In my last C&L post on climate change, I ‘predicted’ (if that’s the right word) that at the current rate of global warming/global dimming by 2030, global temperatures could rise more than two degrees, twice as fast as previous models suggested they would, and trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet – after which nothing could be done to stop the eventual death of the entire planet by the end of the century, which no would be around to see anyway. Pretty grim stuff, really.

First, the bad news. Happy New Year, it’s 2010.

Our politicians, just about all of them from every country, are like children playing on a beach while the tide goes out and fish flop on the sea bed, ignoring the signs of a coming tsunami, too busy squabbling over toys and kicking sand in each other’s eyes. Our current technology is shackled to oil interests, with alternative energy and its technology insufficiently advanced to make much of a difference. According to the figures whizzing by ever so quickly on an excellent website, Worldometer, we’ve consumed nearly 170,000,000 MWh of energy today alone, 156,700,000 of which is from non-renewable sources. We’ve got 15,676 days left until oil runs out completely.

That’s slightly less than 43 years. That’s all – 43 years, and we’ll have sucked those wells dry as a witch’s... bones. My grandmother was born in 1910, she saw the car replace horse-drawn wagons, and by the time she died, she’d witnessed the birth of the internet and a man walking on the moon. A child born this year, 2010, a mere hundred years later, could possibly see that happen in reverse... should we survive that long. By 2030, energy, water and food shortages will be heading toward a ‘perfect storm’, with major upheavals, destabilization and riots worldwide as food prices will rise to become unaffordable to the majority, starvation increases and millions of refugees flee climate ravaged regions.

We are consuming the world’s resources like a plague of locusts, ripping through the earth’s metals, fossil fuels, timber, and by 2030, we’ll have consumed the lot. A study of 1700 species over 35 years, from 1970 to 2005, have declined in numbers 28 percent overall, with a 51 percent decline in tropical species. We’re consuming fresh water at an unsustainable rate, just to produce stuff – the U.S. using 2,483 cubic meters, about the size of an Olympic swimming pool, every year. The amount of land necessary to support one human being is 2.1 hectares. Demand in 2005 amounted to 2.7 hectares per person. The United Arab Emirates, a tiny country of only 32,268 square miles with 6 million people – about one acre per person – needs 23 acres of agricultural land, pasture, forests, fisheries and space for infrastructure, as well as absorb all the waste products and greenhouse gases, for each and every one of those inhabitants. The U.S. is the second-most demanding country per inhabitant, with Kuwait taking bronze. We’re consuming everything we need for long term survival – trees and animals do more than provide us with wood and food, they protect coasts, conserve the soil, replenish the air we breathe, provide us with medicines. Mostly trees, we’ve still got plenty of animals – if you don’t mind domestic sheep and cows replacing more useless wild things. And maybe not so much the trees, either, palm oil production destroying tens of millions of hectares of rain forests along with killing 50 orangutans a year, pushing Sumatran tigers and rhinos and the Asian elephant into functional extinction within ten years.

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USAToday took a look at schools near toxic hot spots - something the EPA has never done, and what they found isn't reassuring:

The result: a ranking of 127,800 public, private and parochial schools based on the concentrations and health hazards of chemicals likely to be in the air outside. The model's most recent version used emissions reports filed by 20,000 industrial sites in 2005, the year Hitchens closed.

The potential problems that emerged were widespread, insidious and largely unaddressed:

• At Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in East Chicago, Ind., the model indicated levels of manganese more than a dozen times higher than what the government considers safe. The metal can cause mental and emotional problems after long exposures. Three factories within blocks of the school — located in one of the most impoverished areas of the state — combined to release more than 6 tons of it in a single year.

"When you start talking about manganese, it doesn't register with people in poverty," says Juan Anaya, superintendent of the School City of East Chicago district. "They have bigger issues to deal with."

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Today President Bush lifted the executive ban on off-shore drilling first enacted by his father is 1990, and had the audacity to blame Democrats for the high price of gas. No, I'm not kidding.

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Bush's cynicism on this issue is simply breath-taking. He's trying to exploit the anger Americans are feeling over the crushing price of fuel by blaming Democrats and challenging them to allow a vote on a bill that would have ZERO immediate impact on fuel costs, but would be very difficult (politically speaking) to oppose. Just like the Republicans do with every possible issue, they feed off voter resentment and play cynical politics with a very serious and complicated problem.

The fact that opening up off-shore drilling sites won't yield more resources for at least a decade doesn't matter. What matters is that Republicans can use the issue as a political bludgeon to bash Democrats with, all the while just prolonging our addiction to foreign oil. Shameful.

