Category Archives: environmental news

environmental news, local news

Oh, the wind takes its toll

We awoke this morning, flipped on the TV and watched the Metroplex weather forecasters going apoplectic over the wind, rain, thunder and lightning that tore through the region.

Our lights in Princeton flickered off for about 20 seconds, then came back on. That was it. Yeah, it was a frightening time this morning before dawn.

The storm raced across the region, which turned out to be a bit of a blessing. It wouldn’t linger long and tear the daylights out of people’s homes, motor vehicles and assorted other structures.

Then we got word of the wind that roared across our former home in the Texas Panhandle.

Sustained blasts of 50 mph, with gusts of 80 mph.

But here’s where my heart breaks. A lot of trees blew over. The wind ripped them out of the ground by their roots. They fell into houses, onto motor vehicles, were laying on street surfaces. The good news is that I haven’t heard of any human casualties. For that we all should be grateful.

The heartbreak occurs because if you’ve seen the High Plains region of Texas, you know it lacks trees. They cherish their trees in that part of the world. There was the time, for instance, when the Texas Department of Transportation proposed culling some trees along U.S. 60 in Hemphill County; you would have thought TxDOT had hired the devil himself. The outrage was ferocious; TxDOT backed down.

Yes, I know you can plant new trees. They’ll grow and replace the flora that’s been destroyed by Mother Nature’s fury.

Still, I hate hearing about the loss.

Keep the faith, everyone.

environmental news

Prayers, please, for tornado victims

The tornado that tore through southern Alabama the other day tells us once again about nature’s unspeakable strength and wrath.

At last count, 23 people have died as a result of the massive twister that leveled the area near Opelika, Ala. Ten of them came from the same extended family. How does one cope with such loss? You do so through faith and, of course, with help from your government and your neighbors.

The first couple went to the region late this past week to see first hand what nature had brought to the region. The president hugged some folks and pledged the government’s full support as they start to rebuild after the tragedy.

I don’t quite know what to say with this blog post except to offer emotional support. We chide public officials for offering “love and prayers” after gun violence. We demand more than just platitudes.

Mother Nature’s violence, though, leaves us feeling helpless. There really is little we can do to fight back against the unspeakable power of forces such as, oh, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes or lightning-ignited wildfire.

Thus, we are left just to offer “love and prayers” for the souls we have lost and for those who survive and who must struggle to rebuild their shattered lives.

I am doing so here. Right now. May we all keep our fellow Americans in our hearts as they fight back.

environmental news, State news

Just not caring about Daylight/Standard time

I guess I should care about this. Except that I don’t. Really, I don’t.

Some members of the Texas Legislature want the state to stop switching back and forth each year between Daylight Saving Time and Standard Time. They say the “spring forward” and “fall back” routine causes too much sleep deprivation at the front end, when we push our clocks forward an hour. We’re going to do it again Saturday night; we’ll awaken Sunday morning with one less hour of shut-eye to get our day started.

And, of course, many of us will bitch about it!

I just don’t see the significance of it all. I continue to recognize the motive behind enacting Daylight Saving Time in the first place. It was intended to help conserve energy by allowing us to not turn on our lights and, thus, burn electrical energy when we don’t need to do it.

As for the sleep deprivation, I learned long ago that however tired we might be on the first day of switching to Daylight time, we get over it quickly. We adjust. We human beings are adaptable creatures.

If we’re going to end the back-and-forth, though, I propose we stay on permanent Daylight Saving Time. I like having the sun in the sky a little longer at the end of the day.

Now . . . I am going to get back to the things that really matter, at least they do to me.

environmental news, International news, national news, political news

One-note samba won’t cut it on campaign trail

I’ll give Washington Gov. Jay Inslee plenty of credit for candor.

He announced his candidacy the other day for president of the United States declaring right up front, out loud and for all the world to see and hear that he’s running on one issue only: climate change and the peril it poses for the world’s most powerful nation.

Fine. What about the rest of the job, governor? What about, oh, let’s see: fighting terrorism, creating jobs, fiscal responsibility, dealing with cybersecurity, border security? There are a whole lot of other issues, too.

Inslee wants to make climate change the strongest plank in his platform on which to seek the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2020.

I don’t dispute the urgency he is placing on the matter. I do dispute whether it’s enough all by itself to commend him for nomination and election.

Just as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is running on economic inequality, which kind of mirrors Issue No. 1 for Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Inslee is staking his candidacy on a single issue.

We have Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar in the hunt already. Former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado is in. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is, too. I know I’m missing someone. There’s too many of ’em to keep up.

