- EC - lists.cheatlakeclear.org

Fwd: tri-ennial review
by James Kotcon 08 Jun '13

08 Jun '13

>From my backlog of e-mail, here is an idea for a new initiative. DEP is required to do a review of water quality standards every three years. In preparation for that, they solicited public comments last fall (available at: http://www.dep.wv.gov/WWE/Programs/wqs/Pages/2014TriennialReviewofWaterQual… Among the environmental groups, Appalachian Mountain Advocates recommended a standard for conductivity, John and Petra Wood recommended standards for conductivity, sulfates ad TDS, and Duane Nichols recommended a TDS standard. Not surprisingly, First Energy wants to weaken the arsenic standard. And AEP wants to limit the Category A (Public water supply) implementation, as well as restrict uses of the Stream Condition index (benthic insects), rescind the selenium Acute criterion, and weaken standards for mercury, beryllium, iron and aluminum (the aluminum and beryllium changes happened in the Legislature this year). Although we missed the deadline for initial comments, it would be a good step for us to support a WQS for TDS or conductivity as an extra tool for Marcellus activities, and adding a sulfate standard would be useful for coal-related impacts, as this is the dominant toxicant in TDS, and needs a stand-alone standard. Whaddya tink? Jim Kotcon P.S. Please keep the message form the "mole" below to ourselves. >>> Here are some comments from a mole in the water office. What I'm hearing is that it would be good for the environmentalists to request that DEP develop a sulfate criteria, that the Legislature needs to be lobbied to pass the TDS standard, and that they should be keeping up with what DEP's watershed assessment branch is doing with the fish IBI. Both our water quality standards group, Kevin Coyne and Watershed Assessment Branch, John Wirts are willing to meet with them to help them understand what DEP is doing. That used to happen but the enviros have not requested a meeting for a long time. They should try to meet with the staffers vs the politicos to get the best info. There is alot of room for intereference and influence on the fish IBI so it would be best not to let industry get the upper hand. As far as the specifics below, it all looks good. DEP staff feels pretty confident about the fecal coliform/e coli switch and don't see much of a threat there, but welcome the comments. It is suggested that Michael Becher, Appalachian Mt. Advocates is knowledgeable on the Category A issue listed here, but this group is probably aware of that.

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underground mine to close
by Jim Sconyers 08 Jun '13

08 Jun '13

Alpha closing Justice No. 1 mine in Boone County. http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201306070105 -- Jim Sconyers jimscon(a)gmail.com 304.698.9628 Remember, Mother Nature bats last. *There is no Planet B!*

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link from Barbara Fallon
by Barbara Fallon 07 Jun '13

07 Jun '13

http://nukegets.info/gxco/swwgcfvakgv

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from ScienceDaily e-newsletter: Disincentives to energy efficiency can be fixed
by Paul Wilson 05 Jun '13

05 Jun '13

Disincentives to energy efficiency can be fixed<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/y92…> Posted: 04 Jun 2013 12:35 PM PDT A new study finds that utilities aren't rewarded for adopting energy efficiency programs, and that reforms are needed to make energy efficiency as attractive as renewables. -- Paul Wilson Sierra Club 504 Jefferson Ave Charles Town, WV 25414-1130 Phone: 304-725-4360 Cell: 304-279-1361 "There is no forward until you have gone back" ~Buddha "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous" ~ Aristotle

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Re: [EC] Fwd: Article from E&E News on WV Senate race
by Jim Sconyers 04 Jun '13

04 Jun '13

Sad, isn't it. Even a Democrat has to kiss King Coal's butt. On Jun 4, 2013 10:18 AM, "Paul Wilson" <pjgrunt(a)gmail.com> wrote: > fyi, paul > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Emily Diamond-Falk <emily_diamond-falk(a)tws.org> > Date: Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 10:00 AM > Subject: Article from E&E News on WV Senate race > To: Birth Place of Rivers <birthplaceofrivers(a)tws.org> > > > CAMPAIGN 2014:**** W.Va. Dems hopeful of finding pro-coal candidate to > follow Rockefeller**** > > Manuel Quinones, E&E reporter**** > > Published: Tuesday, June 4, 2013**** > > West Virginia Democrats are expressing optimism about their chances of > replacing retiring Sen. Jay Rockefeller with another Democrat in next > year's election, despite their apparent difficulty in tapping a strong > candidate.**** > > Yesterday, well-known West Virginia radio talk show host Hoppy Kercheval > raised eyebrows when he reported that Charleston attorney Nick Preservati > -- who had been called a potential "unicorn" candidate and an electable > pro-coal Democrat -- would not jump into the race because of family reasons. > **** > > Preservati did not return a call to confirm his intentions in time for > publication. But news that he would likely not be running sparked observers > in West Virginia and Washington, D.C., to chatter about the party's uphill > climb against Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, who announced her > intention to run even before Rockefeller announced his retirement.**** > > "I think with or without Preservati, this was looking like a really > difficult hold for Democrats," said Nathan Gonzalez, campaign analyst with > the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report, which has the West Virginia > Senate race leaning in favor of the Republicans.**** > > Gonzalez said Democrats "were excited about Preservati and his family's > connection to the coal industry, but the political reality is that it's > going to take a special Democratic candidate to win in West Virginia in the > second midterm of President Obama in the White House."**** > > West Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Larry Puccio brushed off claims > that the party was in dire straits in its efforts to find a candidate.**** > > "The truth of the matter is, we have a couple of individuals who we > believe will have a positive announcement in the near future," Puccio said > in an interview.**** > > One name that keeps popping up is West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie > Tennant, a former journalist who has worked to increase her statewide > profile. She came in third in a 2011 primary for governor.**** > > Puccio, while not revealing names of candidates who have expressed their > interest to run, said support for the state's coal industry was an > important test of electability.**** > > "I think that's extremely important in this state," said Puccio. "And I > will tell you, of the candidates who have spoken to me, they are all > extremely supportive of coal in West Virginia."**** > > In recent days, attorney Ralph Baxter, the former CEO of global law firm > Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe LLP and a West Virginia native, also > decided against taking on Capito.**** > > Republicans were already painting Baxter as too liberal for West Virginia > and highlighting his connections to San Francisco, where the firm is > headquartered.**** > > Former state GOP Chairman Mike Stuart told Kercheval on West Virginia > MetroNews "Talkline" that Baxter's background was "frankly not in tune with > most of the people in West Virginia." Stuart said Baxter would have spent > "millions of his own dollars and [have lost] badly."**** > > George Carenbauer, former state Democratic chairman, shot back, saying > that Capito's record is "not necessarily a record that fits well with the > average West Virginian." He mentioned Medicare, likely referring to > Capito's vote for the GOP budget plan that would rework the system.**** > > Democrats control the West Virginia Legislature and the governor's > mansion. There are more registered Democrats than registered Republicans in > the state. Plus, along with touting their support for the state's coal > industry, Democrats generally also tend to favor strong worker protections, > endearing them to the United Mine Workers union.**** > > "Yeah, Democrats can get elected, but those state offices are built around > a completely different set of issues," said Gonzalez, noting that when it > comes to federal elections, Mountain State voters want to see candidates > who can prove their independence from more liberal national Democrats and > an unpopular Obama.**** > > Popular Sen. Joe Manchin has emerged as a model for an electable West > Virginia Democrat at the national level. Many observers called Preservati, > who has represented the coal companies and has family connections to the > industry, another "Joe Manchin."**** > > But even though some Democrats think Preservati's lack of an electoral > record is a good thing, Gonzalez said, "Joe Manchin didn't just develop his > political profile a year before his election to the Senate. He was a > two-term governor who also ran a good campaign."**** > > Rep. Nick Rahall, a Democrat serving his 19th term in the House, mulled a > Senate run but decided against it earlier this year. He may face a tough > race of his own for re-election.**** > > "West Virginia has lost a tremendous amount of seniority already with the > loss of Sen. [Robert] Byrd and [soon to retire] Sen. Rockefeller," said > Rahall in a recent interview. "And I felt that for the best interests of > the state of West Virginia and its people, that my seniority should stay in > the House of Representatives."**** > > Addressing his party's Senate prospects, Rahall said, "We'll come up with > a good candidate that can attract sufficient votes. The seat, I believe, > can be won by a good, strong Democrat who backs our coal industry and would > continue to diversify our economy and has experience in those areas."**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > *Emily Diamond-Falk* > > Communications Manager**** > > *The Wilderness Society *| Washington, DC** > > 202.429.2608| cell: 202.841.8605**** > > www.wilderness.org**** > > ** ** > > Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheWildernessSociety**** > > Twitter: twitter.com/Wilderness <http://twitter.com/#!/Wilderness>**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > *[image: cid:image001.jpg@01CC7170.6F236C10]**We protect wilderness and > inspire Americans to care for our wild places*** > > ** ** > > > > -- > Paul Wilson > Sierra Club > 504 Jefferson Ave > Charles Town, WV 25414-1130 > Phone: 304-725-4360 > Cell: 304-279-1361 > > "There is no forward until you have gone back" ~Buddha > > "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous" ~ Aristotle >

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Forwarded article re comeback of coal from Power Line
by william.depaulo＠gmail.com 03 Jun '13

03 Jun '13

COAL MAKES A COMEBACK..... http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/06/coal-makes-a-comeback.php I highly recommend giving it a read. ---------------------------- This e-mail was sent because you were recommended via SmartAddon.com Share Tool - To stop all e-mails coming from us, please visit: http://www.smartaddon.com/?unsubscribe=ec@osenergy.org

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Arch's Leer mining complex ramping up outside Grafton - State Journal Article re vast expansion of production at Arch mine............
by William V. DePaulo, Esq. 03 Jun '13

03 Jun '13

http://www.statejournal.com/story/22399790/archs-leer-mining-complex-rampin…

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Re: [EC] ] Articles on Chilling Dissent
by Beth Little 02 Jun '13

02 Jun '13

This is a quote from the article linked below. If a bill like this were passed in WV, I would be a felon and an ecological terrorist, except that some of the videotaping I did of the Lochgelly UIC by myself. The anti-fracking effort is becoming something much deeper than just trying to curtail pollution. Anybody know a computer geek who could tell if my computer is monitored? It seems pretty slow, but that could just be Frontier. Earlier this year, a bill was introduced into the Pennsylvania legislature that would make it a felony to videotape farming operations in Pennsylvania - so-called "ag-gag" legislation that has already passed in Utah and Iowa, and has been introduced in several other legislatures. Many of the ag-gag bills draw on language crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC) "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act." (In recent years ALEC has received considerable support from the natural gas industry). Section D of the ALEC bill defines an animal or ecological terrorist organization in broad terms "as any association, organization, entity, coalition, or combination of two or more persons" who seek to "obstruct, impede or deter any person from participating" not only in agricultural activity but also mining, foresting, harvesting, and gathering or processing of natural resources. The proposed law has many anti-drilling activists worried. If such language were included in the bill (it is currently in committee and will be revised before it comes to the floor) it would greatly limit the ability of residents to photograph or video well sites, compressor stations, and pipeline development - all of which could be considered part of the "gathering or processing of natural resources." From: wvec-board(a)yahoogroups.com [mailto:wvec-board@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of cindy rank Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 5:14 PM To: WVEC Subject: Re: [wvec-board] Articles on Chilling Dissent good one.... On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Steve Thompson <unclesteve197(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I think it was George Carlin that suggested sending a copy of the Constitution to himself every day by e-mail on the off chance that the national security state might actually read it... May 29, 2013 We Are Being Watched Corporate Spying on Environmental Groups by ADAM FEDERMAN http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/29/corporate-spying-on-environmental-gro ups/ May 29, 2013 Welcome to the Freakshow Media Gets Targeted by Obama, Discovers No One Cares Except the Media by BETHANIA PALMA MARKUS http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/29/media-gets-targeted-by-obama-administ ration-discovers-no-one-cares-except-the-media/ (Referenced in above article) Obama's personal role in a journalist's imprisonment By Glenn Greenwald Salon.com Wednesday, Mar 14, 2012 http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/obamas_personal_role_in_a_journalists_impris onment/ <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvec-board/post;_ylc=X3oDMTJxcGY3czB0BF9TAzk3 MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzIxNTg0MDQxBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTM2NTM5MgRtc2dJZAMzNDgwBHNlYwNm dHIEc2xrA3JwbHkEc3RpbWUDMTM2OTc2MTQ0OA--?act=reply&messageNum=3480> Reply via web post <mailto:deniseap@earthlink.net?subject=Re%3A%20WVEC%20Calendar%20June%20%26% 20July> Reply to sender <mailto:wvec-board@yahoogroups.com?subject=Re%3A%20WVEC%20Calendar%20June%20 %26%20July> Reply to group <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvec-board/post;_ylc=X3oDMTJmYnJ0Z3VyBF9TAzk3 MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzIxNTg0MDQxBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTM2NTM5MgRzZWMDZnRyBHNsawNudHBj BHN0aW1lAzEzNjk3NjE0NDg-> Start a New Topic <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvec-board/message/3480;_ylc=X3oDMTM1dHZjaGU3 BF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzIxNTg0MDQxBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTM2NTM5MgRtc2dJZAMzNDgw BHNlYwNmdHIEc2xrA3Z0cGMEc3RpbWUDMTM2OTc2MTQ0OAR0cGNJZAMzNDgw> Messages in this topic (1) Recent Activity: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvec-board;_ylc=X3oDMTJmOG1yODg3BF9TAzk3MzU5N zE0BGdycElkAzIxNTg0MDQxBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTM2NTM5MgRzZWMDdnRsBHNsawN2Z2hwBHN0a W1lAzEzNjk3NjE0NDc-> Visit Your Group <http://groups.yahoo.com/;_ylc=X3oDMTJlaHB2NHYzBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzIxN Tg0MDQxBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTM2NTM5MgRzZWMDZnRyBHNsawNnZnAEc3RpbWUDMTM2OTc2MTQ0O A--> Error! 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May 30 - McKinley Climate Change Forum
by Jonathan Rosenbaum 29 May '13

29 May '13

May be an interesting event for some local Sierra Club members to attend: Washington, D.C.—Today, Rep. David B. McKinley, P.E. (R-WV) announced a panel of distinguished experts in the field of climate science will conduct a panel discussion in Fairmont. What: Discussion on the Origins and Response to Climate Change Who: The Office of Rep. David B. McKinley, P.E. (R-WV) and the West Virginia High Tech Consortium Foundation Where: W.Va. High Tech Consortium Foundation, 5000 NASA Boulevard, I-79 Technology Park in Fairmont, WV When: Thursday, May 30th from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. This event is open to the media and the public. Please call 202-225-4172 for more information or to R.S.V.P. Confirmed Attendees: • Annie Petsonk, International Counsel of Environmental Defense Fund. • Marc Morano, Executive Director and Chief Correspondent for ClimateDepot.com; former senior advisor, speech-writer and climate researcher for Senator James Inhofe. • Jim Hurrell, Director, NCAR Earth System Laboratory. • Myron Ebell, Director of Energy and Environment, Competitive Enterprise Institute. • David Kreutzer, Ph.D., Research Fellow in Energy Economics and Climate Change, The Heritage Foundation. • Thomas Sheahan, Ph.D., MIT educated physicist and author. • Dennis Avery, Director, Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute and author of “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years”. • Sarah Forbes, Senior Associate, World Resources Institute. • A. Scott Denning, Professor, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University. • Dr. John Christy, Distinguished Professors of atmospheric science, and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

