A new day is coming to recognize critical issues

From an Essay by Robert C. Koehler, Common Dreams, July 12, 2018

Now, more than ever, the whole of humanity needs leaders who can who can envision and articulate a global transition beyond war and dominance, beyond environmental exploitation, beyond policies and practices that dehumanize part of us and cluelessly continue more of the same.

The Democrats have been in turmoil for the last half century and then some, when they abandoned their racist base and supported the civil rights movement.

Revved up by the spirit of the ’60s, the party began opening itself to further change, even daring to push beyond the financial interests of its controlling oligarchs and declare an opposition to war. “I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan,” George McGovern said during his 1972 presidential campaign . . . and that was that. After his crushing defeat, at the hands of Richard Nixon and his “Southern strategy,” the Dems quietly retreated. Their prevailing slogan ever since, whispered subconsciously, has been: We don’t stand for all that much.

The Democrats are now Republican lite.

The Dems are now Republican lite. They don’t have the will to disrupt anything that seems tried and true — such as, for instance, American exceptionalism and bloated militarism.

Even in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, the Democrats opted for wimpiness as opposed to courage and sanity. They didn’t dare speak against it, or propose anything but a military path to “peace.” In his 2004 campaign, John Kerry stood thus on the war, as stated on his website: “The hard truth is that we know that more lives will be lost until the mission is truly accomplished.”

And what was that mission? “To create a stable democracy in Iraq.” Those were the words of Kerry’s media spokesperson, with whom I had an enormously frustrating conversation in the wake of a fundraising call I had received from the Kerry campaign.

That war is still quietly going on, fourteen years later. So are a few others. The planet is hemorrhaging refugees, thanks largely to these wars and to the savage inequality that remains the legacy of colonialism. We still have thousands of nuclear weapons ready, on command, to destroy the world. And climate change is stirring up chaotic conditions across the planet.

Now, more than ever, the whole of humanity needs leaders who can who can envision and articulate a global transition beyond war and dominance, beyond environmental exploitation, beyond policies and practices that dehumanize part of us and cluelessly continue more of the same.

The Republicans, who know how to win elections, have served us up a president who is, for better and for worse, pretty much the exact opposite of this. Donald Trump doesn’t articulate a coherent vision for a sustainable and peaceful future, but he does mock the political status quo that has delivered us to our point of no return.

More precisely, what he mocks is the mask called political correctness, which has hidden the racism we became aware of fifty-plus years ago, which has continued, ever so quietly, to drive much of American politics.

More precisely, what he mocks is the mask called political correctness, which has hidden the racism we became aware of fifty-plus years ago, which has continued, ever so quietly, to drive much of American politics. When Trump and his supporters cry “Make America Great Again,” they see an America free of the constraints of political correctness.

Trump brings us an America once again free to hate, belittle and stereotype . . . somebody. If not African-Americans, then Mexicans and Muslims and, well, Native Americans.

“Let’s say I’m debating Pocahontas, right?” This, of course, is Trump talking about arch-nemesis Elizabeth Warren, at a rally of wildly cheering supporters last week in Montana. Oh, to be free of political correctness!

“I promise you I’ll do this, you know those little kits they sell on television for two dollars. . . . I’m going to get one of those little DNA kits, and in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims that she’s of Indian heritage because her mother said she has high cheekbones,” Trump joked to the delight of his overwhelmingly homogeneous audience.

“We will take that little kit . . . but we have to do it gently because we’re in the Me Too generation so we have to be very gentle. And we will very gently take that kit and we will slowly toss it to her. Hoping it doesn’t hit her and injure her arm, even though it only weighs about two ounces.”

The words are remarkably juvenile and clueless, the spew of a bully-bigot who happily mocks an entire people in order to toss a verbal dart at a political enemy. The laughter and applause from the crowd were, I’m certain, due far less to any animosity toward Warren than to sheer delight at the freedom to stereotype. Make America Great Again!

