Killing the Man Makes the Idea Stronger

And in 50 years, the idea attacked on a Memphis balcony has rarely had a more worthy champion.

Political Animal:

* The man I would call the “moral compass of this country,” Rev. William Barber, had some words to share recently.

Four diseases, all connected, now threaten the nation’s social and moral health: racism, poverty, environmental devastation, and the war economy—sanctified by the heresy of Christian nationalism. Since the 2016 presidential election, when white rage propelled a candidate endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan into the White House, racism has been more prominent in public life. Nearly every politician in the United States condemned “hate” after the violence by anti-black, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer. Racism and white supremacy, however, are not about hate. They are about power. The question is not whether politicians condemn hate, but whether they promote the policy agenda of white supremacy.

The Resistance: Openly Mocking

Yes, he can do this only because he's safely retired.  But he's speaking for many still on the job.

 

Think Progress: 

Mike Cox retired after three decades at the Environmental Protection Agency on March 31 with a scathing letter for EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.

Team Trump is apparently an open joke to their staff — something even the Reagan and Bush administrations never experienced. Morale has collapsed, Cox notes.

“I have worked under six administrations with political appointees leading EPA from both parties,” Cox wrote on his last day on the job. “This is the first time I remember staff openly dismissing and mocking the environmental policies of an administration and by extension you.”

The 60-year-old Cox, who worked on climate change for EPA’s Region 10, which covers Alaska and the northwest, was especially harsh on Pruitt’s science denial.

Cox called Pruitt’s claim on national TV that CO2 is not a primary contributor to recent global warming “shocking” — and directly compared it to the congressional hearing with the CEOs of the major tobacco companies where “all of the CEOs categorically denied that smoking causes lung cancer.”

What’s the result of this denial? “You will continue to undermine your credibility and integrity with EPA staff, and the majority of the public,” Cox wrote, “if you continue to question this basic science of climate change.”

In the five-page letter, Cox slams the president for the “false and misleading” claim that killing EPA carbon pollution standards will bring back coal jobs.

The Resistance: Step Away From the Recycling Bin and Pick Up Pitchforks

And stop wearing pink on Breast Cancer Awareness Day, brought to you by the very companies whose toxic chemicals actually cause breast cancer.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

When consumer movements stop caring about pesticide exposure once new chemicals are created that don’t persist on the vegetables but hit hard and fast and thus poison farmworkers, which was one of the stories I discussed in Out of Sight, that’s a neoliberal aim. When parents move to the suburbs or put their kids in private school to save their children instead of fighting for better public schools where they live, that’s also a neoliberal aim. All of these things–including the Alar campaign, third party campaigns, pointless boycotts to make yourself feel righteous and good, claiming you are the problem because you take long showers even though 90% of water use is from industry and agriculture–prioritize the individual as hyper consumer with the power to change the world through consumption instead of doing the hard work of organizing for change. At best, these campaigns have the power to make small changes if enough of them care, but none of this actually challenges the power structures of oppression. And thus they all reinforce the power of capitalism to set the agenda in our society, more so ever day as the state is seen as a negative and business glorified.

RFK Shredded Trump's Economic Plan 50 Years Ago

Yeah, the Orange Menace is going to create 25 million jobs (sic) by eliminating the food and work safety regulations that keep us alive and turning the Treasury over to his billionaire friends so we can beat Somalia on the Galtian Paradise scale.

Think Progress:

Donald Trump is running on the erroneous belief that ending regulations, particularly environmental ones, is the key to faster economic growth. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY), who was assassinated June 6, 1968, explained just how misguided that view was just weeks before he was killed.

U.S. economic growth has emerged as a major issue in the presidential campaign. Donald Trump has many untenable ideas, as the Washington Post explained in an April piece headlined, “There is math, there is fantasy math, and then there’s Donald Trump’s economic math.”

That article quoted an economist at the Tax Foundation (who helped model Trump’s tax plan) saying, “It’s not consistent with historical experience. It’s more consistent with a world where we’re hiring butlers for our vacation homes on Ganymede” [Jupiter’s largest moon].”

I wanted to zero in on one of Donald Trump’s fictional strategies for boosting economic growth: As he explained last month to CNBC, “we’re going to be getting rid of a tremendous amount of regulations.”

