Artificial intelligence and environmentalism, apps and detaching

I love me some Lyle Lewis and have for what, a decade or so?

That said, this comment of his, in reply to a comment on a piece of his about bats acting strangely, made me think more about the issue in the header, specifically because it's from Lewis. 

First, the heart of Davy Kydd:

i have another kind of observation about the landscape of your words. more and more in the wildlife of writing, readers are noticing an eerie sameness, as if the habitat of possible sentence structures is shrinking. the robotic repetitiveness, the lifeless pose of predictable syntax . . . pretending to be alive. 

like the world's beleaguered teachers inundated by ai essays, the substack habitat too is being infiltrated. we feel a bit cheated. 

even though the planet’s hyper-populated human landscapes are creating pressures on artists to use ai to trick their audiences and generate $$$, i wonder if we might help substack to maintain its integrity by requiring authors to inform their audience each and every time ai is used in their writing or photography.

That's it. (He later removed the note. And, his take on environmentalism is basically kind of antropomorphic mushy, which is not my take or Lyle's. That said?)

Here's the nutgrafs of Lyle's response:

For my own work, I care much less about preserving some imagined purity of literary production than I do about understanding what is happening to the living world. 

I am not particularly worried about whether the ecosystem of sentence structures on the Internet is sufficiently diverse. 

I am worried about the actual ecosystems. 

I am worried about bats and insects, forests and grasslands, rivers and oceans, predators and prey, ecological relationships disappearing before we understand them, and a human civilization transforming the planet faster than either science or society can comprehend the consequences. 

If new tools allow me to examine those questions more deeply, connect information more rapidly, challenge my own assumptions more effectively, and communicate what I find to more people, I am going to use them. 

And I am going to remain responsible for the result. 

That seems to me the standard that matters. 

Don’t ask whether a machine touched the prose.

I don't know how much extra electricity his AI use generates. It does of course generate some. I don't know if he's even tried to calculate that. I don't even know how easy it would be to guess, or to go meta and use AI to try to get an answer.

But I am going to guess he's not thought of that. 

For me, it's a bridge too far.

Not primarily on AI words, where I am not at Lyle's level of environmental knowledge sets, but mainly on AI photos. I played around with one or two sites once the technology started taking off a couple of years ago, and used it once on one Substack piece with a bit of regret.

No more. 

Beyond the truth-value reasons for its use, beyond worries about it being another addiction, I think this has to be asked all the time. 

And, in pieces like this? He uses what certainly looks like an AI photo. I mean, it's a nice illustration for a great story, but I couldn't do that. I'd either find a way to Photoshop different stuff together, or not have an illustration. I would also have it labeled as being a Photoshop illustration, not an actual photo, and definitely labeled as AI-generated if I did.

Massimo Pigliucci is not an environmentalist or climate scientist, but he is a scientist as well as philosopher, and, as in this piece, regularly uses AI photos. 

Besides, per physicist Angela Collier (long YouTube but the first 5 minutes or so will give you the basics) AI doesn't exist anyway. She goes into machine learning in her field, pivots from that to alleged AI, and then goes philosophy with black box references. In the sense that she's rejecting the "I" half of the shorthand, she's correct. 

Five-minute mark: "These programs are great, they're interesting, they're useful, but they're not AI."

That then said, old Davy has himself "liked" and even restacked more than one post from other accounts that use AI images. 

==

That said, both to not look like I'm just picking on Lyle, or a lesser degree, Massimo as well, and because another pet peeve came up the same day, last Sunday? 

It's time to call out Bird Item News for once again pushing the Merlin smartphone app.

From least to greatest, there's several problems.

First, the folks there don't tell you what I told them in a comment. That's that Merlin just ain't that accurate. Folks at the r/birding subreddit field semi-regular bitches about it. 

Second, if you, like me, bird by sight first, sounds second, Merlin ain't that helpful. I doubt it has a draw and drag ID feature like Google Images and besides, I have a real camera; I don't shoot birds with a smartphone.

Third and the biggie, and roughly related to my plaint about Lyle, since that piece I link is about something like an Optimus Prime level of "wilderness"?

Don't know about Hap Ellis and Lisa Noschese of Bird News Items, but whether on a vacation, or a weekend hike at the nearby national wildlife refuge or a closer one at a city park or lake? I'm out there to detach from technology.

On local weekends, my smartphone is generally off.

On vacations, after Monday evening or Tuesday morning to check in with my pinch-hitting owner boss, it's off.

Ellis, per his "clean tech" (is there such a thing?) background, strikes me as a more modern, Shrub Bush rather than Poppy Bush backing, version of bird-watcher Dick Davenport from Doonesbury. 

THIS, presumably from his half of the weekly contribution:

The world can be divided into two types of people — those who have already downloaded the free Merlin Bird ID app, and those whose lives have yet to be enriched by doing so. Dubbed “Shazam for birds”, being able to hold your phone up and within seconds see names and photographs identifying all the birds singing around you has unlocked the secrets of the natural world for millions, revolutionizing birdwatching (or should I say bird listening?) as a hobby.

Not only ignores all of the above, but is an insult to people like me. 

Texas Progressives talk environmentalism, Big Bend, and national parks

For the third or fourth week in a row, the annual Texas Progressives roundup got too big and too diffuse in focus to run in one piece. So, here's the second half.

SocraticGadfly, from his summer vacation, snarked on Yellowstone concessionaire food.

A group affiliated with the Lipan Apache and a Terlingua-based river rafting company are suing the feds to block a border wall in Big Bend. That said, the rafting company's real problem is lack of water on the river; it should be suing BOTH duopoly parties over the climate crisis. The Observer has more

The Monthly reports in detail about bulldozers on the ground and other things at Big Bend. It's right in noting the noise pollution this involves, as well as other things. Much of the story is pull quotes, like this:

When I saw the photos of the bulldozers in front of Santa Elena Canyon, I thought of another sickening image: the two colossal, 1,500-year-old Buddha statues in central Afghanistan being blown up by the Taliban in 2001. What is happening in Big Bend is an act of mindless zealotry being sold as border security. And it forces us to realize that the things of this earth that are beautiful and sacred and mysterious to most of us will always be regarded by a cynical, powerful few as just being in the way. 

—Stephen Harrigan, longtime Texas Monthly contributor and former staff writer

Give it a read. Then click on the Monthly's construction photo album.

Olivia Julianna has a lot of questions about the Big Bend border wall.

Supposedly, work on the wall has now been paused, whether what was being installed was a physical wall or not. 

Related: A federal judge has extended a pause on border wall work in the Valley along the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. (It's still on my bucket list to get down there to that and the National Butterfly Center.)

Meet the guy running the Thornscrub Sanctuary. 

Would-be lithium mining from the Salton Sea hit a roadblock. 

Per new STAAR results, Austin ISD is closer to falling in the hands of slimy evangelical TEA commish Mike Morath. The Observer talks about how much these takeovers cost local districts.

 

Earth Day 55 — we're not making progress

Climate change remains as real as it was five years ago, at the last milestone anniversary.

What also remains as real as then, besides the same guy being in the White House, is Republicans not giving a damn, and Democrats, for the most part, giving just a minor damn while pretending to give a real damn.