Nicole adds: And for all the talk that drilling would provide a psychological boost and drop prices, it's noteworthy that oil is slightly up today at more than $145/barrel. You'd think such a presidential announcement would provide a nice drop -- even if short-lived -- if there was a psychological element to this. Nope.

Senator Obama:

If offshore drilling would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks. But most experts, even within the Bush Administration, concede it would do neither. It would merely prolong the failed energy policies we have seen from Washington for thirty years.

Check below the fold for more responses and a thorough debunking on this farce George Bush and John McCain call an energy policy.

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Elbert Jovante Woods, the son of the former Cincinnati Bengals fullback Ickey Woods, died this Saturday. He was only 16. A cornerback high school football player, he’d been practicing with his varsity team on Wednesday and later collapsed at home. He was rushed to hospital with a severe asthma attack, and put on life-support, but never recovered. His doctors blamed extreme heat and poor air quality for the teen’s death. ‘We've actually had a lot of patients in the last week come in with exacerbation of asthma,’ said Dr. David Bernstein, a University of Cincinnati researcher. ‘We think it's probably related to air quality.’

All of us at C&L extend our heartfelt sympathy to Woods’ family, the loss of a talented, vibrant child a tragedy for anyone. (And aside from anything else, I’d like to note that Jovante was an organ donor, his gift of life is now helping eight other people – the kid was a star, in every sense of the word.)

Like Jovante, I and several other members of the C&L staff, have suffered from life-long asthma. Unlike Jovante, however, I’m lucky enough to live in a part of the world where the air quality is so relatively clean that lichen – which are incredibly sensitive to air pollution – grows on the asphalt of roads, even in cities as big as Auckland. Jovante, on the other hand, lived in Cincinnati, one of the worst cities for air pollution, having been ranked 2nd statewide and 11th nationwide for the worst fine particle, or ‘soot,’ pollution, and ranked 5th nationwide for soot pollution.  Power plants are the largest source of fine particle pollution, which is formed when sulphur dioxide and other pollutants react in the atmosphere.  Fine particle pollution is high year-round in Cincinnati and has routinely exceeded EPA’s standard for what is safe to breathe over the long-term. 

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At a time where most nations haven't even kept their pledges of relief to Haiti, this is very bad timing for the flood-ravaged country of Pakistan.

In the meantime, President Zardari went off on a state visit to France, infuriating Pakistanis:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday that he had never seen anything like the flood disaster in Pakistan and urged foreign donors to speed up assistance to the 20 million people affected.

“I will never forget the destruction and suffering I have witnessed today,” Mr. Ban said after flying over hard-hit areas with President Asif Ali Zardari. “I have witnessed many natural disasters around the world, but nothing like this.”

The secretary general visited Myanmar after Cyclone Nargis struck there in May 2008, killing an estimated 138,000 people. Two months earlier, he flew to Sichuan Province in China, just days after an earthquake killed nearly 90,000 people.

Mr. Ban’s comments also reflected widespread concern about the unfolding disaster in Pakistan. The country is battling militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban and has a weak and unpopular government, while its anemic economy is propped up by international assistance.

The floods, which began more than two weeks ago in the mountainous northwest, have hit about one-quarter of the country, especially its agricultural heartland. While the death toll of about 1,500 is relatively small, the scale of the flooding and the number whose lives have been disrupted are staggering. On Saturday, the prime minister said 20 million people had been made homeless.

The United Nations has appealed for an initial $460 million to provide relief, but only 20 percent has been given.

The relief effort has had nowhere near the success of aid for Haiti after its earthquake:

ISLAMABAD – The global aid response to the Pakistan floods has so far been much less generous than to other recent natural disasters — despite the soaring numbers of people affected and the prospect of more economic ruin in a country key to the fight against Islamist extremists.

Reasons include the relatively low death toll of 1,500, the slow onset of the flooding compared with more immediate and dramatic earthquakes or tsunamis, and a global "donor fatigue" — or at least a Pakistan fatigue.

If you would like to help, you can give at any the following sites [via Pakistani Perspective].

I have such mixed feelings about this. If people's fears about going in the water were ungrounded, I'd be applauding this as the kind of leadership you want to see. But with a million gallons of toxic chemical dispersant in that water, there's no way I'd put my kid in it. How do you feel about it?

PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. — Whether or not he would wade into the water became the question hanging over President Barack Obama’s overnight stay on the Gulf Coast.