In particular, when Fox News’ Chris Wallace pressed Trump in March on how he’d cut the federal budget, Trump answered “Department of Environmental Protection [sic]. We are going to get rid of it in almost every form.”

In reality, slashing regulations, particularly regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, would be very counterproductive, as a 2015 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) report to Congress made clear. The OMB found that ten years’ worth of major Federal regulations provided annual benefits to the nation (in 2001 dollars) of between $216 billion and $812 billion, while the estimated annual costs were only between $57 billion and $85 billion.

Of that, EPA regulations delivered the majority of benefits ($132.5 to $652 billion) but only about half the costs ($31 to $37.5 billion).

Of course, lots of those benefits were things like reduced health care costs because the air got cleaner — and those benefits don’t show up in our primary measure of economic growth, GDP. Indeed, reducing sickness and death actually lowers GDP.

Who can doubt that our wildly unsustainable global economic system is now the biggest of Ponzi schemes — where the economy appears to grow faster the more we burn fossil fuels and destroy a livable climate?

Robert F. Kennedy explained why GDP is a useless measure of economic well-being back in the 1960s.

Robert Kennedy was one of the few national politicians ever to challenge our monomaniacal pursuit of GDP to the exclusion of true economic well-being. In Detroit on May 5, 1967 he pointed out: “Let us be clear at the outset that we will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods.”

 

Weeks before he was killed, he spoke on this subject at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968 — in what President Obama called “one of the most beautiful of his speeches.”

Here are the key lines:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product — if we judge the United States of America by that — that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

When you take this view of economic well-being, a President Trump could well bring this country greatest depression we have ever known.

Forget Trade: TPP Gives Corporations Veto Power Over National Laws

That's not hyperbole.  Under the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, corporations can force countries to repeal all laws protecting consumer health and safety, clean water, clean air, safe food - anything that might cost a corporation a single penny in profits.

Ever wonder what it's like to live in a third-world country?   In a Randian paradise where only corporations have rights? Where the Kinder-Morgan can frack the fuck out of your front yard for free?  When Congress approves TPP, we'll find out.

Down with Tyranny:

Congress isn't just not debating it, Members who want to see what's in it must do so alone in a locked room and aren't allowed to bring a record devise-- or even a pen and paper! Those who have done so say only two of the 26 chapters cover traditional trade matters. The bulk of the document, which must be accepted or rejected without any modification, consists of new rights and privileges for multinational corporations (especially international banks and pharmaceutical companies) and irrevocable constraints on government regulation. The document makes it easier for companies to move jobs offshore, take control of natural resources and prevent the regulation of financial services. Kiss the whole concept of "Buy American" or even "buy local" bye-bye-- banned under the agreement.

Conventional courts cannot adjudicate individual trade disputes in the countries where they occur. All disagreements must be decided by “Investor State Dispute Resolution” conducted by TPP Tribunals staffed by lawyers from the private sector who are empowered to force governments to pay unlimited fines to corporations that believe their profits are in jeopardy.

Plotted in secret, the TPP is a corporate coup d’état benefitting the drug, energy, banking and agribusiness industries. It was supposed to take effect this year but the process was delayed when Australia refused to submit to the corporate court system and New Zealand objected to pharmaceutical companies determining the price of drugs sold in New Zealand. All countries denounced America’s demand that regulations on financial speculation be eliminated and drug patent monopolies be extended so that the introduction of generic equivalents could be postponed for years.

Nuclear Power Still the Worst

Nuclear power is one of the few things - along with smallpox and climate change - that really is even worse than its most hysterical opponents claim.

Zandar:

As I mentioned this morning, today is the anniversary of the Fukushima disaster in Japan, which resulted in tens of thousands dead, tens of thousands more displaced, and a nuclear plant meltdown that will continue to cause detrimental environmental effects for generations.

Reactor number one at Fukushima Daiichi is still so hot that five years later, robots still can't enter.

The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site. 

Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history triggered a 10-meter high tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station causing multiple meltdowns. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods in the quake and tsunami. 

Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods, weighing hundreds of tonnes. Five robots sent into the reactors have failed to return. 

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco)  has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed. 

“It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant," Naohiro Masuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning said in an interview. "The biggest obstacle is the radiation.” 

The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods. 

But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said. 

Each robot has to be custom-built for each building.“It takes two years to develop a single-function robot,” Masuda said.