In other words, one party continues to cater to hypercapitalist destruction of the earth; the other caters a bit more fretfully, with pinky detached from teacups.

On the right hand of the duopoly's capitalist masters, who are also masters of much of the left hand of the duopoly, I noted a week ago, per a New Republic piece, that banksters and think tanks were just surrendering — or even talking about new money to be made if when we hit 3C. Per that piece, you'd think someone at the Council on Foreign Relations would recognize that climate and climate change doesn't stop at coastlines, and so, "economic nationalism" on climate is impossible, at least in ways they envision.

And, it's all about oil.

In the first of my pieces from 50 years ago, I noted the federal government, when under the left hand of the duopoly, remains complicated at best in restraining oil drilling on federal lands. Under the right hand of the duopoly, it remains unconstrained and unworried. 

In the third, I said that there will still be blood for oil. That's part of Canada's turf wars over coastlines in the Canadian Arctic. It's why both Trump and Biden bombed the Houthis. It's why the Gulf Arab states pretend to care about Palestine, but really, not so much.

This too, beyond the bombing above, is "bipartisan." Remember that the Carter Doctrine is named for someone from the left hand of the duopoly. 

But, the left hand of the duopoly, which stole the Green New Deal from the Green Party, then watered it down, and then didn't pass the watered-down version, doesn't care.

And, speaking of Canada, the "we" not making progress is not just Merikkka. Justin Trudeau and his Liberals are about as wedded to tar sands oil as are the Conservatives. I'm not sure where the NDP stands on climate issues. I know Canadian Greens are as good as U.S. Greens.

 And, the "we" is not just the U.S. and Canada. Remember post-Fukushima, when Chancellor Angela Merkel replaced Germany's nuclear plants with more coal? And today, German carmakers are way behind the curve on both hybrids and EVs.

Earth Overshoot Day — the issue and various partial answers

Many capitalist Americans have heard of "tax-free day," the date in which the average American (these things are always done by the mean, not the median, so of limited insight) has earned enough to be free and clear of government obligations.

Far fewer have heard of Earth Overshoot Day, the day in which the planet "goes into debt" for the rest of the year of capitalist Americans and other world island citizens raping it, not just raping it "at par," but beyond what is sustainable. We hit that last month.

As the link notes, climate change is but one symptom of broader Earth Overshoot. But, it gets even less attention. Usually, far less.

Per that chart, we've been in overshoot for more than 50 years, and it has generally continued to worsen until about the time of the Great Recession.

Many organizations pushing more activism on the issue have focused on population growth. Regardless of any ethical issues on forced limits on population growth (you, China) and how that affects longer-term society to boot, such activists are all wet.

Yes, we're a bit over 8 billion, but the UN has indicated we'll probably peak somewhere between 9 and 10 billion, and won't get close to 11 billion. That means limiting population growth is not really a part of the solution, with the exception of one country, possibly two. More below. Consumption is. If you won't be honest about that as the bottom line, you're not being honest.

It should also be noted that, while things haven't gotten better, contra the natalists, they haven't gotten worse since the Western world's Great Recession, even as population has continued to rise, even soar, in places like India and sub-Saharan Africa.

The one country? India, especially as long as its Hindutva-fascist leadership sees "more people" as a key part of policy. The possible second country? Pakistan, if triggered by Indian birtherism.

On consumption and the developing world? It is the developed world's responsibility, just as it is with the Earth Overshoot subset of climate change, to help the developing world avoid our mistakes and past history — help that must be financial as well as technological, and "open" — untariffed, unburdened by intellectual property restrictions or pseudo-restrictions, etc.

Beyond that, touting antinatalism as "the" answer looks racist, even if not meant that way. And, there's a history of White environmentalism that's racist that's not just "history." It's still out there today.

National Public Lands Day, High Country News woke version

National Public Lands Day is a good day for celebrating our public lands, even though Ken Burns was wrong and they're NOT "America's greatest idea" or that close, and even though, as Olympic National Park shows, as I blogged earlier today, the Park Service looks good only when compared with the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service. I forgot that six years, ago, in the run-up to the NPS centennial, I had tackled various other shortcomings of the Park Service.

So, it's nice of High Country News to have staffers reminisce about access to public lands.

Or, when I clicked the link, I found out it was "nice."

Two problems with noting the American Indians who once had possession of the land.

First, as Al Runte noted years ago, and I blogged about, being American Indian is no guarantor of being a good environmentalist.

Second, the American Indians in possessions of the land at the time the U.S. government made treaties with them, then broke them, weren't always the possessors. In fact, in the case of Comb Ridge, it was NEVER part of any Navajo Reservation, not the main part and best known part in Utah, vs the southern tip in Aridzona. It's arguably got a better claim from Utes. And Sarah Tory should know that, and she specifically mentions the Utah portion.

Runte also tackled that, quoting T.H. Watkins:

In short, if compensation in 1974 was the proper policy, why limit it to people of European descent? For example, Watkins asked: “If the descendants of nineteenth-century white Americans have a moral obligation to the descendants of nineteenth-century Navajos, do not the Navajos have a similar obligation to the descendents of the Pueblo Indians, whom they forced from their lands in the thirteenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Chippewas (or Ojibways), do not the Chippewas have a moral obligation to the Lakota Sioux, whose lands they appropriated by warfare in the seventeenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Blackfeet, do not the Blackfeet have a moral obligation to the Shoshoni, who were driven out of their hunting territory by the Blackfeet in the seventeenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Cherokees, do not the Cherokees have a moral obligation to the Shawnees, whom they vanquished in the early nineteenth century in a war over which tribe would have a monopoly selling Indian slaves to the South?”

There you go.

I think this is about Reason No. 116 why I haven't, and won't, renew an HCN subscription that's been lapsed for years. (This also is not the first time it's gotten American Indian land issues wrong.)

Sidebar: I do NOT agree with everything Runte writes at National Parks Traveler and elsewhere about preservation in the modern U.S. in general and the modern NPS in particular. I do NOT want light rail, let alone light rail run by traditional rail companies, in the parks, contra his plea. Instead, I want more buses at sites that already have them, with smaller buses running more frequent routes, and buses at places that don't already have them, and I want these buses to be all-electric. No more propane buses. His critics are right that his idea almost certainly means "more development." They're also right about the worrisomeness of him first writing that piece for a "more development in the parks" site. Things like that undercut some of his other insights and make them look politically motivated.

Earth Day 2021: Earth Day to May Day

As yours truly blogged at Independent Political Report, ecosocialists within the Green Party have it exactly correct: Earth Day to May Day is the only way to look at April 20. Per Albert Einstein's famous comment about insanity, we cannot truly and fully address climate change within the same capitalist system that has foisted climate change on our planet in the first place.

At the same time, many libertarians in Green clothing, like nutter William Pounds and his ilk, hate this. They hate anything with a whiff of socialism. And, as libertarians, they hate anything with a whiff of the regulatory state, which is also needed. Voluntary collectives, especially when the European idea of "libertarian" that's behind "libertarian socialism" is twisted into the American idea of libertarianism, can't do it. And, many of them, like Chad Wilson, have other problems.