The Democratic Party field has reached a dozen candidates so far. There will be more. Many more, or so it appears. Texan Beto O’Rourke appears to be set to go. Former Vice President Joe Biden is letting it slip out that his family is all in on his running for president.

They all need to demonstrate a well-rounded, well-considered and well-tested competence on an array of domestic and foreign policy issues. Climate change is a big one. So is income inequality.

Spare me, though, the one-note samba. I tend to tire of hearing the same thing coming out of candidates’ mouths.

We’ve already elected an incompetent business mogul/boob to the nation’s highest office. We don’t need to train another president on the vast complexities of the nation’s highest office.

environmental news

Recycling to become a way of life . . . again

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I am happy to announce that my wife and I are going to reside in a community that recycles.

Big deal? Yeah. It is. Princeton, Texas, is like many North Texas communities that place a premium on lessening the amount of trash we toss into landfills. Very soon, we’re going to move into our house. We’ll be returning very soon to the already-huge fraternity of Americans who receive opportunities to preserve our beloved Planet Earth.

We’ll be putting our recyclable items into bins; trucks will pick them up, empty them into bins in front of our home and take the contents to places where they’ll be repurposed, recycled and reused.

We lived for 23 years in Amarillo, a wonderful city that is generally well-run, well-administered and provides the services we all expect to get when we pay our property taxes. It doesn’t allow for “curbside” recycling. The city used to place Dumpsters at locations around town where residents could take items to be recycled. The city gave up on that effort a few years ago because too many residents were throwing non-recyclable material into the bins marked clearly for “recyclable” items.

Amarillo, therefore, is a throwaway community.

Princeton, I am happy to say, allows residents to set aside materials destined for recycling centers. We’ll recycle paper, plastic, glass and aluminum. Cool, yes! You bet it is!

This is an important thing for all of us. My wife and I are fairly dedicated recyclers. We understand the value of reusing material instead of just tossing it into a landfill where it gets buried forever.

I realize this isn’t a huge groundbreaking effort. It’s not a new concept. Recycling has been part of many Americans’ life for longer than any of us can remember. However, for too long I have felt left out of that lifestyle.

I grew up in Oregon, a state that has blazed the environmental awareness trail. It introduced the “bottle bill,” a law that pays deposits for returned glass bottles. Recycling has been a way of life there for decades. There once was a huge debate in the city where I used to work over whether to build a “resource recovery” center, which would recycle household trash into steam energy.

I’m just glad to get back into the recycling game in Princeton, Texas.

environmental news

Here is your ‘national emergency,’ Mr. President

Donald Trump keeps yapping and yammering about the “national emergency” he insists is occurring on our nation’s southern border.

I continue to doubt that such an emergency actually exists. I do know of an actual emergency that the president and his fellow Republicans keep ignoring.

It involves climate change, the meteorological condition known formerly as global warming. That emergency is real. It’s occurring 24/7. It is bringing harm to Earth, the only planet we are able to inhabit.

Here is a bit of good news. The Democratically controlled U.S. House of Representatives today had an actual hearing to discuss climate change. It was the first such hearing in about eight years. The GOP has controlled the House and it decided that climate change was a phony issue. It’s a “hoax,” as Donald Trump prefers to call it.

It’s not a hoax. It’s real. It is posing an existential threat to our coastal regions. It is putting our polar wildlife in dire peril. Polar ice caps are melting, creating a significant loss of hunting habitat in the Arctic for polar bears.

The hearings in Congress, which must continue, are meant to expose further the cause for this changing climate. Scientists from across the spectrum are arguing that human beings are a primary cause for the changing climate on Earth. Those carbon emissions are depleting oxygen, causing the atmosphere to warm at dangerous levels.

I know that’s at times a tough thing to swallow during winter months. The Upper Midwest is enduring frigid temperatures, causing climate change deniers to say, “See? We told you that climate change is ‘fake news.’ It’s phony. It ain’t happening.”

Except that it is happening.

Can we stop it? Slow it? Can we prevent Earth from suffering irreparable damage? Those, folks, are the questions we need to explore. I am glad to know that a change in the congressional command structure in one legislative chamber is going to elevate this discussion to where it belongs.

environmental news

Man it’s cold out there . . . but Earth is still getting hotter!

I love the ignorant statements from climate-change deniers who insist the record winter deep freeze means the planet’s climate isn’t changing, that it isn’t getting warmer.

One of those bizarre declarations came from none other than Donald J. “Stable Genius” Trump, the nation’s president. Why, he just cannot understand why if the planet is warming that people are coping with record low temperatures in the Midwest.

