Not So...Clean

Since the Fukushima nuclear disaster first began back in March of 2011, there have been near daily updates on the condition of the stricken plant, updates that have been getting worse and worse, painting a very dire scene at the Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.

From the moment the tsunami devastated the plant, officials at the plant have been struggling to contain the leaks of radioactive water.

In February, officials discovered a fish in a nearby water intake station for the plant that contained more than 7400 times the recommended safe limit of radioactive cesium.

And now, officials are concerned that, because of all of the leaks, power outages and glitches that have occurred, the Dai-chi nuclear power plant could begin to break apart and cause an even worse nuclear disaster, when a years-long clean-up process finally begins.

But despite all of the chaos in Japan, and the continued fears of more nuclear disasters down the road, here in the United States, we are still relying heavily on nuclear power.

And to make matters worse, there are 23 nuclear reactors across the country with General Electric Mark 1 systems for containing radioactivity, the same containment system used at the Dai-ichi plant that failed so miserably.

These Mark 1 reactors are located all across America, from Vermont to Minnesota, New York to Nebraska.

If just one of these reactors were to fail on the level that the Dai-ichi Mark 1 reactor did, we could be looking at an unprecedented disaster.

But don’t tell that to government officials, lawmakers or nuclear power proponents, who continually argue that not only is nuclear power one of the safest forms of energy, but that it is also one of cleanest and greenest forms of energy.

Events like Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disprove the safety claims about nuclear power pretty well, but what about the claims that it is one of the cleanest and greenest forms of energy out there?

Proponents of nuclear powerlove to claim that nuclear power is a “carbon-free” solution to climate change.

Nuclear power lobbyists claim that the production of energy via nuclear power does not emit any CO2, and as a result, is one of cleanest forms of energy out there.

But this is non-sense.

There is nothing clean about nuclear power, and the only thing green about it is the glowing radioactivity.

When nuclear power proponents argue that it’s a “carbon-free” form of energy, they’re failing to realize that, whenever a power plant is built, whether it is a solar plant, a wind plant, or a nuclear plant, there is always CO2 emitted. Every form of energy production produces some amount of CO2.

In order to accurately calculate just how much CO2 is produced from a power plant, the entire lifecycle of the plant as well as the production of the raw energy that it produces have to be looked at.

In terms of a nuclear power plant, that means looking at the construction of the plant, the operation of the plant, maintenance and refurbishment efforts and the decommissioning and dismantling of the plant’s nuclear reactor. And, you must also look at the type of nuclear fuel used, and the process for recovering it.

Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, nuclear energy consultants with Ceedata Consultancy in the Netherlands, carried out life cycle analyses of nuclear power plants, and found, on average, they produce anywhere from 90 to 140 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity.

In comparison, solar power, wind power and hydroelectricity produce anywhere from 10 to 40 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity, and gas burning power plants produce 330 to 330 grams of CO2.

In other words, nuclear energy does produce carbon, and it certainly isn’t the solution to curbing the devastating effects of global warming and climate change.

The fact that government officials in Japan are continuing to struggle with the crippled Dai-ichi nuclear powerplant, more than two years after it initially failed, should be all the proof needed that nuclear power is far too volatile a form of energy to safely rely on.

All the myths about nuclear power have been debunked.

It’s time to shut down reactors and put an end to nuclear power worldwide.

And let’s start that process right now – right here in the USA!

The Evil Twin...

As lawmakers in Washington continue to ignore the most pressing issue facing our planet today - climate change - we are about to pass a very disturbing environmental milestone.

The CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii will likely soon reach 400 ppm, which could spell further disaster for our planet.

Named after Charles Keeling, who started measuring CO2 air concentrations in 1858, the Keeling Curve measures the concentration of CO2 in the air in parts per million.

Since measurements started at Mauna Loa in 1958, there has been a steady increase in CO2 concentration.

In fact, since 1960, CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa has increased by almost 28%.

