Author Archives: marsxxzaa

Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere, As Far As the Eye Can See

by marsxxzaa Posted on December 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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One of the fundamental causes of the housing bubble of the aughts was a global glut of investment money with nowhere productive to go. So instead it went into housing, causing bubbles in the U.S. and several other countries. When the bubble burst, the economy tanked. And since the United States is so big, the Great Recession affected the whole world.

Here in America, we’d like to believe that we learned our lesson. And maybe we did. But there’s still a global glut of investment money around, and there still aren’t enough productive uses for it. So where’s it going? Neil Irwin reports that Nouriel Roubini thinks it’s still going into housing:

Roubini doesn’t see bubbles in the places where they were most severe in the pre-2008 period. He doesn’t mention the United States or Spain or Ireland. Rather, Roubini sees housing prices getting out of whack in quite a few small and mid-sized nations that are well-governed and managed to avoid the worst economic effects of the financial crisis: Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the London metropolitan area in the U.K.

….Roubini’s argument boils down to this: The major economies have been growing only slowly. Yet with low interest rates and aggressive central bank action across the globe, there is a giant pool of money that has to go somewhere. That somewhere has not been productive new investments, like companies building new factories. Rather, it has come in the form of people taking advantage of cheap credit to bid up the price of existing real estate in cities from Stockholm to Sydney.

The key problem, as it’s been for over a decade, is why investors can’t find enough productive uses for their money. Weak economic growth due to rising income inequality is one possibility. Another is the rise of cheap entertainment—Facebook, Xbox, World of Warcraft—which portends lower demand for physical goods and services in the future. Or maybe it’s because of steadily rising unemployment thanks to the growth of automation.

Whatever the reason, if this imbalance continues, it’s hard to see things turning out well in the medium term. We need either less capital formation or else more consumer demand—or both. The alternative is bubble after bubble. They may come in different places and different things, but what other alternative is there?

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Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere, As Far As the Eye Can See

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Want to Piss Off the White House? Talk About Climate Change

by marsxxzaa Posted on November 14, 2013

Mother Jones

Politico’s Glenn Thrush has a revealing new piece on the pressures of being in President Obama’s cabinet—a supposedly fun thing most of its members will never do again. There a lot of nuggets in there, but one in particular stood out: the White House’s private outrage at former Secretary of Energy Steve Chu’s impromptu decision to talk about climate change while visiting an island nation uniquely threatened by it. On a trip to Trinidad and Tobago with the president, a staffer persuaded press secretary Robert Gibbs to let Chu answer a few questions:

Gibbs reluctantly assented. Then Chu took the podium to tell the tiny island nation that it might soon, sorry to say, be underwater—which not only insulted the good people of Trinidad and Tobago but also raised the climate issue at a time when the White House wanted the economy, and the economy only, on the front burner. “I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans, and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes,” Chu said. “This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. … The island states … some of them will disappear.”

Earnest slunk backstage. “OK, we’ll never do that again,” he said as Gibbs glared. A phone rang. It was White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel calling Messina to snarl, “If you don’t kill Chu, I’m going to.”

Emanuel didn’t kill Chu, although that would have made for a more interesting story.

A couple things stand out here. Trinidad and Tobago is seriously threatened by climate change, and given the efforts of similarly situated island nations—the Maldives; Tuvalu—to call attention to the crisis, it’s hardly an insult to use the occasion of a trip to the country to talk about it. (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago’s capital, is 10 feet above sea level.) But this underscores just how narrow the White House’s thinking was at that time. Does anyone actually remember Steven Chu speaking out about sea-level rises in Trinidad and Tobago? Did it really distract from the president’s economic message? Were there mass protests in the streets of Port of Spain? Did it delay pending legislation or result in any electoral setbacks? The reality is that talking about climate change probably isn’t going to be a catastrophe, no matter how awkward it might seem at the time—but not talking about climate change most definitely will.

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Want to Piss Off the White House? Talk About Climate Change

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Which Helps Kids More: iPads or Eyeglasses?

by marsxxzaa Posted on October 2, 2013

Mother Jones

From an op-ed in the LA Times today by Austin Beutner:

There is a crisis in California’s schools. More than a quarter of a million children, most of them from poor and minority backgrounds, lack the technology they need to succeed in school.