And so the cleanup will continue, probably for the rest of the lives of the people there working to decontaminate the site now.  It's a massive environmental disaster that should have been the end, worldwide, of nuclear power technology.  It's not.  And there are hundreds more potential Fukushima meltdowns waiting to happen.  We do this to ourselves and see the results, and we still do it.

We only get one planet, and we've killed it multiple times over.

But wait!  Nuclear power gets worse.  As has been  true from the birth of nuclear power, nuke plants are never, ever, EVER cost-effective.  They always cost more and charge their customers more than any other kind of electricity generation - even solar and wind in the infancy of those technologies when they cost a mint, but nuclear cost a dozen mints.

But don't be relieved - there's one way to make nuclear energy economical: make the government - that would be you and me as taxpayers, but not the profit-taking nuke industry - subsidize it.

Joe Romm at Think Progress:

In the modern era, nuclear power plants have almost always become more and more expensive over time. They have a “negative learning curve” — along with massive delays and cost overruns in market economies. This is confirmed both by recent studies and by the ongoing cost escalations of nuclear plants around the world, as I’ll detail in this post.

The cost escalation curse of nuclear power

“Ever since the completion of the first wave of nuclear reactors in 1970, and continuing with the ongoing construction of new reactors in Europe, nuclear power seems to be doomed with the curse of cost escalation,” read one 2015 journal article, “Revisiting the Cost Escalation Curse of Nuclear Power.”

In the United States, the cost of Georgia Power’s newest twin Vogtle reactors may top initial estimates of $14 billion and reach $21 billion, according to recent Georgia Public Service Commission testimony. Of course, the first two Vogtle Units begun in 1971 took 18 years to build (a decade over schedule) at a final price of $9 billion — ten times the original price tag. BloombergBusiness wrote last fall, “Even as sympathetic an observer as John Rowe [former chair of the U.S.’s largest nuclear utility] warns that the new units at Vogtle will be uneconomical when — or if — they’re completed.”

 Nuclear power: worse than coal, worse than fracking, worse than Saudi oil, worse than anything.

I Am Too Cynical to Celebrate, But You Should Not Be

I don't know how old D.R.Tucker is, but my guess is at least a generation younger than me.  He hasn't watched the fossil fuel industry win every single battle for the last 40 years.  He doesn't know that all Exxon-Mobil has to do when some little country - and compared to Exxon-Mobil, even the U.S. and China are little countries - demands it stop drilling/fracking/mining is say "Make me."

Because I don't think we can.  But I do sincerely hope D.R. Tucker is right.

The next time somebody tells you change cannot happen, that hope is a hoax, that good men and women cannot win the biggest fights of the day, remind them of December 12, 2015.

Representatives of 195 countries reached a landmark climate accord on Saturday that would, for the first time, commit nearly every country to lowering planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions to help stave off the most drastic effects of climate change.

Delegates who have been negotiating intensely in this Paris suburb for two weeks gathered for the final plenary session where, suddenly, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France asked for opposition to the deal and, hearing none, gaveled the session closed.

With that the delegates achieved what had been unreachable for two decades: a consensus on the need to move away from carbon-based fuels and a plan for the 195 nations to do so.

Thought the final deal did not achieve all that environmentalists, scientists and some countries had hoped for, it set the table for further efforts to slow down the slide toward an unlivable planet.

In the end, it was an extraordinary effort at international diplomacy. Supporters of a deal have argued that no less than the future of the planet was at stake, and in the days leading up to the final session worked relentlessly to push skeptical nations to join their ranks.

I am fighting back tears as I write this. Do you know what this moment means? It means the most rapacious and destructive industry on the face of this warming Earth is on the downfall. It means that we will finally race towards the day where fossil fuels are kept in the ground where they belong, and children born today can have clean air, clean water and a stable future.

Do you know what this moment means? It means men and women of goodwill can succeed in the face of impossible odds.

Do you know what this moment means? It means that the deniers, the disinformers and the demagogues have been humiliated and humbled once and for all.

This is history’s golden moment. This is a moment where hope won in a blowout against cynicism. This is a day to be proud, damn proud, of being alive, of being compassionate, of being human.

Caring won. Hope won. Science won. The better angels of our nature won.

Will Matt Bevin Let Fracking Poison Mammoth Cave?

