U.S. in Big Trouble from Big Money but We Can Still Help Stop Environmental Destruction on Our Own

We have to get the big lobbyist money out of Washington.  Everything that is done there is bought and sold. Every bill, every decision, is paid for by some special interest.  Everyone in Washington is swayed somehow or other by special interest and industry money.  Consider the health care “financial report” that was paid for by the health insurance industry.  (From TPM)  The goal of this report was to kill healthcare reform by scaring people into thinking that their premiums will rise and become unaffordable.

As a result of the big-money campaign on the part of the insurance industry, we got an inadequate health care reform bill out of the Senate Finance committee today, but it’s not real health care reform. (See: Baucus Committee OKs a Health Bill, But Not Reform)

It’s a bill bought and paid for by the insurance industry. It does not contain a public option, although Nancy Pelosi swears the House bill will contain a public option. How that will be reconciled is unknown. In the end, we will be asked to view a requirement to get health care insurance (or be fined) and no public option as some great new reform we should celebrate.

Since we can’t really do anything about that, I’m highlighting environmental news today,  because climate change is something we can all do something about. We can’t expect our government to pass anything meaningful or adequate, but we can all reduce our carbon footprint anyway. Use less, buy less, fly less, drive less, recycle more, use public transportation more, etc.

• Battle over Alberta oilsands now being fought abroad – Last week, near Le Havre, France, 30 activists scaled a security fence at the nation’s largest oil refinery.Inside, they clambered up towers and unfurled banners. Their message, roughly translated, was this: Get out of the oilsands; Get out of Alberta.
  The refinery’s owner, Total S. A., has been considering a multibillion-dollar expansion of their oilsands holdings. The CEO of the company’s Canadian division said in a published report last week a decision would come within months.” Greenpeace is stepping up actions like this (and for that reason I have recently donated to them) — we need more of this type of activism and they are willing to do it. Tar sands need to be shut down. Someone tell T. Boone Pickens, an investor in Tar Sands and a big greenwasher.
• Exploring the extreme frontiers of oil drilling–America’s energy landscape – Their success opened up a new drilling frontier—a monster oil patch holding between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. It was hailed as the largest discovery in the United States since 1968—a discovery potentially big enough to boost national oil reserves up to 50 percent. Since then, global oil companies have been pouring billions of dollars into these so-called ultradeep waters of the Gulf in pursuit of the region’s buried treasure.” Why would Grist highlight this drilling as though it were some kind of adventure? We have to get off oil and fossil fuels, not make them sound cool. Even if we preferred not to, we have no choice. Peak oil is about 30 years off and from then on it will be prohibitively expensive. No reason to pursue fossil fuels anymore when replacement renewable energy is available.
  
• Coal, Environmentalists Massing for Corps Hearings – Six public hearings beginning today by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concern its pending proposal to require coal mining companies to obtain individual Clean Water Act permits for dumping material resulting from mountaintop removal mining into valleys of Appalachia. Companies have used a streamlined permitting process up to now, but the Corps proposed to change or eliminate the streamlined process in July 2009 and announced it will hold these hearings – one in each of the six affected states – Oct. 13 and Oct. 15. Environmentalists opposed to mountaintop removal mining and coal companies are reportedly massing supporters to defend their positions on the practice.”  Help these people preserve their landscapes, lives and health. Coal is the dirtiest form of energy we use, besides the tar sands in Canada.  Visit I Love Mountains.org
• Pulling CO2 from the Air: Promising Idea, Big Price Tag – “If we really do get into a situation where we realize that we’ve changed the atmosphere too much for our own well-being, there are at least ways to back off of that,” argues climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford University, an expert on geoengineering. “There’s no fundamental limit on how much you could scale those activities up. It’s mostly a matter of how many resources you throw at it.” It would be so much easier to just stop pumping greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere. But Congress is owned by special interests, including coal corporations.  They insist on burning every last bit of dirty coal so we have to spend hundreds of billions to clean up the waste and the emissions.
• US Coal Plants Dump Thousands of Gallons of Waste Into Drinking Water Supplies a Day – A detailed report in the New York Times just revealed that hundreds of coal plants across the country are routinely dumping thousands of gallons of waste water into rivers and lakes–rivers and lakes that millions of people get their drinking water from.   So here’s why all that dumping is going on, in a nutshell–coal plants, as you well know, are extremely heavy polluters. Some plants pollute so heavily, some even spewing sickly yellow smoke, that little coal waste chunks litter nearby residents’ yards and coat their property in a thin film.” How is this tolerated?  Even worse, coal burning is protected and encouraged in the new Climate/energy bill.  People who complain about how dangerous nuclear power is should wake up and look at how filthy and toxic and radioactive COAL is.   Clean water is a human right.