America's Weak Immune System

While weighing the possibilities of launching more Tomahawks on parts uncivilized, Blowhard has paid scant attention to a threat far more perilous than chemical weapons; even far more likely than a nuclear attack, but more deadly. That threat is from viruses in our environment that can mutate, spread, and multiply too quickly for us to respond if we are not organized and prepared. Once a virus is on a rampage, the result of unpreparedness could be millions of deaths in just a few weeks... for months on end.

Those viruses may seem to favor squalid and exotic places, but globalization, decay of our cities and towns, and wild changes in our climate make the U.S. a better breeding ground than we would care to admit. Neglect of the environment only increases the chances of a pandemic. Blowhard is not only guilty of such neglect, he is also failing to appoint officials who can prepare us for any outbreaks that do occur - indeed, he is calling for drastic budget cuts to agencies whose job it is to head off pandemics. Then again, this is a president who thinks that any domestic problem can be solved with a travel ban.

From Esporo

The world's most recent brush with widespread pestilence was the West African Ebola hemorrhagic fever outbreak in 2014. Blowhard was calling for travel bans - in this case, aimed at the medical heroes coming home from the front lines of the fight against Ebola. Any new viral threat would surely elicit executive orders for travel bans. Given Blowhard's craven germophobia, how many responders today would catch a one-way flight to head off that threat? Then, when the disease lands in the U.S. anyway, how many Blowharders would refuse to get their children vaccinated for fear of making them autistic?

America's retrenchment from globalism, while due, will have many drawbacks that leave us less capable of mustering global responses to problems such as pandemics, climate change, and feeding the hungry. There are several indicators that we won't be ready to respond effectively when the next virus outbreak occurs. This aspect of the America First doctrine may be tantamount to genocide by negligence.

Read “Weevil Bride” by Rishloo on Genius

The Solution to Pollution is Economic Revolution

It may have escaped most people's notice that availability of the earth's resources has been swiftly declining for decades. This will soon be reflected in a declining rate of goods available to the average world citizen, including food. Widespread hunger will be a faithful witness that we lack the basic necessities to sustain a growing world population. Those of seared conscience will begin to take notice when they sense it in their gut, if not in the food line.

This predicament simplifies decision-making considerably. When decisions deal with feeding a starving population in the interest of the common good, choices that improve food production and distribution should receive highest consideration. Problems that weren't formerly seen in those terms are brought into stark relief when recast in the context of famine.

Many issues could be boiled down to how well the possible solutions improve food availability, but one salient example in my neck of the woods is the health of the Chesapeake Bay. There are many eco-services that a vibrant Chesapeake Bay watershed offers to the economy (most currently valued more than food), but food production alone is more than enough to justify government expenditures toward restoring the watershed.

A 2014 peer-reviewed study for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation determined that the natural capital of the watershed offers a high economic return on our restoration dollars spent. Of the billions of dollars of benefits we reap from this unique ecosystem, only about 10% comes in the form of food production, e.g. seafood and agriculture. Nevertheless, a 10% increase in baseline food production, which could be expected from cleaning up the bay, is of sufficient economic value alone to pay for administering those cleanup efforts. On the other hand, if President Blowhard's proposed elimination of the program is approved and we go back to the old way where states were not accountable for making progress, there would be an estimated 11% loss of food production. That is an annual loss of $1.3 billion in food production as opposed to last year's cost of $73 million for the EPA to run the cleanup program.

Even if we discount the value of improved aesthetics, climate, recreation, waste treatment, and air and water quality (should those criteria become less important in the coming decades than putting food on the table) we would be money ahead by continuing the federally administered program to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.  However, while we are in transition to a sustenance economy, these other affected sectors will initially reap 90% of the multifarious economic benefits. Among the beneficiaries would be real estate, tourism and hospitality, outdoor recreation, and public health; and with the increase in our food supply, there are starving nations today who could use our surplus.

There is a cost to all of this ecological restoration beyond the amounts in EPA and state budgets. It is embedded in industry compliance with stormwater and sewer regulations, mainly in connection with property development and agriculture (mostly carried by Department of Agriculture subsidies). There are also municipal wastewater treatment costs. All these costs may offset the various GDP increases from the restoration and that will continue to be the case until we learn that failing to account for externalities in choosing how we coexist with nature will always come back to bite us. The way to avoid this unhappy result in the future is to adopt a different economic motive that prioritizes permaculture principles. As Richard Heinberg explains,

'Village 1860' by Stuart Williams

"growth is ending anyway: we need to restructure the economy so it can provide what we really need (food, basic services) without the expectation of continual expansion."

