And So It Begins . . .

Looking at what lies ahead for the Republican-controlled Senate, Georgia’s Johnny Isakson talked about the bills he wanted to see drafted right away: “The first thing I’d send the president is the Keystone Pipeline.” In fact, the fate of “KXL” right now rests on the robed shoulders of the Nebraska Supreme Court, but Isakson’s post-election point is well taken: Earth, watch out.

 Let’s back up: The purpose of the Keystone XL pipeline is to ship “dilbit” (diluted bitumen) from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries and ports on the Gulf Coast. Not surprisingly, given the South’s longtime prostration before Business, the southern leg of the pipe, from Oklahoma to the Gulf, has long since been completed without protest. For that matter, the “middle” leg of the pipeline also already exists, running from Steele City, Nebraska, to Oklahoma. So the controversy is all about whether to build the 1,200-mile “bullet” line from Alberta straight to Nebraska, replacing a patchwork of older, smaller pipes.

What’s the hold up?  Before Obama could respond to the State Department’s opinion, issued back in February, that there is “no compelling environmental argument” against completing the pipe, a Nebraska judge sided with landowners and overturned his state’s permit for the pipe’s construction. The state Supreme Court is supposed to settle the matter any day now.

In favor of the pipe, would be my guess, but so what? What if Obama gives KXL the green light? Hey, a pipeline is going to be built. Canada has vast reserves of this tar sands oil, worth a lot of money, and nobody is in favor of leaving it there. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is all about the pipeline, not surprisingly, since Canada is an oil giant right up there with Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, most of the nation’s oil reserves consist in this nasty tar sands bitumen, which is the consistency of asphalt and releases plenty of extra toxins at the refinery. Not to mention the nineteen bajillion additional tons of CO2 that will be rising into the atmosphere when the pipeline is delivering at full capacity.

It’s also unfortunate that the tar sands in question happen to be located under 54,000 square miles of (until recently) pristine boreal forest in east-central Alberta—the kind of forest the earth needs worse the faster they disappear. The Harper government is managing to not worry about that, or about the disappearing caribou, or the hundreds of square miles of chemical refuse lakes, or the ruined nesting grounds of millions of migratory songbirds. Its thinking, I guess, is that Canada is a huge country with plenty of wilderness areas, and if it wants to, by jiminy,  it can spare a little Florida-sized patch of ground in support of such a great industry and so many thousands of jobs.

Dirty or not, carbon-intensive or not, the oil is coming out of the ground. Canada is determined to ship it and sell it, if not out of the Gulf of Mexico then out of its own eastern and western ports. So if a pipeline is going to be built anyway, why not build it through the U.S. and put Americans to work? Why not just get behind old KXL and quit being such a party-pooper?

Writing about the pipeline in The New Yorker last year (9/16/13), Ryan Lizza lays hands on a report from a pro-oil Canadian think tank, which perfectly crystallized the issue. In the absence of Keystone, the steadily rising amount of oil produced would soon outpace the industry’s ability to export it. “If this happens, investment and expansion will grind to a halt.” Keystone’s capacity, on the other hand, would mean dramatically more oil coming down the line faster, which would increase, rather than inhibit, the speed with which this dirty oil is extracted and ultimately burned.

It’s pretty clear, isn’t it? KXL is simply a monster-sized enabler, and whether you support it or not depends upon whether you want to promote or retard the fossil-fuel energy business. Me, I want to retard it; I think that burning fossil fuels warms the atmosphere, and I believe the warming atmosphere is effecting changes in our climate that whoever’s around to deal with them will profoundly regret.

What I regret, today, is that the party now in full control of Congress wasted so little time announcing that it has less than zero interest in the health of the planet.

Drill, Baby, Drill! Still??

That was the subject of the “point-counterpoint” on the AJC opinion page the other morning. The “counterpoint”—on the bottom of the page—was a piece by Karen Grainey, chair of the Coastal Group of the Georgia chapter of the Sierra Club. Sierra’s agenda is clear, and Grainey represented it in a plea on behalf of the beauty, ecological richness, and economic value of Georgia’s coastal marshlands.