Thanks to our society’s toxic addiction to fossil fuels, unprecedented levels of CO2 are being pumped into our environment each and every day.

But why have CO2 concentrations increased so much over the past few decades?

Part of it has to do with increased industrialization and reliance on dirty fossil fuels, but part of it also has to do with the world’s oceans. 

According to Richard Bellerby, Research Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, the oceans have “been performing a huge climate service over the last 200 years.”

That’s because oceans have the ability to absorb CO2, which prevents it from escaping into the atmosphere and hastening the process of climate change.

In fact, the world’s oceans, especially the coldest waters, have absorbed 50 percent of the CO2 that we have emitted, and continue to take up 25 percent of the CO2 that we produce.

But, we, as a global community, have abused the oceans’ ability to absorb CO2, and now the oceans and the ecosystems within them are paying the price.

As the world’s oceans absorb more and more CO2, they become more and more acidic, and, according to a new study released yesterday by the Norwegian Institute for Water Research at the International Conference on Arctic Ocean Acidification, the rapid acidification of the Arctic Ocean has pushed us beyond “critical thresholds,” and it’s likely that widespread impacts will be felt for “tens of thousands of years” even if  we stopped all carbon emissions today.

Dubbed “climate change’s evil twin”, acidification of ocean surface waters has increased by around 30 percent over the last 200 years, with the highest levels of acidification occurring in the Arctic and the rest of world’s coldest waters.

Richard Bellerby, the chief scientist on the report, said that, “Arctic ocean acidification is happening at a faster rate than found in other global regions. This is because climate change such as warming and freshening of the oceans is acting in tandem with the enormous oceanic uptake of C02.”

And Bellerby told BBC News that “continued rapid change is a certainty.”

Another researcher on the study, Sam Dupont of the University of Gothenburg, told the conference that, “something really unique is happening. This is the first time that we as humans are changing the whole planet; we are actually acidifying the whole ocean today.”

According to the study, it’s quite possible that, within a few decades, the world’s oceans will be two times more acidic, and the situation could be even worse in the Arctic. 

So what are the impacts so ocean acidification?

Well, to start, the oceans are able to absorb less CO2, which means more of it enters our atmosphere and helps to hasten the processes of global warming and climate change.

But more importantly, ocean acidification can lead to mass ocean species extinction. 

One example of a possible species extinction that the scientists at the conference gave was of the brittle star.

When exposed to the ocean acidification conditions that can be expected in the decades to come, the eggs of the brittle star died within days.

If the brittle star dies off, than the species that feed on it could die off as well and there would be a massive chain reaction of oceans species extinctions.

And if the ocean dies, we die.

It’s that simple.

The bottom-line here is that our toxic addiction to fossil fuels rooted millions of years in the past is not only polluting our skies and wreaking havoc on our climate, it’s also destroying our oceans and the species in them.

It’s time to ditch the fossil fuels, make the switch to cleaner and greener forms of energy, and save the world’s oceans, before they die and we go with them.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

What do you get when you have a for-profit healthcare system, like the one we have here in America, that not a single one of the 33 other OECD countries has?

You get one hospital in Washington, D.C that charges $115,000 to keep a patient on a ventilator, and another hospital in that same city that charges just under $53,000 for the same thing.

You get one hospital in Miami that charges over $166,000 for treating a heart attack with four stents and major complications, and another hospital in that city that charges around $89,000 for the same thing.   

For years, we weren’t able to get a clear picture of what various hospitals charged for similar procedures. 

Hospitals have gone out of their way for years to protect their procedure price lists, almost as if they were national secrets.

But not anymore, because the cat is finally out of the bag.

Today, the Obama administration and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a database that reveals, for the first time, how much the vast majority of hospitals in our country charge for the 100 most common inpatients procedures billed to Medicare.

The data released today covers claims that were filed in the fiscal year 2011, and includes over 163,000 individual charges recorded at more than 3,300 hospitals in 306 metropolitan areas.