The Chesapeake Bay in Greater Peril Than Ever

While the estuary on a stick known as Maryland girds for legal battles over continuing the federal program to restore the Chesapeake Bay, the global force of climate change will increasingly hamper the region-wide effort even if the program ends up being fully funded in the official federal budget.

We are already able to discern the impacts of climate change on the Chesapeake. For example, though most of the world is losing access to water, the northern Chesapeake Bay area where I live has gained 6.6 inches of annual precipitation over the last century. In some respects, this is beneficial, but the major negative effect of more heavy rain is runoff into the bay and its tributaries, causing pollution by nutrients and sediment. This is exacerbated by urbanization throughout much of the watershed. Building codes and local governments are racing to keep up with the problem of stormwater runoff caused by development.

Rising temperatures affects a number of other aspects of the bay ecosystem. One is the profusion of Vibrio bacteria which spreads cholera and a similar disease either by ingestion or through skin lesions.

Before President Blowhard dispenses with climate change throughout the executive branch, government-funded scientists are valiantly assembling reports explaining its observable and anticipated effects. With the amount of rainfall increase we have observed with just a 1.5 C temperature increase, it seems that we should expect significantly more in the coming decades if global temperatures continue to go up exponentially.

From Albert Bates at The Great Change

The graph here shows a generic temperature curve along with several global macronomic indicators modeled in the Limits to Growth study. You might note that the human population is expected to drop in about thirty years (as food becomes too scarce) and think that this will flatten the temperature curve, but there is a delay between cause and effect in global warming as vertically circulating ocean currents cycle over a millennium meaning that increases in ocean temperatures and release of dissolved CO₂ will not achieve their full effect on the atmosphere until decades after the greenhouse effect is arrested by lowering atmospheric carbon.

Bottom line: we can't restore the bay by taking our current inadequate measures. Rising atmospheric temperatures make it necessary to exercise even more severe measures to avoid pushing the bay beyond recoverable limits.  We should not only continue to limit runoff from new and existing development, but we also need to rethink urbanization in terms of permaculture and apply afforestation wherever we can.

Smoke on the Water

While states in the southwest dicker over who gets the last slurps of the Colorado River, here in Maryland we are at odds with other states in our region over the spillovers from their industries on our air and water. The paralysis at the EPA over budget cuts and policy changes leaves us hanging.

The water pollution in question is that affecting the Chesapeake Bay which is almost wholly located in Maryland and Virginia, though polluted water may enter the bay from the four other states in the watershed. Farming is often assigned culpability, but urbanization is more and more to blame. It has taken decades to get the six states and D.C. to agree on strict pollution reduction measures. Without the EPA to manage this agreement, it will be difficult to ensure that all parties abide by it.

Photo by aka Tman

The air pollution comes from several more states, mainly to the west of Maryland. The EPA has been less instrumental in helping Maryland and the bay with this problem. The problem stems from power plant emissions that settle on the Chesapeake Bay watershed causing nitrogen pollution and lingering in Maryland's air where the oxides are transformed into ozone which causes smog and endangers health. Maryland's remaining coal-fired power plants are relatively clean when compared to those outside the state that do not measure up to Maryland standards.

Ever since President Blowhard was voted in, the EPA has hunkered down to see what survives of their agency. Consequently, Maryland's petition asking them to enforce the Clean Air Act (not the Clean Power Plan, which recently became defunct by Presidential decree) has mouldered in an EPA inbox rather than elicit a response by the 60-day deadline. In particular, Maryland is requesting that clean operation of power plants be based on more frequent smokestack readings because the averaging of readings allows much more pollution than the figures might show. The other states involved have not been willing to adopt these requirements when requested by Maryland.

Resource sharing and cross-border pollution are two conflict areas that, if the federal government doesn't help to resolve, could drive states farther apart, making continuation of the union all the more difficult as we negotiate the climax of our secular crisis.

Raiders of the Lost Watershed

Maryland has decided to forego the fracking craze! One of the major reasons is the damage to aquifers from use and disposal of fracking fluid. Water is life.