Oh man, that really irks me, especially after reading yet another story about LAUSD’s idiotic, billion-dollar “iPad for everyone” program. Not to go all grampa on you, but technology isn’t our problem. What we need is —

Wait. What? I should read beyond the first paragraph? Well, OK:

But what they need has nothing to do with mobile devices or educational apps. It’s a technology nearly 800 years old: eyeglasses.

About 250,000 California schoolchildren don’t have the glasses they need to read the board, read books, study math and fully participate in their classes. About 95% of the public school students who need glasses enter school without them….We assembled a team of dedicated eye doctors and turned a couple of buses into mobile eye clinics. We travel to public and parochial schools in low-income communities in Los Angeles and screen each and every student.

….We commissioned an independent study….researchers repeatedly heard about how students’ classroom performance improved. They approached their schoolwork with more confidence and had more success….Parents reported a huge sense of relief. They said they could now understand their kids’ previous academic struggles and why their children had been anxious about school. In the words of one parent: “The teacher told me that now I don’t have to try to keep my daughter’s focus….Now she sees and tries, and I don’t have to be after her like before.”

That’s a technology program I can get behind. Beutner’s operation, called Vision to Learn, says it’s distributed about 10,000 pairs of eyeglasses in its first year for less than a thousandth of the cost of the iPad program. More like this, please.

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Which Helps Kids More: iPads or Eyeglasses?

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Venom P Stinger’s Raw, Relentless, Punk Retrospective

by marsxxzaa Posted on August 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Venom P. Stinger
1986-1991
Drag City

Like a furious blast of hot, rancid air, the Australian quartet Venom P. Stinger spewed startling punk-rock noise on the Melbourne scene during its prime. With all the subtlety of a steamroller, the band subjected what could have been, in gentler hands, catchy rock ‘n’ roll to a barrage of abuse, pushing its vibrant tunes to the edge of chaos without going over the brink.

For all the brutality, though, these guys could really play: Guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White brought fresh twists to the genre’s conventions, rarely lapsing into familiar tropes. Together, they would later form the more refined Dirty Three, an instrumental band with violinist Warren Ellis (not the novelist), as well as work with Cat Power.

At the center of the storm, singer Dugald McKenzie, formerly of Sick Things, brandished a voice so raw and relentless that the Clash’s Joe Strummer sounded like Frank Sinatra by comparison. Howling, barking and snarling with scabrous charisma, McKenzie suggested a wounded beast on the loose, which might not have been too far from the truth, since self-destructive habits allegedly sparked his departure from the band. In any case, this essential two-disc set collects Venom P. Stinger’s widow-rattling output, consisting of two albums, plus an EP and a single. Annoy the neighbors and blast it today.

For more great ’80s punk from Down Under, also check out last year’s four-disc set The Aberrant Years (Sub Pop), compiling recordings of the Sydney group Feedtime, who were more focused and just as exciting.

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Venom P Stinger’s Raw, Relentless, Punk Retrospective

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A Texan Tragedy: Ample Oil, No Water

by marsxxzaa Posted on August 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The video was produced by Climate Desk’s James West and reported by the Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg.

Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night in June when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.

“The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes,” she said, blinking back tears. “I went: ‘dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind.”

Across the Southwest, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.

Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry’s outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.

In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart’s case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking.

The town—a gas station, a community hall and a taco truck—sits in the midst of the great Texan oil rush, on the eastern edge of the Permian basin.

A few years ago, it seemed like a place on the way out. Now McGuire said she can see nine oil wells from her back porch, and there are dozens of RVs parked outside town, full of oil workers.

But soon after the first frack trucks pulled up two years ago, the well on McGuire’s property ran dry.

No one in Barnhart paid much attention at the time, and McGuire hooked up to the town’s central water supply. “Everyone just said: ‘too bad.’ Well now it’s all going dry,” McGuire said.

Ranchers dumped most of their herds. Cotton farmers lost up to half their crops. The extra draw down, coupled with drought, made it impossible for local ranchers to feed and water their herds, said Buck Owens. In a good year, Owens used to run 500 cattle and up to 8,000 goats on his 19,000 leased acres. Now he’s down to a few hundred goats.

The drought undoubtedly took its toll but Owens reserved his anger for the contractors who drilled 104 water wells on his leased land, to supply the oil companies.

Water levels were dropping in his wells because of the vast amounts of water being pumped out of the Edwards-Trinity Plateau Aquifer, a 34,000-square-mile water-bearing formation.

“They are sucking all of the water out of the ground, and there are just hundreds and hundreds of water trucks here every day bringing fresh water out of the wells,” Owens said.

