Category Archives: Environment

How the Pending Trans-Pacific Partnership and EU-US Trade Deals Will Gut National Regulations, Hurt Budgets, and Undermine Sovereignity

Yves here. We’ve written from time time about the latest plans underway to further degrade the lives of ordinary citizens in order to fatten the bottom lines of major multinationals, namely, two major US-led international trade pacts. Even though the US media has given these pending deals scant attention, they represent a far-reaching effort to restructure basic legal and regulatory frameworks.

Ilargi: London Is Fracking, And I Live By The River

By Raúl Ilargi Meijer, editor-in-chief of The Automatic Earth, Cross posted from Automatic Earth

It’s a state of mind, a way of thinking and a belief system bordering on outright religion all in one. If it would be recognized as a religion, it would be the world’s biggest. Its followers and proponents hold that growth is a necessary element of survival, that technology is capable of solving all problems (especially those caused by mankind), and that the earth, nature, the living environment, is there for mankind to be exploited at will to achieve that growth

Michael Klare: The Third Carbon Age – Drop the Fantasy of a Coming Era of Renewable Energy

Yves here. To put none too fine a point on it, the most important steps to reduce carbon emissions would be a Marshall plan level effort to reconfigure living and resourcing arrangements so as to reduce energy demands, and to go particularly aggressively after the worst polluters (for instance, the cars you see spewing fumes, are surprisingly large contributors to total emissions from automobiles). But it’s much easier to go the Easter Island route and keep carrying on more or less as before until you hit insurmountable constraints.

Obama’s Own Party Wages War on Energy Plans

Yves here. Since I watch energy and environment stories only from time to time, I’m not certain of the significance of pushback by some in the Democratic party against Obama’s deliberately mislabeled “clean energy” plans, which translate roughly as “all fracking all the time”. Is it that Obama is moving a tad early into lame duck status? Is it that Democratic party Congresscritters learned from 2010, in which the Blue Dog Democrats who were aligned with Obama took big losses, and the bona fide progressives did well?

Ilargi: Capitalism, A Norwegian Rat And Some Cockroaches

Yves here. Ilargi takes up one of our favorite topics, how the fetishization of numbers and measurement is at best misguided and at worst profoundly dysfunctional, as we discussed in a 2006 article, Management’s Great Addiction.

James Galbraith on Social Breakdown and Financial Stress in Europe and Why the Word “Stimulus” Needs to be Banned

Yanis Varoufakis provided the English translation of a new interview with James Galbraith published in Suddeutsche Zeitung. Galbraith focuses on institutional arrangements, the need for restructuring and reform, and constraints on growth.

Fukushima Problems Escalating, Radioactive Water Going into Pacific

The Fukushima nuclear plant crisis continues unresolved in a bad way.

Wolf Richter: “Who Could Trust Such A Company?” – The Big Fat Lies About Radiation Exposure Of Workers At Fukushima

Yves here. This post is yet another reminder of how most companies’ first line of defense when they have engaged in seriously bad conduct is to lie, no matter how flagrant the lie is. Recall during British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon crisis when the oil producer repeatedly and grossly misrepresented the flow rate from its out-of-control well.

As Good as a Stopped Clock: The House Does Transparency

Yves here. This post illustrates yet another sign of decay among the ruling classes: that of not even bothering to go through the motions of following stipulated political and regulatory processes.

Michael Hoexter: Politically Fashionable Carbon Gradualism vs. Reality

Obama has unfortunately been backed by a segment of the environmental and policy community that believes or wants desperately to believe that fracked natural gas is cleaner and otherwise preferable to coal. But it’s already too late for this and other “carbon gradualist” strategies to be viable.

Gaius Publius: A Primer – What’s in a “Tar Sands” Pipeline?

In the wake of renewed interest in the Keystone Pipeline project and the likelihood that Obama will eagerly approve it unless we stop him, there’s a lot of interest in what actually flows through those pipes.

Has the U.S. Reached Peak Car?

Yves here. This post is a workmanlike compilation of trends in the driving habits of Americans. Some of the data shows that use of public transportation has been rising faster than population growth…yet budget stresses mean those services are regularly targeted for fare increases and schedule cutbacks.