environment – Page 5

Killing GM to save it

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

A follow up on yesterday’s post on General Motors:

Having watched Michael Moore’s appearance on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night, and read Moore’s blog post on the bankruptcy, I am convinced that we had little choice.

I also am convinced that we have a great opportunity. Consider this comment from Moore from his blog:

The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we’ve allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

He offers a mostly sensible plan for what we — GM’s new owners, the American people — should build in the old automaker’s place:

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We are now in a different kind of war — a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call “cars” may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn’t give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true — that there are only a few more decades of usable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.

2. Don’t put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce — and most of those who have been laid off — employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.

3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades — and we don’t even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven’t used it, is criminal. Let’s hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.

4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.

5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.

6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we’re going to have automobiles, let’s have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories — that simply isn’t true).

7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.

8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.

9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Not all of these suggestions are going to fly with the American public, but Moore’s laundry list offers a great starting point, a way of taking President Obama’s professed commitment to building a new economic order based on alternative energy and conservation and forcing it into the debate by showing that the economy and the environment are inextricably linked.

Moore implores the president, GM’s management and the United Auto Workers not to “save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs.”

This is not a long-term solution. Don’t throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.

A new direction is needed, he says, and he is right.

Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front — and the back — seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it’s over. It’s a new day and a new century. The President — and the UAW — must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.

Money makes the world radioactive

I shouldn’t be surprised by stories like this — Nuclear Power Gets Boost From Top Campaign Cash Recipients — and yet surprised I am. Money is poison to good policy.

Energy ground zero

Clean coal may be coming to New Jersey — a Massachussets firm wants to build a $5 billion, 500-megawatt electrical generating facility that would capture emissions, pump them a hundred miles and store them under the Atlantic Ocean.

If approved and built, it would be the first plant of its kind and would move us in a new energy direction, say advocates. It would allow us to continue using coal — the cheapest energy source — without its polluting effect, they say.

But there is a flaw in the reasoning. Finding a way to limit or eliminate the emmissions from energy sources seems a positive step, until it is made clear that there are other environmental problems with coal and other fossil fuels.

Even if the sequestration process works flawlessly, we’re still left seeking energy sources that require us to disturb large amounts of land — to find the coal and to create the piping infrastructure that would allow us to bury it.

I think Jeff Tittel, president of the New Jersey Sierra Club is correct:

“Coal is like heroin — cheap, plentiful and addictive, but very dangerous and to get it they take down mountains along with square-miles of trees, adding to the carbon output and environmental damage.”

Rather than find ways to make bad fuels less bad, we need to reduce our energy consumption — more efficient homes, cars, buildings — and find ways to make truly renewable sources like wind and solar cheaper.

I love that dirty water….

It’s been a 180-degree turn for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with today’s announcement on carbon once again makes clear:

The Obama administration took another step toward regulating carbon dioxide, issuing a notice Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency will review whether those emissions should fall under the Clean Water Act.

The EPA earlier this year determined that C02 should be regulated under the Clean Air Act due to its impact on temperatures. But Tuesday’s notice — soliciting scientific data as to what extent seas are made more acidic by C02 — could extend regulation out to U.S. waters.

The notice was in response to a petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, which wants the EPA to impose stricter pH criteria for ocean water quality and publish guidance to help states protect their waters from ocean acidification, which reduces pH levels.

“As more CO2 dissolves in the ocean, it reduces ocean pH, which changes the chemistry of the water,” the EPA said in its notice. “These changes present potential risks across a broad spectrum of marine ecosystems.”

And so, maybe, we still have a fighting chance to reverse this thing.

Don’t forgot the Supremes

Not Diana Ross’ girl group, but the nine black-robed justices sitting in Washington, the ones who decided the 2000 election and currently have a decidely conservative, pro-business tilt.

It was easy to do — forget the Supremes, I mean — in the wake of the election of Barack Obama and all the discussion over the Minnesota Senate race and the huge electoral shift.

But conservatives still have an oar in this river (race?) in the form of five justices — Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy — as today’s ruling on cost-benefit calculations and the Clean Air Act shows:

In a defeat for environmental groups, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the Environmental Protection Agency may use cost-benefit calculations to decide whether to require power plants to make changes that could prevent the destruction of billions of aquatic organisms each year.

The decision affects more than 500 power plants that are collectively responsible for more than half of the nation’s electricity-generating capacity. The plants use more than 200 billion gallons of water from nearby waterways each day for cooling, and they kill vast numbers of fish, shellfish and other organisms in the process, squashing them against intake screens or sucking them into cooling systems.

The environmental agency weighed the costs of making changes to the plants’ cooling structures to protect the organisms against their value expressed in dollars. Considering only the 1.8 percent of the affected fish and shellfish that are commercially or recreationally harvested, the agency concluded that the organisms at issue were worth $83 million.

Requiring the plants to convert to closed-cycle cooling systems, which recirculate water, would have saved almost all the organisms but cost $3.5 billion a year, the agency said. Instead, it ordered far cheaper changes that spared fewer organisms.

The question in the case was whether Congress had authorized that cost-benefit approach in the Clean Water Act, which requires cooling water intake structures to “reflect the best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that the agency’s approach was not permitted by the law.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for himself, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said the agency’s approach “is certainly a plausible interpretation of the statute” and was thus entitled to deference.

That leaves it up to the Obama administration and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to end the cost-benefit practice.