With 170 tons more radioactive water added each day, Japan’s desperate plan for dumping Fukushima water into Pacific Ocean
‘An Appalling Act of Industrial Vandalism’: Japanese Officials Do PR for Plan to Dump Fukushima Water Into Ocean https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/03/appalling-act-industrial-vandalism-japanese-officials-do-pr-plan-dump-fukushima The Japanese government told embassy officials from nearly two dozen countries that releasing the water into the ocean was a “feasible” approach that could be done “with certainty.”According to Kyodo News, officials from the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry claimed releasing the water and evaporating it are both “feasible methods” but said the former could be done “with certainty” because radiation levels could be monitored.
There’s more than one million tons of contaminated water already stored at the plant, with 170 tons more added each day. Utility TEPCO says there will be no more capacity for tanks holding contaminated water by 2022.
As Agence France-Presse reported, “The radioactive water comes from several different sources—including water used for cooling at the plant, and groundwater and rain that seeps into the plant daily—and is put through an extensive filtration process.”
That process still leaves tritium in the water and “has been found to leave small amounts of other radioactive materials,” Kyodo added.
The session for embassy officials followed Friday’s recommendation by a Japanese government panel that releasing the water into the ocean was the most feasible plan. As Reuters reported Friday:
The panel under the industry ministry came to the conclusion after narrowing the choice to either releasing the contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean or letting it evaporate—and opted for the former. Based on past practice it is likely the government will accept the recommendation.
Local fishermen oppose the plan and Reuters noted it is “likely to alarm neighboring countries.”
They’re not alone.
Nuclear policy expert Paul Dorfman said Saturday, “Releasing Fukushima radioactive water into ocean is an appalling act of industrial vandalism.”
Greenpeace opposes the plan as well. Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist the group’s German office, has previously called on Japanese authorities to “commit to the only environmentally acceptable option for managing this water crisis, which is long-term storage and processing to remove radioactivity, including tritium.
Weather reporters joining the battle against climate change
Weathercasters Are Talking About Climate
Change—and How We Can Solve It https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/02/weathercasters-are-talking-about-climate-change-and-how-we-can-solve-it/
In recent years there’s been a seismic shift on climate change within the weather reporting community. MADDIE STONE THIS piece was originally published in Grist and appears here as part of our Climate Desk PARTNERSHIP.
For many years, as the science of human-caused climate change grew ever clearer, TV meteorologists avoided discussing the topic on air. Today, many weathercasters bring up climate change regularly. By embracing the science and presenting it in a simple, locally-relevant manner, TV meteorologists have managed to become some of the most effective and trustworthy climate change educators in the country.
Now some meteorologists are taking the conversation a step further and talking not just about the science of climate change, but how we can solve it.
At the 100th annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in Boston earlier this month, a panel of broadcast meteorologists, climate communicators, and policy experts assembled to discuss how solutions to the climate crisis can be woven into TV weather reporting. While wading into politics on the air can carry career risks for many meteorologists, weathercasters are also uniquely positioned to educate the public about climate solutions in a nonpartisan way, whether that’s by delivering locally tailored forecasts of renewable power production or discussing climate resilience strategies in the wake of a major storm.
“Broadcasters have an unusually good platform from which to engage,” said Ed Maibach, the director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, during the panel. “You not only have the access but consistency of relationships with an audience.”
In recent years there’s been a seismic shift on climate change within the weather reporting community. In a 2011 survey of AMS members and the National Weather Association, less than 20 percent felt sure humans are the primary driver of global warming, a statistic that Maibach attributes, in part, to an “aggressive misinformation campaign by the Heartland Institute,” a climate change–denying think tank. But by 2017 that figure had jumped to 80 percent. That’s thanks largely to the efforts of the educators who organized Climate Matters, a climate reporting resource developed by the nonprofit Climate Central, the AMS, and various governmental and academic partners
Why Arctic glaciers are melting away at an accelerating rate
How the ocean is gnawing away at glaciers, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200203114350.htm
- Date:
- February 3, 2020
- Source:
- Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research
- Summary:
- The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting faster today than it did only a few years ago. The reason: it’s not just melting on the surface — but underwater, too. AWI researchers have now found an explanation for the intensive melting on the ice’s underside, and published their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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The glaciers are melting rapidly: Greenland’s ice is now melting seven times faster than in the 1990s — an alarming discovery, since climate change will likely intensify this melting in the future, causing the sea level to rise more rapidly.