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Fwd: You're invited: Forum on science, democracy, and fracking
by Paul Wilson 29 May '13

29 May '13

fyi, the link will go to my RSVP form so you will need to register with UCS or clear the form and start from scratch. It is on July 25th so there is a lot of time to sign up but space may be limited. best, paul ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: UCS Science Network <sciencenetwork(a)ucsusa.org> Date: Tue, May 28, 2013 at 5:32 PM Subject: You're invited: Forum on science, democracy, and fracking To: pjgrunt(a)gmail.com [image: UCS Science Network] *Register for the Forum Today* Join the Center for Science and Democracy for a live webcast of our *Science, Democracy, and Community Decisions on Fracking Forum* on July 25, 2:00 p.m. PDT/5:00 p.m. EDT. As a Science Network member, you can also sign up for a chance to win an free trip to the forum<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=E9INvInhunyAhe7-updT7w> . *[image: RSVP button]<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=i1uKNdz3WpjGs7VyxzMOCA> * Related Links What Do Food and Fracking Have in Common? We Need Information to Make the Best Choice <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=pOOIW6RLozxNYM_BrN_YWw> Lewis M. Branscomb Science and Democracy Forums<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=47hMwPJPKHY0SiUcXYqbcA> Tell A Colleague Please encourage your colleagues to sign up<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=hfRwZpMeu_seikh3P8ILQw>and help increase our effectiveness in creating a healthy environment and a safer world. CLICK HERE<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=RnN8BhlXQbfYCeEggOJ17g> . Science, Democracy, and Community Decisions on Fracking A Lewis M. Branscomb Forum Dear Paul, The Union of Concerned Scientists invites you to join us for a public forum webcasted live from the University of California, Los Angeles on July 25. This forum will convene leading thinkers and key stakeholders for a candid discussion on how the best available science can help communities make informed decisions on hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") amidst the current expansion in drilling for shale oil and gas across the United States. *Science, Democracy, and Community Decisions on Fracking<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=99S1FKLfKZJzeKjx1pgR_A> * *A Lewis M. Branscomb Forum* Date: Thursday, July 25 Time: 2:00-5:00 p.m. PDT/5:00-8:00 p.m. EDT Location: UCLA *Register for the Webcast Today<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=YOuO0ezUNKSDuPtR_g-N4Q> * We will share a line-up of speakers and a detailed program soon. But as space is limited for this distinctive event, we want to give UCS supporters like you the opportunity for early event registration<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=M4yVVi9flo_ELAxRlk8Dvg>to join via webcast. *Want to join us in person?* As a member of the UCS Science Network, you can participate in the *UCS Science Network's Science and Democracy Forum Sweepstakes* for a chance to win an all-expenses paid trip to the forum as a Science Network Special Guest. *Click here to learn more and sign up for the sweepstakes. <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=sNy1-m0WcEBoZl8iWLgnpg>* The rapid growth in fracking is driving many communities to make decisions on fracking without access to comprehensive and reliable scientific information of the potential impacts on their air and water quality, community health, and economic well-being. The forum will provide a unique opportunity to learn from experts, decision makers, and community leaders about the state of the science around fracking, the state and federal policy landscape, and what citizens and policy makers need to know to make informed decisions about whether, and under what conditions, to extract oil and gas using fracking. We look forward to you joining us and contributing to the conversation. Sincerely, [image: Andy Rosenberg signature.jpg] Andrew A. Rosenberg, Ph.D. Director, Center for Science and Democracy Union of Concerned Scientists The Union of Concerned Scientists puts rigorous, independent science to work to solve our planet's most pressing problems. Joining with citizens across the country, we combine technical analysis and effective advocacy to create innovative, practical solutions for a healthy, safe, and sustainable future. UCS is a 501(c)(3) organization. All gifts are tax deductible. You can be confident your donations to UCS are spent wisely. <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=zVPxxSJ-EnFxD1_813U_4g> Union of Concerned Scientists 2 Brattle Square Cambridge, MA 02138-3780 Phone: 800-666-8276<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=wGhDdFbreVuX06tJ15xkJA> Fax: 617-864-9405 <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=XpLrJEHFh8pZynQBT9jF4w> *ucsaction(a)ucsusa.org* <ucsaction(a)ucsusa.org> *www.ucsusa.org* <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=OLTRU7lMHAbDsBZbMdoDCg> *About UCS* <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=YSWTM6aE_dDkaKwYLs5y9Q> | *Take Action* <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=QZGOxRXaqZpTV7LJx_tVaA> | *Donate * <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=86JvXQMR5lfvTB-DbnENVQ> | *Contact Us*<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=AIOQAmFQVnzj_rIOvSl17w>| *Privacy Policy* <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=92yUvudnHtAc31d6-J7eTA>| *Unsubscribe*<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/CO?i=JmPHG4ESwLswPDvKQFetQh7ATGdctngE&cid=178…>| *Update Your Profile*<http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=Xmae0Zs02ap63Hyup1FL2w> © Union of Concerned Scientists. All rights reserved. [image: powered by CONVIO] <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=Rj0tPUBrPPBNzPzJmRvtLQ> nonprofit software <http://action.ucsusa.org/site/R?i=LcjtIloqm0tyI40Y_pTXXw> -- Paul Wilson Sierra Club 504 Jefferson Ave Charles Town, WV 25414-1130 Phone: 304-725-4360 Cell: 304-279-1361 "There is no forward until you have gone back" ~Buddha "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous" ~ Aristotle

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FW: [MarcellusGasInfo] Map of Gas Infrastructure, Susquehanna Co. PA + S. Broome NY
by Beth Little 24 May '13

24 May '13

From: marcellusgasinfo(a)googlegroups.com [mailto:marcellusgasinfo@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of William Huston Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 11:27 PM To: undisclosed-recipients: Subject: [MarcellusGasInfo] Map of Gas Infrastructure, Susquehanna Co. PA + S. Broome NY Holy God (see attached) -- -- May you, and all beings be happy and free from suffering :) -- ancient Buddhist Prayer (Metta) -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MarcellusGasInfo" group. To post to this group, send email to marcellusgasinfo(a)googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to marcellusgasinfo+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/marcellusgasinfo?hl=en This listserv is managed and owned by the Binghamton Regional Sustainabiliy Coalition (BRSC) For our email list policy, visit For BRSC email list policy, visit http://groups.google.com/group/marcellusgasinfo/files --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MarcellusGasInfo" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to marcellusgasinfo+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. _____ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.3343 / Virus Database: 3184/6351 - Release Date: 05/23/13

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Fwd: WVNS story: Another Power Plant Being Unloaded Onto WV Consumers?
by Paul Wilson 22 May '13

22 May '13

f;yi, paul ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Public News Service <newsservice(a)newsservicemail.org> Date: Mon, May 20, 2013 at 3:04 AM Subject: WVNS story: Another Power Plant Being Unloaded Onto WV Consumers? To: PaulWilson <pjgrunt(a)gmail.com> Another Power Plant Being Unloaded Onto WV Consumers? Dan Heyman, Public News Service-WV http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32546-1 Join the discussion: facebook.com/PublicNewsService<http://www.facebook.com/PublicNewsService> Twitter: @pns_news <http://twitter.com/#!/pns_news> @pns_WV<http://twitter.com/#!/pns_WV> Google+: plus.to/publicnewsservice <http://plus.google.com/106260479325451709866> (05/20/13) CHARLESTON, W.Va. - With coal-fired power plants around the nation shutting down, why are corporations such as American Electric Power trying to sell coal-generating capacity to customers in West Virginia and Kentucky? Critics say the corporations are trying to move plants that are no longer cost-effective onto the backs of ratepayers who would have no choice but to pay for them. Alex Desha, an organizer with the Sierra Club in Kentucky, said that motivation is behind a plan to have AEP subsidiaries Appalachian Power and Kentucky Power take the Mitchell power station in Moundsville from a deregulated AEP subsidiary in Ohio. "It's essentially playing a shell game with our money," he said. "They're buying an old, outdated power plant and they're locking us into coal-fired generation for an extended period of time." Critics said the plan would raise rates and make consumers more dependent on a single fuel source, maybe adding to future costs, while making the deregulated Ohio subsidiary more diversified and flexible. AEP also wants to shift part of the John Amos plant to Appalachian Power, and a separate power company - FirstEnergy - wants to do a similar thing with a power plant in Harrison County. Cathy Kunkel, policy analyst, Energy Efficient West Virginia, pointed out that this is happening as dozens of coal plants have shut down due to competition from cheap natural gas. She said if AEP tried to sell the Mitchell plant on the open market, it might get only a quarter of what the power company wants Appalachian Power to pay. "The low price of natural gas has really driven down open-market sales of coal plants," Kunkel said. "It's cheaper to generate and buy power from natural gas plants." AEP said its regulated West Virginia and Kentucky subsidiaries need the generating capacity. However, Kunkel noted, the corporation initially said Appalachian Power needed 80 percent of the Mitchell Plant's capacity, until Kentucky Power decided to retire part of one of its plants, meaning it could buy some of the Mitchell capacity. "Appalachian Power's plan suddenly changed," Kunkel explained. "They said, 'Oh, we only need 50 percent of the Mitchell plant.' Is this actually about what's the best way to meet the capacity needs of Appalachian Power, or AEP offloading the Mitchell plant?" The West Virginia PSC will hold a hearing later this summer. Click here to view this story on the Public News Service RSS site and access an audio version of this and other stories: http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32546-1<http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32546-1> --- To be removed from this list please send an e-mail to remove(a)publicnewsservice.org <remove(a)publicnewsservice.org?subject=remove>and put the word "remove" in the subject line. -- Paul Wilson Sierra Club 504 Jefferson Ave Charles Town, WV 25414-1130 Phone: 304-725-4360 Cell: 304-279-1361 "There is no forward until you have gone back" ~Buddha "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous" ~ Aristotle

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Fwd: WVNS story: Report: WV Coal Production Will Fall, but Employment Will Rise
by Paul Wilson 16 May '13

16 May '13

fyi, paul ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Public News Service <newsservice(a)newsservicemail.org> Date: Thu, May 16, 2013 at 3:01 AM Subject: WVNS story: Report: WV Coal Production Will Fall, but Employment Will Rise To: PaulWilson <pjgrunt(a)gmail.com> Report: WV Coal Production Will Fall, but Employment Will Rise Dan Heyman, Public News Service-WV http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32502-1 Join the discussion: facebook.com/PublicNewsService<http://www.facebook.com/PublicNewsService> Twitter: @pns_news <http://twitter.com/#!/pns_news> @pns_WV<http://twitter.com/#!/pns_WV> Google+: plus.to/publicnewsservice <http://plus.google.com/106260479325451709866> (05/16/13) CHARLESTON, W.Va. - For the next two decades, more miners will be digging less coal in West Virginia, according to an in-depth report<http://downstreamstrategies.com/documents/reports_publication/the-continuin…> . Morgantown consulting firm Downstream Strategies analyzed federal and other figures and pins the cause on thinner coal seams and, to a lesser degree, cheap natural gas. By 2040, the report said, central Appalachian coal production will be about a third of where it was at its 1997 peak. Even so, Downstream president Evan Hansen said employment actually will rise. "It takes more miners to produce a ton of coal," he said. "Generally that's because the thickest, most easily accessible coal seams are being mined out." Both production levels and per-miner productivity already have fallen a great deal in the past decade, Hansen said, adding that he expects that trend to continue. The industry attacks what it calls a "war on coal" by regulators, but Hansen said their real enemy is geology. Thinner coal seams and cheap gas mean much of the demand for central Appalachian coal from power plants is going away, he said, and regulations often don't enter into it. "If there's less demand," he said, "then frankly it doesn't matter how strict the regulations are because people are not going to buy as much." Despite the decline in demand from power plants, the report said, the number of mining jobs will rise - in part, Hansen said, because of a shift from highly mechanized surface mining that supplies coal for power plants to more labor-intensive underground mining for coal to make steel. According to the report, five West Virginia counties - Mingo, Kanawha, Lincoln, Boone and Nicholas - will be especially vulnerable as production declines.They could face a tough patch, Hansen said, but devoting part of the severance tax to a future fund would help pay for the transition. "Set aside that fund so that it can be used in these counties long into the future, as a perpetual source of funding to help diversify the economy," Hansen said. The report is available online at downstreamstrategies.com<http://downstreamstrategies.com/documents/reports_publication/the-continuin…> . Click here to view this story on the Public News Service RSS site and access an audio version of this and other stories: http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32502-1<http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32502-1> --- To be removed from this list please send an e-mail to remove(a)publicnewsservice.org <remove(a)publicnewsservice.org?subject=remove>and put the word "remove" in the subject line. -- Paul Wilson Sierra Club 504 Jefferson Ave Charles Town, WV 25414-1130 Phone: 304-725-4360 Cell: 304-279-1361 "There is no forward until you have gone back" ~Buddha "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous" ~ Aristotle

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WVU's VenNostrand - strong op-ed against FE deal
by Jim Sconyers 16 May '13

16 May '13

http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/ WVU's James VanNostrand has an excellent analysis and statement of everything wrong with the FE deal to sell Harrison Station to Mon Power. -- Jim Sconyers jimscon(a)gmail.com 304.698.9628 Remember, Mother Nature bats last. *There is no Planet B!*

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CLIMATE CHANGE - Can we live with it?
by William V. DePaulo, Esq. 16 May '13