            Her worry is that the Obama administration has given the go-ahead to seismic exploration along the Atlantic coast, and the oil companies are lining up for the leases. Grainey doesn’t want oil derricks off Georgia’s coast. She remembers that the herring fishery in Prince William Sound never recovered from the Exxon Valdez spill, and she doubts that we’re anywhere near assessing the ecological damage to the Gulf of Mexico from the 2010 BP catastrophe. She hopes Obama will put on the brakes, decide not to grant the drilling leases after all, and focus instead on developing green power.

            In other words, Grainey was saying exactly what all of us reasonable and thoughtful people say here in the early decades of the 21^st century: that the earth matters, and that we need to stop trashing it.

            Hard as it is to believe, though, there is another way to look at things. The column on top of the page, “Protect nature, fill gas tanks,” illuminates this dark ideological terrain. Anastasia Swearingen, identified as a senior research analyst at something called the Environmental Policy Alliance (which is part of something called the Center for Organizational Research and Education), is pleased to confirm that all this relief we’ve been feeling at the gas pump is in fact a direct result of a “great boom in oil production” here in the U.S. And guess what? “Families could save even more money if the federal government wasn’t standing in the way.”

The U.S. holds “vast energy resources” in the Atlantic, but that infernal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management refuses to lease them. “The feds ought to open the spigot,” writes Swearingen, then spouts the predictable economic benefits: billions in “added economic value”—whatever that means—not to mention tax revenues and, of course, jobs.* Even figuring in the potential costs of the downside—ecological damage, oil-spill clean-up, increased carbon emissions—the benefits of exploring the Atlantic “exceed costs by 3 to 1.” Three to one? Wow. End of argument.

If any further reassurance were needed, Swearingen reminds us that “major oil spills are incredibly rare” and “the ability to clean up after tragic spills has improved immensely.” Just look at the Gulf, she says, where pessimists predicted an “uninhabitable wasteland.” But BP stepped up—hurray!—and “devoted dollars and man hours to Gulf restoration.” Today the Gulf is faring “better than expected by most accounts” and “permanent damage seems less likely.”

You’d swear it was a parody. But it’s not. A couple of clicks and you’ve discovered that the blandly titled Center for Organizational Research and Education is basically a PR firm representing big business and that the ironically titled Environmental Policy Alliance (EPA) is the Center’s pro-extraction, anti-environment wing. A trip to the EPA website, which describes the organization as "devoted to uncovering the funding and hidden agendas behind environmental activist groups," will confirm everything you suspect about this strange antiworld.

What is its appeal, anyway, except those who sit in the luxurious lap of Big Oil? That’s the mystery to me. Here on the same page of the paper are these two smart young people, one following the path of light and reason, the other fallen by the wayside, thrashing in the weeds of prevarication and hypocrisy. How does it happen? It’s like when poor and marginalized people vote Republican. You want to stand up and holler, Hey! Stop! Those people do not represent your interests!

I’m always hopeful that today’s young people are going to do a better job than their parents did of figuring out what’s what, and, particularly, who’s for ‘em and who’s agin’ ‘em. But then there’s Swearingen, working for that tired old man.  

I’m hollering. I’m waving. Anastasia . . . Anastasia . . . You’re still young . . . It’s not too late. . .

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* See “The Jobs Thing,” October 9, 2014.

On the Lighter Side: Aging

What’s with all these syndromes? You think maybe the pharmaceutical industry has figured out that if they name things they can prescribe things? Restless Leg Syndrome. Give me a break. Of course you’ve got restless legs. You’ve been sitting on your big butt all day. Your legs are restless, man. You don’t need a syndrome. Next we’ll have Horribly Coated Tongue Syndrome, for the affliction formerly known as “hangover.” There already is something called Gourmand Syndrome. I’m sorry. This is so embarrassing. But I . . . I love good food.

            Understand—I have great respect for true syndromes. I’m talking about the sorts of impairments that steal up on you quietly enough, but that, once rooted in your consciousness, plunge you into a downward spiral of paranoia and despair. Mine, THS, we’ll return to.

            Not all true syndromes are so devastating. Or they are, but boomer culture, as is its wont in the face of physical ruin, has transformed them into coffee-room gags. I’m thinking of CRS here—Can’t Remember Shit. You know what? I honestly cannot remember shit, and it’s about as funny as a two-headed chicken.

