A Change in the Wind

Poetry vs Oil (and bulldozers)

Vancouver poet Stephen Collis writes about the poetic resistance to another pipeline planned to transport oil sands slurry from inside western Alberta to market in Poetry vs. Oil. 

Right now, one major pipeline carries the goop to Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet, where it is loaded onto supertankers tourists can wave at from scenic Stanley Park. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, south, to Texas, has been (temporarily, perhaps) blocked. So now there are plans for a “Northern Gateway” pipeline to carry massive amounts of crude over 1,170 kilometers of forested and river-crisscrossed Northern BC—to the still largely undeveloped coast of the Great Bear Rainforest. Charming.

Into the fray steps a poetry anthology—The Enpipe Line (Creekstone Press 2012)—edited by a diverse collective that includes poet/activist and project founder Christine Leclerc...Originally conceived as a 1,170 kilometer long line of collaborative poetry (matching the proposed pipeline’s length), the project eventually grew to over 70,000km. The poetry in it is diverse, to say the least, and includes contributions from widely published and recognized poets to children and “professional” activists (such as Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler).

[snip] 

Here’s an example of the range. Eleven-year old Ta’Kaiya Blaney of Sliammon First Nation wrote the song “Shallow Waters” (the performance of which has become a popular mainstay of demonstrations in the province over the past year) when she was ten:

In shallow waters, I can’t see
Your clear waters lapping at my feet
The lifeless ocean, black not blue
I didn't help but deep down I knew

[snip]

From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, some readers might find some of the work in this anthology “lacking.” However, the precise point this anthology raises—the very fact of the concatenation of art and revolution that it works—is the disappearance and impossibility of the “purely aesthetic” in today’s world. Rex Weyler, writing in the Forward, asks—“Can poetry stop ecocide?” I would have to answer no. But I would also say—it’s not not going to stop it either. 

A similar point was made in a striking essay in Poetry a couple of years ago by John Kinsella, an Australian poet, about resisting the destruction of the natural world:

A pacifist, which is what I am, can be the strongest resister, and pacifism the most defiant form of resistance. Same with language usage: I mix the old and the new to engage with a debate about protection, preservation, conservation, and respect of the “natural” world. I am aware of the problems these words carry in terms of implying complicity, because I am a poet rather than a speech writer. For me, because of this, poems can stop bulldozers. Not because they just say “stop bulldozer,” but because the intricacies of language challenge, distract, and entangle the bulldozer. I am using a semantics not of analogy, but of opposition. My words are intended to halt the damage—to see what shouldn’t be seen, to declare and challenge it.

Resistance, in this case, is not futile -- it's a belief in life. Here's the enemy, in an astounding photo essay from, of all places, Business Insider, called The Oil Sands Mines Refused Us Access, So We Rented This Plane to See What They Were Up To: 

via Fountain, not Mountain. 

Could one consultant mislead two SoCal water districts?

At its best, journalism is surely a joint enterprise. It's not a reporter that makes democracy workable, it's the press. Quotes from Thomas Jefferson come to mind. So it's very exciting to yours truly to see another reporter pick up and run with a crucial detail from a long story I wrote a few weeks back on an unhappy experience a big water district in Ventura County had with an underground reservoir.

This unhappy history could be repeating itself in the Mohave desert, with a notorious underground resevoir project known as Cadiz. 

Let the reporter herself, Emily Green, an expert in water issues, explain: 

When last month the Ventura County Reporter recounted that the capacity [of the Las Posas aquifer] proved to not be the much-celebrated 300,000 acre feet, but instead 50,000 acre feet, no villain was named. Who needs a villain when, as the Reporter ran a rough tally, the cost borne by a water district serving 620,000 people exceeded $53 million?