Sigh . . .

Scientists say cold doesn’t debunk warming fear

We need to look at the big picture, the longer term. Ice caps are melting. Median Earth temps are climbing. Sea levels are rising.

It’s happening. Scientists say it is and I believe them. I disbelieve the notion that snow, ice and bitterly cold wind means that climate change is a “hoax” or that it is a conspiracy cooked up by lefty tree-huggers who are bent on destroying our industrial infrastructure.

Yet we keep hearing this nonsense from political leaders — such as POTUS. Donald Trump doesn’t have a scientific background. He quite likely hasn’t studied the works of those who do have such expertise. He instead appears to rely on the word of fossil fuel industry lobbyists, radio talk show hosts who agree with his “hoax” allegation and politicians from states that produce fossil fuels and spew tens of thousands of tons of emissions into the atmosphere.

I stand with the scientific community. They know more than I do about these things. They also know more about them than the president of the United States. Therefore, the president is wrong and he should be ashamed over his profound ignorance.

Except that he knows no shame.

environmental news

Knock it off, Mr. POTUS; Earth is getting warmer!

Donald John “Dipsh** in Chief” Trump put this tweet out today to take note erroneously of a global crisis.

He wonders why, given the intense cold in the Midwest, that Earth’s climate is changing, that it’s getting warmer and that quite likely human beings are largely responsible for this peril.

Never mind the typo when he refers to “Global Waming.” That sort of thing happens, even when it involves the president’s self-proclaimed brilliance.

What I cannot fathom is why this individual cannot understand the need to look at the bigger picture, that today’s cold temps do not negate what scientists around the world have been reporting on for many years. Perhaps he does understand, but chooses to willfully ignore it because his political “base” comprises so many climate change deniers.

environmental news

Climate change debate is over? Don’t believe it is

Chuck Todd, the moderator of “Meet the Press,” has done something I find troublesome. He said he longer will give air time on his program to those who deny the existence of climate change.

Here is a snippet from a monologue Todd gave at the start of his program this past Sunday: “We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not. And we’re going to confuse weather with climate.”

Debate hasn’t ended

Where do I begin? I’ll start with the acknowledgment that I happen to agree with Todd, that climate change is settled science and that human beings are a major cause of it.

However, the existence of differences in “political opinion” make the debate a live option.

I am disappointed that Todd has decided that he no longer will allow his TV show to be a forum to debate this critical issue. That a major TV news talk and analysis show would cease that debate bothers me. It shuts out important voices, even if many of us disagree with them; there certainly are other Americans who side with those who question the existence of climate change, let alone its cause.

It troubles me that “Meet the Press” won’t welcome an open debate on what well might be the most compelling issue of our time. Let both sides argue their points. Indeed, there are plenty of “experts” on either side who can make their case.

As Todd himself as admitted, “political opinion” remains deeply divided on the issue of climate change.

environmental news

Let’s confront the ‘existential threat’: climate change

Newly installed U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi laid a number of key issues on the line today moments after taking the gavel.

One of them is what she described as the most dangerous “existential threat” facing the nation: climate change.

Pelosi pledged to bring climate change back to the front of the nation’s attention, to the top of our national mind.

It has been pushed aside by Republicans who formerly ran the House, by those who continue to run the Senate and by the individual who sits in the Oval Office, Donald Trump, the president of the United States.

Trump has called climate change — formerly known colloquially as “global warming” — a “hoax.” His allies in Congress have bought into the Trump mantra. The president selected a key climate change denier, Scott Pruitt, to run the Environmental Protection Agency; another such denier, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, is now the energy secretary; still another denier, Ryan Zinke, has just left his post as interior secretary.

Pelosi clearly understands what most Americans understand, that Earth’s climate is changing and the change is due largely because of massive amounts of carbon emissions being thrown into the atmosphere. That phenomenon, coupled with deforestation, is warming the planet’s temperature; the polar ice caps are melting; sea levels are rising; communities along our seas, gulfs and oceans are being placed in dire peril — not to mention what it’s doing to wildlife habitat.

Pelosi pledged today to return climate change to the front of the line. I wish her well. Whether this discussion produces legislation and a restoration of regulations aimed at curbing those emissions remain to be seen. The GOP still runs the Senate. The Republican president is still in office.

Whatever it is worth, and I hope it’s worth more than it might seem, Pelosi has the public on her side. Whether that’s enough to, um, turn the tide fills me with a bit of hope that this nation might take a proactive stance against this existential threat.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2017/11/government-endorses-notion-that-humans-cause-climate-change/