Accordingly, researchers are now working to better understand the underlying mechanisms of this melting. Ice melts on the surface because it is exposed to the sun and rising temperatures. But it has now also begun melting from below — including in northeast Greenland, which is home to several ‘ice tongues’. Each tongue is a strip of ice that has slid down into the ocean and floats on the water — without breaking off from the land ice. The longest ice tongue, part of the ’79° North Glacier’, is an enormous 80 km long. Over the past 20 years, it has experienced a dramatic loss of mass and thickness, because it’s been melting not just on the surface, but also and especially from below.
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Too much heat from the ocean
A team led by oceanographer Dr Janin Schaffer from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven has now identified the source of this intense underwater melting. The conclusions of their study, which the experts have just released in the journal Nature Geoscience, are particularly unsettling because the melting phenomenon they discovered isn’t unique to the 79° North Glacier, which means it could produce similar effects elsewhere. For the purposes of the study, the researchers conducted the first extensive ship-based survey of the ocean floor near the glacier, which revealed the presence of a two-kilometre-wide trough, from the bottom of which comparatively warm water from the Atlantic is channelled directly toward the glacier. But that’s not all: in the course of a detailed analysis of the trough, Janin Schaffer spotted a bathymetric sill, a barrier that the water flowing over the seafloor has to overcome. Once over the hump, the water rushes down the back of the sill — and under the ice tongue. Thanks to this acceleration of the warm water mass, large amounts of heat from the ocean flow past the tongue every second, melting it from beneath. To make matters worse, the layer of warm water that flows toward the glacier has grown larger: measured from the seafloor, it now extends 15 metres higher than it did just a few years ago. “The reason for the intensified melting is now clear,” Schaffer says. “Because the warm water current is larger, substantially more warmth now makes its way under the ice tongue, second for second.”
Other regions are also affected
In order to determine whether the phenomenon only manifests at the 79° North Glacier or also at other sites, the team investigated a neighbouring region on Greenland’s eastern coast, where another glacier, the Zachariæ Isstrøm, juts out into the sea, and where a large ice tongue had recently broken off from the mainland. Working from the surface of an ice floe, the experts measured water temperatures near the ocean floor. According to Schaffer: “The readings indicate that here, too, a bathymetric sill near the seafloor accelerates warm water toward the glacier. Apparently, the intensive melting on the underside of the ice at several sites throughout Greenland is largely produced by the form of the seafloor.” These findings will ultimately help her more accurately gauge the total amount of meltwater that the Greenland Ice Sheet loses every year.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Japanese expert panel recommends releasing Fukushima radioactive water into the ocean
Fukushima radioactive water should be released into ocean, say Japan experts, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/01/fukushima-radioactive-water-should-be-released-into-ocean-say-japan-experts
Build-up of contaminated water from wrecked nuclear plant has been sticking point in clean-up likely to take decades, A panel of experts advising Japan’s government on a disposal method for radioactive water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant has recommended releasing it into the ocean, a move likely to alarm neighbouring countries.
The panel, under the industry ministry, came to the conclusion after narrowing the choice to either releasing the contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean or letting it evaporate – and opted for the former. Based on past practice, it is likely the government will accept the recommendation.
The build-up of contaminated water at Fukushima has been a sticking point in the clean-up, which is likely to last decades, especially as the Olympics are due to be held in Tokyo this year with some events less than 60km (35 miles) from the wrecked plant.
Neighbouring South Korea has retained a ban on imports of seafood from Japan’s Fukushima region imposed after the nuclear disaster and summoned a senior Japanese embassy official last year to explain how the Fukushima water would be dealt with. Its athletes are planning to bring their own radiation detectors and food to the Games.