This is the same president who, in May, said of immigrants: “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”

As Annie Linskey noted in the Boston Globe: “And with Trump, pontification becomes policy.”

The wars we wage, the horrors visited on civilian populations, have faded into invisibility, but a national compassion and outrage have broken loose about Trump’s border policies.

Shortly afterward, news of the Trump administration’s treatment of asylum seekers at the Mexican border — the separation of children from their families, putting children in “cages” — went global. And suddenly the treatment of immigrants dominates the news. The wars we wage, the horrors visited on civilian populations, have faded into invisibility, but a national compassion and outrage have broken loose about Trump’s border policies.

It’s almost as though this is a real democracy, at least on that issue.

All of which brings me back to the Democrats, who have one choice only in this year’s midterm elections, and in the presidential election of 2020: Put forth real values and run on a commitment to real change, a la Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young Democratic Socialist who won a shocking upset victory in her congressional primary in the Bronx two weeks ago, and then this week won a second primary in her neighboring district as a write-in candidate. She wasn’t a candidate, but she won anyway.

This is what’s possible for Democrats who refuse to campaign as centrists: that is, as lite Republicans.

Ground water conditions vary widely from place to place

Letter to Editor, Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV

Hoppy Kercheval’s May 16 opinion piece, “Evidence against fracking lacking,” is remarkable for several reasons.

First, he writes about a subject, hydraulic fracturing, citing a single piece of research, coming to the conclusion it “demonstrates that the hysteria over fracking is unwarranted.”

Not so fast Mr. Kercheval! There is now a literature of more than 600 articles published in scientific journals. Such peer-reviewed research is difficult, expensive, and time consuming to complete.

Six years ago, before the body of literature developed, a single article with such conclusions might have been acceptable as a first try, but that is hardly the case now.

The articles now published are divided, by my estimation 80 percent saying investigators found harms or substances that could cause harm as a result of fracking. That doesn’t provide a tight cinch, but it certainly doesn’t justify Mr. Kercheval’s facile conclusion.

Second, referring to the concerns of rural people who have observed adverse effect in their children, their seniors and themselves as “hysteria” is roundly and soundly depreciating. It is much like racism or depreciation of foreign people or minority religion.

The countryside is not inhabited by mindless souls who function with the sensibilities of ghouls. These are real people who take their children to physicians who treat various medical issues that may include respiratory problems, birth defects, blood disorders, cancer and nervous system impacts from questionable causes.

When the disease occurs concurrently with drilling and production and nothing else new has happened, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suspect fracking. Not much else does happen in the country side involving a thousand or more truckloads of chemicals and water per well, injected underground at as much as 15,000 pounds per square inch, along with surface disturbance of several acres for well sites, access roads and pipelines.

Fracking is really a big thing. It requires a huge amount of land. More than 15 million Americans now live within a mile of an oil or gas well, and many more wells are in prospect. These people, choosing to live in rural areas, experience many problems tolerated in only the worst urban areas such as excessive lighting, noise, odors, broken roads, property depreciation and institutional bullying.

In Wendell Berry’s terminology, rural America is considered a “resource colony.”

S. Thomas Bond, Jane Lew, W.Va.

Thomas Bond writes for Frackcheckwv.com.

Allegheny County has increasing drilling & fracking

From an Article by Reid Frazier, The Allegheny Front, February 9, 2018

Michael Thomas didn’t think the Marcellus shale industry, with its multi-acre well pads and large drilling operations, would come to the Pittsburgh suburb of Plum. But then one day last summer, it did.
“I was on vacation and I got an e-mail from a council member that said, ‘Are you going to the meeting tonight?’” said Thomas, the borough manager. “And my response was, ‘What meeting?’”

It was a public hearing for an underground injection well for fracking waste, held by the EPA. Around 200 residents came out to oppose the project. Pretty soon the borough got word that another company wanted to build shale gas wells in Plum.

