For the biggest news of the week, I think I will let the President speak for himself.
President Obama's Climate Change Speech: Full Text
"So the question is not whether we need to act. The overwhelming judgment of science – of chemistry and physics and millions of measurements – has put all that to rest. Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest. They’ve acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.
So the question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it’s too late. And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your grandchildren.
As a President, as a father, and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act."
Amidst a tumult of news regarding the EPA's decisions to end a study of fracking-caused water pollution in Wyoming and in another announcement that they were delaying another report until 2016, a new study has found that although the contamination of drinking water is not at epidemic levels as some would have us believe, the industry and supporters are wrong that incidents are overblown. The truth is, like anything done quickly and on a large scale, there will always be problems unless significant resources are dedicated to minimizing them. Fracking deals with such volatile chemicals near water and food sources, that any number of problems can have cascading results that affect hundreds of thousands of people. Now that evidence shows that contamination happens with regular frequency, hopefully we can have a reasonable discussion as to how to improve the process.
Mixed results in study of water, fracking
"The findings represent a middle ground between critics of the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing who claim it causes widespread contamination, and an industry that suggests they are rare or nonexistent."
They say those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We still have not learned how to handle the consequences of our last major "innovation" in energy generation that dropped prices to consumers, but left us with a heavy burden to bear. Perhaps we should fix one problem before causing another.
Quarrels continue over repository for nuclear waste
"Stored fuel requires guards and other continuing expenses, which are significant if there is no reactor nearby. Those expenses eventually fall on federal taxpayers because the Energy Department has defaulted on contracts it signed in the 1980s to begin accepting the wastes for burial in 1998. As a result, financial penalties the federal government must pay to the nuclear utilities for failing to dispose of the waste now amount to hundreds of millions of dollars a year."
This interview highlights that there is no one solution to the economic issues caused by the environmental damage we have all brought upon ourselves. We like to remind others that there are consequences when they take the easy way out, however who will accept the same when it's our turn?
You want to ration my what?
"Economists have used mathematical models when they ask, “Does price or formal rationing perform better in getting basic necessities to everyone?” The conclusion is that if a society has a high degree of income and wealth equality, and large differences in preferences for different goods, then a price system works better. But if there is high inequality, which is the situation almost everywhere today, explicit rationing is better at ensuring that people can meet their needs. In the long run, what is needed is a massive redistribution of economic power."
This is the future of community economic development: the large scale delivery of resources to communities where they assemble and make the products they need. We already do this with food, and with advances in communication, logistics, and manufacturing technology there's no reason your local grocer cannot be located next to your local, green furniture manufacturer.
The distributed future of manufacturing: Think IKEA without the furniture
"'It's like how you give away a recipe, but people still go to your restaurant,' says Anne Filson, co-founder of AtFAB. 'We feel the [do-it-yourself person] is always going to want to be curious and make our furniture themselves, while a consumer may have the aspiration to own our furniture, but may not have the luxury of the time or resources to do it.'"
Happy Friday!
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