The Danger of Stored Waste

I read this disturbing article the other day in the Washington Post - Factory Farming Practices Are Under Scrutiny Again in N.C. After Disastrous Hurricane Floods.

The short version of that story is this: enormous, factory-scale facilities for raising and slaughtering cattle, pigs, and chickens generate vast amounts of waste material - manure, urine, and other things - that are stored in huge "lagoons." And when major storms roll up the coast and flooding ruptures those lagoons, all that bacteria-laden, foul-smelling sludge spills out and combines with flood waters to compound what is already a disaster.

But the problem isn't limited to animal waste. What about our political waste? Consider the impact on our health and environment of the election detritus ...

Tens of millions of yard and highway signs that will end up in landfills;

Hundreds of millions of feet of film and thousands of hard drives full of digital video which contain heavy metals and other toxic materials;

Millions of pages of "opposition research," most of it without context;

Tens of billions of cubic feet of hot air* and poisonous gas;

Countless hours of annoying robo-calls that choke telephone lines, aggravate nerves, and provide no useful information;

Hours of threats and vitriol that have poisoned the well of good citizenship and denigrated the once-noble tradition of public service.

Oh, and then there's Congress ... as complete a waste of air and space as I've seen in my lifetime, hopelessly mired in the muck of I'm-Right-You're-Wrong-Screw-You hyperpartisanship**. We might as well just clean out the Capitol Building and rent the space to Super PACs and the NRA ... we'd be no worse off, and the rent would help pay off the national debt***.

Not all the toxic sludge that threatens our physical and mental environments can be blamed on industrial waste. Unfortunately, the industrial waste will be much easier to clean up in the long run. There's not a Superfund that's super enough to clean up the rest.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* As if global warming ... uh ... climate change isn't enough of a problem already.

** Please spare me the juvenile argument that the other side did it first/is worse.

*** Assuming they actually paid it, which is probably not a good assumption.

Bilbo Pontificates on Energy, Transportation, and the Environment

Back in 2007 I wrote a post titled Thigh Bone's Connected to the Hip Bone, etc., in which I suggested that we as a nation were being pretty dumb by looking at all our problems in isolation rather than as part of an interconnected system in which responses to one issue have ramifications in other areas. That idea - my concept of government, society, law, and the economy as a system rather than a group of unconnected activities - underlies my thinking on virtually every discussion of the issues we face. In the last few posts, I've talked about approaches to immigration reform, foreign policy, tax reform, and the economy in ways that try to address how the solutions are all interconnected. Today, let's think about how energy, transportation, and environmental policies all fit together (and, of course, fit with all the others).

Tax reform is difficult enough to think through, because there are so many vested interests that benefit from the current system in one way or another. The same applies to developing energy, transportation, and environmental policies, except that it's almost worse: our current slapdash approach combines the worst features of tax policy, agriculture policy, housing policy, foreign policy, environmental policy, the oil industry, the nuclear industry, vast swarms of lawyers and pundits, and probably several others I've forgotten. If the country needs a tax system that looks like someone designed it on purpose, it needs other comprehensive policies at least as badly.

Here are my thoughts ...

1. Immediately Start Up Manhattan Project II to Develop Safe, Reliable, Renewable Alternative Energy Sources. During the darkest days of World War II, when victory against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was not yet a foregone conclusion, President Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. It was the most expensive crash program in American history, harnessing the efforts of the nation's finest scientists in a money-is-no-object effort to develop the ultimate weapon to defeat the ultimate evil. Today, we need a new Manhattan Project to break our reliance on fossil fuels. This effort would be funded by a tax on oil company profits, a small tax on gasoline- and diesel-fueled vehicles, and a small parallel tax on gasoline at the retail level (not more than 2 cents/gallon).

2. Open the Yucca Mountain Repository for the Safe Storage of Nuclear Waste, and Do Not License Any New Nuclear Plants Until It Is In Operation. Nuclear energy is often touted as an environmentally safe, clean source of energy, and it is ... for the short term. The elephant in the nuclear room that no one in the industry wants to discuss is that nuclear power generation produces radioactive waste, much of which will be deadly for tens of thousands of years (see my earlier post "Don't Dig Here"). If we are going to rely on nuclear power, we must accept the risks inherent in its waste, and must have a secure, remote place to store it that's as safe as we can make it. Yucca Mountain is probably as safe a place as we're likely to find on the earth.

3. Shift Ethanol Production From Corn to the Use of Other Agricultural Waste Products. If ethanol continues to be used as a component of gasoline, it should be made from products other than corn. Reliance on corn distorts agricultural prices and policies and eats up valuable land that could be used for growing other staple products.