16 May '13

How can we live with it?Thomas Jones - BUY<http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/product.php?productid=58996&utm_source=LRB&utm_med…> The Carbon Crunch: How We're Getting Climate Change Wrong - and How to Fix It by Dieter Helm <http://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Helm,+Dieter> Yale, 273 pp, £20.00, September 2012, ISBN 978 0 300 18659 8 - BUY<http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/product.php?productid=60773&utm_source=LRB&utm_med…> Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering byClive Hamilton<http://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Hamilton,+Clive> Yale, 247 pp, £20.00, February, ISBN 978 0 300 18667 3 - BUY<http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/product.php?productid=63016&utm_source=LRB&utm_med…> The City and the Coming Climate: Climate Change in the Places We Live by Brian Stone <http://www.lrb.co.uk/search?author=Stone,+Brian> Cambridge, 187 pp, £19.99, July 2012, ISBN 978 1 107 60258 8 You are invited to read this free book review from the *London Review of Books*. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the*London Review of Books*, including the entire LRB archive of over 12,500 essays and reviews.<http://ads.lrb.co.uk/www/delivery/ck.php?oaparams=2__bannerid=554__zoneid=9…> On a damp, chill, blustery August afternoon in Whitby a few years ago I overheard a disgruntled holidaymaker declaiming - to his family, to anyone who would listen, to the wind - that 'global warming is a load of codswallop.' One of his children, a boy of around ten, was valiantly trying to explain to him the difference between climate and weather. But he wasn't paying attention, or couldn't hear over the gale and the sound of his own voice. 'Global warming,' he insisted again, 'is a load of codswallop.' This year's April snows provoked similar sentiments in many quarters. 'After such a long spell of cold, wet weather,'*Channel 4 News* asked, 'should scientists admit that the drastic temperature rises they predicted have failed to materialise?' A few days later, *Nature Geoscience*published a paper showing summer melting on the Antarctic Peninsula at a level 'unprecedented over the past thousand years'. The codswallop brigade say that even if the climate is changing, it isn't our fault. 'We human beings,' Boris Johnson wrote in the *Telegraph* in January, 'have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands.' On the one hand, then, the modest mayor of London. On the other, a former head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (as paraphrased by Brian Stone): 'Only Newton's laws of motion may enjoy a wider scientific consensus than a human-enhanced greenhouse effect.' There isn't consensus, however, either scientific or political, about the best ways to respond to the problem; in part because so many possible avenues of research are being explored, and it's still too early to say which, if any, have a reasonable chance of leading us out of the woods (or rather the desert, or the floodplain). The facts, rehearsed so often, for so long and to so little effect, nonetheless bear repeating. The greenhouse effect was first hypothesised in 1824 by Joseph Fourier - though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse - and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn't trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth wouldn't be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been at any point in the last 800,000 years (we know this because researchers have analysed air bubbles trapped in the ice in Greenland and Antarctica: the deeper you go, the older the bubbles). The concentration has increased from nearly 320 parts per million (high, but not unprecedented) in 1960 to more than 390 ppm today, 30 per cent higher than any previous peak, largely as a result of human activity. Not even the most fervent climate change denier can argue with the fact that burning carbon produces carbon dioxide: before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were 280 ppm. Since 1850, more than 360 billion tonnes of fossil fuels have gone up in smoke. Average global temperatures have risen accordingly, for the last quarter century pretty much in line with the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its first assessment report (1990). Almost every year since 1988, when the IPCC was established, has been the hottest ever recorded. The most optimistic projection, which governments are nominally committed to (that's to say, the signatories of the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 agreed it would be nice), is that the average global temperature will rise no more than 2ºC by the end of the century. Sea level has risen 6 cm since 1990. The IPCC's fourth assessment report (2007) projected that it would rise between 18 and 59 cm by 2100. According to a more recent study, it could be anything from 33 to 132 cm. The question of how to prevent climate change - we're way past that point now - has morphed into the question of how to slow it down. There's no shortage of theoretical answers about the best way to pump fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or suck more of them out, or lower the temperature by other means. (Another week, another book about climate change: the mood optative, the structure evangelical; threats of doom followed by promises of salvation, punctuated by warnings against false prophets.) And yet carbon emissions, temperatures, sea level and the frequency of extreme weather events just keep on going up. Which leads to another, perhaps even more urgent question: if climate change is not only inevitable but already underway, how are we to live with it? The shift in emphasis towards adaptation will be reflected in the IPCC's fifth assessment report, due next year. The aim of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, negotiated at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, was to 'stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system'. So much for that. Twenty years on, after many more rounds of inconclusive talks, declarations of good intentions and accusations of bad faith, the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol has expired, with next to nothing to show for it, despite its excessively modest demands. Of the world's eight biggest national emitters of carbon dioxide, which between them account for more than 66 per cent of global emissions, only Germany (2.4 per cent) has agreed to legally binding reductions in the second commitment period (2013-20). Canada (1.7 per cent) has withdrawn from the protocol; the United States (16 per cent) never ratified it; China (29 per cent), India (5.9 per cent), Russia (5.4 per cent), Japan (3.7 per cent) and South Korea (1.8 per cent) are still signatories but don't have binding targets. Even the apparent successes of the first commitment period turn out to be not only modest but illusory: as Dieter Helm points out in *The Carbon Crunch*, Western Europe's 10 per cent reduction in emissions since 1990 is largely attributable to a decline in manufacturing. A lot of the energy generated in China's coal-fired power stations, which burn nearly as much of the black stuff as the rest of the world put together, is used to manufacture things for export to the West. We haven't really cut our emissions; we've just outsourced them. China is now pumping four times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it was thirty years ago. There is a widely held view that if only China would stop burning coal, everything would be more or less OK (it's almost the only thing Helm and Clive Hamilton agree on). The government in Beijing said in February that China's coal burning will peak in the next two years. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Nicholas Stern, who wrote a report on the economics of climate change for the British government in 2007, reckons the world would do well to take China at its word. 'Smart investors can already see that most fossil fuel reserves are essentially unburnable,' he wrote in the foreword to a recent report by the Carbon Tracker initiative and the LSE's Grantham Institute, if we are 'to avoid global warming of more than 2°C'.1<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/thomas-jones/how-can-we-live-with-it?utm_sourc…> The report imagines that emissions targets will somehow be met, which means that up to 80 per cent of the vast quantities of fossil fuel reserves held as assets by publicly listed companies will lose all their value, and the huge sums currently being expended on finding new reserves will all be wasted: result, financial meltdown (again). It isn't hard, however, to turn the argument on its head: there's too much money at stake for those reserves not to be burned, so global warming of only 2°C is a pipedream.2<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/thomas-jones/how-can-we-live-with-it?utm_sourc…> Either way, Beijing is apparently pouring money into renewable energy (hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal), as well as setting up an emissions trading scheme like the one the EU introduced in 2005. The idea behind an ETS is that power stations and factories are allocated a greenhouse gas emissions quota. If they emit less than their quota, they can sell the difference to a factory or power station that wants to emit more. A report in*Nature Climate Change* last autumn cautiously concluded that 'armed with powerful state machinery, China may be able to avoid some of the earlier failures of the EU ETS.' The European failures include handing out too many permits and giving them away rather than making companies pay for them. In April, the European Parliament voted against temporarily reducing the allowances (a reduction might have stimulated the flagging market): the economic slump means there's been very little demand for excess pollution rights. After the vote the carbon price fell even further. 'Some environmentalists,' the *Economist* said, 'fear that the whole edifice of European climate policy could start to crumble.' Others are hoping it will, so that something that works may be put in its place. * Helm, an economist and British government adviser (he's the chair of the Defra Natural Capital Committee and a member of the Economics Advisory Group to the secretary of state for energy and climate change), has a three-part proposal: switch from coal to gas; introduce a carbon tax to replace the ETS and apply it to imports to encourage other nations to get out of coal too; and invest in research into renewable energy. He almost makes it sound simple. Current renewables, he argues, simply aren't up to the task: he especially has it in for wind, quoting the dismaying statistic from David MacKay's *Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air* that a four-kilometre-wide belt of offshore windfarms all the way round the coast of Britain would provide less than an eighth of Britons' average daily energy consumption (according to official, conservative figures, which don't take imports into account).3<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/thomas-jones/how-can-we-live-with-it?utm_sourc…> And nuclear power stations are just too slow to build, too unpopular and too expensive. [image: Felix Dennis Tour 2013]<http://ads.lrb.co.uk/www/delivery/ck.php?oaparams=2__bannerid=656__zoneid=5…> So natural gas, which is half as polluting as coal, is the best - indeed the only realistic - 'transitionary option', Helm says, until a carbon-neutral alternative capable of meeting the world's growing energy demands is developed. He acknowledges some of the problems with gas, especially shale gas: leakages (methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though it doesn't stay in the atmosphere for nearly so long, ten years rather than hundreds); water pollution at fracking sites; the abundance, cheapness and greener-than-coal reputation of gas reducing or delaying incentives to develop genuinely green alternatives. But he shrugs them off, as lenient on them as he is unforgiving of the supposedly insurmountable difficulties with wind power. Other commentators (Bill McKibben is one) are less sanguine. And it is convenient, not to say suspicious, that Helm should be pushing gas as a solution to climate change, however 'transitionary', just as, in Barack Obama's words, 'we're producing more natural gas than ever before.' Helm doesn't make clear why current renewables, however imperfect, should be seen as an obstacle to the development of better alternatives and not as a 'transitionary' step in the right direction. It seems a bit like saying: 'No thank you, Mr Stephenson, you can keep your slow and inefficient steam locomotive; I'm waiting for the bullet train.' As for the form the bullet train could take, Helm won't hazard a guess. 'It is impossible to pick the winners in this technology race,' he says, noting po-faced that his 'email inbox is full of excited reports of the latest "breakthrough"'. 'The best we can do is identify classes of technologies that look like good prospects': including next generation solar (using, for example, carbon rather than silicon in photovoltaic cells), biotechnologies, nuclear and geothermal heat. The nuclear possibilities still include fusion, though Helm doesn't mention it. The amazing thing about fusion is that it doesn't produce radioactive waste or greenhouse gases, only helium, and it doesn't require nuclear fuel, only deuterium (a hydrogen isotope readily extractable from seawater) and a relatively small amount of lithium (already mined in large quantities for use in batteries). The really big problem is how to set up a fusion reaction that produces more energy than it consumes. That's what happens in stars, but creating the conditions for productive fusion on earth is far from easy. Three years ago, at Cadarache in south-east France, work started on the EURO 13 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor: a joint venture by China, the EU, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the US. The hope, when it eventually goes online (in 2020, supposedly), is that it will be able to generate ten times as much power as goes into it: 500 megawatts from 50. In order to do this it will have to reach temperatures of 150,000,000°C, ten times hotter than the middle of the sun. 'The goal of the ITER fusion programme,' its website says, 'is to produce a net gain of energy and set the stage for the demonstration fusion power plant to come.' Even if everything goes according to plan, large-scale electricity generation from nuclear fusion is a very long way off. Researchers at Lockheed Martin are working on a nippier approach that could, they say, 'be ready with a power plant in ten years' that 'would enable us to meet global electricity demands by around 2050, in time to have a significant impact on our climate.' But no one else seems to be holding their breath. As for biotechnologies, Helm mentions using algae to produce biodiesel. But that's the least of it. The Bioenergy Systems Research Institute at the University of Georgia announced in March that they'd found a way to 'remove plants as the middleman ... We can take carbon dioxide directly °from the atmosphere and turn it into useful products like fuels and chemicals without having to go through the inefficient process of growing plants and extracting sugars from biomass.'*Pyrococcus furiosus* ('rushing fireball'), discovered in the Aeolian Islands in 1986, is a micro-organism that thrives at high temperatures (around 100°C) near underwater geothermal vents. Organisms able to live in conditions that would kill most things - under extremes of temperature, pressure, acidity, radiation - are known as extremophiles. Bacteria known as snottites (the etymology is bluntly Anglo-Saxon) live in caves deep underground where they feed on hydrogen sulphide. Among the largest extremophiles are half-millimetre-long eight-legged animals called tardigrades. Johann Goeze, who first described the phylum in 1773, called it *kleiner Wasserbär* ('little water bear'); they're also known as moss piglets. More than a thousand species have since been identified, found everywhere from the seabed to the peaks of the Himalayas. The oldest tardigrade fossils date from 530 million years ago. They can survive for several minutes at 150°C or near absolute zero (and for several days at -200°C); endure both a vacuum and 6000 atmospheres of pressure; and tolerate levels of radiation a thousand times higher than would kill a human being. They've been taken up on space shuttles, exposed to open space for ten days and survived. According to a paper by a team of German researchers published in *Bioinformatics and Biology Insights* last year, the 'specific molecular pathways for stress adaptations' in tardigrades 'are partly conserved in other animals and their manipulation could boost stress adaptation even in human cells.' The mere existence of extremophiles (though 'mere' is hardly the word) is, in its way, bleakly comforting: evidence that life in some form seems bound to continue, whatever destruction humanity may wreak. But they offer more immediate grounds for hope. The researchers at UGA genetically modified *P. furiosus* to feed on carbon dioxide at much lower temperatures and, with the addition of some hydrogen, to produce 3-hydroxypropionic acid, a useful industrial chemical. Tinker with its genes in other ways and, in theory, you could have a micro-organism that would more or less guzzle CO2 and piss petrol. But not just yet. * Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, Canberra, is suspicious of 'the lure of the technofix'. In *Earthmasters*, between the handwringing ('for those who value civilised society and who are not willing to turn their faces away from the poorest and most vulnerable people of the world, the reasons to fret are numberless') and the awkward imagery ('I will suggest that climate engineering is the last battle in a titanic struggle between Prometheans and Soterians,' Soteria being 'the goddess of safety, preservation and deliverance from harm'), Hamilton gives a fairly thorough survey of schemes to counteract global warming through large-scale manipulation of the stratosphere or the oceans. As we're doing such a hopeless job of pumping less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, how about trying harder to suck some of it out? In the budget in March, George Osborne announced that the government intended to take 'two major carbon capture and storage projects to the next stage of development'. One of them, in the words of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, 'involves capturing around 90 per cent of the carbon dioxide from part' - how large a part it doesn't say - 'of the existing gas-fired power station at Peterhead before transporting it and storing it in a depleted gas field beneath the North Sea'. The other scheme 'involves capturing 90 per cent of the carbon dioxide from a new super-efficient coal-fired power station at the Drax site in North Yorkshire, before transporting and storing it in a saline aquifer beneath the southern North Sea'. The cynical view is that such projects - these two 'involve' private companies including Shell and BOC - are (skimpy) fig leaves for the fossil fuel industry. Two other projects are being held in reserve. 'A final investment decision will be taken by the government in early 2015 on the construction of up to two projects.' 'Up to two' could mean one. Or it could mean none. Whichever, it won't be nearly enough to have a discernible effect on Britain's emissions, let alone global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Other, more ambitious carbon sequestration schemes are based on the idea that, given a little chemical encouragement, other species could do the capture and storage for us. Twenty-five years ago, one of the 11-year-olds in my science class asked our teacher why 'they' didn't invent machines to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. 'They have,' Mr Cooney replied. 