New York City imitates Kansas City, for once

They now want to tear down their airport, too.

Final push to save landmark 'flying saucer’ terminal

"Hell to pay" in Kansas and the plains states

The New York Times ran an important article today (one more), this time on the Great Plains overall but Kansas, in specific, and how our water aquifers below ground are running dry:

Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust

Just a bit from the article:

HASKELL COUNTY, Kan. — Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every minute.

Last year, Mr. Yost was coaxing just 300 gallons from the earth, and pumping up sand in order to do it. By harvest time, the grit had robbed him of $20,000 worth of pumps and any hope of returning to the bumper harvests of years past.

“That’s prime land,” he said not long ago, gesturing from his pickup at the stubby remains of last year’s crop. “I’ve raised 294 bushels of corn an acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he said, “it’s over.”

...Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.

On some farms, big center-pivot irrigators — the spindly rigs that create the emerald circles of cropland familiar to anyone flying over the region — now are watering only a half-circle. On others, they sit idle altogether.

Two years of extreme drought, during which farmers relied almost completely on groundwater, have brought the seriousness of the problem home. In 2011 and 2012, the Kansas Geological Survey reports, the average water level in the state’s portion of the aquifer dropped 4.25 feet — nearly a third of the total decline since 1996.

And that is merely the average. “I know my staff went out and re-measured a couple of wells because they couldn’t believe it,” said Lane Letourneau, a manager at the State Agriculture Department’s water resources division. “There was a 30-foot decline.”

And as it says above, we see this coming and we've seen it coming. There have been warnings. We can't go on like this forever. It isn't, it wasn't sustainable. We can't just take and take and take.

Something's got to change.

What has struck me most about our current situation, both about drought and the 2008 financial crisis, the worst in 80 years, since the Great Depression, is that it is, in those two ways--the financial crisis and drought--so very much like those years, the 30's. That is, people hurt by both the financial crisis and the drought.

In the case of the Depression, it was all man-made.

Turns out, really, it could be argued this one is, too.

As if that isn't enough, Robert Reich, writing from Europe today, posts the following on Facebook:

At a time when you'd expect nations to band together to gain bargaining power against global capital, the opposite is occurring: Xenophobia is breaking out all over. 

Here in Britain, the UK Independence Party -- which wants to get out of the European Union -- is rapidly gaining ground, becoming the third most popular party in the country, according to a new poll for The Independent on Sunday. Almost one in five people plan to vote for it in the next general election. Ukip's overall ratings have risen four points to 19 per cent in the past month, despite Prime Minister David Cameron's efforts to wrest back control of the crucial debate over Britain's relationship with the European Union. 

Right-wing nationalist parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe as well. In the U.S., not only are Republicans sounding more nationalistic of late (anti-immigrant, anti-trade), but they continue to push "states rights" -- as states increasingly battle against one another to give global companies ever larger tax breaks and subsidies. 

WWIII, anybody?

One last thing from Facebook today that wraps this all up:

Anyone care yet?

Additional link: 

When the Wells Go Dry in the Great Plains

Republicans and Libertarians: You really want to do away with the EPA?

For any Republican or Libertarian or anyone else in America who think it is or would be a great idea to do away with the Environmental Protection Agency--the EPA--or who think there's too much "red tape" from the EPA, I just have to ask if they want us to be like China.

The above situation, announced today and going on now in China, is just one more example of what a nation and an economy is like and would be like if we don't have protections from corporations, especially, so we have and keep cleaner water, air and soil.

A little from the article (link at bottom):

"Young and old residents of the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan were advised to stay indoors on Monday after a thick haze blanketed the city of nine million people, official media said.

Described by residents as opaque with yellowish and greenish tinges, the fug descended suddenly in the morning, prompting people to rush to put on face masks, witnesses told AFP."



"The official Xinhua news agency quoted the environmental protection department of Hubei province saying in a statement: "Children, the elderly and people with heart or respiratory diseases are advised to stay indoors."