4. Require That All New Construction Employ Environmental Principles. "Green" construction techniques and building features will help save energy both in construction and throughout the life of the structure. Built-in solar panels in areas with abundant sun or geothermal units in geologically active areas, "green roofs" for insulation (and gardening), and a return to the use of natural construction materials instead of plastics will all help to conserve energy by minimizing the need for electricity and relying on renewable natural energy sources.

5. Ban the Manufacture and Use of Non-Biodegradable Plastics for Packaging. There are vast islands of floating plastic bags in the oceans, hazardous to fish and plant life and not going away in our lifetimes. Landfills are choked with plastic trash. We need to get away from the use of such materials now. Many stores are offering reusable bags; their use should be made mandatory, as should the use of biodegradable products for packaging of all types.

6. Invest in the Nation's Rail Network. Railroads can move vast amounts of cargo over long distances at cheap rates while using less energy than long-haul trucks. Modernize and expand the nation's rail system for both passengers (in high-traffic areas like the East Coast corridor) and for cargo (nationwide).

7. Encourage Expansion and Use of Mass Transit in Major Metropolitan Areas. Buses, light rail networks, and similar mass transit methods save energy while moving large numbers of people. Encourage use of mass transit by expanding networks to serve larger areas and by limiting the ability to drive in urban areas (for instance, by reducing availability of parking). This will be very difficult, as we're a nation that loves its cars and the individual freedom and flexibility they offer ... but they turn open land into roads and parking lots, turn fossil fuels into carbon exhaust, and are a long-term threat to the environment.

That's the basics of my energy policy. Take your best shot. Some of my friends and commenters have already pointed out that everything on the list is going to be expensive and problematic in some way, but we need to do something. If you don't like my ideas, don't just say they won't work ... propose something better.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow, when we announce the Right-Cheek Ass Clown for September.

Bilbo

Thinking About Sand

There are a lot of things in this world that we're running short of - clean water, various minerals, arable land, and common sense among them. But one thing it never occurred to me would be in short supply is - of all things - sand. Yesterday I ran across this extremely interesting (if a bit long) March 26th article by Vince Beiser from Wired Magazine: The Deadly Global War for Sand.

Now, sand isn't something I've thought very much about, other than to curse it while I sweep away piles of it from our streets and sidewalks after the recent miserable winter, but it turns out that common, ordinary sand is one of the most important commodities in the world. We need sand to make glass, cement, silicon chips, and all the other things that are built with them. Our civilization is, quite literally, built on sand. According to the article,

"Apart from water and air, humble sand is the natural resource most consumed by human beings. People use more than 40 billion tons of sand and gravel every year. There’s so much demand that riverbeds and beaches around the world are being stripped bare ... And the amount of sand being mined is increasing exponentially."

But how could there be a shortage of sand?, you ask, when there are vast tracts of sand in the world's deserts, and the Middle East has to be good for something besides oil and mindless violence. But as the article points out and I never realized,

"Desert sand generally doesn’t work for construction; shaped by wind rather than water, desert grains are too round to bind together well."

I think this is a fascinating article. It describes vast criminal networks devoted to mining, transporting, and selling common sand, a resource that may seem limitless but which is, in fact, in increasingly short supply. As the world's beaches and riverbeds are scraped free of sand, huge industries have sprung up to vacuum it up from the ocean floor. Uncontrolled sand mining causes beach erosion and pollutes the air and water.

It's political, too. China is dredging millions of tons of sand to build or enlarge islands that will reinforce its claims to vast sections of the South China Sea. Dubai's enormous land-reclamation projects like Palm Island (shown below) and constant building of huge skyscrapers have exhausted all the nearby sources of sand, leading to a worldwide trade - both legal and illegal - in plain old sand. The article points out that "Exporters in Australia are literally selling sand to Arabs."

Sadly, if you and I ever think about sand, it's in the context of sandbags to hold back flood waters and material to fill children's sandboxes. It's the beautiful white stuff we get in unfortunate orifices at the beach, or the abrasive substance glued to heavy paper to help with woodworking. And it appears in our songs as a symbol of impermanence, as in the song "Yesterday When I Was Young," written by Herbert Kretzmer and Charles Aznavour and sung memorably by Roy Clark:

"The thousand dreams I dreamed,

The splendid things I planned,

I always built to last on weak and shifting sand"

And yet, as we see, we depend on sand for the very permanence that we deny in song.

Sand. Don't build home without it.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo