Environment

Apocalypse has been given a bad name.  The Seventh Day Adventists are still around.  The Nike sneaker cult failed to open Heaven’s Gate.  The new millennium brought us George W. Bush, not Jesus H. Christ.  And everybody’s terrified of “drinking the Kool-Aid.”

But our species is living beyond its means.  If we continue down this path, the planet, our food supplies, our climate, and life as we know it will collapse.  If we bring population growth, read more

Uncontent with the existing methods by which industrialized societies poison themselves, local governments across the United States have apparently come up with a new one: adding chloramine to our water.  The case against doing so, seems to be pretty well documented.

Here’s an article from Cville Weekly.

Lorrie Delahanty provides some information and what can be done about it:

In March of 2014, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority plans to switch chlorine to CHLORAMINE as a disinfectant read more

U.S. District Court Judge Robert Wilkins heard the arguments on Friday in Washington, D.C., and is deliberating now on the question of whether young people can sue to compel their government to take serious measures to stop global warming. 

Judge Robert Wilkins is familiar with discrimination, having been the plaintiff in a well-known driving-while-black case of racial profiling in Maryland.  But few of us are familiar with the concept of discrimination against future generations.  read more

Here in the land of the free lunch and the home of the instant gratification, most people make a huge deal out of children’s rights or fetuses’ rights, or occasionally both.  Which is extremely bizarre — crazier perhaps than bombing houses in Afghanistan to protect the rights of the women inside them.  Because we’re engaged in the deliberate and knowing process of slowly and irreversibly rendering the whole damn planet uninhabitable.  If not our children, read more

A new book suggests that “It’s the economy, stupid,” may be more than political strategy; it may also be the key to environmental sustainability. The book is “Green Washed: Why We Can’t Buy Our Way to a Green Planet,” by Kendra Pierre-Louis. The argument developed is not just that the consumer choices of an individual won’t save the planet without collective action, but also that the only collective action that will save us is abandoning the whole idea read more

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Before trees got cleared out
While oil fumes belched out
And acid rain replaced the snow

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be filled up with spite
And the war on Christmas give you fright

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
And if this trend keeps up I might
Occupy a camp out
Until we stamp out
Every stinking coal plant within sight

The International Forum on Globalization has published the most concise, useful, readable, and damning denunciation of nuclear technology I’ve seen.  And it’s available for free as a PDF right here:

Nuclear Roulette: The Case Against a “Nuclear Renaissance”

Nuclear energy suffers from the following drawbacks:

The energy put into mining, processing, and shipping uranium, plant construction, operation, and decommissioning is roughly equal to the energy a nuclear plant read more

Last year I reviewed a book called “Apocalypse Never” that made a powerful case for our options being limited to two: either we get rid of nuclear weapons or humanity will be destroyed. I noted then a deep flaw in the case: the author accepted nuclear energy as something we could survive, focusing his opposition purely on nuclear weaponry.

A new film makes the additional case I was looking for. “Knocking on the Devil’s Door: Our Deadly Nuclear Legacy” by Gary Null read more