In 2018, Tokyo Electric apologised after admitting its filtration systems had not removed all dangerous material from the water, and the site is running out of room for storage tanks.
But it plans to remove all radioactive particles from the water except tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that is hard to separate and is considered to be relatively harmless.
“Compared to evaporation, ocean release can be done more securely,” the committee said, pointing to common practice around the world where normally operating nuclear stations release water that contains tritium into the sea.
The recommendation needs to be confirmed by the head of the panel, Nagoya University professor emeritus Ichiro Yamamoto, and submitted to the government at a later date that has not been set.
Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, has collected nearly 1.2m tonnes of contaminated water from the cooling pipes used to keep fuel cores from melting since the plant was crippled by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The water is stored in huge tanks that crowd the site.
The utility says it will run out of room to store the water by 2022.
Backstory: Inside the destroyed Fukushima plant – radiation, risk and reporting
Backstory: Inside the destroyed Fukushima plant – radiation, risk and reporting, 29 Jan 2020,
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By Aaron Sheldrick, OKUMA, Japan (Reuters) – Reuters was recently given exclusive access to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, where three reactors melted down in 2011 after a powerful earthquake and tsunami overwhelmed the seaside facility. It was my fourth visit to the plant since the disaster to report on a massive clean-up. Work to dismantle the plant has taken nearly a decade so far, but with Tokyo due to host the Olympics this summer – including some events less than 60 kilometers (38 miles) from the power station – there has been renewed focus on safeguarding the venues. Nearly 10 years into the decades-long clean-up some progress has been made, with potentially dangerous spent fuel removed from the top of one damaged reactor building and removal underway from another. But the melted fuel inside the reactors has yet to be extracted and areas around the station remain closed to residents. Some towns have been reopened further away but not all residents have returned. This time I was taken to the site’s water treatment building, a cavernous hall where huge machines called Advanced Liquid Processing Systems (ALPS) are used to filter water contaminated by the reactors. On my first visit in 2012 I had to wear full protective gear put on at an operations base located in a sports facility about 20 kilometers south of Fukushima Daiichi called J-Village, where the Olympic torch relay will start in March, then taken to the site by bus. This time I was driven by van from a railway station in Tomioka, a town re-opened in 2017, about 9 kilometers away with no precautions. More than 90% of the plant is deemed to have so little radioactivity that few precautions are needed. Nevertheless, reporting from there was not easy. Before entering the plant itself, which is about the size of 400 football fields, I was asked to take off my shoes and socks, given a dosimeter – a device that measures radiation levels – three pairs of blue socks, a pair of cloth gloves, a simple face mask, a cotton cap, a helmet and a white vest with clear panels to carry my equipment and display my pass. I put on all three pairs of socks and the rest of the gear given to me, later including rubber boots. I was to change in and out of different pairs of these boots many times – I lost count – color coded according to the zone we passed through, each time putting them in plastic bags that would be discarded after use. After reaching the ALPS building in a small bus, I was decked out in protective equipment, a full-body Du Pont Tyvek suit along with two sets of heavy surgeon-like latex gloves that were taped fast to the outfit. I also had to put on a full-face mask after taking off my spectacles since it would not fit otherwise and told to speak as loudly as possible due to the muffling effect of the gear …….. About 4,000 workers are tackling the cleanup at Fukushima, including dismantling the reactors. Many wear protective gear for entering areas with higher radiation. The plant resembles a huge construction site strewn in areas with twisted steel and crumpled concrete, along with cars that can no longer be used, while huge tanks to hold water contaminated by contact with the melted fuel in the reactors increasingly crowd the site. Some wreckage is still so contaminated it is left in place or moved to a designated area for the radiation to decay while the important work on the reactor buildings is underway……….. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-2020-fukushima-backstory/backstory-inside-the-destroyed-fukushima-plant-radiation-risk-and-reporting-idUSKBN1ZS0IR  |
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Saugeen Ojibway Nation vote ends company’s plans to store nuclear waste near Lake Huron
The decision came following years of Michigan lawmakers asking Ontario Power Generation to reconsider. It took the vote of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation of Ontario Friday to shift the discussions away from the lake. Of 1,232 ballots cast, 1,058 were against the site and 170 in favor.
