Coal is following whale oil into extinction and Republicans are fighting to the death to preserve coal

Did you ever inhale coal smoke? We don't need to burn coal and nobody wants it, except the Koch brothers. The Koch brother's inheritance is coal based. The Koch's are almost matching the Republican Party in campaign spending. Republicans are very unpopular. Without the Koch money they can't win elections. 

Coal is following whale oil into the extinction bin of energy sources. 

The Republican Party has chosen to march to extinction along with coal. This summer the coal industry and the Republican Party will march into oblivion shoulder to shoulder. 

“Called the Manning brothers of climate change, the mild-mannered, dry-witted Nordhauses are scions of a New Mexico family long rooted in the land, which powerfully shaped who the brothers became. But for the Nordhaus brothers, protecting the earth depends far more on dispassionate thinking and intellectual rigor than on showy protests outside the White House.
They have neatly divided their world — Bill is the academic theorist, Bob the legal mind and political pragmatist — but their work is intertwined…
Bob wrote the provision — it became Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act — at a time when carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, was not considered harmful. It was not until 2009 that the Environmental Protection Agency defined carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant because of its contribution to global warming. Thus it falls into the category of an unknown “pollutant of the future.” Section 111(d), after languishing in obscurity for decades, is now the legal rationale for the Obama administration’s plan to regulate carbon emissions without a law passed by Congress…
In the ensuing decades at Yale, Bill developed an economic model that put a price tag on the effects of climate change, like more droughts, flooding and crop failures and stronger hurricanes. He called it the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, or DICE.
“The name was both descriptive (representing a dynamic integrated model of climate and the economy) but also consciously aimed to suggest that we are gambling with the future of our planet,” Bill wrote in an email.
DICE profoundly changed climate policy. Although the chief political argument against curbing carbon emissions from cars and coal plants has long been that doing so would harm the economy, the DICE models show that, depending on various scenarios, one ton of carbon pollution can inflict $20 to $30 in economic damage — a major cost, given that the global economy emits about 36 billion tons of carbon a year.
From:
New York Times
May 11, 2014
Brothers Battle Climate Change on Two Fronts

Earth Day Coatesville 2014

There was a large turnout of volunteers for the Coatesville Earth Day planting and cleanup. I made a video of the projects.

All Pennsylvania fish have mercury contamination. New study finds toxic levels in pristine areas.

"A new government study has found that, even in the pristine waters of western national parks, fish can carry enough mercury to endanger wildlife and, in some cases, people.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Service and the National Park Service teamed up to sample fish in 21 national parks found that even fish in regions as remote as Glacier National Park and Alaska high levels of mercury."

SEE:

BOZEMAN DAILY CHRONICLE

Park study finds high levels of mercury in fish

By LAURA LUNDQUIST, Chronicle Staff Writer

Posted: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 8:00 pm

WHAT YOU CAN AND CAN'T EAT FROM PENNSYLVANIA WATERS:

Watching True Detective brought up mind pictures of real places in Pennsylvania.

True Detective' Recap: A Light at the End of the Tunnel 

A familiar finale proves our obsession with the show was about the journey, not the destination
  

"By locating its human monsters in the countryside, far from the supposedly corrupting influence of the modern city, this horror subgenre makes the argument that America's rot spreads up and out from the core. As Errol's sister-lover might put it, it's all around us: before you were born, after you die...
  

Whatever its faults, and they were many, True Detective's power lies in the way it made us feel when we watched it. Like Rust and Marty, we'll always have the memory of being drawn into its dark territory."

There are places in Pennsylvania that look like scenes in “True Detective”.

They never took them out for show and tell but I knew that some of my flyfishing buddies carried a firearm in their vest. It seemed like a little much, at first.

Sometimes I drove to fishing spots on macadam, then dirt roads then just wheel tracks.

The best fishing is usually at sunrise and sunset. Which means that it’s dark when you walk in or dark when you walk out. If you let it your primal fear of the dark can take over.

I don't think there are Hoodoo believers in Pennsylvania’s countryside but there are some strange people. Like the guy who answered the female Census taker’s questions naked behind his screen door. At least he would talk. Most of the “backwoods” people in Montgomery County hid from the Census takers.

The Perkiomen flows through more civilized areas of Pennsylvania in Montgomery, Bucks and Berks Counties. There were “cross lighting celebrations” along the Perkiomen with KKK, skinheads and people with swastikas. The skinheads were or are illegal drug entrepreneurs. The “celebrations” still go on to this day slightly subdued and maybe without lit crosses because of the Perkiomen Trail.

I think the Perkiomen Watershed has about as much or more drug dealers as Coatesville does. It’s one more reason some of the locals didn’t want the Perkiomen Trail and the armed Montgomery County Park Rangers and State Troopers who patrol it.

It’s said that “Wilderness is a place where you can be eaten.” If you pay attention to the signs in places like Yellowstone Park that say “Bear in Area” I believe that wilder areas are safer than more civilized areas. It’s the civilized accessible fringes of wild areas that can be dangerous.

Maybe my flyfishing buddies had good reason to pack heat in their vests.

Got the new issue of Orion at Barnes and Noble.

Can't call it a magazine. There is no advertising. The writing, the photographs and illustrations are 1st class. The paper even feels good. It's a small treasure.

The surgeon that did my intestinal surgery finds the human gut impressive. It has it's own separate nervous system, but hardly any of it is us.

Pogo might say “Us aren’t us”.

Each of us is a society that goes 24/7. We don't eat for one or when pregnant two. We eat for trillions.

The New You
By Anthony Doerr

 LAST TUESDAY I PRESSED little white keyboard squares for eight hours, drove home, helped the kids with their homework, overcooked some chicken breasts, watched Jeopardy, paid Idaho Power, read some paragraphs, switched off the lamp, and thought: You lummox, you didn't do anything outside all day. 

Why berate myself? Because getting outdoors helps me think, feel, and sleep better. Increasingly, science has my back on this. A 2008 University of Michigan study, for example, showed that volunteers who ambled through a campus arboretum improved their short-term memory by about 20 percent. 

More recently, Japanese studies have found that regular strolls in the woods can lower depression rates, blood pressure, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol. South Korea is so convinced of the benefits of “forest bathing,” they’re building a $140 million National Forest Therapy Center. Finland is funding similar research. 

All of which is both interesting and encouraging. Yet I remain troubled by the language of my own formulation. The words I chose—you didn’t do anything outside—suggest that I didn’t leave the “Inside” to do anything in “Nature.” They imply that a world exists called “Inside” and that it is fully separable from another world called “Outside.” 

Implicit within that arrangement is the assumption that “Me” and “Nature” are discrete entities. But the emerging reality is immensely more complicated. “Me” is not some inalienable being that has to remind himself to plant a tulip once in a while before getting back to the real business of watching Alex Trebek. And “Nature” is not some elfin, rejuvenating spa that provides “Me” with a daily dose of fresh oxygen, mental health, and organic broccoli. 

Increasingly, the science of microbiology is showing that we carry “Nature” with us everywhere we go. From the moment we emerge from our mothers, we are colonized, seized, and occupied by other entities. We are not, it turns out, walking cleanrooms that ought to be shuttled into Nature for forty-five minutes, then bustled inside and bathed in hand sanitizer. 

In truth, no matter how far “Inside” we get, the “Outside” is always with us. 

MORE AT: 

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7971

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AUDIO AND VIDEO

Orion Editors Out Loud: January/February 2014

January 21, 2014

Summary: Editors Jennifer Sahn and Andrew Blechman discuss the contents of the January/February 2014 issue of the magazine,