The Green Party is going to crack up anyway, between the Howie-haters / Jesse Ventura cultists (and Dario Hunter fellow travelers), on one hand, and so-called "trans activists" ("trans" by itself is not a word except as the first word in the name of an old GM car or an old airline, and "transgender" is not "transsexual") demanding everybody run them up the flagpole and salute them while booting the Georgia Green Party on the other. (None of this should be taken as implying that I agree with everything some Georgia GP representatives have stated, either on this issue or other issues.)

But, with or without party alignment, I can still fight for ecosocialism on Earth Day. (The SPUSA has its own bits of "trans activism" problems from what I've heard.)

Earth Day 50: some sobering thoughts

50 years ago, the nation's national symbol (contra Ben Franklin plumping for the wild turkey) was facing extinction due to DDT and hunting, among other things.

115 years ago, this beauty, a snowy egret, was facing extinction due to the whims of capitalist fashion.

Both photos are from Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge, which both illustrates how far American environmentalism has come and how far it has to go.

The first NWR was created 115 years ago to protect those egrets and other birds whose feathers were being used in then-popular hats. The first ranger at one refuge in south Florida was killed within a year. Another was killed a couple of years later. And it still happens.

More "bird refuges" were created by Theodore Roosevelt and other presidents. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was created to protect wildlife and run other wildlife services in 1940, out of the previous Fisheries Commission and other agencies.

Unfortunately, Hagerman NWR exemplies problems with American environmental protection. It was created after Denison Dam backed up Lake Texoma, out of government-purchased land that wasn't flooded. And, as with many refuges, the feds only bought the surface estate.

The Texoma area, especially in the 1940s, was a fairly productive oil area. One Texas tributary of the Lake is Big Mineral Creek. The wildlife refuge is dotted with dozens of pumpjacks. And, as climate change is expected to increase average rainfall in this area, that means more flooding, which means more oil at the bases of those pumpjacks gets washed into the lake, and that other areas get flooded more.

And, that's the least of recent problems of the FWS. It was a willing collaborator with former Texas Comptroller Susan Combs' fake protection of the dunes sagebrush lizard, stinking to high heaven with various types of actual corruption, and collaborating with a person who likened Endangered Species Act listings to Scud missiles. It sold out protection of Rockies wolves. It has been reluctant to do anything about Southwestern jaguars.

And, there's other problems yet. The folks who actually administer the drilling permits? The same Army Corps of Engineers that built the damned dams in the first place. Not the "greenest" of folks by any means. (Many of the national wildlife refuges these dams created were first made part of the Park Service. It eventually backed out of them. But, give the NPS something like Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, even though its act of creation clearly violates the NPS' Organic Act, and it won't say boo because of bucks. As in Glen Canyon makes a lot of them, but a no-fee NWS doesn't.) That said, this is the same NPS adding cellphone towers to parks — a process accelerating under Trump, but started under Obama.

But, this post goes beyond FWS. Or NPS.

The ultimate threat to our planet is climate change.

And, despite many Democrats, and some Greens who should definitely know better like Jill Stein, while Trump pulling out of the Paris Accords was not good, the accords themselves were and are nothing more than toothless Jell-O.

Two people made sure of that: Xi Jinping and Barack Obama.

So, if you really want to celebrate Earth Day, stop voting Democrat.

The downsides of Wrong Kind of Green

Recently, I wrote a blog post about Wrong Kind of Green, and frequent and prolific writer Corey Morningstar's in-depth series about how neoliberal environmentalist NGOs have, a la Noam Chomsky, "manufactured consent" around Greta Thunberg.

The ultimate goal seems to be a "capitalism as usual" battle against climate change.

This I reject.

But, I also reject a lot of the background mindset of Wrong Kind of Green.

First, in his newest update, Morningstar seems to be falling into the fallacious belief that native peoples are Roussellian noble savages on the environment. Tain't so. Not so at all. Pre-Columbian Contact, American Indians had slavery, the bestiality of Aztec human sacrifices and other things. Today, American Indians have Utes drilling for oil and gas, others tribes operating casinos, etc. etc. And, please don't try to blame all of that on American Indians being co-opted and brainwashed. The potlatch culture of the Pacific Northwest, which also existed pre-Contact, shows that something along the lines of western capitalism was here before Columbus was. (In the most extreme potlatch events, slaves were killed on the same bonfires used to destroy material goods.)

That's far from the only problem with WKOG, too.

One is either a moral self-blindness or something similar. Calling wind farms "Fossil Fuel+" because they expropriate indigenous people is true to the degree that's true. That said, it's no more true than it is with fossil fuels themselves. If they use this to mean we not only need to de-carbonize but de-electricize? No, you first. Shut down your website. It's just like with people pushing population reduction around the world. No, you first.

The biggest problem of WKOG is that most writers there are Marxist. Marxism, whether in its traditional form or modern spinoff, is pseudoscience within what's already the scientifically weakest of the social sciences. No, really. Hegelian dialectic is crappy philosophy and pseudoscience when used as the basis for a theory of economics. Period and end of story. And Marx himself was as dogmatic as Herr Hitler.

Beyond that, I wouldn't call myself an anti-capitalist. With WKOG, I see enough problems with capitalism of today to call myself a post-capitalist, at least in my yearnings, but not an anti-capitalist.

Beyond that, what IS capitalism and when did it start? I certainly see capitalism as being centuries older than when Adam Smith wrote "The Wealth of Nations." Does it go back to when Croesus allegedly issued the first coinage? Tang China's first paper money? Medieval Italians' double-entry bookkeeping?

Or maybe, to riff on "The Gods Must Be Crazy" and some anthropologists, the invention of the triad, basically, of cultivated agriculture, settled civilization and private property.

For me, this plays out in my voting. I'm currently a Green at the presidential level and in most other cases where available. If the GP screws the pooch enough, my next destination would be SPUSA. But, I could never go further "left" than that.

Top blogging for September

Calling out the Dallas Observer for running a hit job piece about a wind farm was No. 1.

Decrying John Brockman's work in promoting the science connected "influencer" work of Jeffrey Epstein was No. 2.

Both those led well ahead of others.

Noting that former San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick was NOT going to the Pittsburgh Steelers after Ben Roethlisberger went down with an elbow injury, and also was NOT going to the New Orleans Saints as a short-term replacement for Drew Brees, was No. 3.

A blast from the past, from MANY years past, was in No 4. "Show me the Trig Palin birth certificate" gained new life when Sarah and Todd appeared to be divorcing, per legal filing, at Wasilla, Bum Fuck Egypt borough, Alaska.

The updated baggage of Royce West was No. 5.

Who are the neoliberal NGOs and minders behind Greta Thunberg was No. 6.

Calling out Liza Featherstone for giving Bernie Sanders a family values pass was No. 7.

Ranking Democratic presidential candidates by cult level was No. 8.

Pointing out that American Indians, whether pre-Columbian or post-Columbian, aren't always environmentalists was No. 9.

Top blogging from August, to go meta, was No. 10.

American Indian land rights "versus" environmentalism

I put the "versus" in scare quotes in the header because it is partially that; American Indians can be good environmentalists indeed.

But, it's in part a real versus.

