Badlands Journal

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“The risk of radiation poisoning is the furthest thing from our minds as we shop for everyday items like handbags, furniture, buttons, chain link fences and cheese graters. Unfortunately, it turns out that our trust is misplaced thanks to sketchy
government oversight of recycled materials.

“The discovery of a radioactive cheese grater led to an investigation that found thousands of additional consumer products to be contaminated. The source is recycled metals tainted with Cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope that can cause cancer with prolonged exposure." ... “The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates there are some 500,000 unaccounted for radioactively contaminated metal objects in the U.S., and the NRC estimates that figure is around is 20 million pounds of contaminated waste….

“In 2006 in Texas, for example, a recycling facility inadvertently created 500,000 pounds of radioactive steel byproducts after melting metal contaminated with Cesium-137, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission records. In Florida in 2001, another recycler unintentionally did the same, and wound up with 1.4 million pounds of radioactive material.”

2-4-13

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--from Ecological Rift, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clrk, and Richard York, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p. 101.

The ecological blinders of neoclassical economics, which serves to exclude the planet from its preanalytic vision, are well illustrated by a debate that took place within the World Bank, related by ecological economist Herman Daly. As Daly tells the story, in 1992 (when Summers was chief economist of the World Bank and Daly worked for the Bank) the annual World Development Report was to focus on the theme Development and the Environment:

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.

A few tools for digging our own graves
Submitted: Dec 29, 2012
By:
Badlands Journal editorial board

Cities with highest unemployment:

    El Centro, Calif. 27.2
    Yuma, Ariz. 23.7
    Merced, Calif. 16.9
    Yuba City, Calif. 16.8
    Fresno, Calif. 15.7
    Modesto, Calif. 15.5
    Stockton, Calif. 15.5
    Visalia-Porterville, Calif. 15
    Hanford-Corcoran, Calif. 14.7
    Madera-Chowchilla, Calif. 14.3

Cities with the lowest unemployment rates were as follows:

    Bismarck, N.D. 2.8
    Fargo, N.D. 3.1
    Lincoln, Neb. 3.2
    Burlington-South Burlington, Vt. 3.7
    Sioux Falls, S.D. 3.8
    Iowa City, Iowa 3.8
    Ames, Iowa 3.8
    Logan, Utah 3.9
    Mankato-North Mankato, Minn. 4
    Midland, Texas 4.1

(www.californiacitynews.org, 1-4-12)

________ has to grow (or else it is in crisis) and its very logic and motivated force impels growth.

________ has to grow (or else it is in crisis) and its very logic and motivated force impels growth.

Dear Green Goivernment,

You never tire of telling us how massive solar projects, the investments of hedge funds and Wall Street banks, must be approved b our local government officials (in charge of land-use decisions in California); you are considering modifications to the California Environmental Quality Act that will not doubt include weakening review of alternative energy projects; and lately we are being told that these projects, at least those on prime farmland, will be "mitigated" through perptetual agricultural easements on nearby farmland (assuming such easements are for sale by willing sellers); and of course all this must be done to lessen carbon dioxide emmissions because they cause global warming (a double plus ungood thing): 

But, what is never mentioned is if these massive solar projects -- there are so many more of them in the pipeline there may not be enough prime farmland left in the state to "mitigate" for all of them -- is the number of polluting gas and coal-fired plants in other states that are being taken off line are a result of the addition of the green and clean energy now available or soon to be available.

This should lead Californians that still have their wits about them to assume the obvious: that the power produced by alternative energy sources will not replace existing power sources; it will merely augment them and provide a comfortable excess of energy available for the next growth boom.