A Triple Curse : The Corporate Climate Bill

Image from Climatico.
Devil's brew:
Curse of the climate bill

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / May 4, 2010

Legend says curses come in threes. Let's pray that doesn't happen with the unholy trinity of the Corporate Climate Bill

It demands drilling for oil, digging for coal, and big money for new nukes. How such a devil's brew could help save the Earth conjures a corporate cynicism beyond the scope of the human mind and soul.

It all now bears a special curse. It was meant for Earth Day. Then it slipped to the April 26 Chernobyl anniversary. But co-sponsor Lindsay Graham (R-SC) pitched a fit over immigration and pulled his support.

As did Earth herself. Just prior, more than two dozen hill country miners were killed in a veritable Three Mile Island of black carbon. This entirely avoidable accident was built on years of sloppy denial by King Coal and the tacit assent of pliant regulators. With mountains of offal being pitched into rivers and streams, and underground hell holes filled with gas and soot, coal has been slaughtering people and eco-systems here for more than a century. Now, as at TMI, the death has become visible.

Meanwhile, the undersea gusher destroying the Gulf of Mexico may soon pour up the east coast. Like Chernobyl, it defies comprehension.

As the Soviets denied it, Chernobyl gushed radiation that killed some 985,000 people. Based on more than 5,000 studies, a definitive assessment has been authored by three Russian scientists, issued by the New York Academy of Sciences, that should serve as the ultimate warning against atomic energy.

But the third leg of the Climate Bill trifecta has -- thankfully -- yet to kick in. Like coal and oil, America's 104 licensed nuclear plants are a catastrophe in progress. They all leak lethal radiation on a regular basis. Their wastes are unmanageable. They emit greenhouses gases in their vital fuel cycle. They pump untold quantities of heat into the air and water. They are sitting ducks for terror and error.

Our aging fleet of rickety reactors continually flirts with disaster. Many are on or near active earthquake faults. Turkey Point, in south Florida, was directly hit by Hurricane Andrew. Ohio's Davis-Besse came within a fraction of an inch of a breach of its inner containment. A new inspection has shown more than 2 dozen potentially critical new flaws there.

New York's Indian Point and New Jersey's Oyster Creek, along with their radioactive siblings, are super-heating the rivers, lakes, bays and oceans on which they sit. Embrittlement, decaying hardware and an overall aging process have this country riding the radioactive brink every moment.

On September 11, 2001, terrorists flew directly over the Indian Point reactors on their way to the World Trade Center.

America's reactors constitute less than a quarter of those operating worldwide. Despite their inability to get private financing or liability insurance, the Obama Climate Bill is larded with billions in handouts for new reactor construction. Yet the first reactor design proposed (for Georgia) has been strongly criticized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a key financing scheme has been voided by the courts.

Only one Climate Bill can solve our energy crisis -- a Solartopian program for converting the entire economy to renewables, conservation, and efficiency. It would fly in the face of the corporate destroyers who are behind the current Climate Bill. But these are technologies that actually work, that pay, that create jobs and prosperity, and that will preserve rather than destroy our sacred Earth.

The atomic shoe could be dropping as you read this. It is a catastrophe we cannot afford -- ecologically, financially, economically, spiritually.

These old reactors must shut before they irradiate the apocalyptic footsteps of their fossil fueled brethren.

The Curse of the Climate Bill is upon us. Let's transform it to something truly green before it kills again.

[Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, is at www.harveywasserman.com . He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and senior editor of www.freepress.org, where this was also published.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Lethal Denial : Chernobyl and the Climate Bill

Composite photo. Image by Vivo (Ben) / Village of Joy.

After the explosion at Reactor 4 [at Chernobyl] the people of Pripyat flocked to the railway bridge just outside the city to get a good view of the reactor to see what had happened.

Initially, everyone was told that the radiation level was minimal and that they were safe. Little did they know that much of the radiation had been blown onto this bridge in a huge spike.

They saw beautiful rainbow coloured flames of the burning graphite nuclear core, whose flames were higher than the smoke stack itself. All of them are dead now -- they were exposed to levels of over 500 roentgens, which is a fatal dose.