No, no hand was caught in the civic till. There were only pregnant hints as to the possible miscreant, all implying that it was a one-man job. “After 18 years as general manager for Calleguas, Don Kendall abruptly resigned in May of 2010,” went the Reporter account. “Neither he nor the Calleguas board of directors will discuss with the press the reasons why he left. Nor will any other water official speculate on the record as to why he stalked off a job that paid him a quarter-million dollars a year. Off the record, a Metropolitan insider said that Kendall’s resignation was ‘not unrelated’ to the collapse of the Las Posas ASR deal… “

As it happened, when earlier this week I decided to put up a brief  post connecting the early enticements made about Las Posas and a new generation of stunningly high estimates to do with a project best known simply as Cadiz, the fleecing of Ventura County was not on my mind. Orange County was, where a municipal water company has signed on to front the Cadiz project. San Bernardino County was, where the Cadiz target basin is located in the dry Mojave.

All it took to get me wondering aloud about the hard landing that the Ventura County rate payers covered by Calleguas suffered in the Las Posas venture was the chance observation that Las Posas shares a hydrologist with Cadiz. Cadiz has convinced the Rancho Santa Margarita Water District, an Orange County water company only a fraction the size of Calleguas, to go a-prospecting in the San Bernardino desert. Like Calleguas, Rancho Santa Margarita Water District is big enough to be credible, but small enough to be credulous. If only by coincidence, it’s been using hydrological estimates from the same man who consulted Calleguas.

As Green points out, the Los Posas deal cost Calleguas ratepayers about $53 million. The deal also evidently cost the general manager his job, but no one before Green seems to have questioned the consultant involved. The controversial Cadiz deal is expected to cost in the range of $200 million, even though the availability of the land, the delivery of the water, and the condition of the aquifer all look far more dicey than the Ventura County/Los Posas project did in its early days. Here's muckraker Michael Hiltzik on the Cadiz issue three years ago in the LA Times:

As it was presented to the Metropolitan Water District in 2002, the idea was to pump surplus Colorado River water into the aquifer underlying the firm's desert acreage. During droughts, the stored water (along with some indigenous groundwater) would be pumped out for delivery via the aqueduct to a parched Southern California.

If you don't look too closely, the plan has a sort of shimmering authenticity, like a desert mirage. Yes, the state faces a long-term water shortage. And yes, in the midst of drought, sometimes the rain comes down in torrents.

Yet as the MWD realized, reality isn't so simple.

First, there isn't any surplus water in the Colorado. Rather, the basin is in a long-term drought. For the foreseeable future California will be lucky to get its full statutory apportionment of river water. A single extra drop? Forget it.

Second, there's considerable disagreement over how much groundwater really underlies the Cadiz parcels, not to mention how much the company is legally permitted to pump out and how much could be pumped before neighboring aquifers become contaminated with carcinogenic minerals.

Green herself does point the finger, as tough reporters sometimes must, at a consultant for the huge water engineering firm CH2M Hill, a hydrologist named Terry Foreman. She calls him a "serial exaggerator," for his work on the Los Posas and Cadiz aquifers. She also implicitly criticizes yours truly for not delving deeper into the collapse of the Los Posas deal. To this charge I plead guilty, with extenuating circumstances. (After all, that deal fell apart many years ago, and I was focused on its successor, a completely different technology, just as complex, and pricier.)

But more importantly, Green suggests -- based on a study of documents -- that the former general manager of the Ventura County project, Don Kendall, was himself misled by Foreman. Kendall's successor, Susan Mulligan, who I interviewed at length, and who was a model of responsiveness by a public official, disputes Green's charge. But given Mulligan's good government orientation,  I expect that if she were on the spot, that she would take Green's advice:

If Mr Foreman’s work is good, isn’t the best insurance against calamity with Cadiz impartial review of the hydrology as he presents it by the USGS? Only the USGS should do it because it is their model Mr Foreman purports to use on Cadiz to arrive at recharge estimates that are, according to other USGS estimates, wildly high. 

At least, I hope so. Here's a chart Green posted of the Los Posas aquifer, the one that was expected to store water in case of drought or disaster not just for Ventura County, but all of SoCal. 

Didn't work out that way -- a warning to those who would try it again. 

To see the Prez, it helps to be a whale

In Las Vegas, to be a "whale" -- a high roller -- you have to be ready to live large, even if it costs $500,000 an hour.