            Throw vision loss in with memory loss you’ve got huge laughs.

            Hey, Hon, seen my glasses?

            Well, where’d you put them?

            We wait a beat, then fall down in hysterics.

            That’s how we are, we of a certain age. It’s happening, but let’s not get all bent up about it quite yet. My hearing loss has developed an interesting new twist. (Dede and I have already gotten burnt out on the game of semi-intentional misconstruing: “Did you take a nap?” “Did I eat a slab of what?”) Now I not only don’t know what I heard; I don’t know where the sound came from. I might be in the kitchen and think the ice maker dropped a cube into the tray when actually a throng of guests just barged through the front door.

            But that’s not the one I’m talking about. Here’s the scene: You turn away from the bathroom sink to head into the bedroom when, behind you, the Old Spice topples over on the countertop. Or you’ve finished drying the dishes and begin to put them away when you look back to see one of the wine glasses teetering in a slow spin. Or maybe a dinner knife goes clattering to the floor.

            You didn’t see any of these things as they happened because, of course, you weren’t looking. You didn’t used to have to watch your hands every goddamn second of the day. Now you do, because you have TRAILING HAND SYNDROME.

            I’m the kind of guy who can’t pull a jar of pickles out of the refrigerator without tossing it up into a couple of slow 360s then catching it again just right. Know what I’m saying? I’m talking about my hands, my beautiful, adept, utterly dependable hands. Now they’re just trailing along behind me, knocking shit over. All loose items are at immediate risk.

            Remember the scene in The Twilight Zone when the bookish, bespectacled old guy is in the library catacombs when the Rooskies drop the big one but he’s happy as a clam because all he ever wanted was to be left alone to read books but then he knocks his glasses on the floor and steps on them?

            Not funny.

35 Thousand Signs of the Times

I missed this story when it broke on October 2. Most big papers covered it, under headlines more or less like Justin Moyer’s: “As sea ice melts amid global warming, 35,000 walruses crowd the shores of Alaska” (“Morning Mix,” washingtonpost.com).

            I got wind of it 16 days late, via the Gail Collins New York Times column that the AJC reprints on Saturdays. Her headline was “Politicians ignore dire signs of climate change,” and while this record-breaking congregation of walruses was her hook, she was really after those politicians: Alaska Republican senate-hopeful Dan Sullivan obfuscating, “There is no concrete scientific consensus on the extent to which humans contribute to climate change”; Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal calling climate change a “Trojan horse,” WeverTF that might mean; Mitch McConnell’s historic pronouncement on behalf of the entire thumb-up-your-ass crowd: “I am not a scientist.”

            It’s a great column, but let’s get back to those walruses. For those of you who, like me, are a little hazy on marine mammals in distant climes, walruses are those comically bewhiskered, grotesquely betusked, pathetically beflippered, and enormously beblubbered animals you see lounging around on ice floes. True, in the frigid waters where they spend two-thirds of their time, whiskers, tusks, flippers, and fat come in handy—whiskers to find those kilos of bivalves on the ocean floor, for instance, and the icepick tusks to “haul out” onto the ice once the 3,000-pound beasts have stuffed themselves. They forage in the shallow waters of the continental shelf, following Arctic ice north as it melts in the summer and back south again as the water refreezes in winter.

            In early summer, the females haul out onto the ice to deliver the 100-plus-pound calves that have been gestating for fifteen months. The young, though they can swim at birth, spend a year on the teat and may choose to tag along with their mothers for several more after that. Young males loaf the first half of their lives away, shirking their duty to the species until they’re 15 or so. Right away they go back to their old ways and have no truck with child-rearing—an arrangement the females seem to have no objection to. What with the “nature red in tooth and claw” business, walruses seem to have it pretty good. Found their niche, you might say, following the weather.