'They're called trees.' But trees are slow growing, and vulnerable to fire and chainsaws, and when they rot or burn the carbon they've captured and stored is released back into the atmosphere. Half the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by photosynthesis not in trees but in phytoplankton. They reproduce incredibly fast and, when they die, some of the carbon they've taken from the air eventually sinks to the ocean floor (passing through the bodies of a series of larger creatures along the way), where it will remain for possibly thousands of years. Phytoplankton blooms can be encouraged by fertilising the seas with iron (they can't photosynthesise without it). This happens naturally when high winds blow iron-rich dust from the land out to sea. Or it can be done artificially by spraying a few thousand litres of iron sulphate solution off the back of a boat. Several experiments have been carried out to determine how effective this is as a way of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for the long term: probably not very, because far less carbon than was hoped actually tends to sink to the seabed, though it depends where the experiment is carried out (phytoplankton with shells, which can only grow if there's silicon in the water to make their shells from, sink better than those without). And iron fertilisation has any number of unintended and unpredictable consequences for marine ecosystems. But none of that stopped Russ George - a Californian businessman variously described as a 'geo-vigilante', 'rogue geoengineer' or 'climate hacker'; he calls himself 'a translator of science into application' - from discharging a hundred tonnes of iron sulphate, far more than any previous experiment had used, into the Pacific last summer. It produced a phytoplankton bloom over 4000 square miles of ocean. Beyond that, the effects are as yet unknown. Another possibility, instead of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, is to turn down the heat, using what's known as 'solar radiation management'. The term was coined by Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institute, who told Hamilton he came up with it while organising a workshop with Nasa in 2006 and wanted a 'boring sounding name' that wouldn't scare bureaucrats who were 'queasy' about 'geoengineering'. Worried about the negative connotations of the word 'radiation', Caldeira later suggested that the acronym SRM stood for 'sunlight reflection methods'. The more visible sunlight that is reflected back into space, the less there is to be absorbed by the earth and re-emitted as lower frequency infrared radiation, which is what's absorbed and re-emitted into the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. One of the many reasons the melting of ice sheets, ice-caps and glaciers is such bad news is that ice and snow are highly reflective - it's the reason they look white to us - and rocks are not: less ice means less reflected sunlight means more warming. Proposed artificial sunlight reflection methods include launching giant mirrors into space, making clouds brighter by spraying seawater into the air (clouds are formed when water vapour condenses on tiny particles of dust, say, or soot, or sea salt; more salt in the air means denser clouds; denser clouds reflect more light), and spraying sulphates into the stratosphere. Large volcanic eruptions - Mount Laki in 1783, Mount Tabora in 1815 (1816 was 'the year without a summer'), Mount Pinatubo in 1991 - can send enough ash into the stratosphere to bring the average temperature down significantly: by 0.5°C during the year after Mount Pinatubo. Rather than waiting for the next volcano, we could spray sulphates into the stratosphere using planes, or even a giant hose. 'Stratospheric aerosol spraying is the archetypal geoengineering technique,' Hamilton writes. 'It would be easy, effective and cheap, and have the most far-reaching implications for life on earth.' The two big problems with geoengineering are, first, that interfering with vast, complex and poorly understood systems may well have unforeseen and potentially disastrous consequences, though that has to be weighed against the fact that simply carrying on as we are has consequences that are largely foreseeable and certainly disastrous; and, second, moral hazard: if the symptoms of global warming can be relieved by geoengineering, there's even less incentive for greenhouse gas emitters to do anything about the cause. Hamilton quotes a study that models what would happen if carbon emissions continued to rise at their present rate, but solar radiation management were used to offset the global warming between 2020 and 2059 and then for whatever reason abruptly stopped: temperatures would soar, and we - and other species - would have to (or in many cases fail to) adapt to the surge over ten years rather than fifty. Hamilton hazily worries that geoengineering crosses some kind of line in humanity's relationship with 'nature', though you could just as well argue that our ancestors crossed that line when they first struck flint to pyrite over tinder tens of thousands of years ago. 'There is something deeply perverse,' Hamilton writes, 'in the demand that we construct an immense industrial infrastructure in order to deal with the carbon emissions from another immense industrial infrastructure, when we could just stop burning fossil fuels.' But, actually, we couldn't. Not because it would be too expensive, and not only because billions of people would promptly die - from starvation, disease, cold, heat - but also, as Hamilton observes elsewhere in*Earthmasters*, because one immediate effect would be a sharp rise in global temperature. One of the effects of burning fossil fuels is the maintenance of a thick haze of sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere, which keeps the sunlight out and the temperature down. Sulphates last only weeks in the atmosphere; carbon dioxide endures for centuries. We are in a multiple bind. Both emissions and atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases need to be severely reduced. Cutting one without the other would be either fruitless in the long term or dangerous in the short term. We may well need to find other ways to keep the temperature down without fooling ourselves into believing we've made the problem go away. And we need to do all these things at the same time. * But who are 'we'? Who will - who can - do what is required? Neither the 'international community' nor such enterprising individuals as Russ George are in a position to save the planet (not that 'the planet' per se is in any need of saving, not even from the people who want to cool it down by shifting its orbit further from the sun using nuclear missiles and asteroids; just some of the lifeforms clinging to or scurrying around on its surface). The problem is so vast that it seems beyond anyone's individual or collective power to do anything about it. The theme of Earth Day 2013 on 22 April was 'The Face of Climate Change', an attempt to 'personalise the massive challenge climate change presents'. Another way of putting it would be to say that everybody needs to start looking at climate change as a local as well as a global problem. This may or may not have been what the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meant when she said earlier this month at the end of a 'very productive week' of talks in Bonn that 'there is a growing realisation that this cannot be done exclusively by governments.' Carbon dioxide, wherever it may be emitted, is evenly distributed around the globe. But warming isn't. (Britain's recent cold winters don't disprove anything: they may well be caused by melting Arctic sea ice.) Brian Stone points out in *The City and the Coming Climate* that cities are getting hotter faster than anywhere else - so much so that they're often excluded from calculations of average global warming as statistical outliers. But more than half the people in the world now live in cities, and the proportion is set to increase to 70 per cent by 2050. The infrastructure that cities depend on is far more fragile than we care to think about. In August 2003, a short circuit on a power line in rural Ohio left 55 million people in the north-eastern United States without electricity. Stone begins his book with a riveting account of the devastating heatwave that swept over Europe ten years ago, when a temperature of 100ºF was recorded for the first time ever in the UK: In all, the EU estimated that more than 70,000 citizens of 12 countries died from heat-induced illnesses over a four-month period in the summer of 2003. This number represents more fatalities than have resulted from any EU or American conflict since World War Two or any natural disaster (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes and floods) to have ever struck a developed nation. It dwarfs the 1800 deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and effectively renders trivial the 900 lives lost during the highly publicised Sars epidemic that struck in the same year as the heatwave ... Americans would need to experience more than 20 terrorist attacks equivalent in destruction to 9/11 before such a death toll would be approached. Yet the global response to this climate event, an event that reveals more about the profoundly changing environment in which we now live than any other yet endured, has largely been one of indifference. The reasons for the indifference aren't unobvious: the slow burn of a heatwave is less dramatic than a hurricane, an earthquake, a flood or a terrorist attack; most of the victims were old and many of them unidentified, buried in unmarked graves; the death toll is calculated by counting excess deaths, comparing the number of people who died during the heatwave with the number in previous years, so it's possible to say how many were killed, but not who they were. Heatwaves resist personalisation. 'Cities do not cause heatwaves,' Stone writes, 'they amplify them.' At the peak of a heatwave in July 1999, Chicago was more than 6ºF warmer than rural Illinois. The urban heat island effect was first documented in 1818, when Luke Howard, an amateur meteorologist, took a series of temperature measurements in and around London which showed that the city was on average 4°F warmer than the surrounding countryside. It's partly down to human activity (from driving to cooking to air-conditioning to breathing), partly because cities tend to be built from materials that are really bad at reflecting sunlight (tarmac's especially terrible), and partly because of the lack of trees. It takes a certain amount of energy to turn a liquid into a gas. When water evaporates, its molecules absorb heat from the surroundings: that's why sweating cools you down. The heat is then 'locked up', as Stone puts it, in the water vapour. Plants don't sweat, they transpire; but the principle, as far as water's concerned, is the same. So trees mitigate global warming not only by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but also by cooling the earth down. Yet the emphasis on greenhouse gases in UN legislation means that planting or preserving trees gets you negligible points under the Kyoto Protocol, because of the uncertainty as to how long the carbon they take out of the atmosphere will be sequestered for. Even though, in Stone's words, 'a cessation of rainforest destruction in just two countries, Brazil and Indonesia, would by itself bring the world four-fifths of the way to meeting the cumulative targets of the Kyoto Protocol.' The difference trees make is demonstrated by a 2003 study that modelled the effects of reforesting the Sahara (there were trees there five thousand years ago). 'In theory,' Stone says, 'a Saharan subtropical forest could absorb enough CO2 each year to cease altogether greenhouse-driven climate change, and it could do so without the decommissioning of a single power plant.' Though it would require a logistically daunting and tremendously expensive network of desalination plants and irrigation pipes across a dozen of the world's politically less stable countries. More modestly, Stone recommends changes in global policy to focus on land-use management as well as carbon emissions (on turning the heat down under the saucepan as well as taking the lid off, to use one of his analogies), and a shift in urban planning towards densely populated cities with plenty of trees and good public transport systems, surrounded by forests rather than suburban sprawl. What's not to like? Local improvements in urban planning also have the advantage that they stand a realistic chance of being implemented, certainly compared to the prospect of united global action*.* The smothering pollution in Chinese cities is one of the major incentives for the government in Beijing to set about reducing carbon emissions. One of the 20th century's more effective pieces of environmental legislation was the 1956 Clean Air Act, a response to the great smog of 1952 that killed as many as 12,000 Londoners. Atlanta (Stone teaches at Georgia Tech) introduced a 'no net tree loss' policy a few years ago, but it's still a work in progress: 15,000 trees are cut down in the city each year; only 3000 are planted to replace them. Stone urges the adoption of 'mitigation strategies that yield concurrent adaptive benefits'. Examples of the opposite - adaptation without mitigation - are easier to come by. In 2004, Tim Flannery said that 'there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century's first ghost metropolis' because of the threat to its freshwater supply. The capital of Western Australia has since then opened one desalination plant, powered by wind turbines, and is in the process of setting up a second, much larger one, driven by coal. 'The benefits to Perth are direct and immediate (new water) and the harms are diffuse and intergenerational,' Robert Glennon wrote in *National Geographic* last year. 'That's what makes climate change such an intractable problem.' * There's no immediate need for desalination in Britain. But ahead of the UK National Adaptation Programme that will be published later this year, Defra last year released the first of its new five-yearly Climate Change Risk Assessments.4<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/thomas-jones/how-can-we-live-with-it?utm_sourc…> It outlines the 'priorities for adaptation' under five 'themes' (Agriculture & Forestry; Business and Services; Health & Wellbeing; Buildings & Infrastructure; Natural Environment) and considers not only the risks associated with climate change - flooding, drought, supply chain disruption, flooding, disease, higher energy demand, flooding and more flooding - but possible opportunities, too: under the business theme, for example, there is hope for a 'possible increase in market opportunities such as tourism and leisure industry' (presumably this means luring the codswallopers back to a warmer, sunnier Whitby, even if most of the beach will have disappeared under the North Sea). Now there's a reason to look on the bright side. There are more detailed ideas in the Environment Agency's action plan for the Thames Estuary. The 'assets and people at risk in the tidal Thames floodplain' include 135 square miles of land, 1.25 million residents, 500,000 homes and 40,000 businesses with a combined property value of £200 billion, 400 schools, 16 hospitals, eight power stations, more than a thousand electricity substations, four World Heritage Sites, 35 Tube stations, 51 railway stations, more than a hundred miles of railway and 200 miles of road. In its first decade of operation, between 1982 and 1992, the Thames Barrier was closed 11 times. Between 1999 and 2009, it was closed 81 times. The current worst-case scenario is a rise in maximum water levels by 2100 of 2.7 metres (revised down from a previous estimate of 4.2 metres; it may yet be revised up again), which means that the Thames Barrier and 'associated defences' will need 'significant improvements' from 2035: not least, embankments and flood defences will have to be made higher. 'Major changes to the structure of the system will not be needed until much later in the century - under the government's current climate change guidance new arrangements must be in place by 2070.' Those new arrangements will have to be settled on by 2050. Under current plans they will include either replacing the current barrier at Woolwich or building a new one at Long Reach or Tilbury. The outlook may not be so bad for American and British cities. But the news that there are ways for the global North and West to adapt to and tolerate global warming is hardly reassuring for, say, the 12 million residents of Dhaka, which faces a much greater risk of flooding and has far less money to spend on defences. A paper published in *Natural Hazards* last year comparing the vulnerability to flooding of nine cities found - unsurprisingly, but it's useful to have it quantified - that Shanghai, Dhaka and Calcutta were far more vulnerable than Rotterdam, Marseille and Osaka. The director of the Research Institute of Global Climate and Ecology at the Russian Academy of Sciences, according to Hamilton, has said that 'it would be cheaper to resettle Bangladeshis threatened by sea-level rise' than to adhere to the Kyoto Protocol - and cheaper still to do neither. A recent Unicef briefing reiterated the obvious but important point that the world's poorest children are the most vulnerable to climate change. The report's recommendations include 'providing crops that are more drought resistant to smallholder families in areas that are increasingly prone to drought.' Unicef doesn't spell it out, but drought-resistant crops probably means genetically modified crops. One way to make crops hardier is using genes from tougher organisms like *Pyrococcus furiosus*. The International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines recently announced that it had developed a new kind of 'super salt-tolerant' rice by crossing two very different strains, one of them a wild species that 'is extremely difficult to cross with cultivated rice varieties'. If last year is anything to go by, British farmers are going to need new varieties of winter wheat that are more tolerant of cold and flooding. But last year may not be anything to go by. One of the difficulties with trying to adapt to climate change is that while the long-term average global effects seem to be fairly predictable, local and temporary effects are not. Depending on how you tweak the models, rainfall in Kansas, for example, could increase or decrease by more than 40 per cent by 2060, or stay roughly the same as it is now. That's quite a range of possibilities. Britain in the last ten years has seen severe heatwaves and extremely cold winters, periods of drought and serious flooding. It's hard to say which are the greatest long-term threats locally, which is a reason people talk about 'adaptive capacity': in other words, we need to prepare to be prepared. Policymakers aren't entirely to blame for the frustrating vagueness of their proposals, which often seem to consist of no more than a commitment to look at the situation again in a few years' time. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that somehow - using some of the technologies and policies I've discussed here, and some of the many I've overlooked - we'll muddle through. But only if we slow climate change to a rate that we, like other organisms that evolved when the world was mild, can adapt to. If we don't, we may indeed be doomed. And*Pyrococcus furiosus*, which needs us a lot less than we may need it, will inherit the earth. We hope you enjoyed reading this free book review from the *London Review of Books*. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the *London Review of Books*, including the entire LRB archive of over 12,500 essays and reviews.<http://ads.lrb.co.uk/www/delivery/ck.php?oaparams=2__bannerid=552__zoneid=1…> The print edition of the *London Review of Books* in which this book review appears<http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/product.php?productid=63015&utm_source=LRB&utm_med…> and a downloadable PDF version of this book review<http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/product.php?productid=62997&utm_source=LRB&utm_med…> are also available for purchase from the*London Review Bookshop*. Contact us<http://www.lrb.co.uk/contacts> for rights and issues enquiries. facebook - - 64 - twitter - - 35 - share - - email - letter - cite - print - More from this issue <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/contents> >> - More by this contributor<http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/thomas-jones> >> [image: Subscribe to the London Review of Books]<http://ads.lrb.co.uk/www/delivery/ck.php?oaparams=2__bannerid=612__zoneid=3…> [image: Combined Academic Publishers]<http://ads.lrb.co.uk/www/delivery/ck.php?oaparams=2__bannerid=659__zoneid=4…> ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright <http://www.lrb.co.uk/copyright> (c) LRB Ltd., 1997-2013 | Send Us Feedback <http://www.lrb.co.uk/feedbackform> ^ Top<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/thomas-jones/how-can-we-live-with-it?utm_sourc…> | Mobile website<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/thomas-jones/how-can-we-live-with-it?utm_sourc…> | Librarians <http://www.lrb.co.uk/librarian> | Copyright<http://www.lrb.co.uk/copyright> | Terms & Conditions <http://www.lrb.co.uk/terms> | Privacy<http://www.lrb.co.uk/privacy> | Sitemap <http://www.lrb.co.uk/sitemap> | Acce<http://www.lrb.co.uk/accessibility> ssibility <http://www.lrb.co.uk/accessibility> -- William V. DePaulo, Esq. 179 Summers Street, Suite 232 Charleston, WV 25301-2163 Tel 304-342-5588 Fax 304-342-5505 william.depaulo(a)gmail.com www.passeggiata.com

