by Bruce Johansen
Like anyone else, I can draw some joy out of a sunny, mild day in the middle of January. We take enough punishment in Nebraska to deserve a few of them. But nearly a month of them, back to back (from mid-December, 2011 to at least mid-January, 2012)? Dare I rain—or snow, sleet and hail—on this parade?
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by Bruce Johansen
A friend, Professor Henry D'Souza (who is well-known around Nebraskans for Peace), told me that he had watched parts of the Unicameral hearings on the Keystone XL Pipeline. He remarked at how limited the focus of the hearings seemed to be, as if we are dealing mainly with a routing issue for the pipeline, not the larger issue, the introduction of a whole new (and very large) pool of fossil fuels, by way of Alberta’s tar sands.
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The proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would carry about 830,000 barrels a day at full capacity, has been catching a lot of grief locally because it could spill oil that might ruin our underground water supply. That much is true. But the environmental cost of the pipeline does not stop there. The oil that will be transported is refined from tar sands, mainly from Alberta, which combine all the worst attributes of fossil fuels: spill potential, the carbon footprint of coal, and the environmental damage of coal strip mining. Tar sands are, briefly stated, a triple environmental atrocity—enough to send a thinking person to a bicycle.
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By 2011, scientific studies were beginning to bear out what many incidents of extreme precipitation have been telling weather watchers who follow the meteorological news: a warmer atmosphere produces more rain and snowfall—and a greater risk of damaging floods. These studies also lend credence to a scary prospect, and one that popular media coverage of these studies largely missed: while increases in temperature are linear, intensity of precipitation increases exponentially. One must wonder what the atmosphere has in store for us once temperature increases get really serious.
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BY BRUCE E. JOHANSEN
It’s the end of winter here, but summer along the coast of West Antarctica, with ice melting in ominous ways that may reshape coastlines around the world for coming generations.
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