Earth Pub: New home of Earth Impacts

June 08, 2009

Just in case any body is wondering why I have not posted recently: I have, just not here. The Earth Impacts blog has been folded into the Earth Pub blog, which is the official blog of Discovery Earth. So set your browser favorites or bookmarks to Discovery Earth, where there is always a box showing the latest Earth Pub posts, including not only my musings but those of John D. Cox, Kieran Mulvaney and Michael Reilly. Better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed. And many thanks for clicking our way!

The Silver Lining

January 28, 2009

If you're like most folks these days, your reality is looking kind of warped. One year ago most informed folks around the world frowned on Americans for consuming too much and not giving a damn about it. Today Americans are smarting from economic troubles and consuming less. Is the world applauding? Nope. The world now wants us to consume more to stimulate their economies....(read the rest at the new Earth Pub blog)

Discovery Earth -- now live

January 23, 2009

I've been a bit busy and neglected this blog over the last week or two. My excuse is a pretty good one, however. I've been hard at work on Discovery Earth, the newest Discovery Channel website. If you have enjoyed any of the posts on this blog, you will love Discovery Earth. There are videos, blogs, news, images, puzzles, opinions, slide shows and lots of other geoscience and environmental science stuff. The site is live now, as of a few hours ago. Be the the first Earthling on your block to discover it!

Pirates & Radioactive Waste

January 08, 2009

Here's a revealing article that rings true to me. The infamous Somalian pirates are not what they seem and the genuine criminals are not who you'd expect. Bottom line: Somalia's anarchy is being exploited not by the pirates but by other nations. The Somalian waters, coastal areas, people and wildlife are paying a horrible price as organized crime, to name just one exploiter, dumps radioactive waste from Europe in the lawless Somalian seas. Seems the mainstream media has missed this bigger story entirely.

Staying Awake For 4 Years

January 07, 2009

Okay, so you elected a new president who has every indication of being more environmentally and scientifically aware than the guy leaving office (not saying a lot, since I've known hamsters more environmentally aware than the Bush administration). So what do you do now? Just go back into that doze that allowed Bush and Cheney to undo decades of environmental law and protection? I hope not. The League of Conservation Voters has a fun little video reminding folks that we need to help this new president out (as well as keep him on track, IMHO). Here it is:

Earth Spinning Slower

December 09, 2008

If you missed the big news maybe you felt it in your bones: The Earth's spin has slowed enough to add a "leap second" to the end of 2008. The Associated Press story linked to above, however, fails to mention why the Earth is spinning down. Turns out it's all the fault of Al Gore. No wait, it's Exxon's fault. Just kidding. It's really not anyone's fault. Maybe God's fault, if you absolutely have to assign blame.

One thing not to blame, for a change, is global warming. Despite the fact that climate changes can cause winds and ocean currents to slow or speed up the spin of the Earth, those are tiny, itty-bitty changes that don't warrant a leap second. What's really happening is the same thing that's been going on for billions of years: The Earth's spin is very gradually slowing down. It's just one great big spinning top, after all, in a very low-friction environment that allows it to keep spinning for an extraordinarily long time. But not forever.

Some of my colleagues think this is a pretty depressing bit of news. But I say longer days are a good thing. Let's have more quality, not quantity of days. Enjoy that extra last second of December 31st by smiling and saying "One Mississippi" then "HAPPY NEW YEAR!"

Irrational Recession

November 23, 2008

Somebody explain this to me: How can we be in so much growing economic trouble despite the fact that we are not facing a resource shortage? Let me put it another way. For the great bulk of human history and prehistory hard times have been tied too little water and food or too much war and disease. Today in the "developed" nations we are not facing any of these at the moment. Yet still there is this gigantic "economic" strife heading at us like a full-steam locomotive.

