Hope in a Darkening Age...
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"THE END OF ALL INTELLIGENT ANALYSIS IS TO CLEAR THE WAY FOR SYNTHESIS."--H.G. Wells. "It's always a leap into the unknown future to write anything."--Margaret Atwood "Be kind, be useful, be fearless."--President Barack Obama.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
The Oil Sands of Time
President Obama accepted State Department advice and killed the Keystone oil sands project, as officially announced Wednesday. The oil sands of time were running out, thanks to the GOPer congressionals' deadline, so it's bye bye pipeline.
Bill McKibben commented: "this isn’t just the right call, it’s the brave call. The knock on Barack Obama from many quarters has been that he’s too conciliatory. But here, in the face of a naked political threat from Big Oil to exact ‘huge political consequences,’ he’s stood up strong. This is a victory for Americans who testified in record numbers, and who demanded that science get the hearing usually reserved for big money."
GOPers gushing the usual oily bullshit from whichever orifice they use to talk, charge this kills jobs, kills energy independence. Their inflated figure for how many jobs the pipeline would have created was 20,000. Actual experts say it would have been closer to 6,000.
But according to the Brookings Institution, the growing clean energy industries already employ some 2.7 million in the U.S., with explosive job growth that outpaced the rest of the economy during and after the Great Recession. Moreover, "The clean economy offers more opportunities and better pay for low- and middle-skilled workers than the national economy as a whole."
Meanwhile, in one industrial city just north of the U.S. border, a coalition of business, government, environmentalists and labor (including the efforts of one of the most dedicated readers of Captain Future's Dreaming Up Daily--congrats, Cousin Lemuel, otherwise known as Bill Thompson) has brought a majorwind turbine manufacturing project to Hamilton, Ontario--with an expected 1900 jobs. These will be the first offshore wind power assembly facilities in North America.
This is just the beginning, if America would get serious. A new study concludes that a truly serious approach to energy efficiency could alone add up to 2 million new jobs in the next few decades.
So the jobs argument is specious, and is only part of the economic story (if you want to reduce everything to that.) Opponents to the Keystone pipeline cite tremendous costs to protect water, soil and air against pollution, and even higher costs for accidents and the hidden costs (because families mostly bear them) of bad effects on health. It's a similar story with clean energy--the health benefits are also economic benefits.
And of course, there's the economic price of the Climate Crisis--which the Keystone pipeline would hasten to its worst case scenarios---with costs that could include the very concept of "economy" as we know it.
In the transitional meantime, an expanding U.S. oil and gas industry has added some 75,000 jobs since President Obama took office. There's no truth to even this charge, that the pipeline harms the effort to decrease dependence on foreign oil sources. But apparently a 13% expansion of these industries isn't enough for some of these fossil fuel hot air billionaires. They have to own the planet, as they ruin it.
On Turning 73 in 2019: Living Hope
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*This is the second of two posts from June 2019, on the occasion of my 73rd
birthday. Both are about how the future looks at that time in the world,
and f...
Whirlwind Series
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What--it's over? This vaunted World Series for the Ages should be just
getting interesting. Instead it's all done. Dodgers in five.
It was billed as ...
Strange Old Worlds
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On September 8, 1966 the first season of the Star Trek series began. It
explored strange new worlds in the galaxy of imagination as well as in
televis...
Legacy of the Carnegie Libraries
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The centennial celebration in 2004 of the Carnegie Library in Eureka, CA,
transformed into the Morris Graves Museum of Art a few years earlier, was
the occ...
2 years ago
The Malling of America
available at your online bookseller
Manifesto
..."The answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve, to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day."--Barack Obama Nov. 4, 2008
"Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage." Barack Obama January 20, 2009
"If you turn away now – if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible…well, change will not happen. If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void: lobbyists and special interests; the people with the $10 million checks who are trying to buy this election and those who are making it harder for you to vote; Washington politicians who want to decide who you can marry, or control health care choices that women should make for themselves. Only you can make sure that doesn't happen. Only you have the power to move us forward.--President Obama on Sept. 6, 2012
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