If anyplace exemplifies that statement, it is Las Vegas. They need lots of water to make their desert village seem like an oasis to visitors. They get it from Lake Mead on the Colorado River. Unfortunately, like frackers pumping every ounce of oil or gas they can reach, Nevada has tapped Lake Mead all the way to the bottom in their desperation for water. If the long-term drought continues (though snowpack this year promises some relief), by 2030 there will not be enough water to conduct business as usual in Las Vegas.

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker

Southern California, which would also lose its supply from the Colorado River, could at least start desalinating sea water. Vegas doesn't appear to have any realistic alternatives besides conservation which, gauging by the falling level of Lake Mead, hasn't been enough to beat the drought. I doubt there was any consideration of the possibility of Las Vegas running out of water when the NFL decided to move the Raiders there starting around 2019. The business case for that move includes stadium attendance of 2 million visitors every year. 😕

Greed-driven growth will only exacerbate Las Vegas' water shortage. They are just one example of cities that need to take a whole new approach to navigating the resource constrained future looming over us. They could start by applying a concept out of the Green Party platform:

Consider the carrying capacities of the bioregions in which our cities are located and attempt to match urban populations to these natural limitations.

Sticky Tarheels vs. Loose Wildcats

Today's plans include a homemade pizza

(pepperoni, mushroom, green pepper), a boilermaker, and CBS at 5 pm (EST) where UK and UNC vie for a spot in the Final Four. My several reasons for taking time to watch a televised college sports match are that (1) I have close family in both states (one being a UNC alum), (2) I have lived in both states at different points in my life, (3) I like watching sports, and (4) these two teams represent a clash between player aggrandizement and competition for team glory.

UK is an NBA player factory. High school superstars go in and professional players emerge a year or so later. North Carolina is not about that. High school superstars go in and they remain homeboys through graduation and beyond. Since I abjure professional sports, I'll be rooting for the Tarheels.

North Carolina is one of the top five states for Division I basketball recruitment, three others of which are concentrated around North Carolina. This gives UNC an ample recruitment pool (though crosstown rival Duke, gets some of the best). Kentucky would be hard pressed to recruit on equal grounds with North Carolina, so they resort to luring kids with the prospect of making big bucks as a pro.

UNC recruiters might explain to their prospects that they are among the 5% of high school hoopsters that will have a chance to play on a Division I team. After that, the chances of making it straight to the NBA is even less (3.6%, or about one player out of 28). UNC and UK (especially) recruit some of the more promising pro prospects, so their chances are actually higher. However, UK players are more likely to be disappointed, since that's what their program is mainly about and a good many of them never get drafted.

Kids should play just for the thrill of victory. Then their spectacular feats can be the talk of the town, but that's about it. Well ok. An Olympics every four years is fine, but only if we can completely drop the egomania of pro sports. Maybe then, the Olympics would no longer tip host countries into financial ruin.

Putting Away Childish Things

Richard Branson lost an airline today. However, he has another in the works under the Virgin brand; more precisely, a spaceline: Virgin Galactica. Maybe we should just call it a high end airline - elites only, one of whom is pledged to be Stephen Hawking.

Stephen isn't the only disabled person getting a boost. Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools must develop challenging curricula for every learning disabled student according to their capabilities. No longer can schools claim success with these students by teaching to the level of the lowest common denominator. In other words, special education students are going to be getting special treatment.

In sports, special kids are rising to challenges with the special olympics which is just about to wrap up for winter in Austria. For the rest of us, sports festivals are a kind of special olympics for not so special athletes. They help us keep fit and raise money for charity. Beyond that, adults competing in sports are, like space tourism, just a big ego trip.

Photo by Werner Kunz

Unfortunately, we lavish copious amounts of time, money, and memory on professional sports ego trips while the entertainment potential is already there cheaply with high school and college sports, and even the special olympics. The usefulness of sports is mainly that it gives kids an energy release and adults a way to stay fit. Why pay to watch adults do something that is basically child's play?

In the once again popular book, 1984, George Orwell showed his disdain for spectator sports as a way for the powerful to opiate the masses. Parallels to that novel are playing out not only because of Trump. We have allowed ourselves to be dumbed down by the din of televised sports, the daily buzz of contests without consequence.

As we deal with the hard decisions of catabolic collapse, we should step back and ask ourselves what is truly necessary and what is only benefitting the few. Professional sports is a giant racket. Our insistence that only the best will do has warped our society. We should content ourselves with enjoying the physicality of youth and then behave as grown ups.