He's a repug bidness man full of anti-gubmint FREEDUMB.  Of course he will.

James Bruggers at the Courier:

Pushing a toxic mixture of natural gas liquids through an aging pipeline near Mammoth Cave National Park threatens the world-famous cave’s unique and fragile ecological systems, the National Park Service is warning.

“The National Park Service is concerned about the potential for a catastrophic failure of the ... pipeline” within areas designed to protect endangered cave shrimp and other rare park resources, park superintendent Sarah Craighead wrote recently in a letter to federal energy regulators.

The pipeline is 70 years old and was designed to carry a different product, natural gas, said Bobby Carson, chief of science and resource management for the park. “It’s been underground for a while” and may not be safe for carrying the liquids, which if spilled could damage the park’s rare natural resources, including a variety of endangered species, he said in an interview this week.

The proposal by Kinder Morgan to convert part of its subsidiary Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. operations from carrying natural gas to moving natural gas liquids has stirred controversy all year along a 256-mile path through Kentucky, with citizen groups, environmental organizations and some local officials objecting. Many have asked for a full environmental study rather than the less extensive review now underway.

Yeah, it's a federal agency decision, but Bevin vows to defy the EPA on coal rules; why would he obey the feds on fracking?

True Story of the Bluegrass Pipeline Premiering at the Kentucky This Thursday

I saw the preview and it is wonderful. If you are not moved after watching it to take action for justice yourself, at the very least you will learn why it is a bad idea to get on the wrong side of nuns.

​

Please spread the word!

You can invite your friends on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events/1640998036148861/

DVDs will be available at the screening, and can be ordered online at www.selluswilder.com/dvd.

KY Already Meeting Coal Rules McConnell Claims Will Kills Us All

Both Bevin and Conway are also whiny-ass titty baby liars about this, by the way.  And the fact that Big Coal apologist Len Peters is actually admitting it tells you the new EPA rules are really far weaker than they could have been.

Kevin Drum:

Whenever a new environmental regulation gets proposed, there's one thing you can count on: the affected industry will start cranking out research showing that the cost of compliance is so astronomical that it will put them out of business. It happens every time. Then, when the new regs take effect anyway, guess what? It turns out they aren't really all that expensive after all. The country gets cleaner and the economy keeps humming along normally. Hard to believe, no?

Apologies for the spoiler, but can you guess what's happening now that President Obama's new carbon rules for power plants are about to take effect? Mitch "War on Coal" McConnell has been issuing hysterical warnings about these regulations for years, but the Washington Post reports that—sorry, did you say something? You've already guessed, have you?

More striking is what has happened since: Kentucky’s government and electric utilities have quietly positioned themselves to comply with the rule — something state officials expect to do with relatively little effort....“We can meet it,” Kentucky Energy and Environment Secretary Leonard Peters, speaking at a climate conference, said of the EPA’s mandate.

Seriously, what was the last thing repugs sounded the alarm about that actually happened, or even posed a genuine threat in reality?

KY Wants Your Opinion on Fracking

The comments at this meeting will influence future legislation on fracking in Kentucky.  You can be sure that the motherfrackers will be there in force; don't let them get away unchallenged.

Please appear at the public hearings if you can, testify if you feel so moved, and if you can't be there, send a message to them.

FRANKFORT, Ky. (June 22, 2015) – The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet (EEC) and its agencies have set the dates and locations for three public meetings to allow interested parties to submit comments concerning oil and gas development in the Commonwealth. The locations will be in Madisonville, Somerset and Hazard.

“It is important that the public, including environmental groups, the oil and gas industry and landowners be given the chance to express their opinions on how Kentucky moves forward with the regulation of this industry,” said EEC Secretary Len Peters. “We understand this is a very high-profile issue and hearing all sides presented will be beneficial to everyone involved.”

The listening sessions will be held on the following dates and times. All times are local:

·         July 7:  Madisonville Community College’s North Campus, 2000 College Drive, Madisonville. The meeting will be held in the Quad Room in the Brown Badgett Sr. Energy and Advanced Technology Center.  Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. and the meeting will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. local time.

·         July 23: The Center for Rural Development, 2292 South Highway 27, Somerset. The meeting will be held in the auditorium. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. and the meeting will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. local time.

·         July 30: Hazard Community & Technical College, One Community College Drive, Hazard.  The meeting will be held in Room 208 of the Jolly Center, located in the JCC Building. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. and the meeting will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. local time.