            Which brings us back to the 35,000 that made the headlines. They’re part of the Pacific population of 200,000, by the way, which represents four-fifths of the world’s total. They’ve hauled out on Alaska’s extreme northwest coast, where the Chukchi Sea turns into the Arctic Ocean. Walruses routinely haul out on land, in small groups, mostly males, but the 35,000 are mostly female with their young. It’s hard to imagine that they like it there, with a dwindling food supply and crowded, messy quarters—not to mention the violent stampedes incited by polar bear attack, which cause so many fatalities among the young as to be a serious conservation concern.

Well, why don’t they leave? Because their ice has disappeared, and they’re waiting for cold weather to bring it back.  It’s been happening more and more. Three years ago, an unheard-of crowd of 30,000 walruses hauled out on land for the same reason. I think I can predict with confidence that 2014’s claim on the record will be short-lived. As the U.S. Geological Survey reported plainly, “The walruses are hauling out on land in a spectacle that has become all too common in six of the last eight years as a consequence of climate-induced warming. Summer sea ice is retreating far north of the shallow continental shelf waters of the Chukchi Sea . . .,  a condition that did not occur a decade ago.”

Isn’t shrinking sea ice visible? Isn’t it measurable? Isn’t it infactable? Yes, in fact, it is. National Geographic’s October 2 report on the walruses (“Biggest walrus gathering recorded as sea ice shrinks”) cites the official NASA estimate that Arctic sea ice has retreated by 12 percent per decade since the late 1070s. It also links to the NASA website for confirmation.

“The walruses are telling us what the polar bears have told us and what many indigenous people have told us in the high Arctic,” says Margaret Williams of the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic program, “and that is that the Arctic environment is changing extremely rapidly and it is time for the rest of the world to take notice.”

Is it time? Say so at the polls in 10 days.

The World in Crisis . . . Again

Ebola. Wow. Now a second nurse in that same Texas hospital has contracted the virus—and she got on a plane! “We’re terrified,” said another nurse at another hospital, prompted, maybe, to say something very much along those lines. On TV news shows, experts are gravely concerned.

                ISIS. Beheadings on video. Jay. Now we’re bombing the crap out of these people. Got to. They’ve showed they stop at nothing, and once they take over Iraq and Syria, then what? So good. Bombs away. All I’m saying is, just don’t forget about the ones pouring into the U.S. across the Mexican border. (And while we’re not forgetting, let’s not forget that the leader of a Mexican drug cartel will behead you as quick as look at you.)

            Europe is teetering on the brink of a post-recession recession, and U.S. markets are suddenly tanking. How’s your retirement, by the way? Not going to be a burden on your children, are you?

            And how about Ferguson? Nobody ever went broke by reminding us that we are a deeply racist society and that our cities could explode at any moment and that your store might be the next one to be looted.

            Do you ever wonder why we’re encouraged to be so afraid?  It’s not a new question. I expect books have been written on our “culture of fear,” and if you’ve read those books you’re way ahead of me.

            I do have a couple of thoughts, though, if you’ll permit a couple of generalizations. It seems to me that fearful people would be inclined to hunker down, hold what they got, and resist change, right? And wouldn’t that work to the advantage of the powerful? Remember “death panels.” Right out of the VIP (vested interests playbook). You might have no insurance to cover your battle against a life-threatening disease, but at least your fate isn’t going to be decided by some faceless, godless OBAMACARE DEATH PANEL!!! Okay, okay. It’s fine. Don’t change it.

            I’m also hazarding the generalization that fearful people make great consumers. Lots of products out there to make us feel safer—from houses in gated communities, to security systems, to private schools, to gazillions of guns. Then there’s the whole other ocean of products that address an even deeper fear—that is, the fear that we’re not sexy enough. Not just the plastic surgery, diet plans, gym memberships, deodorants, shampoos, and white teeth. No. We who fear we’re not sexy enough want everything the sexy people on TV have—the Lamborghinis, the Lear Jets, Caribbean islands all our own. Now we’re talking high-end. Now we’re talking consumption. Point being, consumption has built an opulent palace for the powerful, and they seem to like it there.  

            Important distinction: Fearful people are not desperate people. Desperate people are among the things that fearful people fear most, and in fact (as we see on news TV 24 hours a day) desperate people are used by powerful people to keep fearful people fearful.

            I hate to give the impression that the powerful people have us fearful people by the short hair, but I’m afraid they do.