-- Village of Joy

For the ecology and the economy:
Chernobyl demands a REAL climate bill

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / April 26, 2010

This week 24 years ago, untold quantities of lethal radiation began pouring into the atmosphere from the catastrophic explosion at Chernobyl Unit 4. Nearly a million people have died because of it.

And on this horrific anniversary we have now seen the stumble of a very bad climate bill. The events are directly related.

Chernobyl's death toll has been bitterly debated.

But after nearly a quarter-century of industry denial, the New York Academy of Sciences has published, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, the definitive catalog and analysis. Drawing on some 5,000 studies, three Russian scientists have placed the ultimate death toll at 985,000.

The authors include Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the president of Russia; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist who was, at the time of the accident, director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. The book has been edited by Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist expert in the health impacts of radioactivity.

As Karl Grossman has shown, Chernobyl's death toll stretches worldwide. Its apocalyptic cloud blanketed Europe and blew across the northern tier of the United States. Sheep in Scotland and milk in New England were heavily contaminated, along with countless square miles of land and sea.

Ohio's Davis-Besse may have come within a fraction of an inch of such a disaster, and has again been found with potentially apocalyptic structural flaws. Michigan's Fermi I and the infamous Three Mile Island Unit 2 did melt.

Now the brand new Toshiba-Westinghouse AP-1000 design has been deemed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as unable to withstand earthquakes, hurricanes, or tornadoes, and has turned up with a critical generic flaw that could cause it to explode.

Which is where the climate bill comes in.

Widespread reports of what it contained were to be clarified with its planned introduction on Chernobyl Day. But co-sponsor Lindsay Graham (R-SC) abruptly withdrew, apparently amidst partisan wrangling over immigration.

By all accounts this bill included a fossil industry wish-list, with big money for "clean coal," off-shore drilling, a disembowelment of the EPA, and much more. With oil fires raging at sea and miners being buried in the coal fields, how this bill would actually solve the climate crisis remains unclear.

What WAS clear was subsidies that John Kerry (D-MA) said would put taxpayers on the hook for at least a dozen new reactors, and possibly far more.

The details are temporarily moot, but the portent is not.

It's precisely that dangerously deficient AP-1000 design that the Obama Administration wants to fund first, for construction in Georgia. America's leaky fleet of 104 aging clunkers meanwhile staggers toward disaster at places like Vermont Yankee and New York's Indian Point, Ohio's Davis-Besse, and California's Diablo Canyon.

Chernobyl exploded in a remote backwater of an impoverished region. But by official accounts from Ukraine and Belarus, it did $500 billion in damage just there. Nowhere in the U.S. would the property damage be remotely that small. The near-million death toll would be a mere fraction of how many would die here.

Nothing in any known draft of this now-in-limbo climate bill demands private insurance against such a catastrophe. Nor does it have a solution for what to do with 60,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste, or thousands more yet to come.

Nor does it begin to answer the reality that every cent thrown down the reactor rat-hole could quickly save far more energy than such a reactor could produce -- if it ever did come on line after the seven-to-ten years it would take to license and build such a boondoggle.

No sane attempt to save the global ecology could ever include more money for precisely the most dangerous, destructive, dirty, and deficit-ridden energy technology ever devised.

Let's hope this bill's yank away from Chernobyl Day will take it to the desperately needed safe haven of a Solartopian plan built around renewables, conservation and efficiency.

Neither the planetary ecology nor the U.S. economy can afford anything less.

Nothing else would deserve the label "Climate Bill."

[Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, is at www.harveywasserman.com . He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and senior editor of www.freepress.org, where this was also published.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Climate Bill : Morphing into a Monster?

"Acid Tar." Image ©2009 ~Monster-Man-08.
A John Kerry/Lindsay Graham production:
Pro-nuke, pro-drilling, pro-coal 'climate bill'

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / October 15, 2009

Is the climate bill morphing into an excuse to promote fossil fuels and new nuclear power plants?

Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) recent promotion of a pro-nuke/pro-drilling/pro-coal agenda in the name of "climate protection" has been highlighted in a New York Times op ed co-authored with Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC). The piece brands nuke power "our single largest contributor of emissions-free power." It advocates abolishing "cumbersome regulations" so utilities can "secure financing for more plants." And it wants "serious investment" to "find solutions to our nuclear waste problem."