American Indians are not necessarily, as in logically necessarily, as in innately necessary, as in stereotypical Rousselian noble savages — environmentalists.

And, no, it's not that the Columbian Contact debauched them from Rousseau's state of nature, either.

Forests were burnt by them ... to manage as human influenced parkland and to make hunting easier.

Animals were overkilled when they could be and only the best cuts eaten.

In the Southwest, mountains and mesatops were overforested to try to support unsustainable cultural growth in Anasazi sites such as Chaco. Washes were agriculturally overused, with resultant arroyo cuts. Conspicuous consumption was part of the cycle.

That all makes this essay, about environmentalists of the past fighting harder to block restoration of ancient treaty lands if they thought the tribe or tribes in question wouldn't be good environmental stewards, still worth reading today.

Runte notes that many of today's environmentalists don't want to fight this battle. Perhaps it still needs to be fought. What if today's Colorado Utes wanted lands they thought had been promised to them by treaty and their primary goal was more oil and gas drilling? In this case, due to climate change, it would be a battle that had to be fought no less than against white-led private oil companies.

Part of the change is that, oil-drilling Utes, like slave-owning Cherokees, have tried to participate in white capitalism as it was put forth to them. A side issue is that doing this can have long-lasting effects, as the plight of the Black Cherokees shows.

But, that's not all the picture, as noted above. This needs to be stressed and cannot be overstressed. Beyond the examples above is potlatch culture of the Pacific Northwest, which included not only conspicuous consumption, but pre-Columbian contact slavery and even slave sacrifice.

Beyond that, Runte is right about something else: The fear of capitalist corporations lurking behind Indian land rights claims. Look at the loopholes attached to Alaska Native Corporations today.

And (update, Sept. 19, 2021), speaking of the Pacific Northwest? The Makah Tribe, as documented by Carsten Lien in "Olympic Battleground," tried to get its mitts on all lands of the extinct Ozette Tribe ... for lumbering.

Then there's the likes of the Aztec and Inca. They might not have been as greedy for gold as the Spanish, but they weren't "innocent," either.

Also, not all "ancient" American Indian lands are so ancient. The Sioux, kicked out of Wisconsin, largely, by the Ojibwa, were moving west of the Missouri and to the Black Hills in numbers only at the same time Lewis and Clark were moving up the river. Before this, the Black Hills were basically "neutral ground," not ancient or not so ancient Sioux lands.

Maybe one final way of looking at this is that American Indians didn't exploit the land more because they didn't have the numbers, or the tools beyond Stone Age or occasional Chalcolithic Age technology to do so.

 

Sidebar: I do NOT agree with everything Runte writes at National Parks Traveler and elsewhere about preservation in the modern U.S. in general and the modern NPS in particular. I do NOT want light rail, let alone light rail run by traditional rail companies, in the parks, contra his plea. Instead, I want more buses at sites that already have them, with smaller buses running more frequent routes, and buses at places that don't already have them, and I want these buses to be all-electric. No more propane buses. His critics are right that his idea almost certainly means "more development." They're also right about the worrisomeness of him first writing that piece for a "more development in the parks" site.

 

In a follow-up, Runte ignores that Yosemite was created before any of the transcontinental railroads. And, one of the authors of the piece criticizing him notes that he was "protesting too much, wethinks" if nothing else, by writing a piece at least five times longer than his original and the critics' response.

It's another Earth Day with the earth continuing to be lost

The biggest lost is further delays in addressing the massive problem of climate change.

I've discussed AOC's aspirational Green New Deal, the one started by neoliberals who are the youth division of Gang Green environmentalist org Sierra Club, versus the Green Party's better but not perfect version, three times already, with a fourth in the hopper.  Part three, with links to one and two, is here.

My personal purple iris Earth Day gift.

Among problems with the Gang Green New Deal is, beyond it generally being aspirational and not concrete, it talks little about a carbon tax and nothing at all about a carbon tariff. A carbon tariff rightly addresses the political question of "why should we shoot ourselves in the foot?" and the moral issue of "we need to all be on the same page." It would not harm developing nations, as many, especially in subSaharan Africa, have not committed to a 20th-century style western grid or industrialization in the first place.

Second, to riff somewhat on other people, and without saying Ocasio-Cortez doesn't care about other environmental issues, climate change is only one issue.

Habitat degradation and species extinction beyond what's being caused by climate change are another. Potential Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins discusses this and more.

With our Gen Z kids, device addiction and nature apathy is also big. Actually, it's big for their parents and even older adults as well.

If you're at an Earth Day event, whether one affiliated with the national Earth Day group or not, turn your phone OFF. Not just to "silent" but OFF.

If you don't, you're part of the problem. It's hard to care about nature if you can't occasionally focus on it.

That said, the planet WILL be around. And, the planet will recover — eventually — from most human degradation.

But, we may not. This is like an asteroid 66 million years ago, but we're aiming it at ourselves. Only the mega-rich of libertarian ilk could seriously tout the idea that we as a civilized, settled species could just pack up and relocate our entire civilization from its largely coastal and riverine current location.

Patrick Moore, Greenpeace and climate change denialism And ... the issues of nuclear energy, GMOs, etc.

In case you're not up to speed on Twitter hot takes, Donald Trump unshockingly had taken at face value Patrick Moore's climate change denialism, as well as the lies about Moore helping found Greenpeace.

Greenpeace has the truth on this. So does Wikipedia, there on Moore's page and again on Greenpeace's page.

For wingers trotting out a Wayback Machine version of Greenpeace's website? A self-owned fail, as that website lists Moore under "founders and early members." NOT "founders."

A list two paragraphs below that? "On board" is not "on THE board." Rather, it's on board the ship Phyllis Cormack when it went to Amchitka, Alaska in silent protest of a U.S. nuclear weapons test.

For wingers trotting out a Google search which allegedly shows Moore among Greenpeace's founders? Dudes, this is Twitter. And, that's not what MY Googling shows.

My first assumption is you, or another wingnut, is OK with Photoshopping 101.

So, put a sock in it.

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Moore is generally a pretentious twat, such as bitching about enviros for saying "carbon" instead of "carbon dioxide."

Second, before he became a pro-nukes mouthpiece, he was a British Columbia timber industry mouthpiece, supporting forest clear-cutting, among other things. He ceased to be an environmentalist decades ago, as soon as he made that devil's bargain.

More on his background here.

===

That said, is nuclear power the devil?

Not in my book.

We need to approach it cautiously. We need to fix the long-term waste disposal before building any more nuclear plants. We need to correctly carbon-price nuclear power plants, including mining costs of carbon dioxide emissions.

AND, we need to do the same with wind and solar, including mining costs.

We also need HONEST answers on how much wind and solar we would need not just to replace the current electric grid but to allow us to go to a 100 percent electric car fleet.

And, so far, environmental groups have generally shied away from that.

IF we can do that (and reasonable estimates only, please) without nuclear power, fine. If we can't? Well, we need to start talking, then.

And, I'm far from the only environmental to feel that way.

I'm also not the only environmentalist who is OK with GMO crops. And, I've said that for years, too. Read Grist's "Panic Free GMOs." Let's talk reality, not bogeymen or Frankenfoods. Or "chemicals" in your food. (Which is also radioactive.) Let's also not ignore how "Big Organic" has a vested interest in running down GMOs.