It's a little like what you have to do if you want to get into the White House and see the President. Big bucks, as this graphic shows. Perhaps coincidentally, it's known as the "Blue Whale": 

Other representations of related data, with other spirit animal names, are posted on a fascinating and apparently new site devoted to representing numerical facts in graphic form, a tumblr (of all things) called ChartsnThings. 

The proprietor, New York Times graphics editor named Kevin Quealy, discusses how he "cleans up" the data by putting it through programs. Correlation comes in various forms: Working in R is necessary but "unsexy," he says, for example.  He briefly explains how to explicate datasets with various tools. 

Could this be the fastest possible delivery of fact to mind? 

"I will not walk away from the promise of green energy": Obama

This year, despite the failure of the solar firm Solyndra, to which a half-billion dollars of Federal aid was guaranteed, President Obama reaffirmed his support of green energy. He said so in January, when the right was stirring on pot of this issue, reminding one and all of a lost $535 million. The Prez confronted the issue directly and appears to have put it to rest with his declaration that I will not walk away from the promise of green energy. (It doesn't hurt that green energy consistently polls well, from North Carolina to California and all across the country, by huge margins) 

Brings to mind this instant classic from Joel Pett. 

If only we had such problems! 

Winner of Ventura county climate action award: 2012

Yours truly doesn't often win awards -- it's been since college, actually -- so when I won an award for my climate reporting (cited was Drought-Proofing Ventura County) it's news worth posting here.  

I was up against fellow reporter and friend Zeke Barlow, who unfortunately for the county has taken a job in Virginia, and an professor. Here's a link to a picture (bottom right) of the winners: I'm standing (for the curious) on the lower far right, between two men, two supervisors, in dark suits.  

Here's the plaque. 

In sustainable bamboo. Yes, I'm happy to be called a hero for once. 

The least known proof of global warming: phenology

A month ago Heidi Cullen, the hardest working weatherperson around, penned a NY Times op-ed about the least known proof of global warming, phenology:

The climatologist Mark D. Schwartz at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and colleagues at the USA National Phenology Network have developed an index that can be used to estimate the date of the onset of the spring growing season (as opposed to the date in March when daylight and darkness are of equal length, the technical definition of the first day of spring, which falls on Tuesday). This “first leaf” index estimates the first day that leaves appear on plants. Here in the lower 48, spring now arrives approximately three days earlier. “First leaf” has gone from March 20 (1951-1980 average) to March 17 (1981-2010 average). This forward creep is consistent with the effects of an overall warming climate, roughly 1.4 degrees over the past century, what we refer to as global warming.

Winter 2012 will go down as the fourth warmest on record for the contiguous United States, according to the National Climatic Center. And so far, March will be remembered for the more than 2,200 warm temperature records that were set around the nation. The warm weather, with daytime high temperatures close to 40 degrees above average in some places (high temperature records are outpacing cold records by a ratio of about 19-to-1 so far this March), set the stage for severe thunderstorms that spawned rare, damaging tornadoes near Detroit. It used to be that a warm day in March felt like a gift, but now it feels as if we’re paying for it.

We're now up to 15,000 heat records broken around the country this spring. Still no mention of Midwestn heat wave at climate change denier central, Watts Up With That, even though according to NOAA the first three months of this year were the warmest on record.  

Scrolled through a search for all of March at the hackish Watts Up With That, and all I found was a mention of a mild winter nationally, sourced at NASA, and numerous posts about cold and snow in the Pacific Northwest. What's up with that, Anthony? 

Guess he must've overlooked the heating, somehow. Lost it in the couch. 

Mike Wallace, depression and the real "Blues Brothers"

Today was reported the death of the great reporter Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes fame. Sharon Waxman, an excellent reporter herself, recalls meeting him, and hearing of a now forgotten side of Mike Wallace, and of his great friends Art Buchwald and William Styron too: 

[Mike] Wallace always seemed fearless and in fact on that day -- vibrant and powerful late in his 80s – he seemed timeless too.

