nuclear by-products such as Cesium and Strontium. It appears we are experiencing an ever increasing succession of extreme weather events, long-term droughts, and rising sea levels. Clearly, further catastrophic events and consequences will continue to occur if no action is taken.
Several CEOs of coal, oil and nuclear corporations maintain that they have changed their minds from a year or two ago. Many say they now believe that global warming or the stockpiling of radioactive waste may be a threat. They say they are phasing their corporations to become green, or more safe. But actions speak louder than advertisements. Those same corporations are aggressively building new plants. They have additional plants on the drawing board, and very little green alternatives by comparison. Meanwhile, the oil, coal and nuclear lobbies are allowed to continue showering money and favor upon regulators, legislators, and the public media.
Further, several of the politicians and experts who raise doubts about adverse climate change, or promote the safety and benefits of nuclear power, appear to be doing so in bad faith. Some of them are merely misinformed, but their minds are all captured one way or another by the lumber companies who see nothing but profit when they look at our forests, or by the dirty energy companies who like to cut corners and don't want to change their ways. In fact, many of our loftiest politicians have repeatedly disregarded the appearance of propriety by appointing representatives from the oil, lumber, pharmaceutical, nuclear and financial trading corporations in charge of the federal regulatory agencies that were designed to protect the people and the environment from the greed of those very entities in the first place. The good news again is that big business has always guided the direction of, and been protected by, the the countries wherein it operates. It stands to reason that government exists to protect corporations.But a time is upon us where legislation is sorely needed so that the representatives of the United States Senate and Congress can make sure the government's protection of the corporate powers is shared and returned to the people.
THE FILTHIEST, MOST POISONOUS, MOST EXPENSIVE FUELS ON THE PLANET
Sadly, disgracefully, for the sake of money, many of the bureaucrats and elected officials entrusted to protect us, have historically conspired with corporate lobbyists to keep America burning the filthiest, most poisonous, most expensive fuels on the planet. For the sake of money, they still conspire to cut down our forests, pollute our water and the air we breath.
They repeatedly cover up the pollution and the injuries caused by the production of toxic chemicals like Thimerosal, or the radioactive by-products of nuclear fission. Even if the burning of fossil fuels and the production of radioactive waste had nothing to do with damaging the environment, which it grievously does, the creation of phthalates and synthetic estrogenic chemicals from the production of the vast array of fossil fuel based plastics, and the heavy metals produced by nuclear technoligies has been scientifically proven to be causing serious problems in the human reproductive cycle.
It need not be cost prohibitive to produce oil based products responsibly and safely.
Reasonably drafted legislation can pave the way. Conversely, the corporate funding of deceptive propaganda, and the ratification by elected officials and media executives of the repeated cover-up of ongoing damage to the planet and the people, is actionable under federal and state law.
ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE NEXT DIRTY ENERGY DISASTER
I actually don't need to have an opinion whether the concept of global warming as caused by humans is a hoax or not. I am not moved one way or the other by scholarly papers claiming the production of nuclear energy is purportedy safe. All one has to do is look around at the deadly by-products of fossil fuels and nuclear fission, to comprehend that going along with the status quo is worse than staring into the barrel of a loaded shotgun.
For instance, I remember fishing for all kinds of marine life in the Chesapeake Bay when I was a child. The Chesapeake is the largest estuary in America, but sadly, fish can't survive there anymore. One would presume that by now the poisoning of our rivers and oceans, the environmental damages from underwater oil drilling, and the tragedy of Chernobyl in 1986 would have encouraged authorities to begin phasing out the filthy energy sources of illness and disease, in favor of the clean alternatives from the heavens. Instead, lobbyists and government bureaucrats have attempted to convince us that the damage created by using coal, oil and nuclear energy is not palpable, or that levels of pollution and radiation are acceptable in this great wide world.
Apparently these folks are oblivious or don't want to admit that the Earth is actually a small connected place, that the spec of dust on your desk might actually have traveled on the wind from the Sahara desert, or that any level of radiation is always potentially harmful. Cancer from radiation, whether from contact with particulate radioactive matter or radioactive rays such as we undergo at hospitals or checkpoints, always begins with just one microscopic unit of radiation breaking the DNA chain, in one tiny cell, and thereby interfering with the ability of that cell to regulate itself.
And as far as the concept of "Global Warming" is concerned, all one has to do is study the planet Venus to realize that the increased production of greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) cannot be good. According to Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, co-authors of "Livestock and Climate Change", the environmental impact of the life cycle and supply chain of animals raised for food has been vastly underestimated, and in fact accounts for at least half of all human-caused greenhouse gases. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Report, Livestock's Long Shadow, issued in 2006, estimated that 18 percent of annual worldwide greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs, and poultry. However, Goodland and Anhang assert that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions. Whichever account is correct, these kind of findings indicate that there has been an increased production of livestock and poultry to feed more humans on the planet, and that a good percentage of greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by vegetarian diets.
Notwithstanding questions as to whether increased greenhouse gasses present an immediate danger, which they do, or that nuclear energy is allegedly safe, which it is not, common sense still tells us that it would benefit the planet's atmosphere, its oceans, and its citizens greatly, if we can start to phase out the dirty, filthy fossil fuel and nuclear energy by-products from hell, and replace them with the clean energy sources from the heavens, like the wind, geothermal power, and the electrons that come down to us free, from the sun.