While the mountains of data appear to be daunting at first glance, the numbers paint a picture of a very nonsensical US healthcare system, where prices for the same exact treatments vary wildly, and at random, at hospitals sometime just a few city blocks from each other. 

Let’s look at hospital costs in and around New York City.

The Huffington Post compiled data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services report to make a map of hospital costs for treating chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, in the New York City metropolitan area, and the range of costs to treat the same exact disease is mind-boggling.

At the Bayonne Hospital Center just over the Hudson River in New Jersey, treatment of COPD costs a staggering $99,690. Right across the river, back in New York City and at a hospital on the tip of Manhattan, the cost for treating COPD is just over $11,000.

Looking at the entire New York City metropolitan area, the cost of COPD treatment ranges from $7,044 at a hospital in the Bronx, to the $99,690 charged at the Bayonne Hospital Center.

In major cities across our nation, the range of prices for similar or the same medical procedures looks more like the ups and downs in the wildly volatile stock market.

It’s important to note that the prices revealed in the data do not reflect the prices that Medicare and insurance pay for the various procedures. Medicare and insurance companies pay negotiated rates for the procedures

The data does represent what the 49 million uninsured people in our country would have to pay for the various procedures out-of-pocket.

The data represents the dilemma these Americans face when trying to decide between life-saving health procedures and living a life of poverty while being buried in mountains of debt.

It’s also important to understand that when Americans are forced to go to hospitals, much of the time they are transported to them via ambulances. And when that happens, Americans don’t have a choice of which hospital to go to. They can’t look up on their smartphone which hospital will charge the least for the treatment that they will need.  That’s why this new data is that much more powerful.

But the real takeaway from this new data should be just how absurd and crazy it is to have a for-profit healthcare system. 

America used to have not-for-profit hospitals and insurance companies. These were mainly required by the states that at hospital and insurance regulation boards.

Then, in 1980, Ronald Regan stepped into The White House and everything changed.

Insurance companies and hospitals began turning into for-profit money making machines.

Doctors began forming their own practices, and physician costs began to soar.

Prescription drug companies began their efforts to squeeze every last penny out of the American public, and the costs of just about every other aspect of healthcare in America skyrocketed.

Now, what we are left with is a for-profit healthcare system that charges inexplicable rates for common every-day procedures and lets prescription drug companies fleece the wallets of Americans, while millions are forced to decide between life-saving healthcare and a life of poverty.

If healthcare were part of the commons, none of this would be happening.

We wouldn’t have a hospital in the Bronx, New York charging $7,000 for a treatment, and a hospital a few miles away charging thousands of dollars more for the same procedure.

It’s time to take the American healthcare system out of the hands of corporate profiteers and Wall Street tycoons, and put it back where it belongs, in the hands of the American people.

Sorry I'm Not Sorry?

Yesterday, the U.S. marked the 10^th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. And, over the course of the past ten years, we’ve learned more and more about how the war with Iraq actually started.

While it’s incredibly easy to blame the Bush administration for its lies that led us into Iraq, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Company weren’t the only ones who played an integral role in convincing this nation that Saddam Hussein was a threat, and that WMD’s were a forgone conclusion.

In the days and weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, mainstream media – particularly on the right - was abuzz with the talking points of the Bush Administration, echoing claims that Iraq had its hands on “yellow cake uranium” and that it had a massive arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction.”

Thanks to the mainstream media’s repeated claims that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were immediate threats to our nation, in the weeks leading up to the invasion, nearly three-quarters of Americans legitimately believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks of 9/11.

One of the biggest proponents of the Iraq War was Bill O’Reilly.

Nearly every day leading up to the invasion of Iraq, O’Reilly used his pedestal on Fox News to preach the talking points of the Bush Administration.

In March of 2003, prior to the invasion of Iraq, O’Reilly interviewed actress and political activist Janeane Garofalo, about her opposition towards going to war with Iraq.