This came as a surprise to Thomas, the borough’s manager for 13 years. There were small, conventional gas wells in Plum. But Thomas thought the drilling industry would stay in more rural parts of the state.

“We were not anticipating a lot of requests or a lot of permit requests for wellheads in Plum because — all things being equal — you can get a lot more property up in Elk County, a lot cheaper, than you can in Allegheny.”

But in the last couple of years, interest in gas drilling in Pittsburgh’s suburbs has slowly but surely increased. Wells have been permitted or are being planned for as close to four miles from the city line. And according to research from the oil and gas watchdog Fractracker Alliance, about 18 percent of Allegheny County is leased to gas drillers.

That has rekindled a debate about the risks and rewards of drilling in suburban Pittsburgh, as suburbanites and elected officials now have to decide what to do about fracking in their backyards.

Risk vs. reward

Fracking has brought jobs to Pennsylvania and riches for some landowners, but also controversy. Opponents say the process burdens local communities with truck traffic, emissions from gas wells, and potential harm to groundwater.

But that debate has largely skipped over Pittsburgh and its biggest suburbs — until now. It’s not hard to see why.

“If you look at a map of oil and gas operations in Pennsylvania, you’ll immediately take note that Allegheny County looks like an island in a sea of gas wells on their maps,” said Doug Shields, a former Pittsburgh city council member, and now an outreach coordinator for the environmental group Food & Water Watch.

“It’s only a matter of time before (fracking companies) come into these high-density populations.”

S&P Global Platts energy analyst Taylor Cavey said in an email that the reason for the interest in Allegheny County could be from the buildout of pipelines in the area and the sheer volume of gas beneath the ground there, which rivals that of Washington County. In Washington County, the production from Marcellus gas wells there is around 12 million cubic feet a day. In Allegheny County, the initial production rate is now between 4 and 12.9 million cubic feet a day.

Still, drilling companies have so far stuck to the surrounding, more rural counties. Allegheny County has just over 134 Marcellus gas wells, while Washington County, to the south, has 1,710, according to Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection data.

Drilling close to Pittsburgh is complicated by the fact that Allegheny County has 130 municipalities, some as small as 50 acres. Each can regulate fracking through zoning. So deciding where companies can drill is now becoming a big, open question in Pittsburgh’s suburbs.

Through his job with Food and Water Watch, Shields offers to help communities update local laws to include gas drilling restrictions. Only about a third have zoning ordinances that have up-to-date oil and gas designations. But he said that’s beginning to change. “These communities kind of woke up quickly and began to understand they need to protect themselves,” Shields said.

Oakmont, next to Plum, has enacted strict limits on where companies can drill gas wells. Monroeville also adopted a restrictive zoning policy; but the municipality is now considering an ordinance that would allow drilling in more areas.

Striking a balance

A few months ago, Plum decided to allow drilling in about one-third of the municipality. Thomas, the Plum manager, said that was a compromise. Some residents who owned gas rights wanted to expand the map to allow drilling in more densely populated areas. Others wanted to restrict it to just a handful of industrial zones.

“My rule is always to try to strike the balance,” said Thomas, who convened a panel of local officials, planning commission members, and sought out expert advice on how to regulate fracking.

If you don’t let people make money, he said, you won’t have a healthy economy. But “if you have everything running rampant,” people will move away. He said public opinion in the borough was mixed, but that most he talked to were friendly to the idea of drilling. “I’d say six out of every 10 people that I talked to (said), ‘Let’s drill,’” he said. “But four of every 10 (said), ‘We’ve got to think about this, we’ve got to stop this.’”

On top of that, he worried that the company drilling the well, Huntley and Huntley, would sue if the borough made its ordinance too restrictive, especially since Plum had allowed smaller wells to be drilled in most parts of the municipality.

Huntley and Huntley did not agree to an interview. But in an email, a company spokesman said that environmental problems predicted by environmentalists at the company’s other sites — like Allegheny County’s Deer Lakes Park — never materialized, and that the company was concentrating its Marcellus drilling on the more sparsely populated parts of the municipality.