As a practical, resources-oriented person, the whole situation seems surreal. It reminds me of an argument I had with a fellow back in the 90s. He asserted that the "tech boom" made the world prosperous. I countered that no one prospers without adequate natural resources, and there were many places lacking the resources to prosper, no matter how many websites people were building in Santa Clara, California. In other words, you can't make an economy entirely out of ideas. You need real physical stuff too -- soil, ore, water, sources of energy, etc. This is a very normal geological view of things.

Today it's a strange mirror image of the 90's: A collapse of prosperity despite the availability of resources. How can this happen? We know all the typical explanations by now. But when we really get down to the details and start looking for solutions, most folks can't fathom it. It's not only beyond their comprehension, I suspect it's beyond comprehension -- PERIOD. At very least it's outside of the current economic paradigm.

So this begs the question: What are our economist's not seeing, not asking, and/or refusing to face about the way we run our world? Could it be that all of this trouble is the result of that ancient human sin: Crazed hoarding of resources by a small number of the population? Or is it even worse: Madness and chaos of an economic system that simply grew far beyond the capacity of its foundation to support it, and so teetered and fell? I don't know. I don't know the answers. I suspect no one does. But it does involve madness. That's the one ingredient about which I'm fairly certain. 

Undecided Voters & Global Warming

October 20, 2008

One of the great mysteries in America these days are the Undecided Voters (UVs). We Decided Voters wonder: Who are these UVs and what makes them tick? What on Earth will make them decide? Are they sentient beings and is there any hope we will ever find a way to communicate with them?

Researchers at Yale University and George Mason University think they have some answers. In their Oct. 14 national survey of 2,189 registered voters they found that two out of three of the undecided voters (who were 9 percent of the total) say that a presidential candidate's position on global warming will influence their vote.

Excuse me? Don't the candidates already have positions on global warming? In fact, don't they kind of agree on it? How is that going to help a UV? But perhaps my fever of decidedness has fogged my glasses. Let's just read directly from the Yale press release:      

   While few undecided voters rated global warming as the single most important issue that will determine their vote, 62 percent of undecided voters, 64 percent of voters leaning toward McCain and 75 percent of voters leaning toward Obama indicated that global warming is one of several important issues that will influence their vote. "Even in the midst of the nation's financial turmoil, global warming remains an important issue for large numbers of voters," said Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale University.

Okay. This is good. Maybe. My big worry has been that the economy would bury the overarching, but more difficult environmental issues facing humanity. So this gives me hope. Not much hope, mind you, but a dribble of optimism that the other issues which our beloved UVs rate as highly as global warming are not such things as UFO conspiracies and the national decline in palm readers. Alas, it still may not help...

          In the race to earn undecided voters' trust on the issue of global warming, the two candidates are in a dead heat. Fifty percent of undecided voters trust John McCain as a source of information about global warming and 51 percent trust Barack Obama. "In the closing days of this election, each of these candidates still has an opportunity to make their best case on global warming to these critical voters," said Edward Maibach of George Mason University.

...and neither candidate is likely to, IMHO, since neither one has anything new or strikingly different to say about it. But, really, it doesn't matter. Even if Obama or McCain were to say something significant, the same survey revealed that many UVs won't believe them....

         Surprisingly, however, 45 percent of McCain supporters distrust John McCain as a source of information about global warming, while only 15 percent of Obama supporters distrust their candidate on the issue.

So where does that leave an especially distrusting UV? Not only are you being pecked to death by competing issues, but you don't trust the candidates. You are alone, alone, alone in a vast wilderness of decisive people you don't understand. Where is a good palm reader when you need one?

The Impossible Bailout

September 30, 2008

While U.S. Lawmakers quibble over how to reward bankers and stockbrokers for their greed, stupidity and hubris, there is a far more perilous debt racking up on this planet that is utterly below the radar of most media outlets. It's the resource debt: How much humanity is consuming each year beyond the capacity of our planet to produce. Here's a nice website which explains what this is and how we are flirting with disaster in this regard.