O’Reilly asked Garofalo if she would apologize to President Bush if she was wrong, and if it turned out that the United States went into Iraq, was met with jubilant America-loving crowds of Iraqis, and in fact found “all kinds of bad, bad stuff.”

Garofalo responded that she would gladly go to the White House, get on her knees, and apologize to Bush if she were wrong, but added that she didn’t think she would be. 

Guess what. She was right. And O’Reilly, as usual, was wrong.

Our soldiers were not met by throngs of Iraqis who loved America. And we certainly didn’t find “all kinds of bad, bad stuff.”

So the real question here is, ten years after being so wrong, why hasn’t Bill O’Reilly apologized to Garofalo, and to the American public, for misleading us so badly?

In 2004, O’Reilly was on ABC’s Good Morning America, and offered a half-hearted apology for being so wrong. He said that, “Well, my analysis was wrong and I'm sorry.. I was wrong. I'm not pleased about it at all.”

But shouldn’t O’Reilly get down on his hands and knees, and offer a real apology to all of us, for being a mouthpiece of the Bush administration’s deeply misguided mission to invade Iraq?

And why stop there? O’Reilly shouldn’t be the only one apologizing to the American people.

After all, O’Reilly wasn’t the only one in the far-right realm of mainstream media to make the case for war with Iraq using the Bush administration’s faulty information.

Another one of those who acted as a shill of the Bush administration was Sean Hannity.

On a February 19^th, 2003 episode of Hannity & Colmes, Hannity told Fox News contributor Ellis Henican that, “We're going to go in and we're going to liberate this country in a few weeks and it's going to be over very quickly. No, it's going to be over very quickly. And what I'm going to tell you here is, you're going to find, I predict, mass graves. We're going to open up those -- hang on, let me finish -- those gulags and those prisons and you're going to hear stories of rape and torture and misery, and then we're going to find all of the weapons of mass destruction that all of you guys on the left say don't exist.”

Clearly, Hannity was wrong about the war. Shouldn’t he apologize to the American people?

Then there’s Steve Hayes, a Fox News contributor and writer for the conservative publication The Weekly Standard.

He repeatedly used his columns in the The Weekly Standard and his time on Fox News to further the now debunked myth that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were inextricably linked.

In fact, Hayes even wrote a book about the so-called link, called “The Connection: How Al Qaeda's Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.”

But as we all know, he was wrong too. So where’s his apology?

Then there’s Hayes’ colleague at Fox News, Charles Krauthammer.  At the time of the war, Krauthammer was a Fox News contributor and columnist for the Washington Post.

And, much like Hayes, he used his power of the pen to argue that the Iraq War would usher in unprecedented levels of democracy in the Middle East.

In April of 2002, he wrote in the Washington Post that, “Time is running short. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He is working on nuclear weapons. And he has every incentive to pass them on to terrorists who will use them against us. We cannot hold the self-defense of the United States hostage to the solving of a century-old regional conflict.”

Krauthammer is just another right-wing media mainstay who was 100 percent wrong about the Iraq War.

Finally, there’s MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. He was one of the strongest proponents of war with Iraq outside of Fox News.

In March of 2003, he repeatedly made claims that toppling Saddam Hussein would “mean the end of his weapons of mass destruction.”

In April of 2003, Scarborough said that, “For six months now, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have been telling the world that the people of Iraq needed to be liberated from Saddam Hussein's bloody reign. The past three weeks have shown us just how right these three men have been.”

In that same commentary, Scarborough pondered whether “journalists at The New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks.”

Well Joe, turns out they were right, and you were wrong. So where’s your apology?

The bottom-line here is that, ten years after going to war on faulty information, and after thousands of American lives have been lost, the majority of the right-wing media has yet to offer any semblance of an apology for being so wrong, and for listening to the Bush administration, no questions asked.

The media failed us leading up to the Iraq War, and the consequences have been dire.

Never again can the media be allowed to convince an entire nation of something, without Americans standing up, and questioning the facts for themselves.