“These are not designed as debates, but rather as listening sessions that will allow for brief spoken comments, as well as the submittal of written comments,” said Secretary Peters. 

The remarks made at the meetings will be captured on video and used in a report to be given to the oil and gas workgroup, made up of environmental interests, industry representatives and regulators. The workgroup began meeting in 2014 to update and modernize Kentucky’s statutes and regulations regarding all areas of oil and gas exploration, including fracking. The report will also be made available to members of the Kentucky General Assembly and the Governor’s Office for possible further action.

The report will help further the work of the oil and gas workgroup, according to Department for Natural Resources Commissioner Steve Hohmann, who chairs the workgroup. “The input from the general public is extremely valuable as this group moves forward. We want to be certain future legislation addressing oil and gas development, especially fracking, takes into account all points of view,” Hohmann said.

Anyone who cannot attend the meetings in person, but wishes to submit written comments may do so by July 31. Those written comments can be emailed to OilandGasComments@ky.gov between July 7 and July 31.

Kentucky Landowners Deal MotherFrackers a Setback

Do you like your backyard?  Do you prefer it not have a giant, ready-to-explode high-pressure pipeline full of toxic waste running through it? Then thank Kentuckians United to Restrain Eminent Domain (KURED), who just won a victory over the Bluegrass Pipeline terrorists.

Today, the Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld the Franklin Circuit Court ruling from last year that purveyors of fracking waste, oil, gas or anything else that is not a public utility cannot use eminent domain to force their way onto your land.

Renowned environmental attorney Tom Fitzgerald, representing KURED and Franklin County landowner Penny Greathouse, sued to stop the Bluegrass Pipeline from using the threat of eminent domain to terrify landowners from Pendleton County to Marion County into signing over their land for a toxic-waste pipeline.

Although the initial ruling by Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd applied only to Franklin County, today's Court of Appeals decision applies throughout the Commonwealth.

That means that Kinder Morgan, which is trying to get federal approval to re-purpose a pipeline through east-central Kentucky to carry fracking waste, also cannot use eminent domain powers to force easements from landowners.

Bluegrass Partners, whose Bluegrass Pipeline project has been suspended for the last year, may still appeal to the state Supreme Court.

But meanwhile, this is a victory for genuine grassroots organizing and determination.  KURED members are not out-of-state groups or politicians or celebrities; they are the people whose land Bluegrass Partners threaten: retired people, farmers, women religious, young couples who started asking their neighbors about these strangers with the lying faces and the papers to sign.  They got together, educated themselves, found landowners threatened in other counties, stood together and shouted NO!

And won.

Motherfrackers Get Permit to Start Destroying Kentucky's Drinking Water

Nice to know that Kentucky's fossil fuel "regulators" are not biased in favor of coal.

They'll let anybody come in and kill us.

Brad Bowman at the State-Journal:

The Kentucky Oil and Gas Conservation Commission gave the green light for Kentucky’s first horizontal deep-well fracturing operation in a special meeting Thursday. 

 

The commission granted a drilling permit to Horizontal Technology Energy Company of Pennsylvania that will set up an oil and natural gas drilling operation in Johnson County. 

Based on a recommendation by hearing officer Gordon Slone, the company will drill at a target depth of 11,200 feet and has been approved for a vertical depth of 15,000 feet. 

 

The well will tap into the Rogersville Shale that is a part of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia.  

Kentucky residents will have a chance to voice their concerns on oil and gas development in the state at three public meetings hosted by the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. Meeting locations have been set for Hazard, Somerset and Madisonville, but dates and times for the meetings are undetermined. 

 

According to EEC Secretary Len Peters, the meeting format will include time for brief public comments and the cabinet will also accept written submissions. 

 

In a press release from Dick Brown, spokesperson for the cabinet, Peters said at the meetings there will, “be no debate between those on each side of the issue. These will be ‘listening sessions’ for the cabinet to receive comments on a wide array of issues surrounding the Kentucky oil and gas industry,” and comments will be recorded on video and submitted into a report to the oil and gas workgroup. 

 

According to the release, the report will be available to lawmakers and the Governor’s Office for possible action and the “…input from the general public is extremely valuable as this group moves forward,” Peters said. “We want to be certain future legislation addressing oil and gas exploration, especially fracking, takes into account all points of view.”