And, for that matter, has Greenpeace ever apologized for its 2014 cultural desecration and cultural imperialism?

Overall, I see Greenpeace as about 50 percent Gang Green, 20 percent stuntmakers for stuntmaking's sake, and 30 percent trying to hold on to original roots. (Most Gang Green and non-Gang Green enviro groups alike are anti-GMO, with The Nature Conservancy being the one major exception. (OTOH, TNC takes donations from Monsanto; I agree with their stance but they leave themselves open to challenges there.) They're afraid of losing donors, and within non-profit groups, enviros in general and Gang Green in particular have a high "churn" rate on donors.)

That said, per one of the tags for this post, I reject the idea of "salvific technologism" — that is, I do not believe the tech world, whether in ag or elsewhere, is the cavalry always riding over the hill and guaranteed to save us. But, I'm not a Luddite, either. And, I think most non-Gang Green environmental orgs and activists are. I like a lot of Wrong Kind of Green, for being post-capitalist (that's me, but not anti-capitalist). But ... it too is on the Luddite wagon of most anti-GMOers. GMOs and Big Ag? I'm willing to talk, though I have in the past passed on that Montanto's market capitalization is smaller than that of Starbucks. But, pseudoscience, like WKOG swallowing whole cloth Arpad Pusztai? No.

TX Progressives tackle political, possible editorial oiliness

The Texas Progressive Alliance looks at oiliness polluting the political, and perhaps editorial, landscape and other issues.

Brains and Eggs offers up highlights July campaign finance reports from key the Texas connection on the DNC reverse shift to take Big Oil donations.

DeSmog Blog discusses in detail how  the fracking industry is cannibalizing itself and causing environmental damage. This blogger suggests that Chronicle biz columnist Chris Tomlinson needs to start reading stuff like this, and more, before writing his next “fracking is great, period” column. (Hints have been dropped before.)

Downwinders at risk keeps beating the drums  for Metroplex air quality.

At the Dallas Observer, Jim Schutze gives resigned-in-disgrace former Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway a final kick in the pants, in part for supporting white folk much more than his own South Dallas constitutency.

David Bruce Collins sees faint hopes among today’s Dems but doesn’t expect realization for a generation or more.

The San Antonio Current says millennials are registering to vote.

SocraticGadfly wants to know more about all the alleged Texas atheists the Lyceum poll on the Cruz-O'Rourke Senate race said the state had.

Off the Kuff highlights July campaign finance reports from key State Senate and State House races.

Gaby Diaz documents her time knocking on doors for the Beto O'Rourke campaign.

Texas Standard says Valley schools are doing well.

But The Texas Tribune notes post-Harvey troubles in Port Arthur ISD schools.

David Brockman calls out the Christian right's politics of cruelty.

Free Press Houston wonders if that city will face a far-right rally.

Mark Smith stands up for public libraries

.

The Rivard Report is moving to new digs. Will it hire new staff?

Irene Vázquez maps out where Houston is affordable.

El Jefe recaps the Jeff Sessions/El Tiempo debacle.

Dian Nostikasari explains why Houston's bike plan matters.

One Dem sellout of environment for national parks cashwith National Parks Conservation Association whoredom

Raúl Grijalva, big fat hypocrite at the podium, with snake out of the grass Rob Bishop behind his right shoulder./The Hill

Twenty-five House Dems have signed up to co-sponsor a piece of legislation, allegedly moderated in its modifications from an idea floated last year by black-hat cowboy/Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, that would, if the moderations aren't real, rape BLM land for more oil and gas leases to fund the chronic budget shortfall and maintenance backlog in the National Park Service.

Wait, wait, I take that back.

The Senate version of the bill, cosponsored by six Dems, would at least do that. The House version would just dump half of federal energy revenue into some unspecified fund for whatever.

Raul Grivalja theoretically should know better than playing this Whack-A-Mole bullshit, at least as long as the current administration is in power. I mean, most the Democratic sponsors, aside from him, are ConservaDems and establishmentarian hacks. When you're on the same side as the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Kyrsten Sinema, you're on the wrong side.

So, too, should the National Parks Conservation Association. That said, NPCA, while not an original Gang Green member, can still act halfway like one, even in its narrow focus on NPS support. It's been selective in the past on how the NPS gets money, including selling out NPS users in favor of BLM and USFS extractors.

That's not new, either. Obama's last Interior Secretary, Sally Jewell, supported "all of the above" on oil and gas extraction from BLM land. And, before she joined the gummint? On the NPCA board of directors.

The NPCA is a whore in other ways. Like when it saluted Rio Tinto as a corporate parks sponsor.

And, it won't tell you on its calendars that most National Recreation Areas, like Lake Mead and Glen Canyon, that are in the National Park Service, directly contravene the 1916 Organic Act.

And, as a commenter there noted, it's late-stage capitalist enough that a decade ago, its CEO made $350 grand a year. (That was up to $367,000 by 2015, plus 258K for Pierno as COO. The next year, per Charity Navigator, she got a raise to $300K as CEO/President, but former head honcho Clark Bunting still hauled down $350K.) Per Wikipedia, if it had about $30 million in revenue in fiscal 2014 and 153 employees, that means the average salary is almost $100K.

Such numbers might not be totally ridiculous, just halfway so, if every employee were at the HQ in the capitalist black hole of DC, but they're not. And I know that most the 27 regional offices are in places not only cheaper but a fair amount cheaper.

Speaking of? You want to find more money to address the Park Service backlog? Start by charging Lake Mead and Lake Powell boaters twice as much.

That compares with totally non-Gang Green Center for Biological Diversity. It ranks higher on financial angles, per Charity Navigator, with CEO Kieran Suckling taking just $200K. Suckling also claims his group has twice as many employees per $1 million revenue than the typical larger enviro group.

And, to loop this together? Most years, the CBD hands out a Rubber Dodo Award for antienvironmentalism. Last year's winner? Utah's turd-brown Congresscritter Rob Bishop, in the quasi-seersucker suit behind Grivalja in that pic.

Here's Grivalja's website with all his contact info. Let him know what you think of this.

Jim Stiles, blowhard? Half blowhard? (updated)

The iconic Delicate Arch at Arches National Park. (Author photo)

Jim Stiles, proprietor of the Canyon Country Zephyr online newsmagazine, likes to portray himself as the intellectual heir to Cactus Ed Abbey. Maybe I should say "THE heir" to emphasize that. And, what led me to this blog post was seeing High Country News run a retrospective on the 50th anniversary of "Desert Solitare," Abbey's memoir, environmental manifesto and quasi-anarchist screed about his years of seasonal ranger service at Arches National Monument, today a national park. I checked the Zephyr, which I sometimes like as a tweaker of the more mainstream HCN, to see if Stiles had something similar up, and he didn't yet.

(Update, Feb. 9: Stiles doesn't have anything specific to the 50th in his new February-March issue, either.)

Among his heirship angles is attacking eco-tourism as wrecking Moab, Utah in particular and the American West in general.