We were not consulted when the nuclear industry was established in our Territory,” said a news release on the vote. “Over the past forty years, nuclear power generation in Anishnaabekiing has had many impacts on our Communities, and our Land and Waters, including the production and accumulation of nuclear waste.”
The release said that SON leaders will work with Ontario Power Generation “to find an acceptable solution for the waste.
“We will continue to work with OPG and others in the nuclear industry on developing new solutions for nuclear waste in our Territory,” said Chief Greg Nadjiwon of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation. “We know that the waste currently held in above-ground storage at the Bruce site will not go away. SON is committed to developing these solutions with our communities and ensuring Mother Earth is protected for future generations. We will continue to ensure that our People will lead these processes and discussions.” ……….
Site had been sought since 2010
On Jan. 24, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization announced it had signed agreements with landowners east of Lake Huron in South Bruce, Ontario, which would allow land access for studies for the site. …….
In January, southeast Michigan state representatives Gary Howell, R-Lapeer, and Shane Hernandez, R-Port Huron, issued statements against locations near Kincardine and Lake Huron. They said the Kincardine locations are too close to Lake Huron, and expressed concerns about drinking water and public health if something went wrong at the site.
They called on the United States Congress to do everything in its power to stop the development. https://www.thetimesherald.com/story/news/2020/02/03/plans-store-nuclear-waster-near-lake-huron-halted/4587366002/
The containers the U.S. plans to use for nuclear waste storage may corrode
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The containers the U.S. plans to use for nuclear waste storage may corrode
Groundwater exposure could cause the metal and glass binding the waste to break down. Science News, By Maria Temming, 3 Feb 2020Containers that the U.S. government plans to use to store dangerous nuclear waste underground may be more vulnerable to water damage than previously thought.Millions of liters of highly radioactive waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons program are currently held in temporary storage units across the country. The government’s game plan for permanently disposing of this material is to mix radioactive waste into glass or ceramic, seal it in stainless steel canisters and bury it deep underground. Such a nuclear waste dump may be constructed under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but local opposition has stalled the project (SN: 1/16/02). Now, new lab experiments reveal another potential snafu in the scheme. When a nuclear waste package is exposed to groundwater, chemical interactions between a stainless steel canister and its glass or ceramic contents may cause the materials to corrode slightly faster than expected, researchers report online January 27 in Nature Materials. That corrosion risks exposing the radioactive waste stored in the container. Xiaolei Guo, a materials scientist at Ohio State University in Columbus, and colleagues discovered this problem by pressing pieces of stainless steel against glass or ceramic and submerging the materials in a saltwater solution, simulating groundwater exposure. When water seeped into the boundary between the stainless steel and ceramic or glass, the steel released ferrous iron, ferric iron and other components that created an acidic environment at the metal’s surface. That acidity corroded the neighboring ceramic or glass. ……..https://www.sciencenews.org/article/containers-u-s-plans-use-nuclear-waste-storage-may-corrode |
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Electric Cooperatives Channel Solar Resources to Rural American Communities — Mining Awareness +
Big TVA style projects are no longer needed and appear to be prone to corruption. Community cooperatives have a long and successful track record since the 1930s and are turning to renewables. Household and neighborhood cooperative solar is also now feasible. “Roosevelt’s New Deal era sparked the creation of 900 electric cooperatives (co-ops) that today […]
via Electric Cooperatives Channel Solar Resources to Rural American Communities — Mining Awareness +
February 3 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “If There’s A Silver Lining In The Clouds Of Choking Smoke It’s That This May Be A Tipping Point” • As a climate scientist on sabbatical in Australia, I’ve had plenty of conversations about the climate crisis lately. Although the Murdoch media make it seem as if there’s plenty of debate, the reality […]
An example of nuclear corporations conglomerate formed in desperate effort to promote Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy and ČEZ Announce Small Modular Reactor Technology Collaboration in the Czech Republic. WILMINGTON, North Carolina—February 3, 2020—GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and ČEZ, a. s. (ČEZ), an integrated electricity conglomerate, have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding through which the companies have agreed to examine the economic and technical feasibility of potentially constructing a BWRX-300 in the Czech Republic…… https://www.powermag.com/press-releases/ge-hitachi-nuclear-energy-and-cez-announce-small-modular-reactor-technology-collaboration-in-the-czech-republic/
Fukushima Thyroid Cancer Symposium live stream 3 February 2020
The Symposium is mostly in Japanese (awaiting translations for child cancer data)
Posted to Nuclear-news.net
Posted by Shaun McGee
Posted on 3 February 2020
Talks about the recommended treatment for Thyroid Cancer in Adults in different countries.