One of the main differences between the Wall Street bailout and the resource debt or "overshoot," as it is called, is that there are always those poor saps, the U.S. taxpayers, to fall back on when the Wall Street falls apart (just please forget all those years of Wall Street preaching to us about the nearly divine form of capitalism they practice and how it is magically self-correcting and naturally just). The resource overshoot, on the other hand, has no fall-back position. There is no other verdant planet we can pillage to make up for what we are over-consuming here. There is no wiggle room, except to squeeze harder on our less fortunate bothers and sisters, which we're already doing. No, we overuse this planet and we and lose it. Period. End of species, or at least 10,000 years of civilization.

Despite this, most folks totally ignore the matter and proceed as if this small planet has unlimited resources. What else is a Hummer owner doing? What else could a gigayacht owner be doing? What other logical end is there to the irrational "Theology of Bling." Even worse, more and more people around the world even think it's just fine to hoard as much wealth (a.k.a. access to and control over resources) as they can. It's not fine, of course, because it only digs us deeper into the hole (besides being just plain vile and unethical). It's insane. It's disastrous. But it's going on at a greater and greater clip. It's the Tragedy of the Commons on a global scale. This is not alarmism. It's just common sense to anyone who remembers that we live on a pale blue dot.

Sex & Drugs for U.S. Oil

September 11, 2008

Need a good read? There is a new report out yesterday from the U.S. Department of Interior's (DOI) Inspector General's office about the sex, drugs and gifts that some DOI employees traded with people in the private oil biz. I'm not exaggerating one jot. This is not one of those dry, bureaucratic tomes. There's some incredibly bad and criminal behavior reported here and far too little punishment. Here's the opening paragraph. Notice especially the last two sentences:

"This memorandum conveys the final results of three separate Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigations into allegations against more than a dozen current and former Minerals Management Service (MMS) employees. In the case of one former employee, Jimmy Mayberry, he has already pled guilty to a criminal charge. The cases against former employees, Greg Smith and Lucy Querques Dennet, were referred to the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice (DOJ). However, that office declined to prosecute. The remaining current employees await your discretion in imposing corrective administrative action. Others have escaped potential administrative action by departing from federal service, with the usual celebratory send-offs that allegedly highlighted the impeccable service these individuals had given to the Federal Government. Our reports belie this notion."

The report goes on to describe a "culture of ethical failure" within the Mineral Management Service in which the top dogs went out of their way to NOT apply ethical standards to themselves and did all sorts of nefarious things to personally profit from domestic oil resources. It also mentions the refusal of one oil company, Chevron, to cooperate with the investigation. Here's some more:

"We also discovered a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity in the RIK (Royalty in Kind) program - both within the program, including a supervisor, Greg Smith, who engaged in illegal drug use and had sexual relations with subordinates, and in consort with industry. Internally, several staff admitted to illegal drug use as well as illicit sexual encounters. Alcohol abuse appears to have been a problem when RIK staff socialized with industry. For example, two RIK staff accepted lodging from industry after industry events because they were too intoxicated to drive home or to their hotel. These same RIK marketers also engaged in brief sexual relationships with industry contacts. Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length."

So you see, our government really, literally, has been in bed with the oil companies. This brings to mind a critical principle I've observed in every organization I've ever been a part of (including a short time in the DOI) or watched closely: Ethics, or the lack thereof, always flow down from the top.

So after eight years of having extreme opportunists like Cheney and Rove at the top, is it really any wonder that our country is in the midst of a financial crisis caused by an ethical vacuum? Is it any wonder that oil companies have been given free reign to tear apart public lands at an unprecedented rate, without any concern for wildlife or future generations? And is it any wonder that Sarah Palin recently got Cheney's nod, since her record in Alaska reportedly shows she too supports this sort of scruple-free government (as well as some totally unfounded, ludicrous Bible prophecies that predict End Days any time now, which conveniently and perversely justify not preserving the planet for future generations).

Folks, it's like the bumper sticker says: If your not furious, you're not paying attention.   

Image: BLM