Xinhua said straw burning was the cause and denied there had been any industrial accidents in or near Wuhan, after Internet rumours suggested there had been an explosion at a chemical complex northeast of the city."

In this case, the Chinese not only have this huge problem with their air quality, they don't even know what it is or what it's from.

And that's the kind of world we want to live in?

No, no thank you, very much. I'd like to keep an effective EPA, thank you.

It reminds me of the Native American quote: "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money."

Link: http://news.yahoo.com/chinas-wuhan-city-covered-mysterious-haze-145340073.html

While they were screwing us on this debt deal...

...the Republicans were also putting riders into bills last week to strip our environmental laws of any real "teeth". From The New York Times this past Sunday: Concealed Weapons Against the Environment. "While almost no one was looking, House Republicans embarked last week on a broad assault on the nation’s environmental laws, using as their weapon the 2012 spending bill for the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. When debate began Monday, the bill included an astonishing 39 anti-environmental riders — so called because they ride along on appropriations bills even though they have nothing to do with spending and are designed to change policy, in this case disastrously. Riders generally are not subjected to hearings or extensive debate, and many would not survive on their own. They are often written in such a way that most people, even many Capitol Hill insiders, need a guide to understand them. They are, in short, bad policy pushed forward through a bad legislative process. A rider can be removed from the bill only with a vote to strike it. The Democrats managed one big victory on Wednesday when, by a vote of 224 to 202, the House struck one that would have gutted the Endangered Species Act by blocking the federal government from listing any new species as threatened or endangered and barring it from protecting vital habitat — a provision so extreme that even some Republicans could not countenance it." To show how they're screwing us and the environment, go to this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/opinion/sunday/concealed-weapons-against-the-environment.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=environment&st=Search

Quote of the day--on the planet

"We're in a giant car, heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit."
--David Suzuki, Canadian environmentalist, scientist and broadcaster, b. 1936

Reminds me of the people denying climate change---or global warming or whatever they want to call it--like how we live on this planet is sustainable.

Puh--leeze.

The Chinese failure (amended/updated)

First the Chinese gave us toys laced with lead and poison for our children to play with, be exposed to and quite likely harm.

Of course, part of that is our own fault for having the adult-child George W. Bush in the White House where he denuded our EPA which was supposed to protect us from such things but that's another story.

Then, the Chinese poisoned their own children because some greedy idiot put melamine in their infant's formula food.

Better them than us, right?

All this time, they're poisoning their own water and air, horribly, but, hey, they want to be a wealthy superpower fast.

And of course they have the worst mines and mining accidents on the planet.

Sure, I'd like to see them raise their people out of the abject poverty they've experienced for hundreds of years, sure, but not at any price. Not at the price of unbridled, poisoning capitalism and consumerism.

Next, they poisoned lots of Americans recently in the South with their drywall products which virtually immediately sickened the residents who were exposed to it.

"But it was a bargain!"

Sick.

Now, check this out--a Chinese freighter is sitting on the Great Barrier Reef, down in Australia, about to foul that incredible, unique, magnificent and fragile ecosytem.

You know what? The world needs to tell the Chinese "enough!" "We've had it. We aren't taking this crap any more."

But wait.

That's what they should tell us, the US, too, given our near-destruction of the world economy, given the banking and mortgage mess we inflicted on the world.

Never mind.

Update on the stranded tanker at the G.B. Reef: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100405/ts_nm/us_australia_ship;_ylt=AiOEm81ILnRvmW47WjbF48as0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNscDhraDYxBGFzc2V0A25tLzIwMTAwNDA1L3VzX2F1c3RyYWxpYV9zaGlwBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDNgRwb3MDMwRwdANob21lX2Nva2UEc2VjA3luX2hlYWRsaW5lX2xpc3QEc2xrA3N0cmFuZGVkc2hpcA--