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Finished Testing...
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No Fuel Shortage in our
Drinking Water
by Leslie Clark
People
in Albuquerque need to wake up.
That’s according to Dave McCoy, executive director of the watch dog group
Citizen Action. McCoy was among
the audience at the Kirtland Air Force quarterly meeting October 16th
at the Cesar Chavez Community Center where Sharon Minchak, an Air Force
contractor, detailed the progress of clean-up of a huge jet fuel leak at the
Kirtland base. According to
Minchak, two extraction engines are now working to clean-up the jet
refueling site where the leak was found.
About 7500 gallons of fuel have been removed from the soil since the
end of July, she said, at a rate of about 300 gallons per day.
But that didn’t seem to satisfy the audience.
McCoy pressed Minchak to describe the size and depth of
the fuel leak.
Minchak estimated the plume to be about 14 acres with the depth
of the spill unknown.
But McCoy computed the polluted area as closer to 33
acres. “Figuring about .5 acre foot per acre of contamination,”
he said, “that figures out to about five million gallons of
contamination in the aquifer.”
And with the new data from the recently placed monitors,
the New Mexico Environment Department estimates a 40 acre plume
or six million gallons.
But Minchak reminded the group that calculating the depth
of the spill is complicated by the varying porosity of the soil.
Ultimately though, she agreed there are millions of
gallons of fuel floating on Albuquerque ground water.
read more
No
More Coal
By Peter Montague
As the urgency
of global warming continues to unfold in surprising ways, the coal industry
finds itself in desperate straits. Opposition has developed in completely
unexpected places.
This
week Google -- the innovative internet giant -- announced it will invest
several hundred million dollars in research to produce electricity from
solar power cheaper than from coal. And they intend to do it in the next few
years, not the next few decades. And a new study this week showed that
windmills wired together in a large grid could provide power as reliably as
-- and cheaper than -- coal plants.
Coal
technology has remained essentially unchanged since the dawn of the
industrial revolution in the early 19th century -- so to have a young, savvy
adversary like Google enter the electricity business means that coal and
electric utility executives suddenly have reason to fear for their
retirement benefits. They must be feeling like a slow-moving leaf-eating
dinosaur that suddenly finds itself staring into the eyes of a large pack of
hungry leopards.
Coal-fired electric power plants produce 40% of all CO2 emissions in the
U.S. (and even more, worldwide). By itself, phasing out coal would go a long
way toward fixing the global warming problem.
That point was made last
April in an advertisement in the New Yorker magazine. The ad asserts,
"There is a 'silver
bullet' for global warming:
NO MORE COAL.'
read more
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Decentralized Economy
by
V.B. Price
Voters have heard virtually nothing this election season about what are sure
to be dominant themes in the years ahead – climate change, renewable energy
and a green economy.
Such matters don’t lend themselves to savage 15 second attack ads approved
by the candidates, nor perk up the beleaguered brain cells of media
questioners in national debates.
For many of us, though, it seems a sure thing that we are on the verge of a
gigantic rearrangement of both our economy and our way of life in this
country, a rearrangement that will be carried along by the riptides of
global weather chaos and economic upheavals and insecurity around the world.
Are there any key principles that will help us turn this kind of change into
something more than crisis dressed up to look like opportunity?
The principles may not be simple enough for television, but they seem pretty
clear. The first principle is the decentralization of energy. The second is
the localization of economic interest and activity.
National and regional electricity grids are far too vulnerable to breaking
down when they are overloaded. Electricity is sure to become the stopgap
fuel of all uses as we move from gasoline to other forms of propulsion.
Electric cars will take up the slack to a degree, I think, and overload the
system.
Reducing carbon emission to slow down climate change will demand a massive
changeover from carbon energy to alternative energies in the generation of
electricity. Carbon fuels, like nuclear fuel, require national and regional
grids.
Alternative fuels – such as solar and wind power – can be localized, and
decentralized. Solar power can also be miniaturized to power individual
homes and businesses. And wind power can be localized to supply power to
towns and even cities.
Decentralized energy is infinitely safer than massive grid systems in times
of potential overuse and potential terrorist threat.
None of this will happen overnight, of course. The changes will be gradual,
but traumatic. Businesses will fail, new ones will take their places.
As we wean ourselves from gasoline, however, the price of transporting goods
from one part of the world to another will grow astronomically. Transport
costs have already tripled since 2000.
What that means is that jobs, ultimately, will be returning to this country.
And just as global transport becomes prohibitively expensive, so will
national transport. And that means a resurgence in local manufacturing,
retailing, farming, repairing, recycling and reusing.
The last thing any town or region wants is to have the power go out, or
become unreliable, just as it’s rebuilding its local retail and
manufacturing trades, and getting local farming back to where it
produces more food than has to be trucked in.
As in all changes, transitions are where the troubles are.In moving from one
fuel base to another, we will see many stopgap measures.
We just don’t want the stopgaps to cause more problems than they solve.
Eventually cost will determine demand as it always does in the long run,
despite false demand created by advertising. Decentralized solar and wind
energy, with no dwindling resources or toxic waste to contend with, will
become the low cost leaders.
In the meantime, natural gas will be a cleaner alternative, than scrubbed-up
coal. Perhaps coal can be made clean, but no one has demonstrated a
convincing argument as to how that could be done.
Bio fuels that burn food products to run cars will go the way of the
dinosaurs in less than a decade. Hydro power remains relatively clean,
except for the land destroyed by the dams that make it possible. And with
global warming causing increasing periods of drought in the
American West, hydropower won’t be able to grow enough to replace coal.
Nuclear energy seems to me to be shortsighted stopgap, one that is
potentially far more harmful and costly than any good it could do.
Nuclear power plants take a dozen or so years to come on line. They cost
some $2 billion to construct. They’re vulnerable to terrorist attack.
Uranium mining, including in situ leaching of uranium ore from ground water,
is dangerous to public health, as has been proven over and over
again.
Alternative, renewable fuels lend themselves to decentralization, and,
therefore, to the growth of local, decentralized economies. Why ship energy
gained from sunshine across hundreds of miles, when everyone has enough
sunshine to supply at least part of their energy needs? If cloudy
Germany is growing its solar power base, anyplace can.
Decentralizing power and strengthening local economies does not mean America
will become balkanized into self-contained economic districts.
It does mean, however, that local people can begin again to take more
control over their economic well being.
That’s an opportunity we can’t let pass us by.
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