Wallace was one of [Art] Buchwald’s closest friends. They would spend summers on the Vineyard together (that day Wallace had just come up from exercising on the beach, visiting Art who was recovering from a stroke).

And Art was a friend of mine, a late-breaking relationship during which we talked for hours. One of the things we talked about was Art’s recurring bouts with depression. It was the thing that he shared with two of his closest friends: William Styron, the novelist, and Mike Wallace.

The three of them would discreetly appear together at support groups, calling themselves “The Blues Brothers,” Buchwald told me.

I could understand Buchwald and Styron as suffering from depression: a humorist (a common affliction among them), and a novelist who wrote about the illness in “Darkness Visible.”

But Wallace was a surprise. Familiar to us all as the aggressive journalist who asked the fearless questions of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Malcolm X, that seemed hard to fathom.

But it was the case. In 1996, Wallace went public with his illness, and asked the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging for more federal funds for depression research.

He told the committee that he had felt “lower, lower, lower than a snake’s belly,” and had tried to commit suicide.  (The depression apparently first appeared after being sued for libel by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who sought $120 million for a 1982 “CBS Reports” documentary, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.”)

I don’t know if Wallace succeeded in winning funds for research. But he overcame his depression and went on to continue one of the most storied careers in American journalism.

He is missed, and a man worthy of our great admiration.

I recall Wallace declaring then that he intended to spend the rest of his life on Zoloft. I wonder if he did. 

NSA "to watch everybody all the time" on line

The great James Bamford writes another deeply sourced expose of the NSA, this time for Wired magazine, about an unbelieveably massive, costly, and unconstitutional National Security Agency spy center under construction in Utah (and a twin at Oak Ridge, Tennessee). 

You won't see better journalism this year, and really should read the whole thing.

Here's just one graph: 

The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.

Tell the truth: Didn't you already suspect as much? 

Climate scientist admits deception, engulfed in drama

Peter Gleick, the scientist, the advocate, and the MacArthur Fellow, who helms the influential Pacific Institute, today admitted in his column that he did something he shouldn't have in his on-going struggle with the right-wing climate change skeptics at the Heartland Institute: 

I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document [that came to him anonymously from Heartland files]. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name.

Andrew Revkin, the most-storied of all climate reporters, unloads on Gleick as I don't believe I ever have heard him unload before, in all the years I have been reading him in the The New York Times.

Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others. (Some of the released documents contain information about Heartland employees that has no bearing on the climate fight.) That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family).

The broader tragedy is that his decision to go to such extremes in his fight with Heartland has greatly set back any prospects of the country having the “rational public debate” that he wrote — correctly — is so desperately needed.

Yes. Sad to see the climate science go up in the smoke of this self-destructive drama. Already Gleick is getting damage control advice from a prominent Democratic politico, and lawyering up for the inevitable lawsuits to come. 

The surprise is that Gleick's confession is not mentioned on the front of either the Times nor Drudge, though Drudge does link to Miami's record-breaking heat.

Suspect Gleick will soon become all too famous. This scandal is far more dramatic and eyecatching than the hacked emails of the so-called Climategate affair, and comparable in some respects to the tabloid tricks that have cost Rupert Murdoch and his papers so dearly. 

How to "undermine" climate research with cash payments

As reported by DeSmog Blog, Climate Progress, Brad Johnson, and now the New York Times, internal strategy documents leaked from the climate change denier Heartland Institute flat-out state that:

At present we sponsor the NIPCC [Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Chnage] to undermine the official United Nation's IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports and paid a team of writers $388,000 in 2011 to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered. 

Nearly $400,000 spent explicitly to "undermine" scientific research! Over $4 million spent last year. 

Today Heartland was apologizing to donors for the document leaks. The contributors, including one Anonymous Donor giving a $1 million or more a year, must be wondering if they're getting their money's worth. All that bank, and for what? A mock conference and a bogus report that barely pretends to be scientce and is "self-evidently nonsense," said the researchers at RealClimate. 

The docs also reveal that the Institute coldly dismissed two of its top fund-raisers for failure to bring in more than the millions they raised last year. Could the leaks have come in retaliation?