Chaos is the new Normal {Earthship Wednesday}

by eKos

Welcome to the eKos Earthship, your one-stop-shop for green diaries and series.

Tonight's editor: LaughingPlanet

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So did ya hear? The one about the stuff hitting the fan?

Yeah, so far 2010 is the year of mega-disasters.

Jan 10: Haiti quake
April 20: BP's Big Problem
Jul 30: Russian wildfires
Jul 31: Pakistan's floods

At least 3 of those things can be chalked up to our fossil foolish bender last century.

And yes, there are others.

I got 4 words for ya:

1. Get

2. Used

3. To

4. It

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Beneath the fold you will find news and notes, community announcements, and our eco-diary roundup.

All views expressed by today's editor do not necessarily represent those of eKos or eKos listed diarists.

continued at Daily Kos....

EcoAdvocates: A green model in the Gulf

by Meteor Blades

Five years ago, a natural disaster plus human callousness and ineptitude combined to kill more than 1800 people on the Gulf Coast and plunged an American city into a nightmare from which it has far from fully recovered. Thousands of New Orleanians still live in homesick exile. Four of the hospitals that once served the east side of the city remain permanently closed. Crime is out of control. We had a chance right then, as a nation, to make the catastrophe of 2005 into a flex moment, a window of opportunity not merely to rebuild but rather to go boldly in a new direction, a green trajectory that would restore greater New Orleans and the Katrina-obliterated towns of  Mississippi to ecological health with sustainable economies.

But, of course, the Cheney-Bush administration was in office and it had other fish to fry. Once it had completed the botch-job of its immediate response and handed out a few bucks and a few FEMA trailers, it more or less vanished from the scene. As for spurring a move down a green path in a big way, puhleez. Those were the days when the White House was still in its climate-change denier phase. Local politicians suffered their own form of myopia.

This year’s disaster along the Gulf Coast offers us another flex moment. But we can easily ignore this one, too, if we don’t wise up. And you can already taste that unwise attitude in the air. The attitude which says that the roiling gush of oil into the Gulf will probably never spew from that particular well again so we can just do a little more work with the mops and get back to business as usual. Whew! Sure, residual oil in unknown quantities clings to the sea floor, unknown long-term effects may afflict the Gulf’s water-dwelling creatures, unknown damage may be done to those who depend on those creatures for a living, and a hydrocarbons driller or two may screw up another high-tech puncture. But, every day, with the obvious crisis gone - the one with the camera focused on it - these and other problems will capture less and less attention.

We’re told, obviously so, that the immediate tasks in a disaster are to save lives, save livelihoods and prevent bad effects from becoming worse. Emergencies are no time to start rewriting the CPR manual. The problem with this is that emergencies instantly focus our intense attention but, afterward, when the societal adrenaline from the rescue effort ebbs, so does any thorough public pondering or accounting about how the way we live and consume and are organized contribute to creating these emergencies in the first place. What does get studied typically winds up as a 27-recommendation tome collecting dust somewhere, resurrected 10 or 20 years in the future as a curiosity for some columnist to highlight as what-could-have-been.

The possibilities emerging from flex moments such as Katrina and the BP gusher should be pounced on. “Don’t waste a crisis,” said Rahm Emanuel in the best sound bite I ever heard from him. Use this moment to do something big, something transformative for the Gulf, for the people, the ecology, the economy.

continued at Daily Kos....

Expensive, inconvenient, and scratchy: solutions are easy

by mwmwm

In response to a comment in a recent post of mine, I replied,

"I think lots of us know what we have to do -- change radically -- but far too few are actually doing it. Problems abound, but so do solutions -- they're just expensive, inconvenient, and scratchy.

That's the theme of this diary -- that we can no longer be lazy, and that it can't be cheap, or convenient, or easy to save ourselves.

continued at Daily Kos....

BP's Oil is NOT on the Surface -- it's on the Sea Floor

by jamess

Two weeks ago we were being told the majority of the Oil Spilled was "mostly" gone ...

How did five million barrels of oil simply disappear?

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs points to a pie chart on the BP oil spill during the Daily White House Press Briefing, Washington, DC.

AFP/ Getty Images

Now, University of South Florida, Marine Scientists are reporting Science has a different tale, to tell ...

continued at Daily Kos....

BP Catastrophe Liveblog Mothership: 85

by Gulf Watchers

Please rec the new Mothership #86 here. This one has expired.
The current ROV DIARY: Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #312 - Ambient waiting for the order to kill - peraspera

Rules of the Road

• We take volunteers for subsequent diaries in the sub diaries or ROV's as we have playfully coined them.
• Please rec this mothership diary, not the ROVs.
• Please be kind to fellow kossacks who may have limited bandwidth and refrain from posting images or videos.

PLEASE visit Pam LaPier's diary to find out how you can help the Gulf now and in the future. We don't have to be idle! And thanks to Crashing Vor and Pam LaPier for working on this!

continued at Daily Kos....

OPEC and Low Oil Prices, "Raising the entry barrier for alternative fuels"

by Ellinorianne

It was the summer of 2008 and high Gas prices were getting people to think about how much they drove.  It was getting a lot of people to rethink the cars they purchased and it was actually making a lot of headlines.

High Gas Prices Cause Bike Shortages in N.Y.

High gas prices are causing spot shortages of bikes in New York City, as commuters turn to pedal power.

Many of these new cyclists are from areas not commonly associated with the "Bike Belt" — neighborhoods such as the Upper West Side and Williamsburg in Brooklyn — but are instead from Queens and other places where driving to work has long been common and affordable. With gas costing nearly $4 a gallon, these commuters are switching to bikes, leaving some stores short on fashionable brands and preferred colors.

continued at Daily Kos....