Meanwhile, residents in town complained, they were forced to live under water rationing. “I’ve got dead trees in my yard because I haven’t been able to water them,” said Glenda Kuykendall. “The state is mandating our water system to conserve water but why?…Getting one oil well fracked takes more water than the entire town can drink or use in a day.”

Even as the drought bore down, even as the water levels declined, the oil industry continued to demand water and those with water on their land were willing to sell it. The road west of town was lined with signs advertising “fresh water,” where tankers can take on a box-car-sized load of water laced with industrial chemicals.

“If you’re going to develop the oil, you’ve got to have the water,” said Larry Baxter, a contractor from the nearby town of Mertzon, who installed two frack tanks on his land earlier this year, hoping to make a business out of his well selling water to oil industry.

By his own estimate, his well could produce enough to fill up 20 or 30 water trucks for the oil industry each day. At $60 a truck, that was $36,000 a month, easily. “I could sell 100 truckloads a day if I was open to it,” Baxter said.

He rejected the idea there should be any curbs on selling water during the drought. “People use their water for food and fiber. I choose to use my water to sell to the oil field,” he said. “Who’s taking advantage? I don’t see any difference.”

Barnhart remained dry for five days in June before a local work crew revived an abandoned railway well and started pumping again. But residents fear it is just a temporary fix and that next time it happens they won’t have their own wells to fall back on. “My well is very very close to going dry,” said Kuykendall.

So what is a town like Barnhart to do? Fracking is a powerful drain on water supplies. In adjacent Crockett county, fracking accounts for up to 25 percent of water use, according to the groundwater conservation district. But Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, argues fracking is not the only reason Texas is going dry—and nor is the drought. The latest shocks to the water system come after decades of overuse by ranchers, cotton farmers, and fast-growing thirsty cities.

“We have large urban centers sucking water out of west Texas to put on their lands. We have a huge agricultural community, and now we have fracking which is also using water,” she said. And then there is climate change.

West Texas has a long history of recurring drought, but under climate change, the Southwest has been experiencing record-breaking heat waves, further drying out the soil and speeding the evaporation of water in lakes and reservoirs. Underground aquifers failed to regenerate. “What happens is that climate change comes on top and in many cases it can be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back, but the camel is already overloaded,” said Hayhoe.

Other communities across a bone-dry Southwest are resorting to extraordinary measures to keep the water flowing. Robert Lee, also in the oil patch, has been hauling in water by tanker. So has Spicewood Beach, a resort town 40 miles from Austin, which has been trucking in water since early 2012.

San Angelo, a city of 100,000, dug a pipeline to an underground water source more than 60 miles away, and sunk half a dozen new wells.

Las Cruces, just across the border from the Texas panhandle in New Mexico, is drilling down 1,000 feet in search of water.

But those fixes are way out of reach for small, rural communities. Outside the RV parks for the oil field workers who are just passing through, Barnhart has a population of about 200.

“We barely make enough money to pay our light bill and we’re supposed to find $300,000 to drill a water well?” said John Nanny, an official with the town’s water supply company.

Last month brought some relief, with rain across the entire state of Texas. Rain gauges in some parts of west Texas registered two inches or more. Some ranchers dared to hope it was the beginning of the end of the drought.

But not Owens, not yet anyway. The underground aquifers needed far more rain to recharge, he said, and it just wasn’t raining as hard as it did when he was growing up.

“We’ve got to get floods. We’ve got to get a hurricane to move up in our country and just saturate everything to replenish the aquifer,” he said. “Because when the water is gone. That’s it. We’re gone.”

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A Texan Tragedy: Ample Oil, No Water

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5 Terrible Acts of Voter Discrimination the Voting Rights Act Prevented—But Won’t Anymore

by marsxxzaa Posted on August 6, 2013

Mother Jones

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law 48 years ago today. But this June, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court struck down a major section of the law, freeing jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to change their voting laws without federal permission. For decades, Section 5 of the VRA required a number of jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to seek the feds’ approval—called preclearance, in legal parlance—before modifying voting rules. The Supreme Court’s decision gutted Section 5, paving the way for new discriminatory laws.

Since the high court ruling, North Carolina has passed what critics have called the worst voter-ID law in the country, Texas pushed ahead with a voter-ID law and redistricting plan that the VRA blocked last year, and Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed to continue to challenge discriminatory voting laws despite the Supreme Court ruling. Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott announced this week that he would renew his efforts to purge “non-citizens” from the voter rolls, a messy, inaccurate practice that the Justice Department says violates the VRA and unfairly targets black and Hispanic voters.