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Fwd: [Coal Volunteers List] Join us for "Beyond Coal Campaign - We're Halfway There! What's Next?"
by Paul Wilson 15 May '13

15 May '13

fyi, paul w. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Becki Clayborn <becki.clayborn(a)sierraclub.org> Date: Tue, May 14, 2013 at 6:30 PM Subject: [Coal Volunteers List] Join us for "Beyond Coal Campaign - We're Halfway There! What's Next?" To: #Coal-Volunteers <coal-volunteers-list(a)sierraclub.org> Beyond Coal Campaign - We're Halfway There! What's Next? Join us for a Volunteer Webinar on May 28th at 8pm ET / 7pm CT / 6pm MT / 5pm PT! <https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/165438239> The Beyond Coal Campaign set out to retire 105,000MW’s of coal fired electricity by 2020 – and according to the commitments we have secured - we're half way there! This webinar will highlight how we secured those MW retirements and the campaign’s strategic thinking heading into the second half of MW’s targeted. Join this webinar to hear the vision strategy and outlook for the next stage of the Beyond Coal Campaign from Mary Anne Hitt, Campaign Director and Verena Owen, Campaign Volunteer Lead. Q&A will be held at the end. Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/165438239 *Title:* Beyond Coal Campaign - We're Halfway There! What's Next? *Date:* Tuesday, May 28, 2013 *Time:* 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM CDT After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar. *System Requirements* PC-based attendees Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server Mac®-based attendees Required: Mac OS® X 10.6 or newer Mobile attendees Required: iPhone®, iPad®, Android™ phone or Android tablet -- Becki Clayborn Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign Internal Capacities and Communications Coordinator Chicago, IL 312-251-1680 630-881-3480 (cell) -- To access the Beyond Coal Campaign Resource Portal, go to: https://sites.google.com/a/sierraclub.org/beyond-coal-resource-portal/ To sign up for this list, email becki.clayborn(a)sierraclub.org with the subject and message "SUBSCRIBE #coal-volunteer" --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "#Coal-Volunteers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coal-volunteers-list+unsubscribe(a)sierraclub.org. To post to this group, send email to coal-volunteers-list(a)sierraclub.org. -- Paul Wilson Sierra Club 504 Jefferson Ave Charles Town, WV 25414-1130 Phone: 304-725-4360 Cell: 304-279-1361 "There is no forward until you have gone back" ~Buddha "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous" ~ Aristotle

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Fwd: WVNS story: Is Mon Power Trying to Stick Customers With a White Elephant?
by Paul Wilson 14 May '13

14 May '13

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Public News Service <newsservice(a)newsservicemail.org> Date: Mon, May 13, 2013 at 3:13 AM Subject: WVNS story: Is Mon Power Trying to Stick Customers With a White Elephant? To: PaulWilson <pjgrunt(a)gmail.com> Is Mon Power Trying to Stick Customers With a White Elephant? Dan Heyman, Public News Service-WV http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32433-1 Join the discussion: facebook.com/PublicNewsService<http://www.facebook.com/PublicNewsService> Twitter: @pns_news <http://twitter.com/#!/pns_news> @pns_WV<http://twitter.com/#!/pns_WV> Google+: plus.to/publicnewsservice <http://plus.google.com/106260479325451709866> (05/13/13) CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Consumer advocates say Mon Power is trying to stick ratepayers with an overpriced white elephant, in a deal that would benefit another subsidiary of FirstEnergy. The utility has asked the Public Service Commission to let it buy 80 percent of the huge Harrison power plant from sister company Allegheny Energy Supply. With natural gas cheaper than coal, said Cathy Kunkel, a policy analyst for Energy Efficient West Virginia, the Harrison plant is not as cost efficient. FirstEnergy wants to shift the liability from a out-of-state subsidiary that would have to eat the cost to Mon Power, which would stick ratepayers for it, Kunkel said, adding that the sale price is way too high. "Every utility in the country right now basically is running away from coal towards natural gas," she said. "Coal plants have been going for about a quarter of the price that Allegheny Energy Supply wants to sell Harrison for." Kunkel said Mon Power would be paying too much for generating capacity for which it doesn't have nearly the demand. "Buying the Harrison plant is way more energy and capacity than the company even needs," she said. "If they buy this plant, they're going to have excess energy and capacity for more than 10 years into the future." A properly designed energy conservation program actually could make money for the company while reducing customers' bills, Kunkel said. That would be a lot smarter than paying too much for a generating station that has serious competitive disadvantages, she said. "Around the country, time and again, we've seen that those sorts of energy-efficiency investments are actually much cheaper than investments in new generating capacity," she said. The company says the Harrison County plant would give it more predictable future power costs. However, Kunkel said most projections are that gas will stay cheap at least through 2020. The PSC will hold hearings on the case May 29-31. The case number is 12-1571-E-PC. Click here to view this story on the Public News Service RSS site and access an audio version of this and other stories: http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32433-1<http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32433-1> --- To be removed from this list please send an e-mail to remove(a)publicnewsservice.org <remove(a)publicnewsservice.org?subject=remove>and put the word "remove" in the subject line. -- Paul Wilson Sierra Club 504 Jefferson Ave Charles Town, WV 25414-1130 Phone: 304-725-4360 Cell: 304-279-1361 "There is no forward until you have gone back" ~Buddha "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous" ~ Aristotle

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400 parts per billion......
by William V. DePaulo, Esq. 11 May '13

11 May '13

[image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/> ------------------------------ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes… May 10, 2013 Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears By JUSTIN GILLIS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/justin_gillis/…> The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years. Scientific instruments showed that the gas had reached an average daily level above 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering. The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea. “It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading. Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography <http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/> in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said. Virtually every automobile ride, every plane trip and, in most places, every flip of a light switch adds carbon dioxide to the air, and relatively little money is being spent to find and deploy alternative technologies. China is now the largest emitter, but Americans have been consuming fossil fuels extensively for far longer, and experts say the United States is more responsible than any other nation for the high level. The new measurement came from analyzers atop Mauna Loa<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/science/earth/22carbon.html?pagewanted=al…>, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide trend on carbon dioxide, or CO2. Devices there sample <http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html> clean, crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for half a century. Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa. But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday. The two monitoring programs use slightly different protocols; NOAA reported an average for the period of 400.03 parts per million, while Scripps reported 400.08. Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle, and the level will dip below 400 this summer as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400. “It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E. Raymo, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of Columbia University. >From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked. For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future. Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher. Experts fear that humanity may be precipitating a return to such conditions — except this time, billions of people are in harm’s way. “It takes a long time to melt ice, but we’re doing it,” Dr. Keeling said. “It’s scary.” Dr. Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, began carbon dioxide measurements on Mauna Loa and at other locations in the late 1950s. The elder Dr. Keeling found a level in the air then of about 315 parts per million — meaning that if a person had filled a million quart jars with air, about 315 quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in. His analysis revealed a relentless, long-term increase superimposed on the seasonal cycle, a trend that was dubbed the Keeling Curve<http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/>. Countries have adopted an official target to limit the damage from global warming, with 450 parts per million seen as the maximum level compatible with that goal. “Unless things slow down, we’ll probably get there in well under 25 years,” Ralph Keeling said. Yet many countries, including China and the United States, have refused to adopt binding national targets. Scientists say that unless far greater efforts are made soon, the goal of limiting the warming will become impossible without severe economic disruption. “If you start turning the Titanic long before you hit the iceberg, you can go clear without even spilling a drink of a passenger on deck,” said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “If you wait until you’re really close, spilling a lot of drinks is the best you can hope for.” Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air — as of Thursday’s reading, exactly 0.04 percent. “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic,” a Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher, said in a Congressional hearing several years ago. But climate scientists reject that argument, saying it is like claiming that a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom cannot have much effect. Research shows that even at such low levels, carbon dioxide is potent at trapping heat near the surface of the earth. “If you’re looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don’t believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO2emissions have to occur right away,” said Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist who studies climates of the past. “I feel like the time to do something was yesterday.” This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: *Correction: May 10, 2013* An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of carbon dioxide in the air as of Thursday’s reading from monitors. It is .04 percent, not .0004 percent. -- William V. DePaulo, Esq. 179 Summers Street, Suite 232 Charleston, WV 25301-2163 Tel 304-342-5588 Fax 304-342-5505 william.depaulo(a)gmail.com www.passeggiata.com

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Fwd: WVNS story: Fight Over Clean Water Rules
by Paul Wilson 11 May '13

11 May '13

FYI. Paul ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Public News Service" <newsservice(a)newsservicemail.org> Date: May 10, 2013 3:05 AM Subject: WVNS story: Fight Over Clean Water Rules To: "PaulWilson" <pjgrunt(a)gmail.com> Cc: Fight Over Clean Water Rules Dan Heyman, Public News Service-WV http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32354-1 Join the discussion: facebook.com/PublicNewsService<http://www.facebook.com/PublicNewsService> Twitter: @pns_news <http://twitter.com/#!/pns_news> @pns_WV<http://twitter.com/#!/pns_WV> Google+: plus.to/publicnewsservice <http://plus.google.com/106260479325451709866> (05/10/13) CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Congressional Republicans want to force the Environmental Protection Agency to loosen clean water laws, but coalfield residents say their water is too polluted now. Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, are backing a bill that would force the EPA to act on coal mining permits or have them approved automatically. But coalfield residents say pollution from the mines already threatens their health. Bo Webb of Peachtree Creek in Raleigh County, W.Va., says in the last year and a half, 14 people in that small community have found they have cancer, including his wife. "I got home on December the 1st, my wife wasn't feeling good,” he recalls. “And we went to the doctor, and she'd thrown up some blood. And the doctor called, so we went in. And my wife had cancer. Then on March 3rd she died. And so, it takes its toll." The Republicans say the EPA is sitting on permits in a back-door attempt to shut down coalmines, part of what they call a "war on coal." Meanwhile coalfield residents are bringing gallons of brown and red water to Congress to show what they drink, cook and wash with. The GOP bill, known as the Coal Jobs Protection Act, has the backing of coal industry associations and a variety of business groups. But Ada Smith of Whitesburg, Ky. says the focus should be more about overall job diversification in the region. "I think that most people understand that coal isn't going to be the number one source of employment,” she says. “It hasn't been for a really long time." Many citizen and environmental groups say the clean water that coalfield residents depend on is at risk of being sacrificed for mine company profits. Sue Tallichet, a member of the grassroots citizens group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, calls the legislation "a bailout for coal." "McConnell's bill is very deceiving in that, it's even called the Coal Job Protection Act,” she argues. “They're not protecting jobs and miners – they're protecting profits." Click here to view this story on the Public News Service RSS site and access an audio version of this and other stories: http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32354-1<http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/32354-1> --- To be removed from this list please send an e-mail to remove(a)publicnewsservice.org <remove(a)publicnewsservice.org?subject=remove>and put the word "remove" in the subject line.

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Food, Farms, Forests and Fracking: Connecting the Dots
by Beth Little 09 May '13

09 May '13

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_27489.cfm

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Fracking fracas over Smokey Bear
by Beth Little 09 May '13

09 May '13

http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/14955/smokey_the_bear_anti_fracking_i nsurgent/ John, The Mon is mentioned in this article - specifically the disaster at the Fernow. The article mentions that the artist who created "Only you can prevent faucet fires" wants/needs support from other groups in her legal battle. Maybe we can put a picture in the Voice along with an article. Here's more: http://williamahuston.blogspot.com/2013/05/dont-look-you-may-be-party-to-cri me.html

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Fwd: Report: More US C02 reductions from EE than Switching in Nat Gas
by James Kotcon 08 May '13

08 May '13

For those who still think natural gas is a way to reduce greenhouse gases, join the EE campaign team. Lower your bills, create thousands of jobs, and save the planet! Jim Kotcon ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jennifer Miller <jen.miller(a)sierraclub.org> Date: Thu, May 2, 2013 at 12:50 PM Subject: Report: More US C02 reductions from EE than Switching in Nat Gas To: CONS-FRED(a)lists.sierraclub.org http://co2scorecard.org/home/researchitem/27 "Energy related CO2 emissions in the US fell by 205 million metric tons in 2012. CO2 Scorecard breaks it down and shows that nearly 75% of the decline is accounted for by demand reduction primarily due to the economy-wide energy efficiency and conservation measures in the transportation, residential and commercial sectors; the mild winter in the first quarter of 2012 also gave a helping hand." -- Jen Miller (614)563-9543 ( tel:%28614%29563-9543 ) Senior Campaign Representative for Energy Efficiency Sierra Club National Beyond Coal Campaign

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Re: [EC] Power purchase agreements - bringing rooftop solar
by Jim Sconyers 05 May '13

05 May '13

Very interesting discussion of PPAs 3rd party power purchase agreements. Bringing more rooftop solar. On May 3, 2013 8:18 AM, "Ivy Main" <ivymain(a)cox.net> wrote: > Jim, the discussion of the PPA is here: powerforthepeopleva.com. > > Ivy Main > 703-967-2876 > >

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THE PROPHETS OF OAK RIDGE.
by William V. DePaulo, Esq. 02 May '13