“Oil and gas development in these less developed areas will have the benefit of allowing these landowners, who are oftentimes under economic pressure to maintain their open spaces, the ability to keep them as-is, rather than having to sell their land for more intensive development,” said company spokesman Dave Mashek, in an email.

The company’s first Marcellus gas well in Plum is currently taking shape. Backhoes move dirt around the well-pad, which resembles a typical construction site. But in a few months, a drilling rig will be moved on site, to drill down more than a mile underground into the Marcellus shale.

Dave Vento, a former Plum councilman, doesn’t want to see fracking of this scale come to Plum. He’s worried about truck traffic, potential damage to water wells, and whether the development of shale gas wells will drive down property values. He says he understands some of his neighbors would benefit from lucrative royalty payments, but doesn’t think it’s worth it.

“Absolutely, it’s good for them — but at what cost to the rest of the community?” said Vento, who is a foreman for the Pennsylvania Turnpike. “You live in a community, you don’t live by yourself. This isn’t the Wild Wild West. We live in a community. We’re surrounded by humans — you know? It’s just — what you consider your right, (versus) what you don’t consider your right.”

As drilling moves into the suburbs here, it’s a question more and more people will be asking.

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This story is produced in partnership with StateImpact Pennsylvania, a collaboration among The Allegheny Front, WESA, WITF and WHYY.

Bruce Alberts, Scientist

“Science is an amazing human invention—a huge community effort to discover truth…”

By Bruce Alberts, Science, 31 Mar 2017: Volume 355, Issue 6332, pp. 1353

Summary — The recent election cycle has made it abundantly clear to most scientists that a large fraction of adults in the United States are surprisingly susceptible to illogical arguments designed to fool them. Research suggests that a great many people assess evidence not as scientists are trained to do, but rather in an emotion-biased manner that is strongly influenced by the beliefs of their cultural cohort. The increasing dominance of social media reinforces this natural human tendency. The consequences are frightening for those who believe that, for humanity to prosper, both personal and community decisions must be based on the best science. This conclusion demands a major rethinking of the goals and methods of science education at all levels—from kindergarten through college.

Why science? Science is an amazing human invention—a huge community effort to discover truth through repeated cycles of testing and self-correction. As a result, we now have a deep understanding of how the natural world works. The same type of understandings that allow humans to precisely deliver the Curiosity Rover to Mars also enable us to ensure that vaccination is safe and to forecast the danger of continued carbon dioxide emissions.

But most of those who teach science, including myself, have failed to recognize the crucial importance of producing adults who understand the nature of the scientific enterprise well enough to defend its judgments. In a recent survey, for example, the statement that “climate scientists’ research findings are influenced by the best available scientific evidence most of the time” was supported by only 32% of U.S. adults (www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/the-politics-of-climate).

This result is shocking to scientists. But it becomes much less surprising once one admits that science courses are generally taught as the “revealed wisdom” of scientists, with little or no effort spent on conveying the nature of the scientific process. For example, there is a long-standing belief that every introductory college biology course must “cover” a staggering amount of knowledge. There is no time to focus on a much more important goal—insisting that every student understand exactly how scientific knowledge is generated. Science is not a belief system; it is, instead, a very special way of learning about the true nature of the observable world. And yet a large proportion of adults graduate from college without this realization, despite having been forced to memorize a great many scientific facts.

In previous commentaries on this page, I have argued that “less is more” in science education, and that learning how to think like a scientist—with an insistence on using evidence and logic for decision-making—should become the central goal of all science educators. I have also pointed out that, because introductory science courses taught at universities define what is meant by “science education,” college science faculty are the rate-limiting factor for dramatically improving science education at lower levels.

As an important aid for teaching college science, I call attention to an expanded and redesigned resource—Science in the Classroom, a growing collection of 80 research articles (www.scienceintheclassroom.org/).