In honor of the VRA’s anniversary, here are five recent and egregious examples of of minority discrimination that were blocked by Section 5, the part of the law the Supreme Court eviscerated in June:

In 2001, the all-white board of aldermen in the town of Kilmichael, Miss. (pop. 830), canceled town elections after an unprecedented number of black candidates made it onto the ballot. When the DOJ forced an election and the town finally voted, it elected its first black mayor and three black aldermen.
During a 2004 city council primary in Bayou La Batre, Ala., a Vietnamese-American candidate, Phuong Thanh Huynh, ran against white incumbent Jackie Ladnier. Ladnier and his supporters challenged about 50 Asian-American voters at the polls. Their reason? If they couldn’t speak English well, they might not be citizens. The DOJ intervened, and Huynh became the first Asian-American on the city council.
Texas is perfect example of the continued need for the VRA. The state has been repeatedly blocked from implementing both local and statewide changes that blatantly disenfranchise minority voters, from redistricting schemes to the elimination of polling places and early voting in minority districts. A report from Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund found that the between 1982 and 2006 Texas was second only to Mississippi in the number of DOJ objections under Section 5. One example: In 2007, officials in Waller County, home to the historically black Prairie View A&M University, enacted strict voter registration rules (without federal approval) that allowed them to reject voter registration applications, mostly from PVAMU students, for minor errors or omissions. After the Justice Department sued the county, a local judge told the Houston Chronicle that registrars “were maybe being a little picky with some of the things they were rejecting for.”
In 2008, Alaska submitted for federal preclearance a plan that would have required some Native Alaskan voters to travel by air or boat to cast a ballot. The state withdrew its submission after it was challenged by the DOJ.
After the 2010 census indicated that blacks had become the majority of the voting-age population in Georgia’s Augusta-Richmond, a consolidated city and county, the state legislature passed a bill that rescheduled voting from November, which had a traditionally high black voter turnout, to July, which had a low turnout overall, but especially for blacks. The change only affected Augusta-Richmond, and, not surprisingly, was rejected under Section 5.

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5 Terrible Acts of Voter Discrimination the Voting Rights Act Prevented—But Won’t Anymore

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Tax Reform This Year is Just a Charade

by marsxxzaa Posted on August 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Bruce Bartlett argues today that tax reform is a nonstarter this year. It’s insanely complicated; nothing exists even in draft form yet; and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp is busy thinking about a plan to run for the Senate in 2014:

Consequently, the idea that there will be a tax reform bill for the House to consider by the time it must raise the debt limit is ludicrous….Personally, I think Mr. Camp knows full well that he can’t do tax reform this year or next. He just wants a bill for Congress to consider so that there will be many opportunities to meet with lobbyists about their objections to one provision or another. This will help him raise campaign contributions for his very expensive Senate race.

This is your cynicism alert for the day. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong, of course.

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Tax Reform This Year is Just a Charade

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The Missing Children You Won’t See On Milk Cartons

by marsxxzaa Posted on July 2, 2013

Bud D.

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The Missing Children You Won’t See On Milk Cartons

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Keystone XL won’t use state-of-the-art spill technology

by marsxxzaa Posted on June 19, 2013

Keystone XL won’t use state-of-the-art spill technology

By Claire Thompson

Dan Holtmeyer

These women don’t trust TransCanada’s assurances about safety.

TransCanada swears that once the Keystone XL pipeline is operational, it will be totally safe. The company is apparently so confident — despite already having had to dig up and replace faulty stretches of the pipeline’s southern leg — that it doesn’t see the need to invest in state-of-the-art spill-detection technology. TransCanada is like that obnoxious seventh-grade skateboarder too confident in his sick moves to bother with a helmet.

The internal spill detectors TransCanada currently uses — in which sensors alert remote operators if pressure along the pipeline drops — are standard for the industry, but they’re designed to catch high-volume spills. Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

Keystone XL would have to be spilling more than 12,000 barrels a day — or 1.5 percent of its 830,000 barrel capacity — before its currently planned internal spill-detection systems would trigger an alarm, according to the U.S. State Department, which is reviewing the proposal.