02 May '13

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2013/04/29/the-prophets-of-oak-ridge… THE PROPHETS OF OAK RIDGE Last summer, in the dead of night, three peace activists penetrated the exterior of Y-12 in Tennessee, supposedly one of the most secure nuclear-weapons facilities in the United States. A drifter, an 82-year-old nun and a house painter. They face trial next week on charges that fall under the sabotage section of the U.S. criminal code. And if they had been terrorists armed with explosives, intent on mass destruction? That nightmare scenario underlies the government’s response to the intrusion. This is the story of two competing worldviews, of conscience vs. court, of fantasy vs. reality, of history vs. the future. CHAPTER 1 Mission *The devil was* just over Pine Ridge. >From the deserted parking lot on the edge of town, the three servants of God looked into darkness. They clicked on their flashlights, pushed through the initial thicket of brush and began their trek, aiming for the black wooded slope. First, the house painter: bearded, calm, quiet. Second, the Catholic nun: gentle, grandmotherly, short of breath. Third, the drifter: alert, intense, shouldering supplies. They crept across the marshy field, led by some combination of God and Google Maps. Behind them was the city of Oak Ridge, Tenn., 30 minutes west of Knoxville. On the other side of Pine Ridge was Bear Creek Valley — cradle of the Y-12 National Security Complex, the “Fort Knox of Uranium,” birthplace of the heart of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima 67 years earlier. It was, the house painter would later recall, as if the Almighty were guiding each step, across 1,000 feet of open field and up an embankment. By 3 a.m. on Saturday, July 28, 2012, two career peace activists, with eight years jail time between them, and an 82-year-old nun had reached the first obstacle in their two-hour, one-mile hike toward one of the country’s most secure nuclear facilities. A six-foot chain-link boundary fence bordered a gravel patrol road. Strung along the fence were yellow “No Trespassing” placards threatening a $100,000 fine and up to one year in prison. The house painter gripped a pair of bolt cutters, fixed the jaws around a link and squeezed. He cut links in three lines, then opened the new flap. No alarm. No patrol cars. The nun went through first. After the two men followed her, they closed the fence with twine, crossed the patrol road and began the 40-degree ascent to the dark crest of the ridge. The crime had started, which meant they were one step closer to justice. One step closer to rattling the Department of Energy. One step closer to assailing the nation’s storied nuclear identity. One step closer to changing their lives and the lives of the people on the other side of the slope — including the first man they would meet once they cut through three more fences and entered the kill zone. John Hendrix, an ascetic who lived in East Tennesse during the early part of the 20th century, was nicknamed the Prophet of Oak Ridge after his death. His grave is located near the Y-12 National Security Complex. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) CHAPTER 2 ‘… and the earth will shake’ *In those same* woods, around 1900, a middle-aged ascetic named John Hendrix gazed up at the sky and heard a voice like a clap of thunder. The voice told Hendrix to sleep in the woods for 40 nights. So he did. And he had a vision of the future, according to “The Oak Ridge Story<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1440051658/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=17…>,” a 1950 book by George O. Robinson Jr. “And I tell you,” Hendrix said to his farming community after his retreat, “Bear Creek Valley some day will be filled with great buildings and factories and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be. . . . They will be building things and there will be great noise and confusion and the earth will shake.” Hendrix often summited Pine Ridge, Robinson wrote, to pray over the vista of peach orchards and log cabins. “I’ve seen it,” was his refrain. “It’s coming.” On Nov. 11, 1942, decades after Hendrix’s death, a letter from the government arrived at the home of his son: “The War Department intends to take possession of your farm Dec. 1, 1942. . . . Your fullest cooperation will be a material aid to the War Effort.” The government paid Curtis Allen Hendrix $850 for his 60-acre farm, which would be overtaken by the Manhattan Project, the country’s race to build an atomic bomb before Hitler did. Three thousand homesteaders were displaced by the government, which then built a city from scratch by laying 200 miles of road, constructing 44,000 dwelling units and importing 75,000 workers: steelmen from Pennsylvania, machinists and woodworkers from Michigan, riveters and physicists and stenographers and chemists from coast to coast. The 14-square-mile “Secret City” of Oak Ridge was forested with billboards that said “Keep mum about this job” and “We will win in ’44 with your help.” Click or press to view full image Scores of East Tennessee high school girls were trained to operate the dials on complex machinery at the Y-12 site. They didn’t know that each flick of their wrists aided the gram-by-gram production of U-235, the uranium isotope that can sustain the chain reaction of fission necessary to create a nuclear explosion. The science seems simple enough: When a neutron strikes the nucleus of a U-235 atom, the nucleus splits and releases thermal energy and more neutrons, which in turn strike and split more uranium nuclei, and on and on, in an instant, until . . . The biggest boom, from the smallest of particles. Around the clock for 18 months, the Secret City hummed and hustled. Hendrix, his vision borne out, was posthumously deemed the Prophet of Oak Ridge. For most townspeople, the full nature of their mission became clear only in bold newspaper ink on Aug. 6, 1945. “ATOMIC SUPER-BOMB, MADE AT OAK RIDGE, STRIKES JAPAN,” announced the Knoxville News-Sentinel. Sunset at the Y-12 National Security Complex, where weapons-grade uranium is stored and processed. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) CHAPTER 3 Sabotage *It was into* this land and history that outsiders intruded 67 years later: Sister Megan Gillespie Rice, now 83; drifter Michael Robin Walli, now 64; and house painter Gregory Irwin Boertje-Obed, 57. They, like Hendrix, had a vision. They, like Hendrix, can come off a little batty. Michael, though fiercely intelligent, often departs on tirades about the Antichrist. Sister Megan, adamant about not harming any living thing, vowed that if they were attacked by guard dogs inside the complex she would not even raise her hands in self-defense. Greg is so meek in demeanor that it’s hard to imagine him wielding cutlery, let alone bolt cutters. Hendrix envisioned the improbable construction of a wartime city. Michael, Sister Megan and Greg envision its improbable dismantlement. With elbow grease and blind faith, they would make a symbolic incursion to defeat the site’s $150 million-a-year security operation. They would mortify the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, which since 1940 has cost at least $9.8 trillion in 2013 dollars — costlier than all other government expenditures except Social Security and non-nuclear defense programs, according to nuclear weapons policy analyst Stephen Schwartz’s recent update of his1998 Brookings Institution audit<http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/1998/atomic> . In short: Nuclear weapons have been the United States’ third-highest national priority since World War II, in terms of dollars, and we spend a fortune every year to manage and secure them. Yet a crucial facility in this nuclear enterprise “wasn’t even nun-proofed, much less terrorist-proofed,” as a Tennessee congressman would put it in a February hearing on the break-in, which shut down Y-12 site operations for two weeks. This is how Congress describes the intrusion and fallout: “Embarrassing.” “Astonishing.” “Unprecedented.” This is how Greg, Michael and Sister Megan describe it: “God’s will.” “Victory.” “A miracle.” Another step toward the eradication of immoral weapons. When superimposed on the small-town history of Oak Ridge or the quotidian mechanics of federal Washington, their anti-nuclear beliefs can look heroic or treasonous. Nuclear bombs are existential weaponry. They ignite existential debates. Paradoxes proliferate. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, sometimes unclear at first. Sometimes one must step away from lawfulness in the service of a greater good. Sometimes the very thing that keeps us safe is the one thing that can exterminate us. Sometimes we bargain over the lesser of two evils. What is unambiguous: The nun, the drifter and the house painter have been charged with two felonies whose combined maximum sentence is 30 years in prison. One of these felonies is rarely leveled against civilians: “intent to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the national defense of the United States,” as written under the “Sabotage” chapter of the U.S. Code<http://uscode.house.gov/uscode-cgi/fastweb.exe?getdoc+uscview+t17t20+991+0+…> . Their jury trial is scheduled to begin May 7 in Knoxville. The defendants do not view it as *their* trial, even though they proudly admit to trespassing and damaging government property. By exposing what they believe to be the fallacy of national security, by smuggling their anti-war message into the judicial system through the back door, they believe they are putting the country on trial. CHAPTER 4 The summit *The nun plodded* up the steep and densely wooded ridge. In front of her was the painter, behind her the drifter and the boundary fence. Pathless, they snaked slowly in wide turns to ease the climb, pausing often so she could catch her breath. Sister Megan Gillespie Rice *The Holy Spirit directs a person to what is right and what is possible*, the nun thought, *and *this *was possible*. Her parents taught her that life is about moving toward one’s purpose. She had been working her way toward this climb since the age of 9, when she learned her family’s next-door neighbor in New York City was a Columbia University biophysicist privy to the secret Manhattan project. She remembers Pearl Harbor and covering her eyes when the newsreels played war footage before matinees at Trans-Lux movie theaters in Manhattan. She remembers her obstetrician father, who spoke of impoverished patients at Bellevue Hospital; her mother, whose PhD thesis explored the Catholic opinion on slavery; and her uncle, Walter Hooke, a Marine who was yoked with “the terrible weight of knowing” after surveying the decimation of Nagasaki, where all that survived in the city’s cathedral was a scorched wood statue of the Virgin Mary. She remembers committing as a teenager to the teaching order Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus because of their work in Africa, and learning at Boston College how radioactivity affects human cells. The servants of God stopped to rest. A dog barked in the distance. From town? From over the ridge? She had known danger. Kneeling down to block traffic at the entrance to the Nevada Test Site in the ’80s. She had known hardship. Sleeping in classrooms in rural east Nigeria. No running water, no electricity. She had known Sister Anne Montgomery<http://ncronline.org/news/people/sr-anne-montgomery-plowshares-leader-again…>, who, in 2009 at 83, broke into Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, which harbors nuclear submarines, and was convicted, with four others, of trespassing and damaging federal property. How can I get involved? Sister Megan asked Sister Anne after the trial. Call Greg Boertje-Obed, Sister Anne said. “It’s idolatry, putting trust in weapons. And weapons are made like gods. … Weapons are always false gods because they make money. It’s profiteering.”Sister Megan Rice And now there she was, an old lady in sturdy shoes, reaching the limits of her mortal energy at the top of Pine Ridge with Greg, about 90 minutes into the mission. There was the vista over which the Prophet of Oak Ridge had prayed more than a century before, where a national security complex now winked in the darkness. There was still a slope to descend, and three more fences to cut through. The plan was to hike along the ridge, breach the fences away from the facility’s guard towers and then walk casually toward the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility, which houses the nation’s cache of highly enriched uranium — an estimated 400 tons of it, racked in cans floor-to-ceiling across 110,000 square feet. Inside the building was enough radioactive material to fuel over 10,000 nuclear bombs, which would end civilization many times over. Sister Megan was tired and fading with the night, so they recalibrated. They started down the slope immediately. Once clear of the trees, they would head for the first building they saw. The woods of Pine Ridge, which separates the city of Oak Ridge from the Y-12 National Security Complex. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) CHAPTER 5 The belly of the beast *Mission planning involved* searching the Bible and the Internet. All of the relevant information on Y-12’s layout was available online. All of the relevant motivation was available in the books of Psalms, Proverbs and Isaiah. The Y-12 break-in is the latest “Plowshares” disarmament action, a tradition of symbolic and intrepid civil resistance dating to September 1980, when the Berrigan brothers and six others hammered on Minutemen missiles and poured blood on documents at the General Electric weapons plant in King of Prussia, Pa. The Plowshares activists take their name and inspiration from Isaiah 2:4, a verse prophesying a world without war. A parade of actions, each with its own name, has followed over the years. The Dorothy Day Catholic Worker house in Petworth is home to several Plowshares alumni, including Michael, and a home away from home to Sister Megan, who resides in her order’s residence on Newton Street NE. (Greg lives with his wife and daughter in Duluth, Minn.) In the context of Plowshares history, the July action was both typical and astounding, says Paul Magno, a Plowshares veteran and a leader of D.C. nonprofit Witness for Peace. “To me, it goes to not only the over-hype, the over-sell of the whole security mythology, but it goes to what you can do with an act of faith,” Magno says. “God’s people can be faithful and the Red Sea parts and lets them through when there’s no reason to believe that should be possible.” Sister Megan Rice holds her bible. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) The action last summer was dubbed “Transform Now Plowshares” because its three participants desire the immediate conversion of all nuclear weaponry from agents of war to resources that benefit mankind. Michael and Sister Megan live in the world as they believe it should be, not in the world as it is. Sister Megan doesn’t vote. “It would mean I would be a citizen of this regime. I am a citizen of the world. I act in consequence.” Michael derides Washington as the belly of the beast. “Did you know that the last president who wasn’t a war criminal was Herbert Hoover?” Says Sister Megan of Michael: “His mind is never still.” Says Michael of Sister Megan: “She’s a visionary.” Together they’re like an overactive younger brother and patient older sister. Michael summons the brimstone, Sister Megan the bromide. When she and Michael retell their story, which they do often to eager foot soldiers of social justice groups, they put it in tidy parable form on PowerPoint: We saw injustice at Y-12, so we broke in to bring truth and attract the world’s attention, and here is the U.S. government’s seven-decade budget for nuclear-weapons infrastructure. After one such presentation, at the weekly “Clarification of Thought” at the Dorothy Day house, a visitor asks about the forces they faced once they made it through the final fence that summer night. “The first person to really lose his job was this lovely security guard,” says Sister Megan, adding that she hopes to meet him when she, Greg and Michael go to Knoxville for a pre-trial hearing on whether they can offer moral conviction as a defense in court. CHAPTER 6 The descent *The lights of* the Antichrist flickered through the trees. The drifter prayed. *Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. For all the glory is yours, and on the last day Jesus will come like this, like a thief in the night, and the warmongering United States will fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy by beating its swords into plowshares.* Michael Robin Walli He had duct-taped the head of his flashlight to reduce the beam to a sliver. On the downward slope of Pine Ridge, he moved in front of the nun, clearing branches and stones from her path. He was just a frail earthen vessel, he believed, but she was a daughter of God. He was her bodyguard. On his head was a construction hat painted light blue, with “UN” marked on the front. On his breath was the stink of Top brand tobacco. In their backpacks, he and the nun carried twine, matches, candles, a Bible, three hammers, six cans of spray paint, three protest banners, copies of a letter they wished to deliver to Y-12 employees and two emblems of sustenance — a packet of cucumber seeds and a fresh-baked loaf of bread with a cross molded into the top. And six baby bottles of human blood. Click or press to view full image This was easy compared with Vietnam, where he carried briefing boards of heavy hinged plywood out of Phuoc Long province during the Cambodia incursion. Michael was an Army specialist, an expert marksman with an M-14 and M-16. The carpet-bombing from American B-52s still echoes in his head. “Like thunder, but it didn’t stop.” He earned a Bronze Star. He considers himself a war criminal. He left the Army after two tours, found Jesus, became an ascetic, worked in a homeless shelter in Chicago, stormed the gates of the CIA with 1,500 other activists in April 1987, wound up in Fairfax County’s jail and decided to stay in Washington upon his release. And now, 45 years after his enlistment, he was at the edge of the woods on the other side of Pine Ridge, the flood-lit expanse of Y-12 in front of him. “In heaven Jesus has no arsenal of nuclear weapons. And as we pray in the Our Father prayer: ‘Here on Earth as it is in heaven.’ … Nuclear weapons are a product of hell and we need to send them back there.”Michael Walli As predicted long ago, the valley was filled with great buildings, many rusted and dating to the Manhattan Project. But right in front of them was a vast, new fortress of reinforced concrete with a foundation anchored in bedrock. As luck, or providence, would have it, this was their original target: the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility, a large part of Y-12’s mission to reduce its physical footprint, improve its safety and modernize its operations. >From the treeline, they watched a patrol SUV pass one way on Bear Creek Road, then the other. Then they walked across the two lanes and approached the first of three eight-foot chain-link fences. This outer fence, with three lines of barbed wire on top, was part of Y-12’s “perimeter intrusion detection and assessment system.” It was no match for bolt cutters. The house painter began cutting links in the first fence near a sign that said “Danger: Halt! Deadly force is authorized beyond this point.” Somewhere on the site, according to the Knoxville News-Sentinel’s nuclear reporter Frank Munger, were Gatling guns capable of firing 3,000 rounds per minute — a fusillade that could reduce a trespasser to pink mist. The painter pulled back the flap of chain links like a curtain. The nun entered the kill zone first. Oak Ridge, Tenn., was created in 1943 by the U.S. government to play an integral role in the Manhattan Project. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) CHAPTER 7 The Secret City *Nestled in a* river valley, Oak Ridge looks unremarkable on the surface. Its old town square has been overtaken by a congested turnpike lined with fast food joints, credit unions and parking lots. Cul-de-sacs of single-family homes unfurl up the foggy foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Roads are named Hickory, Poplar and Whippoorwill, and Manhattan, Palladium and Boeing. Flagpoles clang. The Panera is always packed. Locals pronounce their city “Oh-*kridge*.” On a knoll on the front lawn of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, a six-foot marble statue of the Virgin Mary gazes southward over the low-rise downtown, toward Pine Ridge. Her face shaded by dark green mold, the Virgin stands barefoot on a spheroid plinth that represents Earth. This Mary, like most Marys, has her foot on a serpent, but there’s a curious non-biblical icon on the Earth under her toes: a nucleus framed by a whirl of electrons. The atomic symbol is on the facade of the public high school. It is rendered in stained glass inside the public library. It is on the big green sign that heralds the Y-12 National Security Complex just over Pine Ridge. Click or press to view full image At noon on the first Wednesday of every month, the DOE tests its public-warning sirens for three minutes. Every June, reenactors stage the Allied invasion of Normandy in the town park. Though you haven’t needed a badge to get into the town since 1949, Oak Ridge’s soul hasn’t changed. It’s still a company town, and the company is the government, and the business is bombs. Its centerpiece, Y-12, has become a large processing shop and warehouse for most of the country’s highly enriched uranium. It’s one of five production sites connected to three research labs under the umbrella of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous entity within the Department of Energy created in the year 2000 to manage and secure nuclear weapons and non-proliferation programs. Y-12 processes highly enriched uranium for a variety of purposes, including “life-extension programs” for three classes of warheads and the B61 bomb<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-b61-bomb-a-case-s…>. The renovation of these weapons programs<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-nuclear-arsenal-is…> could take 25 years, officials estimate, and cost $20 billion. The site also dismantles weapons components and “downblends” the highly enriched uranium, reducing its radioactivity for use in research and nuclear reactors. Weapons, war and secrecy are the city’s economy, its legacy and, for now, its future. Concrete guard stations from the early 1950s lurk on the roadsides. A “commemorative walk” salutes the 43ers — those thousands of people who moved to Oak Ridge at the government’s behest in 1943. One plaque says residents’ work “made possible a weapon that was instrumental in bringing peace to a world anguished by the brutal six-year war in which 54 million people died.” The activists of Transform Now Plowshares are in West Knoxville in early February, at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, testifying to the congregation after a Sunday service. Church members ask them how they can claim nonviolence when they destroyed property. “Maybe the triviality of that destruction comes from a truth that is monstrous,” Sister Megan says. “Those very fences are illegal, and guarding lies and secrecy and corruption and great danger to the world.” White-haired Lillian Mashburn stands, arms crossed, in the back of the church. She’s thinking of her father, who was an infantryman stationed in the Pacific when Oak Ridge’s uranium fell toward Hiroshima. “He was saved by that bomb,” Mashburn, a church board member, says after the discussion. “They were told when they landed they would be killed as part of the first wave. . . . There’s a whole generation of people, most of whom would’ve been dead, who were saved.” What saves Oak Ridge are the dollars that gush from Washington to East Tennessee. The complex is the second-largest employer in East Tennessee and creates 24,000 indirect jobs, according to the site contractor’s Y-12 Community Relations Council. Eight thousand people go to work there, including contractors, subcontractors, protective-force guards and 80 federal employees of the Department of Energy. For 2014, $1.2 billion was requested by the NNSA for the management and operation of Y-12. Y-12 is slated to construct a new Uranium Processing Facility, a massive building that will ensure that America’s nuclear arsenal remains operational. Peak construction of the UPF will create 1,500 construction jobs and 5,000 support jobs. “This community serves the DOE,” says Ralph Hutchison, 56, the coordinator of the nonprofit Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance <http://orepa.org/>, whose ultimate goal is to abolish nuclear weapons, which means halting operations at Y-12. “It’s the environment in which they live. It’s the air they breathe.” CHAPTER 8 The miracle *The trio stood* in a moat of white rocks between the first and second fence. The complex was lit bright as day. No one was racing to apprehend them. The middle fence was intimidating, and wired for something. Motion sensoring? Electricity? *This is not going to work*, the house painter thought. *We are not going to get through this.* Gregory Irwin Boertje-Obed He had known doubt before. Greg was a Presbyterian Iowa farm boy who joined the ROTC to afford Tulane University. He went into active duty at Fort Polk in 1981, as the nuclear-freeze movement rallied against President Ronald Reagan’s stockpile buildup. He read Daniel Berrigan. His government said: Be ready for nuclear war. The prophet Isaiah said: Do not put your trust in horses and chariots. He couldn’t reconcile the two. He left the Army as a conscientious objector, he says, and returned to New Orleans in time to hear Berrigan talk about Plowshares actions. Greg heard an inner voice say, *Go in this direction*. Within two years, he was living at Jonah House, the Catholic Worker residence in Baltimore, where he met his wife, Michele. While raising their daughter, they scheduled their protests to make sure that only one of them was facing jail at any given time. His first action was hammering Trident II missile tubes at Quonset Point shipyard in Rhode Island. Twenty-six years later, a nun would call him up, looking to make her own first action. “We are a little bungling. We are just ordinary people, and inept. … So we chose a date and said come in advance. We thought Sunday. We thought maybe there would be fewer workers, maybe they would be in a more charitable mood – if it’s a Sunday, they’re less likely to shoot you.”Greg Boertje-Obed And now this middle fence, and the possibility that their mission was over. Surely security cameras had spied them by now. Surely this fence would trip an alarm. *You won’t know unless you try*, the inner voice told him. He began cutting links in the middle fence, severing fiber-optic sensors. No one came for them. *This is grace*, he thought, and he climbed through after the others. He cut through the last fence, and they were through the Red Sea, and there was nothing between them and the Fort Knox of Uranium. *God is with us*, he thought. *This is a miracle*. They shook cans of red and black spray paint. They gripped the baby bottles of blood. They spray painted the building’s north wall, which was designed to withstand the impact of aircraft but not the words of the Book of Proverbs. They poured and splashed blood that had once been in the veins of a painter-activist named Tom Lewis, one of the Catonsville Nine who, on Hiroshima Day 1987, hammered on the bomb racks of an anti-submarine plane at the South Weymouth Naval Air Station near Boston. In 2008, Lewis died in his sleep, and his blood was frozen so that he might one day participate in one last Plowshares action. In bright red rivulets, the last of Tom Lewis streaked down the concrete. They removed the hammers from the drifter’s backpack. “TRANSFORM NOW” was written in red marker on the handle of the claw hammer. Burned into the handle of the small sledge hammer was “Repent! God’s kingdom is at hand!” They began to strike the pentagonal base of a guard tower at the northwest corner of the building. Chips of concrete fell to the asphalt. Blood dribbled into the scar. They believed they were also hammering on what had not yet been built. The wide open space to the right of the tower was designated for the Uranium Processing Facility, now projected to cost at least $6.5 billion, a stockpile of money that they wanted spent on life-extension programs for people. They rang their hammers down on the senselessness of it all. They waited to be arrested. In a matter of minutes, a single guard would be sent to investigate. >From left, Sister Megan Rice, Shelley Wascom, Sarah Hutchison, Michael Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed pray before dinner in Knoxville on Feb. 4, 2013. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) CHAPTER 9 The quantum theory of physics *Greg is prepping* baked potatoes. Sister Megan is setting silverware. Michael is carrying armloads of firewood in from outside. They are gathering for a dinner of salmon, tofu and broccoli with a couple of other members of the Transform Now Plowshares support group at a supporter’s house in south Knoxville. From this home base, in the days before their February pretrial hearing, they bring their anti-bomb evangel to various settings. At the University of Tennessee, where they are guest speakers in a systems theory class, Greg talks about the diffusion of social responsibility and how he feels personally responsible for nuclear weapons because his taxes have paid for them. Michael, who is wearing a T-shirt that says “GROUND THE DRONES,” calls Y-12 “a failed rogue terrorist state.” “I think there’s a deafening silence about what’s going on at Y-12,” says student Rochelle Butler, “but I do know people who work there are good people. Why would I believe outsiders rather than people who work there, who I believe to be good?” “We love these people in a deeply compassionate way,” Sister Megan says of the Y-12 employees. “Our motivation was in solidarity with people who spend their time making nuclear bombs to feed their children. . . . We are all so intertwined and empower each other. A thought creates its own energy. The quantum theory of physics is always at work.” The theory is at work a couple of days later at Maryville College, where the trio eats pizza with 15 students from a progressive Christian group. “They are each connected to 50 others,” Sister Megan whispers before chatting with music student Chris Hickman. “I know nothing about the anti-nuclear movement,” Hickman tells her. “I was born in ’92, and it’s kind of an afterthought for my generation.” Greg, Michael and Sister Megan visit with two dozen people at a meeting of the Presbyterian Peacemaking Committee of East Tennessee. “Prince of Peace, we thank you for your prophets who’ve spoken your word down through the ages, and we thank you for the prophets among us,” says host Scott Brunger during his opening prayer. The attendees chat about the fallout from the break-in. Someone asks about what their intrusion has cost taxpayers — at least $15 million in security alterations by the NNSA, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel<http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/feb/01/nnsa-cost-of-y-12-break-in-at-leas…> — and Greg says that they saved taxpayers $12.2 million that was docked from the management contractor’s award fee. Sister Megan again brings up the first guard they encountered inside the facility and how he lost his job. She says how he saved their lives by not escalating the situation. “I feel very guilty not contacting him,” Sister Megan admits. The guard’s number is listed. He’ll answer the phone if you call. And when you ask about the three people who broke into Y-12 last summer, you can almost hear his grip on the phone tighten as he says: “You mean the people who ruined my life?” Security guard Kirk Garland on the property of his former home, now in foreclosure after he lost his job at Y-12. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) CHAPTER 10 ‘I’ve served my country’ *Two weeks after* the break-in, Kirk Garland was handed a letter from the site’s protective-force contractor that said he “failed” in his responsibilities as a guard on the morning of July 28, 2012. The letter said he showed “blatant disregard for the seriousness of the situation.” It said he was terminated, effective immediately, and his health insurance would expire two days later. Kirk Garland A solid man with a cinnamon-colored mustache, Kirk started working in nuclear security in 1983 at Colorado’s now-shuttered Rocky Flats Plant, which processed plutonium for weapons. For three years, he worked in a similar job at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Tex., where nuclear weapons are put together and taken apart. Then he moved to Y-12, where the fuel is processed. What Oak Ridge built, he says, he was proud to protect. “In my eyes, after being a guard for 30 years, I feel that I should be treated the same way as somebody who served in Iraq,” says Kirk, 52. “I’ve served my country for 30 years by protecting my nation’s nuclear assets.” He was four years from retirement, bringing home $85,000 a year with overtime, with a pristine employment record. The sign on the front door of his modest house says, “This property has been determined to be vacant and abandoned.” He could rescue it from foreclosure, but doesn’t have the money. What he has is a rental home in nearby Clinton, a sick wife, a month’s worth of losing lottery tickets, a 16-year-old daughter who has curtailed her passion for barrel-racing horses, and a small contingent of German shepherds that he raises to sell to police department K-9 units. “I do okay,” he says, standing in the ransacked backyard of his former home in Lake City, Tenn. “My wife don’t. She can’t come up here. Nothing I can do about it. Thirty years with DOE. And you’re looking at everything.” Scattered cinder blocks. Sodden heaps of pink insulation. The kennel hauled off by vandals, the small stable stripped of its roof and most of its siding. It had been a good life in Lake City, 20 miles north of Y-12, where he worked for nearly 5 1/2 years until those people, he says, decided to overexert their First Amendment right. The report on the break-in by the inspector general of the Department of Energy faults Kirk for not pulling his weapon, for not securing the area. The site’s management contractor, Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Y-12, faults him for not immobilizing the intruders and for turning his back while they rummaged through their backpacks. The site’s protective-force contractor, WSI-Oak Ridge, faults him for an “embarrassing” and “casual” response to the intrusion. NNSA officials were “horrified” by surveillance video of Kirk first addressing the intruders from his car, instead of immediately jumping out, and for making assumptions about their intent. If he had acted too aggressively, on the other hand, Y-12 might have had a dead nun on its hands. Kirk says there was no reason to unholster his gun, that it was unsafe for one man to try to cuff three people, that an entire patrol team should’ve been dispatched to a zone with multiple alarms. He had previously dealt with peace protesters at Rocky Flats, which is how he knew that the three trespassers were not dangerous, he says. The “blatant disregard,” he says, lies elsewhere. In fact, the security camera that watched Zone 63, the area of the trio’s incursion, had been out of service for six months, according to a subsequent report from the Department of Energy’s inspector general. At the time of the break-in, there were 56 busted security tools across Y-12, seven broken security cameras surrounding the HEUMF and an average of 2,170 sitewide alarms per day — many caused by wildlife, weather and foliage. None of this was Kirk’s responsibility. “In my eyes they’ve ruined my name,” Kirk says of the government and its contractors. “I worked hard. I mean, I put my family second a lot of times to keep this clearance for 30 years, just to have it jerked out from me like that. . . . I think they were embarrassed that an 82-year-old got in that far. And they used me for their scapegoat. They used me to say, ‘Well, he messed it up. We got rid of him.’ But I wasn’t the problem.” The problem, according to a string of reports over the years from the DOE’s inspector general and the Government Accountability Office, was a lax security culture and hands-off federal oversight. The problem was “a culture of compliance, as opposed to a culture of performance,” according to a B&W Y-12’s post-mortem of what became known internally as “the Security Event.” A GAO report released, coincidentally, three days after the break-in admonished the NNSA for cost overruns, mismanagement and an absentee relationship with contractors. To date, Kirk is the only individual to have been fired outright because of the incident. The guards who failed to detect and initiate a proper response to the breach were suspended, and the supervising lieutenant was disciplined. B&W Y-12 removed four managers, allowing the top two to formally retire. Four federal officials with security oversight jobs were reassigned. The leaders of the guard force retired or were reassigned, says Paul Donahue, chief executive of G4S Government Solutions, the parent company of the protective force company, which lost its contract. The management and operations contractor lost $12.2 million of its award incentive fee, and the same firms, with different partners, have bid on a new 10-year contract for both Y-12 and Pantex worth $23 billion. Kirk has a car repairman dogging him for a $1,000 debt that he can’t pay. In March, he took a guard job at a county jail that he says pays $24,000 a year. His case is slated for arbitration this fall through the International Guards Union of America. He’s reached for his Baptist faith to temper his anger. He attends services at Faith Promise, a massive church on a hill on the outskirts of Oak Ridge. He doesn’t understand how law-breaking activists can be inspired by the same God that guides his life down the straight and narrow. “I’ve got to sit down and ask a priest,” Kirk says. “Doing the Lord’s work is not protesting and getting arrested. You don’t get to heaven on your works anyway. You get to heaven on salvation. . . . God’s got a different plan for me. Everything happens in his timing, whenever he’s ready to move us along.” When told that Sister Megan thinks he saved her life by not escalating the situation — that, in fact, he was her salvation — Kirk is speechless. His wife is not. “That’s amazing that she’d make that kind of statement,” scoffs Joann Garland. “She is safe — because of him — to be able to go and do what she’s doing. . . . The joke of it is they came in God’s name. God does not say to break laws. Sorry. God does not say that.” Knoxville attorney Francis Lloyd Jr. listens to his client, Sister Megan Rice, during a meeting before their February pre-trial hearing. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) CHAPTER 11 Scales of justice *If religion gives* meaning to the chaos of the cosmos, the law developed alongside to order society’s unruliest parts. Greg, who represents himself in court, stood behind the microphone and delivered his testimony in monolithic terms. “So when you build a nuclear weapon, you are planning and preparing to commit mass murder,” he argued in a November pre-trial hearing in Knoxville. “You are giving your assent to the killing of civilians.” In that precursor episode to *The United States of America v. Walli et al*, the defense argued that it is illegal for the United States to possess nuclear weapons because their sole purpose is to inflict damage that cannot be contained: Civilians perish en masse, the environment is poisoned for generations and the mere threat of this scenario — even under the guise of deterrence — constitutes “imminent harm” that cannot be ignored for one more minute, let alone successive generations. After the defense cited the Geneva and Hague conventions and invoked the Nuremberg principles, the government argued that international treaties do not take precedence over laws Congress enacts to ensure national defense, including nuclear weapons programs. At the notion of complicity to war crimes, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey E. Theodore balked. “They say if they didn’t act, that they are somehow complicit in this ‘illegality,’” Theodore argued in November. “Well, then, therefore, all the people here who have not acted, not [broken] in to Y-12 to stop the ‘illegal’ operations there, then . . . they’re complicit in war crimes, I guess, which is . . . a ludicrous argument.” William Quigley, the defendants’ pro-bono counsel, told the court his clients should be allowed to testify about their moral imperatives for the break-in. “The effort to preclude necessity, international law, nuclear policy, God, conscience, history, who knows the other things — I think it’s, it’s inconsistent with our search, our mutual search for the truth,” Quigley said. After Michael, Greg and Sister Megan refused a plea bargain, the government hit them with the more serious charge under the sabotage act. That led Transform Now Plowshares and its support group to Courtroom 3B of U.S. District Court in downtown Knoxville in Feburary, for a second hearing on obstructing the national defense, scheduled between a case of bank robbery and a case of Social Security fraud. That morning, Sister Megan has trouble getting through security. “Any metal on you, sister?” a guard asks during her third run through the metal detector. “I have titanium in my wrists,” the nun says, then gestures to the X-ray machine. “Do you wear lead vests standing next to this all day? I think you should.” The support group swells to 25 people and fills all rows on the defense’s side of the courtroom. Ralph Hutchison and folks from the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance are here. As they await the start of the hearing, the supporters begin singing softly. “Peace is flo-wing like a riiiii-ver,” they warble from their seats. “Flo-wing out into the deeeeesert.” Hutchison chuckles. “Oh the judge *loves *it when they sing,” he says. Click or press to view full image CHAPTER 12 Reaction *In Washington, a* congressman asks the nun to please stand up. “We want to thank you for pointing out some of the problems in our security,” says Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Tex.). Another congressman expresses a different kind of gratitude. “Thank you for your willingness to focus attention on this nuclear weapons buildup that still exists in our world,” says Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), “and how much we need to do something to reduce it.” A third congressman is incredulous at the nun’s mere presence at this September oversight hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. “Why are they even here in this hearing room?” says Rep. Michael C. Burgess (R-Tex.). “Why are they not being held in — in detention somewhere?” Since July 28, Congress has been sputtering with indignation. Hearings were scheduled on Sept. 12 and 13,Feb. 28<http://armedservices.house.gov/index.cfm/hearings-display?ContentRecord_id=…> and March 13<http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/doe-management-and-oversight-its-nu…> so legislators could vocalize how “shocked” and “appalled” they are. The phrase “wake-up call” is uttered and re-uttered. “Peace through strength” becomes a refrain. The word “culture” is used 72 times to explain how a complex, highly funded operation could be so vulnerable. Federal officials at the witness table get lost in a maze of their own jargon. Congress members wonder over and over what would have happened if the intruders had been terrorists, not peace activists. Brig. Gen. Sandra Finan, commander of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, appears several times to present her task force’s findings on “Lessons of the Y-12 Security Failure<http://democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Tes…>”: NNSA has muddled lines of authority, and its security culture has “focused on fiscal limitations over effective performance.” Megan Rice and Michael Walli attend a hearing on nuclear security conducted by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Between them is activist and supporter Paul Magno. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) Sister Megan and Michael witness each hearing in sweat pants and parkas. They are lost in the navy thicket of young legislative assistants. On one of these field trips, they get off the Metro at Capitol South station and grimace at the giant Raytheon ads that feature military vehicles and mottos like “Any threat, any mission.” On Feb. 28, the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on strategic forces tries to sniff out blame. “And as the chairman correctly pointed out,” says Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) at one point, “it’s hard to find that anybody was punished except the lowest-level guard.” At a break, Sister Megan approaches one of the expert witnesses, retired Maj. Gen. C. Donald Alston, the former Air Force assistant chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration. “I’ll give this to you,” she says, handing him a folded sheet of white paper. It’s a letter calling for the immediate suspension of funding for the Uranium Processing Facility at Y-12. “The whole thing can be solved by changing the mission,” Sister Megan says to the major general. “Change the mission, brother.” “We have a lot of stability in the world because of” nuclear weapons, says Alston, smiling, towering over her in uniform. “It’s impossible to even secure *one*,” Sister Megan says. “We can change the mission. It’s possible.” “Okay,” he says. “We can have projects that sustain humanity.” “Okay,” he says, starting to leave the witness table. “This is the nun,” Michael says, coming to her side. “*Oh*,” Alston says, before turning away. Sister Megan is not concerned with this slight. The world needs positive * and *negative charges, she says. You can’t have energy without both. On March 13, during a second hearing in front of the Energy and Commerce’s oversight subcommittee, Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) cites a 2010 Department of Energy memo<http://hssoutreach.doe.gov/documents/meetings/20100316_SafetySecurityReform…> in which Deputy Secretary Daniel B. Poneman called for the elimination of “excessive Federal oversight” of contractors and the awarding of “decision-making authorities” to “the lowest level of contractor and Federal management.” The subcommittee, as a body, wonders if the department had farmed out the stewardship of nuclear assets to contractors who self-police and self-appraise, and therefore continue to collect fees while cutting corners. “What we were trying to do, sir, was to get rid of the check-box mentality of just looking at paperwork and creating paperwork,” Poneman replies. “To get back to performance testing so we could be better, safer and more secure.” Sitting just over Poneman’s shoulder at each one of these hearings are two of the people who have put him on this hot seat for the past eight months. “I appreciate what you did,” a staffer for the Government Accountability Office tells Sister Megan after the hearing adjourns. “But don’t do it again, because I don’t want you to get hurt.” The mushroom cloud at Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945. (AP Photo/U.S. Air Force) CHAPTER 13 ‘A sheet of sun’ *The last shipment* of highly enriched uranium bound for Japan left Oak Ridge on July 25, 1945, and arrived two days later on the island of Tinian in the oblivion of the Pacific Ocean. On Aug. 6, a 9,700-pound, 10-foot-long atomic bomb was loaded onto a B-29 bomber, flown 1,500 miles northwest, and dropped over Hiroshima. Eyes melted from the heads of those who had been looking skyward at the “sheet of sun,” as John Hersey’s “Hiroshima<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/148258798X/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=17…>” described the light of the explosion. Some 160,000 were dead, dying or injured. Five square miles burned. “A harnessing of the basic power of the universe,” President Harry Truman announced. “One of the greatest blunders of history,” wrote physicist Leo Szilard, an architect of the Manhattan Project. “WAR ENDS,” The Knoxville Journal declared. Our national complex was just beginning. The bomb created to stop one war imbued all future wars with apocalyptic power. The United States raced Russia to amass nuclear weapons — a peak of 30,000 stateside in the mid-1960s — then began to reduce the stockpile as other nations pursued and attained nuclear capability. This past January, the Indian government distributed to Kashmiris a nuclear-war advisory<http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2013/01/201312382354914360.html> that encouraged the building of bunkers. In March, Secretary of State John F. Kerry told ABC News that “confrontation becomes more possible” if Iran continues its plan to enrich uranium and develop nuclear weaponry. In April, North Korea publicized its desire to strike the United States, and the White House announced that it had helped the Czech Republic remove its entire stockpile<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-house-says-us-h…>of highly enriched uranium — all 150 pounds of it, or enough for two or three nukes. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953 The United States possesses roughly 4,650 active nuclear weapons plus another 3,000 awaiting dismantlement,according to the Federation of American Scientists<http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/publications1/TrimmingNuclearExcess.p…>, a non-partisan think tank created by Manhattan Project scientists. To satisfy the New START Treaty with Russia, our 1,950 strategically deployed high-alert nuclear weapons must be reduced to 1,550 by 2018. In order to get the treaty ratified by the Senate in 2010, President Obama promised $85 billion<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/11/17/fact-sheet-enduring-c…> through 2020 for modernizing the U.S. stockpile. In a time of austerity, our weapons budget is rising as our stockpile is falling. The officials who lay awake at night worrying how to safeguard Cold War leftovers have a delicate, intricate mission fraught with peril and obstacle. “Of course, what’s also undeniable is that the threat remains. There are still too many bad actors in search of these dangerous materials, and these dangerous materials are still vulnerable in too many places. It would not take much… to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people.”President Obama, March 26, 2012 “We have been running a system a certain way for such a long time and not really thinking about whether it was working or not,” says acting NNSA administrator Neile Miller, charged with overseeing the politically choreographed — and therefore incremental — transition from proliferation to disarmament. Miller, during an interview in April at the DOE, acknowledges failures in management and says she understands the protester mentality and frustration. But the wish for a nuclear-free world of the future, she says, can distort perception of the policy that guides the world of the present. “I know people want to believe that everybody here is just of one mind . . . and we’re all somehow of this military-industrial complex — and it just doesn’t work that way,” she says. “ . . . People tend to be religiously for or religiously against. And as a result, they tend to attribute motivations and actions to all sorts of things that, in my personal experience, so very rarely turn out to be anywhere near what’s actually happening.” Our very national position on nuclear weapons, though, is a paradox. “As long as nuclear weapons exist,” says the administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/2010NuclearPostureR…>, “the United States will sustain safe, secure, and effective nuclear forces.” As long as nuclear weapons exist, Sister Megan, Michael, Greg and their fellow activists will hammer on their infrastructure. Incrementalism is the danger, they believe, because the threat is imminent, the consequences are catastrophic and society suffers financially and morally. And what if these backpack-wearing peaceniks had been terrorists, for whom obtaining highly enriched uranium is the likeliest way to create mass destruction? With those 20 minutes of uninterrupted access to the site, they could have blown through the doors or walls of the HEUMF with an explosively formed penetrator and rigged an improvised nuclear device using highly enriched uranium and conventional explosives. A 10-kiloton detonation at Y-12 would cause an estimated 60,000 casualties, including 18,000 deaths, in East Tennessee. Radiation would have sickened people over 40 miles. This worst-case scenario is presented in a yet-to-be-published report on UPF by the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, which combines a “design basis threat” scenario from the Department of Energy with a Department of Defense hazard-prediction algorithm employed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy nonprofit. NNSA officials, noting classified security measures inside HEUMF, call this worst-case scenario “very, very far-fetched.” But then so is a nun breaking into the Fort Knox of Uranium. The intruders who weren’t terrorists admit to their actions. The legislators have thanked them for initiating security reforms. The deputy secretary of the Department of Energy said in February — during the Nuclear Deterrence Summit in Arlington — that the intrusion, while “unacceptable,” did not compromise the uranium and therefore did not directly imperil the nation. The Justice Department has charged the trio with intending to do just that. So what is really on trial the second week of May? The limits of the judicial system, or the limits of social-justice actions? The moral arch of the universe versus the bottom line of governance? Is it the bargain we strike with ourselves? CHAPTER 14 Fission *In the late* afternoon of Friday, July 27, 2012, the guard drove to Y-12, put on his camouflage uniform, embroidered with “Semper Vigil,” and holstered a Sig P226 9 mm on his hip. Over his 12-hour shift, day became night. For his last two hours, 4 to 6 a.m., he rotated into a patrol vehicle. Around 4:20 a.m., a three-second tone came over his radio — a low-priority alarm that was cleared by an officer in short order. Soon after, the guard’s cellphone rang. The cleared alarm keeps bouncing back, his supervising lieutenant said; the alarm station was suggesting “something is not right” in Zone 63, and that a maintenance crew might be at work. The guard was then dispatched to a sector of the security fence that runs around the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility. He arrived there in less than a minute and pulled slowly to the fence in his vehicle. Nothing seemed amiss, until movement caught his eye. He turned his head away from the fence to the HEUMF. An old woman was walking toward his vehicle, a grizzled man on either side. At first he thought it was a painting crew — it wasn’t uncommon for maintenance to be done overnight — but behind them were three phrases spray-painted red and black onto the white building. THE FRUIT OF JUSTICE IS PEACE. PLOWSHARES PLEASE ISAIAH. WOE TO AN EMPIRE OF BLOOD. Click or press to view full image Their hands were up. *Peace protesters*, he thought, as his phone rang again. It was his lieutenant, checking in. “I’ve got three individuals here who have appeared to have breached our system,” the guard told him, “and they’ve written graffiti all over the walls.” His lieutenant thought he was kidding. “I’m telling you what I got. They’re peace protesters. I need backup.” He then identified himself through the vehicle window and asked the trio: “What are you doing here? “God led us here,” said one of the men. “Stop where you’re at,” the guard said, exiting his vehicle. The old woman bowed to him. “Keep your hands where I can see them.” “Will you listen to our message?” she said. The three began to recite text from a white piece of paper. “Brothers and sisters, powers that be, we come to you today as friends . . .” The two men retrieved candles from their backpacks nearby and lit them. “A loving and compassionate creator invites us to take the urgent and decisive steps to transform the U.S. empire, and this facility, into life-giving alternatives which resolve real problems . . .” It would be five minutes before another security officer would show up, brandishing an M-16, ready to help cuff the intruders on the ground as they sang “This Little Light of Mine.” It would be another two hours until special agents from the Department of Energy arrested the trespassers and mobilized the wheels of justice, and six hours until the trespassers were booked in the Blount County Jail, and one day until the biblical graffiti was scrubbed clean, and 10 days until the three were charged with “maliciously” attempting to destroy a structure within the Y-12 National Security Complex, and two weeks until the complex reopened and the guard lost his job, and nine months until the trespassers would face trial before a jury of their fellow citizens that would have the power to convict them of intending to endanger the United States. But for those next five minutes the scene was simple, almost sacramental. Four servants of God, drawn together by conviction and coincidence, regarded each other as dawn approached. The Lord may have been there. The devil, too. Or maybe human beings colliding in the quantum theory of physics was almighty enough. *About this story.* The intrusion at Y-12 in Tennessee was re-created for this article through reporting in the city of Oak Ridge, extensive interviews with the three activists and former protective-force guard Kirk Garland, and interviews with federal officials and site employees. This account also draws upon congressional testimony and detailed written reports on the security event from the inspector general of the Department of Energy and the contractor partnership Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Y-12. WRITER - Dan Zak EDITOR - Ann Gerhart ART DIRECTION - Janet Michaud DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT - Andrew Metcalf - Tim Wong ILLUSTRATION - Jeffrey Smith TEXT AND VISUAL EDITING - Brian Cleveland - Kat Downs - Jesse Lewis - Sarah Sampsel PHOTOGRAPHY - Linda Davidson - Anne Farrar - Dee Swann - Sarah L. Voisin GRAPHICS - Laris Karklis - Todd Lindeman GALLERY: The activists <http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-activists/2013/04/29/d2da…> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-activists/2013/04/29/d2da…> GALLERY: The Secret City <http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-secret-city/2013/04/29/06…> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-secret-city/2013/04/29/06…> GALLERY: Wartime billboards <http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/words-to-live-by/2013/04/29/8…> -- William V. DePaulo, Esq. 179 Summers Street, Suite 232 Charleston, WV 25301-2163 Tel 304-342-5588 Fax 304-342-5505 william.depaulo(a)gmail.com www.passeggiata.com

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from ScienceDaily e-newsletter: Residents concerned about health effects of hydrofracking
by Paul Wilson 29 Apr '13

29 Apr '13

Residents concerned about health effects of hydrofracking<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/IVv…> Posted: 28 Apr 2013 08:04 PM PDT Some residents living in areas in Bradford, Co, Pa., near natural gas operations, also known as hydraulic fracturing, are concerned their illnesses may be a result of nearby drilling operations. Twenty-two percent of the participants in a small pilot study surmise that hydrofracking may be the cause of such health concerns as sinus problems, sleeping difficulties, and gastrointestinal problems. -- Paul Wilson Sierra Club 504 Jefferson Ave Charles Town, WV 25414-1130 Phone: 304-725-4360 Cell: 304-279-1361 "There is no forward until you have gone back" ~Buddha "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous" ~ Aristotle

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