I'm no defender of swapping the single-industry mining or logging nature of many Western towns for one of tourism. And, per that link just above, Stiles is half right, maybe more. But, to say that eco-tourism has caused the problem is itself bullshit. I told High Country News the same when it wrote a semi-puff piece about Moab's retiring mayor, Dave Sakrison. And I'll say the same now, on this updating, about Stiles reprinting a semi-puff piece about a former Grand County commissioner Bill Heddon.

Western small towns and counties, unless forbidden by state law, can ameliorate this issues with eco-tourism (or the stagnant wages of extractive economies on the decline) by:
1. Increasing the local minimum wage
2. Getting developers to build affordable housing, including through either the carrot of subsidies or the stick of requiring it as part of a larger development.

Stiles mentions neither of those. (Moab's mayor never mentioned trying to get the rest of the city council to sign off on such, either.)

That's not all. Other actions could include:
3. Funding for other things to broaden the local economy done via an increased hotel-motel tax, which would primarily tag high-end tourism.
4. Getting the nearest recreationally developed federal area to work better to promote local attractions and events.
5. Getting counties to adopt county zoning policies outside of city limits.

Stiles' ERMIGOD GREEN TOURISM reached shitstorm level over the creation of Bears Ears National Monument. With Trump's (will it stand?) downsizing of BENM, Stiles reiterates claims that national monument designation involved no additional protection, gave American Indian tribes in the area no additional empowerment, and other things.

He's half-right on the first; the protection would have been even better were it to have been moved to the custody of the National Park Service.

But, he's not all right, and that's because he's all wet on No. 2. Jonny Thompson covered that by noting specifically:

A monument manager would be overseen by a commission, made up of one representative from each of the five tribes, and one each from the U.S. Forest Service, BLM and National Park Service. The tribes, collectively, would have the loudest voice in decision-making.

That's more than just "advisory," Jim.

Yes, most of the tribal powers with Bears Ears are advisory, not statutory. But not all of them.

He then ventures into Anglocentric stances from the top, when he claims:

For the purposes of this story I refer to the area of Grand Gulch and Cedar Mesa as “Bears Ears.” But please note that in the forty-seven years I’ve known and wandered southeast Utah, literally NOBODY ever referred to the region as ‘The Bears Ears”  until two years ago. That title is a piece of product packaging and marketing by mainstream environmental organizations and the outdoor recreation industry and has never been a name that meant anything more than the two buttes that lie along the southern edge of Elk Ridge…JS

Gee, Jim, maybe you should expand your circles.

First, what do Navajos, or Ute, or Hopi, call "Cedar Mesa"? Or "Grand Gulch"? We know what the Navajos call "Bears Ears," and that is "Bears Ears."

Second, and related, what do they call the entire area? (Stiles can positively invoke southwestern American Indians in other cases, but it seems as selective, and as personally motivated, as some gang green groups he likes to attack.)

Third, other national parks and monuments are named after just one portion of the territory. Saguaro National Park, which surely was not called "Saguaroland" 100-plus years ago, has more than just saguaros. Really, Jim, this is dumb shit.

Fourth, related to Point No. 2 on my first bullet points? Why not empower tribal cops for patrolling? Since this is outside any reservation, I presume that they could, as appropriately deputized, arrest Anglos, which SCOTUS says they can't on their reservations. The "Jim Chees" comment aside, Stiles in that piece, and per this HCN submission of his last year, seems conflicted or schizo in general about the idea of antiquities protection actually being put in place.

More seriously, Stiles' alternative idea for Bears Ears isn't all bad. But, more seriously, 500 BLM cops aren't going to enforce ARPA any more than now. So, let the tribes put 500 more cops in there, paid by the feds. Even with that, or even more, because of that, we're going to have a Bundyville. You'll need to make it 1,000. More thoughts below the fold.

A few thoughts on National Park Service rate hikes

I'd seen the proposal when it first came out, but, due to doing some Twitter research and other things, hadn't jumped on it right away.

First, let me state that I don't recall folks like the National Parks Conservation Association bitching too much when the Obama Administration replaced the old Parks Pass with the new Access Pass and forced people like me to subsidize the USFS and BLM because the government refused to charge more in extractive fees.

Nor do I recall the protests being a lot louder — and certainly not that long — when Dear Leader let guns back into national parks, and without a lot of pressure to do so, and that was with a Democratic-majority Congress.

Do I think every bit of protest by environmental groups over volume-based pricing for 17 parks is a way to gin up donations? No.

Do I think some of it is? Yes. Especially when I get emails warning of the fee hikes with "donate" buttons in the email.

==

Now that that's out of the way, the fees themselves.

If the Trump Administration weren't simultaneously cutting the NPS budget, I actually wouldn't totally oppose such fees.

Fact is that NPCA et al know that most Grand Canyon visitors never get past walking along the South Rim in the tourist area, never get beyond seeing Delicate Arches as a parking lot distance (if they go that far), etc. Zion they will go to the start of the Narrows because you can get bused there.

So, in a vacuum, and not East Trumpistan?

I would:

A. Get rid of the Access Pass and go back to the old Parks Pass.
B. Through annual inspection of mines on federal lands, force Congress to overturn the General Mining Act of 1872. That gets rid of subsidizing BLM and USFS on hard-rock mining.
C. Find a similar way to price up lumbering in both agencies, though, outside of Alaska, timbering on federal lands seems to be in decline anyway.

With those preliminaries in place, I would support frequency pricing at some parks. Not all 17 on the list, but at:
1. Arches
2. Glacier
3. Grand Canyon
4. Grand Teton
5. Rainier
6. Rocky
7. Sequoia/Kings Canyon
8. Shenandoah
9. Yellowstone
10. Yosemite
11. Zion

About all of these fall into "iconic" parks. Shenandoah, like the California parks, gets listed as being near major urban areas.

And so, with that said, I'll add an 11th that East Trumpistan did not:
12. Great Smokies.

I might not make the frequency fees as high as has been proposed, but I would raise them.

It would drive the total "36-clickers," to use an old film photography phrase, elsewhere. Fine. Reduces stress on park highways. And, on cleanup. In general, people who want to see a park in depth are less likely to litter, etc.

As for minorities, lower-income in general, etc? Going back to a Parks Pass (let's say at the $50 fee it was) rather than the $80 Access Pass. provides 30 ways of solution right there.

===

As for the NPCA donations ask?

Enviro groups have a high rate of churn among members, at least the "name" ones. So they push stuff like this.

Second, at least for Sierra Club, they pay employees crap.

A decade ago, it had an opening for a copy editor for its magazine. $33K a year. In San Francisco. Not "the Bay Area." In San Francisco. The City.

I generally don't give money to those groups.

I've even emailed a couple — if you first want to hire me as a copy editor, assistant managing editor, whatever, then we'll talk on donations.

The NPCA, unlike Sierra, is not a Gang Green group, nor is the Coalition for Biological Diversity, where I've twice sent such emails. OTOH, groups even smaller than NPCA sometimes have ethics problems.

Maybe there's too damn many people there

Per my post last week about Harvey-related evacuation of Houston, if Houstonians and others think that, even with an orderly, Ike-type evacuation, you still couldn't evacuate the whole city in this case, let alone in a fictitious Hurricane Isaiah, then there's one logical conclusion.