New external technology, on the other hand, can identify much smaller leaks. For example, acoustic sensors can pick up the sound of oil escaping through a pinhole-size opening. And helicopters doing flyovers can be fitted with trash-can-size devices that detect oil vapors in infrared sunlight, potentially spotting leaks flowing at rates of less than 10 barrels per day.

Bloomberg Businessweek calculated that it would cost about $705,000 — $5,000 per mile — to install advanced fiber-optic cable technology along 141 critical miles of the pipeline, areas where drinking water, ecosystems, and population centers are at risk. That’s hardly a drop in the bucket compared to the overall $5.3 billion cost of the pipeline. And investing in better spill-detection technology pays off:

Equipment available to spot spills more quickly would have cut 75 percent off the estimated $1.7 billion toll in property damage caused by major incidents on oil lines from 2001 to 2011, consultants said in a December report prepared for the [U.S. Transportation Department].

Though the U.S. EPA recommended these new external detection tools be used on Keystone XL, a TransCanada representative told Bloomberg that they haven’t yet been sufficiently tested on projects the scale of Keystone, and that they produce too many false positives to be reliable. But it’s not like the current system is doing a bang-up job, either:

Internal systems such as the one planned for Keystone XL have a spotty record catching leaks, according to the Transportation Department’s report, prepared by the engineering firm Kiefner & Associates Inc., of Worthington, Ohio. Members of the public reported 23 percent of the 197 oil and liquids pipeline leaks between January 2010 and July 2012, according to the study, compared to 17 percent identified by the pipeline companies.

TransCanada claims to be studying, at the EPA’s request, whether it could implement the new technologies along environmentally sensitive portions of the pipeline.

The company has had its share of safety issues — record numbers of leaks and a shutdown on the original Keystone pipeline, an explosion of a natural-gas pipeline, accusations that it cuts corners on construction. And a report by researchers at Cornell estimates that we could see 91 major spills over 50 years from Keystone XL. So maybe it couldn’t hurt for TransCanada to spring for some new and improved safety features this time around.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Keystone XL won’t use state-of-the-art spill technology

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Support for climate action is the new normal in U.S.

by marsxxzaa Posted on May 24, 2013

Support for climate action is the new normal in U.S.

By John Upton

ShutterstockAmericans want more of this, despite what the fossil fuel companies might say.

Pick 100 Americans at random and line them up. Ask those who think the country shouldn’t do a damned thing to rein in its greenhouse emissions to please step forward.

Guess how many would do so?

Six.

Just six out of every 100 Americans believe there is absolutely no need for the U.S. to take action to reduce its emissions to help combat climate change.

That’s according to the latest survey result from an ongoing project that tracks public attitudes towards climate change. The project is run by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Those six people may look around awkwardly, feeling lonely and lied to by whichever media outlets convinced them that green energy was a fringe obsession of the lunatic left. Meanwhile, 59 of the people in our hypothetical lineup think the U.S. should reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of what other countries do; 10 think the U.S. should take action only if other countries do the same; and 25 are shrugging their shoulders and looking at their feet, unable to state an opinion.

The finding is a reminder that resistance to green energy in America is not created by its people, but by the global fossil fuel companies that pollute its land and water, screw with its weather, manipulate its media, and lobby the living shit out of its lawmakers.

Other results from the survey, which was administered in April, were also encouraging. For example, 70 percent of the 1,045 people surveyed said global warming should be a medium to very high priority for Congress and the president.

Despite the survey’s lopsided results, there remain reasons to be discouraged. Support for action on climate change actually waned over winter — a time of year when the effects of global warming can be less obvious. Take this graph from the survey report as an example:

“Public Support for Climate & Energy Policies in April 2013″

Click to embiggen.

But it’s Friday, so let’s revel in the positive. According to a summary of the results, the majority of Americans support the following:

Providing tax rebates for people who purchase energy-efficient vehicles or solar panels (71%);
Funding more research into renewable energy sources (70%);
Regulating CO2 as a pollutant (68%);
Requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax and using the money to pay down the national debt (61%);
Eliminating all subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry (59%);
Expanding offshore drilling for oil and natural gas off the U.S. coast (58%);
Requiring electric utilities to produce at least 20% of their electricity from renewable energy sources, even if it costs the average household an extra $100 a year (55%).

If only Congress would listen to the people instead of the fossil fuel donors and industry lobbyists, the U.S. could go green in next to no time.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

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Support for climate action is the new normal in U.S.

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, LG, ONA, PUR, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Support for climate action is the new normal in U.S.