Partial removal advice, though an option, in most (Apart from one EU group) countries is generally ignored for full removal and resultant life long medication.
Some interesting notes I took From that part of the Symposium
3000 approx Thyroid cancers per year in the USA averaged (Pop 350 million) and 550 per year approx in China (pop 1.5 billion)
Higher rates of Adult Thyroid cancer in Korea and Japan for adults compared to rest of world. Korea has a slightly higher rate than Japan
Maybe the choice of total removal given is because of risky outcomes for Partial mastectomies ie secondary cancer risk concerns?
Full Session on You tube (Still live as I post) below. Peter Angelos presentation (in English) with slides about 120 minutes in
Update; Video was removed by the user. There are only five (at the time of looking) videos on the Our Planet TV Youtube channel with the Peter Angelos presentation not present.
Update 2: I have not been able to confirm if the China figure is a national or a provincial figure. I will update a clarification to this point when I contact the people I have messaged. I will then be doing a full report on this presentations findings with some other info that has come to my attention – Shaun
Maybe the video will be uploaded later, the channel can be found here;
https://www.youtube.com/user/OPTVstaff/videos
【ライブ】２日・３日国際シンポ 「県民健康調査のいま：甲状腺 」
With thanks to Our Planet TV for streaming service
Europe to be the first carbon neutral continent, and WITH NUCLEAR POWER EXCLUDED
Renew Extra 1st Feb 2020, Dave Elliott: With Climate Change at the top of the agenda, the EU aims to be the first carbon neutral continent, working towards net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with a new climate law being enacted soon. That’s taken some fighting for and fiddling, given the opposition from heavy coal users like Poland, but there’s a proposed Just Transition mechanism to help countries like that move to carbon neutrality, with nuclear excluded from support for this.
So renewables should boom even more. Renewables have
certainly been doing well. Germany will soon get around half of its power
from renewables, Portugal is already at over 54%, Denmark near 60%, while
Sweden is at 66% and Austria over 70%. By 2030 some of these countries
could be getting near 100% of their electricity from renewables and should
also be beginning to meet significant shares of their heat and transport
needs using renewables. Sweden already gets around 54% of all its energy
from renewables, Norway and Iceland are both at around 70%.
https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2020/02/there-have-been-divergent-views-on.html
Indigenous community votes down proposed nuclear waste bunker near Lake Huron,
‘We were not consulted when the nuclear industry was established in our territory’,https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/indigenous-community-votes-down-proposed-nuclear-waste-bunker-near-lake-huron The Canadian Press, Colin Perkel. February 1, 2020
TORONTO — An Indigenous community has overwhelmingly rejected a proposed underground storage facility for nuclear waste near Lake Huron, likely spelling the end for a multibillion-dollar, politically fraught project years in the making.
After a year of consultations and days of voting, the 4,500-member Saugeen Ojibway Nation announced late Friday that 85 per cent of those casting ballots had said no to accepting a deep geologic repository at the Bruce nuclear power plant near Kincardine, Ont.
“We were not consulted when the nuclear industry was established in our territory,” SON said in a statement. “Over the past 40 years, nuclear power generation in Anishnaabekiing has had many impacts on our communities, and our land and waters.”
The province’s giant utility, Ontario Power Generation, had wanted to build the repository 680 metres underground about 1.2 kilometres from Lake Huron as permanent storage for low and intermediate-level radioactive waste. The project was tentatively approved in May 2015.