 

Despite legislation passed during the recent short session updating oil and gas regulations with environmental impact safeguards, it won’t affect this operation.

 

Senate Bill 186, sponsored by Frankfort Sen. Julian Carroll (D-Frankfort) won’t effectively become law until June. It requires high-volume horizontal fracturing operations to conduct baseline water testing before and after drilling operations begin and disclose the type of chemical used in the fracking process for example. 

 

Given the company could receive its permit as early as today, the new regulations won’t affect it.

Johnson County is high in the Eastern Kentucky mountains.  Right above the Kentucky River watershed, which supplies drinking water to more than a million Kentuckians in Central Kentucky before it dumps its load of deadly fracking chemicals into the Ohio River, from which millions more people drink.

The Pipeline MotherFrackers Are Back. Help Stop Them Again.

You know why you haven't heard anything about the Bluegrass Pipeline toxic chemical death funnel through the heart of Central Kentucky's bourbon and horse industries?

First, because local resident stood against the mother frackers and got a court to make the companies stop terrorizing elderly landowners with illegal threats to take their land by eminent domain.

It was the most effective purely grassroots effort seen in the Commonwealth since Daniel Boone led a bunch of crazy people over the mountains to the clean water and fertile soil of the Bluegrass.

But the Stop the Pipeline folks aren't done yet.  Because the motherfrackers are at it again.  Help us stop them. Again.

From Kentuckians for the Commonwealth: 

Take Action
to protect Kentucky communities
from hazardous liquids pipeline

Kinder Morgan wants to transport highly dangerous hazardous liquids through Kentucky. The company plans to re-purpose the decades-old existing Tennessee Gas Pipeline to carry massive volumes of natural gas liquids from the fracking fields of Ohio and Pennsylvania to processing and export facilities along the Gulf Coast.

The pipeline runs through 18 Kentucky counties, near many homes, through popular business districts, across busy roadways, across waters that supply public drinking water systems, and even within view of schools. A study by the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration concluded that the “blast zone” for a pipeline of the size and volume proposed by Kinder Morgan is nearly one mile.

Kentuckians have a better view of our commonwealth and don’t want a pipeline that puts our water, land and safety needlessly at risk.

Kinder Morgan has applied to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to abandon natural gas service, the current use for the pipeline, in order to re-purpose it for hazardous natural gas liquids. Would you take action with KFTC and residents all along the route of the pipeline by co-signing our letter to FERC asking that it protect the safety of communities along the pipeline’s path?

A year ago, Kentuckians stopped the proposed Bluegrass Hazardous Liquids Pipeline. Let's do the same for this proposal.

Thanks for your support!

Accident, My Ass. Throw This Motherfucker in Prison

If you don't, every endangered animal in the country is going to get shot by "accident."

Ari Phillips at Think Progress:

Officials have confirmed that the first gray wolf seen around the Grand Canyon in 70 years was killed in December by a hunter in southern Utah after he mistook it for coyote. The three-year-old female, named “Echo” through a contest held with hundreds of schoolchildren, was the first gray wolf to be spotted in the region since the 1940s. After being collared in Wyoming in early January 2014, the wolf had ventured at least 750 miles into the new territory — further evidence that gray wolf populations are coming back from the brink of extinction after decades of reckless killings.

Move Over, Robert Penn Warren and Harry Caudill: Wendell Berry Is Here

You can't be a liberal in Kentucky unless you read poet/author/philosopher/activist/farmer Wendell Berry. Because there is little in your bag of issues that Wendell Berry has not already subjected to his populist wisdom.

He's a lodestone but also a challenger. His speeches on how to wrest Kentucky's land away from the Big Coal, Big Gas and other corporate forces stealing and destroying it are radical enough to take your breath away.

He shouldn't be as unique as he is.

Tom Eblen at the Herald:

As the first living author inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, Wendell Berry lamented that many fine books the state’s authors have written about Kentucky issues have had little impact on public discussion or policy.

In most ways, Kentucky is too fragmented a state, Berry said in remarks at a ceremony (last week) at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, where he and five writers from the past were inducted into the Hall of Fame.

“This fragmentation is made possible, and continually made worse, by a cloud of silence that hovers over us,” Berry said. “We have in this state no instituted public dialogue, no form in which a public dialogue can take place.