As explained in a brief video (youtu.be/Y6LwiIniYmo), selected Science articles have been carefully annotated for teaching, thanks to the efforts of many volunteers. This free resource makes it readily possible for every college student to read an outstanding research paper as part of a course module focused on teaching the scientific process, and to thereby learn how science actually works.

Science Community

Please try it out, volunteer, and provide feedback at scienceeducation@aaas.org.

Help Save Earth: www.350.org

Why don’t people accept global warming?

Essay on Global Warming, S. Tom Bond, March 28, 2017

When 97% of the scientists (that is, the people who have studied the problem with training) agree it is happening and will continue to happen, why do people deny it is going on? As the poet says, “Let me count the ways.”

1.  Many simply follow the news. With its “on the one hand, and then on the other hand” coverage (to avoid driving off advertisers and readers) it is hard to distinguish which approach is correct if you don’t remember and follow up the arguments. The facts are there, melting glaciers, decline of arctic ice, average world temperatures rising year after year, range inhabited by many species moving North, changes in weather, melting permafrost. The mass media rarely shows sufficient evidence to be convincing, and never explains why changes small compared to what our bodies experience are important.

2.  Another common reason is that many people are unwilling to accept new ideas. Many folks don’t have a view that extends beyond their home, job and family. They are reluctant to accept new ideas. They have difficulty accepting a new paradigm, and new framework of understanding. One thinks of the change when the earth was thought flat, then was recognized to be a very large sphere, or when the sun was thought to cross the earth, then it was recognized the earth went around the sun. When new ideas are incorporated into the public discourse, it takes a while for these folks to adapt.

Today there are a few people dedicated to older ideas, such as the earth is cooling, or that a warming earth produces a higher carbon dioxide content in the earth’s atmosphere, rather than the other way around. If someone has ideas based on earlier science, it may be hard to accept global warming.

3.  Some think God wouldn’t allow global warming. It is his creation and it will end in fire when He is good and ready. It doesn’t fit the plan. Don’t argue with them.

4.  This is the simplest to understand and one of the most commonly discussed: cupidity. The petroleum industry is an elite sector because of its wealth, which purchases political power.

There is extensive information on situations where the business elite has interests that gives them an advantage that is contrary to the long-term interest of the society. The business elite persists until the society no longer has some resource it needs to continue, so it crashes. One of the most famous of these is the deforestation of Easter Island, which caused a population crash and an abrupt change in culture.

Of course, training in a science does little to help in business.. So this peculiarity of omission of understanding of other areas is not one sided. My point is that all of us need to recognize our limitations and trust experts. It must be a much greater temptation for a businessman with millions at his disposal to ignore or deny science that will hinder his success than for a scientist with almost no disposable wealth to ignore business ideas opposed to his success.

But the future of the earth depends on future climate, not someone’s ego or financial success. That future should be determined by those with data and training who take time to think about it.

5.  Finally, there is another reason that is a bit abstruse, but vital. This is the separation of modern man from the biological world of which he is a part. Primitive man was close to his environment. Getting food was a daily preoccupation. If times were good, this took two or three hours a day. If times were bad, 24 hours weren’t enough. He/she was subject to danger from animals, floods, droughts, disease, the next village over and much other uncertainty. Everything including trees, rocks, or storms had a spirit. Many of these had to be appeased. But this religion was his connection to survival.

Domination of earth and nature became a way of life. Increasingly, urban man became separated from the biological world from which he came. Dominion over others became increasingly important. And man was dominant over things, apparently supreme. That included the biological world, reverence for which was eliminated from his culture and religion.

Now the whole earth is occupied, and our industry is so linkd together and powerful it is possible to destroy civilization. The supremacist attitude toward the biological world, our environment is not viable. There is no “other” to avoid destruction of global warming or atomic warfare or over population or resource exhaustion.

We need rational understanding of our world and rational control if civilization, and perhaps human life in any form, is to continue.

>>> Tom Bond is a retired chemistry professor & teacher, now a resident farmer in Lewis County, WV