In August 2017, then-environment minister Catherine McKenna paused the process to ensure buy-in from Indigenous people in the area
While Kincardine was a “willing host,” the relative proximity of the proposed bunker to the lake sparked a backlash elsewhere in Canada and the United States. Politicians, environmentalists and scores of communities expressed opposition.
Successive federal governments have withheld final approval. In August 2017, then-environment minister Catherine McKenna paused the process — the last in a string of delays for the project — to ensure buy-in from Indigenous people in the area.
The generating company, which insisted the stable bedrock would safely contain the waste, items such as contaminated reactor components and mops, said it respected SON’s decision.
“OPG will explore other options and will engage with key stakeholders to develop an alternate site-selection process,” Ken Hartwick, head of OPG, said in a statement shortly after the vote was announced. “Any new process would include engagement with Indigenous peoples as well as interested municipalities.”
The apparent end of the road for the project comes shortly after the federally-mandated Nuclear Waste Management Organization said it was making progress toward choosing a site for storing millions of far more toxic spent nuclear fuel bundles.
The organization, comprising several nuclear plant operators, said it had struck deals with landowners in South Bruce — about 30 minutes east of Kincardine — that will allow it to begin site tests. The only other site under consideration for high-level waste storage is in Ignace in northern Ontario.
Despite the rejection of OPG’s proposal, the utility said it planned to continue a relationship “based on mutual respect, collaboration and trust” with the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, which comprises the Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation and the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation.
Chippewas of Saugeen Chief Lester Anoquot called the vote — 170 for and 1,058 against — a “historic milestone and momentous victory” for the community.
“We worked for many years for our right to exercise jurisdiction in our territory and the free, prior and informed consent of our people to be recognized,” Anoquot said. “We didn’t ask for this waste to be created and stored in our territory.”
At the same time, Anoquot said, the vote showed the need for a new solution for the hazardous waste, a process he said could take many years.
Ontario depends heavily on nuclear power for its electricity but a permanent storage solution for the increasing amounts of waste now stored above ground has proven elusive. The radioactive material, particular from used fuel, remains highly toxic for centuries.
The utility insists exhaustive science shows a repository in stable and impermeable rock offers the best solution.
“Permanent and safe disposal is the right thing to do for future generations,” Hartwick said.
Climate strategies to stave off ecological disaster
 Media on Climate Crisis: Don’t Organize, Mourn, , NEIL DEMAUSE 31 JAN 2920 The year 2019 was, by all accounts, the year of climate awareness. To an unprecedented degree, in the three decades since scientists first warned of the imminent dangers of rising carbon emissions and the resulting global warming, we were transfixed by record-setting heat waves, wildfires in California and Australia, and, of course, Greta Thunberg’s sailboat visit to the US, capped off by her selection as Time‘s Person of the Year (12/23–30/19).Yet the newfound attention to climate came with a strange disjunction: Being aware of this massive threat to humanity hasn’t translated into much concerted action to stop it. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the New Yorker (1/13/20):If in the past year (or the past decade) the world began to understand how dangerous climate change is, it certainly didn’t act like it. In the past ten years, more CO2 was emitted than in all of human history up to the election of JFK.
That same disconnect—recognizing the reality of climate change, but not who’s responsible or what could be done about it—is reflected in today’s media coverage of climate. ………….. It’s not that it’s hard to find explanations of which climate strategies would provide the greatest hope for staving off disaster. Project Drawdown, a site that GRADES POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS BY THEIR IMPACT,ranks better management of refrigerants, switching to wind and solar power, and changes in diet and food waste as among the most immediately effective measures. (Electric vehicles, a popular focus for those arguing that technology will save the day, rank a disappointing 26th, in part because they have a large carbon cost to manufacture and won’t help if they’re charged with fossil-fuel-generated electricity; biofuels only made it to 34th, though DRAWDOWN does include them as a possible stopgap measure until more truly renewable energy sources can be brought online.)