There's too damned many people living in greater Houston. (Until you get politicians who fire climate change deniers and stand up to developers, at least.)

The problem's not just there.

If a Superstorm Sandy gets supersized, I know there's too damned many people living in Manhattan.

And — with note that, due to lack of predictiveness, this would be post-event only — if the next Big One hits San Francisco and not the East Bay, I know there's too damned many people living there, too.

With places like the Bay Area, even before the tech/Net boom, it was the scenery. With Manhattan, it was Big Money — and an interesting sidebar that the Net world, rather than increasing remote working, seems instead to have fueled the desire for Big Money to cluster in the Big Apple.

In Phoenix, even before the housing bubble burst, the healthful dry desert air instead became converted to a smoggy urban heat island, with people half-afraid to be caught outside of air conditioning. Add in rapidly depleting groundwater, the Colorado River system being over-allocated, and there's too many there. (Unfortunately, besides bailing out fat cats, Dear Leader didn't use the Great Recession to get people in Phoenix and Vegas to move back to where water is in exchange for surrendering their "underwater" houses.)

Houston? In part, the "energy industry," even though the Houston area itself is no longer a major producer of crude oil, just refined products. And, the energy companies with world, North American, or US headquarters there, really aren't tied there.

Now, if you freely choose to live in some of these places, as in you weren't born there without reasonable means of escape, or your job didn't transfer you there, fine. Accept the natural disasters as part of the price of living there.

And, in the case of places like the Bay Area and Manhattan, accept that blue states or locales actually have more income inequality than red states. In short, if you're trying to live in San Francisco on a shoestring job, you made that choice, even aside from the natural disasters issue.

#Arkema, #Harvey, "the media," kibbitzers and strawmanners

The Arkema explosion, and a "movement skeptic" former Facebook friend's (more on that in a second post) response to media coverage of it led me to say "enough." Kibbitzing about how "the media" is ignorant about chemicals when they report on them all the time in a place like Houston led me to say "more than enough."

(Update, March 12, 2018: Liberty County is now suing Arkema. Alleged are Texas Clean Air Act violations, Texas Water Code violations, Texas Health and Safety Code violations, and common law nuisances as a catch-all. The first three, generally, have an "every single day" penalty on fines. That will surely be sought against Arkema, and part of the court fight will be when the tolling dates should end.

Update, May 28, 2018: The U.S. Chemical Safety Board reports Arkema knew well in advance of Hurricane Harvey about flood risks, according to Texas Vox.)

First, strawmanning the actual individual members of "the media" with the word "chemophobia" is a sure way to have actual individual members of the media treat your pseudoskepticism skeptically, Jeff Wagg, and others like you. (As he posts to "public" on Facebook, no privacy violations on my normal personal terms of talking about Facebook posting.)

Second, I think most people think of "the media" as like "lawyers" — bad guys until one of them is defending YOU or telling YOUR story. The reality is different.

Third, when a friend of yours comes on and starts clit-swinging (can't call it dick-swinging, can I saw that would be more "mansplaining" and more on that in the second post — and since that was the final accusation against me, I have no better way of expressing the sarcasm) about why Texas has chemical records secret AND GETS IT WRONG, you're asking for more trouble yet.

Naomi Baker

Naomi Baker claims this was all due to 9-11. NOT EVEN CLOSE.

It was a year after the West explosion in 2013, where I know first responders who fought that fire or controlled traffic (because my own newspaper was less than an hour away) that then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott ruled Texas chemical plant records should be sealed. And cited the West explosion as why. Then said "drive around" if you want to find out.

And, whether you work, or worked at EPA, or not, if you're too ignorant to know that, and claim "9/11," you should SHUT UP. I rarely, rarely, am that direct, and very rarely use all caps. But, you earned it. And you should definitely not accuse someone of "mansplaining." That's doubly true if you live in Texas, which Naomi Baker's FB indicated was true. And, if stereotypical males are the ones who "always have to win," you seemed to be exhibiting that more than me.

(And now, Arkema and TCEQ are playing footsie with each other on non-release of Arkema's Tier Two chemical inventory. Would this also be "chemophobia" for "the media" to report on it?)

But, she worked WITH the EPA, she didn't work FOR it. Her LinkedIn profile says she's worked TWENTY YEARS in the energy industry. And is in Houston right now for a natural-gas processing company, one that works with dirty sour gas as part of their work, apparently. Before that? Dirty oil pipeline company ENBRIDGE! (And, graduated from Odessa Permian High, right in the heart of Texas' oil-besotted Permian Basin to boot.)

She VERY carefully said on Facebook that she'd never worked in the "chemical industry" or, IIRC, a "refinery." Very nice. Or "nice." But hiding a lot of dirty reality. So, she's not ignorant at all. She's #oilsplaining.

Also, if you worked "with" the EPA in Texas, you'd know that the EPA threatened to pull back its state outsourcing of urban smog regulation and similar things from the Texas Department of Environmental Quality because oversight was that bad. And that environmental organizations asked for that to be done. That's just a sample.

Of course, having discovered her real employment history, I know she knows all of this and more.

Now, to background on the actual explosion and regulatory history against Arkema. A "big" $110,000 in fines, pled down to $90,000, is a slap on the wrist. Especially when that was for not hazardous but "highly hazardous chemicals." And, given that the French parent had a  2015 revenue of more than $8 billion, $90,000, or even $110,000, is a slap on the hand indeed. That's not surprising, as Arkema is a spinoff of French oil giant Total. Its most recent net profit was $400 million.

And you'd know that Texas regulators, even more than the feds, have a habit of wrist-slapping, if you've also worked with the Texas Railroad Commission. Given that I've read about, and written stories about, actual dollar amounts of RRC fines, I actually do know that.

(As shown by High Country News, on remediation of abandoned uranium mines, the EPA in general stiffs the general public while hand-slapping big business.)

And, if you weren't strawmanning the media as if they were chemtrailers, Jeff Wagg, you might have read "highly hazardous chemicals" somewhere. And, you might have been a little less butthurt when I suggested, but did not outrightly state, that you were coming close to strawmanning. I only made that statement as a definite after I blocked you.

Ms. Baker, you'd also know that, re your ignorance about (or willful lying about) West, Gov. Abbott, etc., above, that Arkema had long refused to release its risk management plan.

Speaking of the EPA there now, and its TCEQ flunkies, or maybe it's the other way around? Per a story from the Houston Chronicle, aka "the media," this:

Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality described the incident at the Arkema Inc. facility in Crosby as a fire, not a chemical release. 

The agencies said airborne sampling shows the smoke did not contain concerning levels of toxic chemicals.

What is a "concerning level" of a chemical? Ms. Baker, since you have a chemical engineering degree, shouldn't EPA have ppm or ppb DATA on how it defines a threshold for "concerning"?

Answer is "yes," of course. 

Ms. Baker then went on to say, well, yes, Republicans are worse on this, but, these things happen everywhere.

Well, Dear Leader weakened the EPA somewhat himself. Guess his community organizing on Chicago's South Side never touched on economic justice. (And, environmental racism is real.) Also, environmental organizations, the biggest, have chemists and chemical engineers who help advise them.