California's solar thermal plants a nationwide first
Construction has begun in Southern California on two solar thermal plants for Pacific Gas and Electric, and Southern California Edison, that will be providing 2.3 gigawatts of solar thermal power. By itself, the Southern California Edison deal is the world's largest solar energy deal. The plants being built are bigger, but will be more cost effective to build than most other new plants. These kind of solar thermal plants are cheaper to build than coal plants, cheaper than gas plants, and they are building them a lot faster.
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental advocate for the past 30 years, has said, "Once the plants are up and running, the energy is free forever. We won't have to go to Saudi Arabia and drill holes in the ground, then pump the oil up, and then refine it, and then ship it across the Atlantic with a military escort, and get in periodic wars in Mesopotamia and other places, and then have to distribute the oil across the country." Nor will we have engage in the expensive folly of burying or otherwise attempting to shield ourselves from the toxic by-products of nuclear electricity plants that produce the deadliest, most radioactive poisons ever known to man, or continually look for new places to store the radioactive waste while gambling that terrorists, earthquakes or other natural disasters will never cause them to leech or bleed into the environment.
We don't have to continue down that path. Electrons are hitting our country for free, every day. If we build plants to pick up the electrons, and the infrastructure to deliver them, we can put them into our power lines... And if we are to build this infrastructure across the country, we can eventually provide 100% of the energy needs in this country, in conjunction with other clean power sources, for about 750 billion dollars. And 750 billion is less than the amount we spend to purchase foreign oil each and every year.
What we need to make this work is a straightforward market place. We need an open marketplace that does what a market is supposed to do, which is to reward good behavior, which is efficiency, and punish bad behavior, which is inefficiency and waste. That is what Americans demand.
Today we have a market that is rigged to favor the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most expensive fuels from hell. We need to design a marketplace that rewards the clean, cheap, fuels from heaven. And we can do this rather quickly. For instance, in 1979 America started a national grid, a national backbone for the internet. In 1980, there were fewer than 500 personal computers in this country and IBM was saying it was a dead end technology. But now, every American has a PC, because we had a marketplace. Look at the effect that has had on the cost of information. It has plummeted to almost nothing. That same thing will happen with the cost of electrons if we follow through and build a national grid for electricity in this country.
Here is another example, in 1996, President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act which opened up the telecommunications grid and spawned a national, and worldwide telecommunications revolution. That is why we have an Ipod. Today there are companies that can provide unlimited long distance and local calling for $18 a year. That is what is going to happen to the cost of energy, if we build a national marketplace that operates in a straightforward manner.
We need to make sure that the market rules are aligned with our national interests, and with the global interest of saving our planet. We need to make sure that our utility companies can make money by getting their consumers to conserve energy, and that their profits are not dependent upon them selling as much energy as possible, and then we need to open up the grid so that everyone can get on it. If we follow through with these fundamentals of our clean energy plan, we will make every American into an energy entrepreneur, every home into a power plant, and we can power this country from American initiative and entrepreneurship of energy, rather than radioactive plutonium and foreign oil.
Fukushima Diiachi
Also of note in the “I told you so” department is my February 21, 2010 article which attempted to sound the alarm "ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE NEXT DIRTY ENERGY DISASTER" and foretold the invisible holocaust of the Fukushima Diiachi tragedy, and the denied impact is has had via the jet stream and the ocean upon California.
We all know that the threat could not have been so bad or else Congress would have done something to protect us, like seed the radioactive clouds created by the Fukushima explosions, so that the contaminated jet stream could have at least dispersed and diluted itself into the Pacific Ocean. If it was really so bad, they would have at least entombed the plant in concrete as the Russians did with Chernobyl. And if the airborne radioactive materials that set off alarms along the California's west coast a few weeks after the Fukushima explosions were harmful, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission would have surely never raised the standard for acceptable radiation limits thereafter. If there was any danger, certainly our elected California legislators would have taken some kind of action. Just click here to see if that is right or not.
Or maybe in their incompetence to protect us, compromised elected officials thought they could at least serve us by keeping the danger a secret so as not to raise alarm, such as was done during Word War II when the Japanese military used the jet stream to launch over 9,000 balloon bombs over America and the government ordered a total news blackout on the subject. But the Fukushima cover-up is not part of any war, and there is no enemy to deceive that we are not all being affected by the radiation, in the hope of our enemy cancelling their program. Meanwhile along the coast of California we are all being bathed in it as Tepco has been pumping 3 to 400 tons of radioactive water into the ocean for over three years.
Sadly, it appears instead that for pure financial and political concerns the U.S. government allowed itself to be lobbied and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission buried concerns and promoted their stilted safety record even as Fukushima melted. Let's be frank. The true facts have been covered up by politicians in the pockets of corporations developing nuclear energy just as they covered up and refused to clean up the 1959 nuclear meltdown which emitted 240 times more radiation from then secret site nestled within the hills of Simi Valley than New Jersey's Three Mile Island disaster in 1979.
The government kept that contamination emitted from the hills surrounding Chatsworth, and the Santa Susana Pass a secret for over 20 years, as Santa Ana winds gusted the radioactive dust into the San Fernando Valley and over the hills and beaches of Los Angeles. In 2008, activists finally forced the EPA to declare the area a superfund cleanup site.
As of today there has hardly been a scant amount of cleanup in face of the suffering of so many cancer patients, and the arguments of attorneys who just can't seem to see how winds blow radioactive particulate, or that the world is really an incredibly small place
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