Badlands Journal

It just doesn't make investment sense to pour money into alternative technologies when such a splendid speculative bubble is developing over the Monterey Shale Formation, promising to be the largest fracking bonanza of them all in the nation. So, the US hurtles onward to extract more petroleum to create more global warming while polluting more groundwater. Power without care is an abomination.

Badlands Journal editorial board

5-7-13

myFoxla.com

Encroaching sea already a threat in Caribbean

http://www.myfoxla.com/story/22184745/encroaching-sea-already-a-threat-in-caribbean

TELESCOPE, Grenada (AP) - The old coastal road in this fishing village at the eastern edge of Grenada sits under a couple of feet of murky saltwater, which regularly surges past a hastily-erected breakwater of truck tires and bundles of driftwood intended to hold back the Atlantic Ocean.

For Desmond Augustin and other fishermen living along the shorelines of the southern Caribbean island, there's nothing theoretical about the threat of rising sea levels.

"The sea will take this whole place down," Augustin said as he stood on the stump of one of the uprooted palm trees that line the shallows off his village of tin-roofed shacks built on stilts. "There's not a lot we can do about it except move higher up."

California High Speed Rail -- A boondoggle in search of a Pork Barrel 

There is a railroad boom going on right now in the San Joaquin Valley. At least there is a boom going on in the newspapers about railroads, fast and not so fast.

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College students, starting in small colleges in New England but in a movement quickly growing, are pressuring high education administrators and boards of trustees to divest investment in fossil fuel corporations.

The state is going mad again. It is happening more frequently these days as it is necessary for the rulers to grasp at evermore absurd propaganda campaigns to mask their purposes. You can't even blame Jerry Brown. It is just the system, grinding on and on.

One of the dipbleep campaigns is to name the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta a "national heritage area," as plans move forward to excavate huge tunnels underneath it to take most of its fresh water supply from the Sacramento River above the Delta to the big north-south canals below the Delta.

Whoop de do! National heritage and all that entails. Puts us right up there with the Mississippi Delta Heritage Area, which claims:

Much of what is profoundly American -- what people love about America -- has come from the Delta, which is often called 'the cradle of American culture.'

Yes, oh yes, how fondly we recall all the the Mississippi Delta has brung us. Now touting itself as a tourist destination, once it was another kind of destination, expressed in the common American expression, "sold down the river."

Home of the blues. Yes, indeedy. And, of course, the blues is worth so much more than all the suffering that went into its creation, down there in the "cradle." Art hurts, after all.

The Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area -- home of the fabled Parchman Farm., where slavery went on and on so long after the visit by Grant and Sherman to Vicksburg.

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As has been said with increasing force in the American economy by responsible critics for the last 40 years: THERE ARE LIMITS!
Badlands Journal editorial board

1-24-13
Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy

Nature’s Capital Is The Limiting Resource

Life will perish as the environment perishes
21st century ecological economist

Paul Craig Roberts

Only in science fiction can humans escape the consequences of destroying their own habitat. In Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love, the “Great Diaspora of the Human Race” began “more than two millennia ago” and has spread to more than “two thousand colonized planets.” The once “lovely green planet” Earth is a slum planet barely able to support life where only the poorest live, Earth’s natural capital having been consumed over two thousand years ago. Humans have found the ability to rejuvenate themselves and to live almost endless lives, but they are unable to rejuvenate the planets whose natural capital they devour. Humans have not encountered “one race as mean, as nasty, as deadly as our own.” As homo sapiens use up the environments of colonized planets, “human intergalactic colony ships are already headed out into the Endless Deeps,” leaving their ruins behind them.