That said, he didn't so weaken the EPA that it didn't propose NEW chemical safety rules. Rules shit-canned by Trump's EPA head. Ms. Baker, since you've worked "with" the EPA, you surely know that. And, per Greg Abbott's weekend driving suggestions, including through West, Texas, you know this is NOT "9/11."

And, Saturday afternoon, the AP reported it had visited a bunch of Houston-area Superfund sites — on the ground or water by the ground, NOT just "visiting" by air — that the EPA claimed were inaccessible.

If only Ms. Baker, in her working "with" the EPA, could tell me what's hindering the EPA, I would be so enlightened! 

If only Mr. Wagg, in his oh-so-diligent concern-trolling the media, would make sure the AP wasn't committing chemophobia, we'd all be so blessed!

Maybe that's why, per friend and Chronicle columnist Chris Tomlinson, Ms. Baker, Arkema's CEO is a leading (but not solo) example of hubris.

Chris begins:

Richard Rennard, the president of Arkema, shrugged his shoulders when asked what more his company could have done to prevent chemicals from burning at his plant in Crosby. 

He rattled off the systems his company employed to chill the organic peroxides: Grid power, back-up generators, nitrogen coolers and ultimately refrigerated trailers. On Thursday the refrigerator systems began shutting down and the peroxides began burning and blowing the lids off their containers. 

After the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, every facility with dangerous materials should know to keep back-up generators above any potential flood line. Yet that precaution escaped Arkema.

Then, to the PROOF, for the chemical engineer and the movement skeptic:

Rennard's fatalism in the face of a natural disaster is disingenuous. Experts identified the plant as high-risk, and Arkema could have designed a more resilient facility. But it didn't, most likely because management considered the risk too low and the costs too high. 

 We know this because the Houston Chronicle identified Arkema as a potentially dangerous plant in an award-winning 2016 investigative series called "Chemical Breakdown." 

That's almost all I can quote honestly under fair use guidelines. Go read Chris.

But, one more sample. The conclusion, in good sermonic style: 

If we learn nothing else from Harvey, let it be the danger of hubris. Despite claims to the contrary, executives will decide that mitigating a risk costs too much, and subsequent events will prove that they made a horrible mistake. 

That's why regulators, journalists and citizen groups have a role to play in demanding accountability and revealing the risks taken. Because when it comes to chemicals, the public shares in the consequences of a bad decision and often pays the highest price. 

Let's be honest, Harvey is not causing accidents. The storm is revealing the risks executives willingly took. No one has the right to shrug their shoulders and say, "C'est la vie."

And just maybe, both Ms. Baker and Mr. Wagg, you'd learn a little less hubris yourself. On regulators, you might admit the truth about Greg Abbott and about how minimal these fines were. 

One more point. Mr. Wagg, if he had just waited a bit, or not protested so much about a David Sirota link I posted, about how Texas AG Ken Paxton et al helped Arkema dodge more federal regulation, could have learned, as a good skeptic, that Arkema was much more worried about explosion dangers in 2014 than it came off as being this week, per that old Wall Street Journal.

But, you chose to say "the media" instead, claiming the media didn't know what it was talking about. Then, Ms. Baker refused to accept the reality about regulatory issues here in Texas, perhaps because she was in CYA mode. Then both of you started sliming with the "mansplaining."

Finally, as a member of "the media," I know the profession is not perfect. I've said that myself, mainly about the corporations that own it, but, sometimes, about the herd mentality, more than anything else, of writers, broadcasters and editors at its larger mainstream outlets. (I've regularly blogged and Tweeted about some of the "Putin did it" nuttery.) But, for a (former) "movement skeptic" to apply "the media" card, first, and then, to basically present media from multiple outlets in one of the nation's largest metropolitan areas (plus local representatives of national media) as ignorant was over the top.

Update to that: One other person, if not a professional movement skeptic, at least a tribalist, talks about me questioning her professional ethics. I'll let what I saw on the Facebook thread, including the parsing of exactly how she spoke, and the actual facts about chemical reporting in Texas speak for themselves. And he got blocked too.

==

Update, noon Sept. 1: Here's a full list of Arkema chemicals at its suburban Houston plant. Please, don't engage in "chemophobia." Please don't strawman that all levels of toxicity are the same. Please don't wonder about the possibility of floodwaters mixing chemicals that are currently separate.

The reality is that you have a variety of chemicals that can form either bases or acids when reacting with water. Their pH causticity would dilute eventually, but, if blown in the air by an explosion, then landing away from the plant, could be more problematic.

And, the alcohols there are of course flammable. So is hexane.

==

Update Sept. 7: First responders are suing Arkema. Here's why:

Houston lawyers Kimberley Spurlock and Misty Hataway-Cone launched a legal battle in Harris County court, accusing Arkema of gross negligence. 

Despite past flooding events and advance notice of the impending destruction of Hurricane Harvey, Arkema "ignored the foreseeable consequences of failing to prepare," the suit claims, leaving trailers of volatile chemicals susceptible to explosion after flooding knocked out the electricity and ability to cool the heat-sensitive compounds. 

The first of nine trailers of organic peroxides exploded early on the morning of Aug. 31, landing a number of first responders in the hospital following exposure to fumes from the chemicals, which ignited and left a 40-foot plume of black smoke that officials later compared to a campfire. 

"Although the explosions had occurred, no one from Arkema alerted the first responders who were manning the perimeter of the arbitrary mandatory evacuation area," lawyers said Thursday in a press release. "Immediately upon being exposed to the fumes from the explosions, and one by one, the police officers and first responders began to fall ill in the middle of the road."

But, this is surely more chemophobia. And Ms. Baker would probably add, if I'm guessing her politics correctly, that this is more of the ebil trial lawyers at work.

==

Update, Sept. 14: More dead horse to flog! Valero now admits, even per the currently toothless EPA, that it "seriously underestimated" (i.e., apparently lied about) how much benzene, a known carcinogen, and other volatile compounds escaped from its Houston refinery.

==

Update, Sept. 19: Superfund site spills under investigation.

==

Update, Sept. 22: The newest and possibly most toxic spill yet.

==

Update, Sept. 25: The AP reports that the EPA says it has removed toxic waste from some Texas sites, but won't say what they are or where they came from.

==

Update, Sept. 26: Chemophobia has hit the Harris County Commissioners Court! Commissioners have voted to sue Arkema on grounds of creating a public nuisance. Update, Nov. 17: Harris County is now filing a larger suilt against Arkema.

==

Update, Oct. 2: #Chemophobia? No, "the media," contra a Houston-area pseudoskeptic and her Chicago Wagg-ish friend, want the public to know about petrochemical hazards that the Houston-area pseudoskeptic, and by implication, her Chicago Wagg-ish friend, unless he repents, want to keep hidden, including with the employer of Ms. Baker surely contributing to the soft money, and maybe even dark money, that works to keep this hidden.

==

Update, Oct. 4: I guess all these respiratory problems are just chemophobia too.

==

Update, Aug. 3, 2018: The EPA is auditing state and federal folks over post-Harvey air quality monitoring and reporting transparency.

AND ... Arkema's CEO has been indicted.