Obama answered it within hours of his arrival in Panama City Beach, when he took his daughter Sasha, 9, out for a dip to prove to the nation’s skeptics that the Gulf of Mexico is safe and clean despite the millions of gallons of oil that flowed into it over the past four months.

It’s exactly the image Florida officials wanted: the president and his daughter in the water. The two of them swam at Alligator Point Beach, an area near the restaurant where they ate lunch.

Unfortunately for the reporters traveling with the president, the White House took control of the photograph of the outing.

A staff photographer snapped the image, and the White House released it online while photographers with the news organizations traveling with the president were holed up inside a banquet room in his hotel.

They're calling it the largest natural disaster on record, destroying homes, land, crops and water supplies, and yet the coverage in the U.S. media has been relatively low-key. Sadly, now it looks like things will be getting even worse:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan issued new flood warnings on Thursday that could last into the weekend as government and relief agencies strained to confront the toll from a growing humanitarian disaster.

The new warnings to several cities in Punjab and Sindh Provinces added to the desperation of many across the country facing a daily struggle for survival as Muslims around the world began to observe the holy month of Ramadan.

[...] The United States Embassy in Islamabad announced that two Marine helicopters had arrived in the country, the first of a contingent of 19 American military helicopters that has been ordered to assist the Pakistani government in relief efforts. The United States has pledged $71 million for flood relief, and American officials have called for more.

“Americans have been very focused on other, equally heart-wrenching issues, like Haiti,” Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said Wednesday at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I hope they will turn their attention as well to this extraordinary crisis that Pakistan is facing.”

The aid deliveries could help the United States improve its image here and blunt a growing anti-American sentiment. The Taliban have already urged Pakistanis to shun American aid and have used the crisis to expand their influence and outreach in the flood-affected areas of the northwest.

The United Nations has estimated that at least one-fifth of the country is flooded, but the scope of the damage seems far greater. About 14 million people have been affected by the floods, and 6 million of them are children, according to Unicef. Estimates of the dead have ranged from 1,200 to 1,600.

Thank heavens, this part of the mess is over. But reports from the Gulf seem to indicate BP's abandoned cleanup efforts:

BP Plc started pumping cement into the top of its crippled Gulf of Mexico well, moving closer to permanently plugging the source of the world’s biggest accidental offshore oil spill on record.

“We’ll create a significant milestone and make a major step forward, probably by tomorrow when the cementing is done,” National Incident Commander Thad Allen told reporters today in Washington. “We can all breathe a little easier regarding the potential that we have oil in the Gulf ever again.”

BP pumped mud into the top of its Macondo well earlier this week, pushing back the flow of oil and gas and making the cementing possible. The cement will cure in 24 to 36 hours, and then the company will resume drilling a relief well that aims to permanently plug Macondo from below.

BP temporarily sealed the well on July 15 through a valve stack placed atop Macondo, stopping a leak that spewed 4.9 million barrels of crude since an April 20 drilling-rig explosion, according to a government estimate. The relief well near Macondo will take at least five days to finish drilling its final 100 feet (30 meters).

By filling the well from top to bottom, pushing cement into the oil and gas reservoir, London-based BP will eliminate any possibility of a leak, Allen said. The well is located about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast.

So this is one of the reasons BP didn't want anyone to be in a position to make accurate estimates, I suppose:

The blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico gushed 12 times faster than the government and BP estimated in the early weeks of the crisis and has spilled a whopping 4.9 million barrels, or 205.8 million gallons, according to a more detailed analysis announced late Monday.

BP's Macondo well spewed 62,000 barrels of oil a day initially, and as the reservoir gradually depleted itself, the flow eased to 53,000 barrels a day until the well was finally capped and sealed on July 15, according to scientists in the Flow Rate Technical Group, supervised by the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The new numbers once again have nudged upward the statistical scale of the disaster. If correct -- the government allows for a margin of error of 10 percent -- the flow rate would make this spill significantly larger than the Ixtoc I blowout of 1979, which polluted the southern Gulf of Mexico with 138 million gallons over the course of 10 months. That had been the largest unintentional oil spill in history, surpassed only by the intentional spills in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War.

As if Rand Paul's flippant "No one will miss a hill or two" comment wasn't egregious enough, his latest PR effort on behalf of the coal industry is even worse. In an interview with Details magazine, he makes some of the dumbest and most offensive statements I've heard yet about mountaintop removal.

See, here's what Rand Paul thinks. Seriously.

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