The Exponential Roadmap, a study by 22 Swedish scholars, rates switching to solar power, increasing recycling of materials, retrofitting buildings to be more energy-efficient, increasing use of electric vehicles and mass transit, switching to a plant-based diet and reducing deforestation among the most important actions to forestall the climate apocalypse.
None of these methods, climate experts warn, will be possible on a large scale solely by individual action; electric cars, as just one example, are still seen as too expensive and having too few charging stations, two items that are unlikely to be solved without a dramatic shift in government policies. So while that may spare readers from any unnecessary “self-flagellation,” the important corollary is that preventing climate catastrophe will require both individual consumer action and governmental action—as well as addressing the political reasons why governments have been so slow to act.
The media’s shift toward acknowledging the reality of climate change is welcome, if three decades too late, given that the IPCC has been sounding essentially the same alarm about a warming planet since 1988 (Guardian, 3/30/14). But the public presentation of the climate crisis remains carefully constrained to focus on the horrors awaiting us, not on what can be done to ward off the worst, or who stands in the way of doing so. When climate coverage leaves that out, it amounts to mourning the Earth without trying to save it.
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“Mercenary science”- crooked science funded by corporations
While the vast majority of scientists, both employed publicly and privately, are honest and do their work as part of a larger quest for truth, there are a few notable exceptions. Specifically, a few mercenary science consulting firms have been very effective at helping corporations continue selling harmful chemicals and drugs long after they should have stopped.
Michaels, who has a new book on the topic titled “The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception,” has been studying this problem for years, in part by virtue of his 8-year tenure at OSHA. Now a public health professor at George Washington University, Michaels’ book pulls back the curtain on the way that dark money and for-profit science is quite literally killing Americans.
David Michaels: Mercenary science means [when scientists] produce studies that aren’t designed to better understand the world, or they help make the world a better place — which is why most scientists are in the business of science – but to defend products and to defend corporations. And often to influence regulation or to slow the compensation of victims.
This is the Enron-ization of science. It’s created a fiction in order to promote an actual game, fiction around science. And it is quite mercenary. In fact, this phrase is not one that I invented, but actually is used by these consulting companies whose business model is to provide some using reports and testimonies to corporations, so they can continue to market dangerous products or activities without being hindered by regulation or by compensating the people they’ve hurt.
What would you say is the most shocking, real-life example of something like this — of mercenary science becoming embedded in mainstream discourse?
I think the most famous [example] is in the tobacco industry… who didn’t invent it, but who certainly gained the most from it — and in climate change. There’s actually some overlap between some of the same mercenary scientists in both examples.
But as I write [in my book], this is now become standard operating procedure for virtually every industry, and in many cases, it’s the same so-called scientists who are involved in doing it. Nowadays, the instinct of corporate leaders — CEOs and executives —when there’s an allegation that their product could be causing harm is to say, “How can we show that it isn’t causing harm?” Not, “how can we determine whether or not we cause harm,” and then figure out what to do about it.
Other examples [include] opioids, and essentially how a few pharmaceutical companies misrepresented the studies to make it look like these opioids were not addictive. We have a death toll of tens of thousands a year as a result of that…………
David Michael’s new book, “The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception,” is out from Oxford University Press on February 3, 2020. https://www.salon.com/2020/02/02/the-art-of-scientific-deception-how-corporations-use-mercenary-science-to-evade-regulation/
1.This Month
Zoom webinar – “Nuclear Winter: The Environmental Consequences of a Nuclear Exchange.”
April 7th at 11:30 am PST / 2:30 pm EST
“Nuclear Winter: The Environmental Consequences of a Nuclear Exchange”
Join us for an informative webinar with renowned atmospheric scientist, Professor Brian Toon, as he discusses the environmental risks and global impacts of a nuclear war. Despite the potential damage caused by the blast from even small nuclear weapons, many countries continue to invest in and expand nuclear arsenals. Professor Toon will provide a scientific assessment of civilian fatalities, agricultural failures, climate concerns, and complications with food supply that would follow any international nuclear conflict. We need to plan how to prevent nuclear conflict and avoid catastrophe. Politicians and military planners must be made aware of global climate and agricultural complications that would ensue. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from, and engage in, this vital conversation
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