“This public silence ought to be a worry, especially to writers,” he said. “What is the effect or fate, Kentucky writers may ask, of Kentucky books devoted to urgent public issues — Night Comes to the Cumberlands or Lost Mountain or Missing Mountains or The Embattled Wilderness?”

Lt. Gov. Crit Luallen, who spoke earlier at the ceremony, said afterward that Berry underestimates the impact of those books and others like them. They may not have led to solutions for Kentucky’s many problems, she said, but things would be worse without them.

Wannabe Security Goons Slapped Down in Louisville

People work private security because they couldn't pass even the pathetic excuse for psych tests given by police departments.

And why the fuck are private minimum-wage goons there instead of good federal employees? Austerity strikes again. 

James Bruggers at the Courier:

I guess you might call them the Keystone Kops, those private security officers responsible for breaking up and moving an environmental protest outside Louisville's federal courthouse on Tuesday.

The security guard who told about 75 participants to move along did not have the authority to do so, said Brian Parrish, chief deputy of the U.S. Marshal's office in Louisville.

"I was frustrated by that situation yesterday," Parrish said, adding that he has taken steps to make sure the private security firm, Paragon Systems, doesn't do that again.

The rally had to do with the Keystone XL pipeline, which was being debated yesterday in the U.S. Senate. Environmental advocates oppose the pipeline because they say it will encourage the development of Canadian oil sands, hastening the climate chaos of global warming.

RELATED | Pipeline foes booted from courthouse sidewalk

The security guard worked for a contractor with the Federal Protective Service, part of the Department of Homeland Security. He declined to tell me his name, when I asked yesterday, and he said he was just doing what his boss told him to do. A spokeswoman for the Federal Protective Service said she was looking into the situation.

Shame on You, EPA

People have already died from coal ash in Kentucky and Tennessee, you chicken-shit, scare-of-Mitch-McConnell motherfuckers.

And no, he's not going to leave you alone because of this; he's recognized your cowardice and he's going to triple down on destroying your agency.

And you deserve it.

Emily Atkin at Think Progress:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday issued its first-ever regulations on coal ash, a toxic byproduct of burning coal for power. But to environmentalists’ chagrin, the agency declined to designate the substance as a hazardous waste.

Instead, coal ash will be regulated similarly to household garbage. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy assured reporters on Friday that designating coal ash as solid waste, rather than hazardous waste, would be sufficient to prevent catastrophic spills of coal ash from the ponds the substance is often stored in, and to prevent it from leaching into groundwater, as it has in the past.

“I’m very proud that the EPA is moving this over the finish line,” McCarthy said. “[The rule] is a common sense path forward that protects public health and the environment.”

Coal ash — which often contains chemicals like arsenic, chromium, mercury, and lead — is the second-largest form of waste generated in the United States. After producing it, coal companies sometimes dispose of it by dumping it into ditches, and filling those ditches with water. Those ditches, called coal ash ponds or lagoons, are often unlined, meaning the coal ash comes in direct contact with the environment. It has, until now, never been federally regulated.

Environmentalists have long been pushing for a strong rule, but they were less than enthused about the direction EPA decided to take with it on Friday. “There is simply no excuse for EPA’s dangerously weak coal ash rule, which treats toxic waste loaded with carcinogens like household garbage,” Josh Nelson, campaign manager at CREDO Action, said in a statement.

 James Bruggers at the Courier has a good piece on this.

New York Bans Fracking; Why Hasn't Kentuckyt?

Because while New York's governor may be wholly owned and operated by Wall Street, Kentucky's is wholly owned and operated by the granddaddy of fossil fuels: Big Coal.

From the New York Times:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration announced on Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State because of concerns over health risks, ending years of uncertainty over the controversial method of natural gas extraction.

State officials concluded that fracking, as the method is known, could contaminate the air and water and pose inestimable dangers to public health.

That conclusion was delivered during a year-end cabinet meeting convened by Mr. Cuomo in Albany. It came amid increased calls by environmentalists to ban fracking, which uses water and chemicals to release natural gas trapped in deeply buried shale deposits.

The question of whether to allow fracking has been one of the most divisive public policy debates in New York in years, pitting environmentalists against others who saw it as a critical way to bring jobs to economically stagnant portions of upstate.

Needs

ummagumma.co:


(Source: 365q)