The Senate bill as now drafted also includes a "Clean Energy Development Administration" that could deliver virtually unlimited federal cash to build new reactors and fund other mega-polluters.

Also on the table are vastly expanded permits for off-shore drilling. And Kerry/Graham have talked of making the U.S. "the Saudi Arabia of clean coal" while bringing "new financial incentives for companies that develop carbon capture and sequestration technology."

If you think pushing nukes, oil wells and coal mines to "prevent global warming" is counter-intuitive, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The give-aways are allegedly meant to attract GOP votes. The joint Kerry/Graham op ed is being billed as a "game changer."

But even with provisions pushing a hundred new reactors in the U.S. alone, some GOP stalwarts hint they would NEVER vote for a bill that includes cap-and-trade clauses. So is the GOP set to play the same game with climate legislation as it has with health care: prolong negotiations, gut the substance of reform, demand -- and GET -- untold corporate giveaways, and then oppose the bill anyway?

What thin green substance survives could be limited to a few showpiece handouts for renewables and efficiency, with cap-and-trade as the centerpiece. But many environmentalists argue that cap-and-trade could create yet another costly bureaucracy with little real impact on the climate crisis.

To get real about solving this crisis, Congress should demand -- and fund -- a definitive national transition to energy efficiency and modernized mass transit. We still waste half the energy we consume. There's no source of usable juice cheaper and quicker to install than increased efficiency.

Taxes on carbon and other forms of "ancillary" pollution would help if they assess radioactive emissions (from coal as well as nukes), destruction of our oceans,lakes and rivers, removal of mountain tops, creation of nuclear waste, and so on.

Merely axing the subsidies to King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas) and rendering a level playing field for true green energy sources to fairly compete with the old fossil/nukes would take us a long way up the road to Solartopia. A feed-in tariff that rewards renewables for the pollution they avoid would also help.

Without all that, the climate bill's outright negatives could be huge. Atomic reactors can do little or nothing to bring down carbon emissions. Projected construction costs for new nukes have jumped from $2 billion to $13 billion and counting. Body-blows to the all-but-dead Yucca Mountain nuke waste dump have left the industry, after 50 years, with nothing tangible to do with some 50,000 tons of spent lethal radioactive fuel rods.

And after a half-century, the industry cannot command private construction financing or private liability insurance to cover a catastrophic melt-down or terror attack. Even if reactors could help with greenhouse gas emissions, it would take a trillion dollars or more to make a noticeable dent, and a decade or more for such reactors to begin to come on line.

But the reactor lifeline does not flow through licensing or waste. Because it has failed as a commercial technology, the industry must have massive infusions of cash and loan guarantees. The climate bill's real damage will be measured by the size and scope of reactor subsidies, if any.

Kerry's willingness to entertain "clean coal" and new offshore oil drilling as "solutions" for climate chaos staggers the imagination. It seems to signal that King CONG still owns Washington, and that any meaningful Congressional push for green power will demand serious redirection from the grassroots.

DC insiders generally doubt that any climate bill can pass this year. Afghanistan and health care still dominate the national agenda.

But Democrats are desperate for SOMETHING to show at December's Copenhagen Climate Conference. The question is: how much will they give fossil/nuke Republicans to get a bill -- ANY bill -- with the world "climate" attached?

The anti-nuclear movement has three times defeated proposed $50 billion loan guarantees for new nuclear plants. The environmental community still understands that solving the climate crisis requires the ultimate phaseout of fossil fuels.

“A carbon-free, nuclear-free energy future is within the Senate’s reach," says Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "The approach laid out by Kerry and Graham would lead to a climate bill in name only." NIRS is organizing a national call-in this week. A nationwide series of demonstrations for the environment will take place October 24.

Preserving our ability to survive on this planet demands we phase out fossil fuels and nuclear power, and win a green-powered Earth based solely on renewables and efficiency. Ultimately, we cannot live with less.

[Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and senior editor of www.freepress.org, where this article also appears.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...