Below is my letter to Secretary of State John Kerry regarding the proposed Keystone XL pipeline (Northern segment). Feel free to copy and plagiarize as much as you'd like to send him your own version as well, or to cut and paste for crafting your own public comment.
The public comment period ends at midnight on 3/7/14, and you can submit comments at:
http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=DOS-2014-0003
To submit a comment to Secretary Kerry, you can use this link from the Friends of the Earth website:
http://action.foe.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=15004
Dear Secretary John Kerry,
I'm writing to urge you to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. The problems with this proposed pipeline are many and varied. As I would hope you understand by now, and as the pipeline rupture in the Arkansas town of Mayflower in 2013 made abundantly clear, dilbit, which the XL would carry if completed, presents major challenges that conventional crude oil does not, both in terms of conveyance, and in terms of remediation, should that become necessary due to ruptures or other possible catastrophes.
Due to these major challenges, TransCanada's recent history does not inspire confidence. Their Bison natural gas pipeline exploded in Wyoming in July of 2011, about 6 months after completion, and 2 months after TransCanada's director of pipeline integrity was quoted in an industry trade journal saying that Bison was built with “state-of-the-art” technology. "They [the pipelines] will be in place for 20 or 30 years before they need any repairs," the director said. When the company's director of pipeline integrity can be that spectacularly wrong, giving them a green light on the XL project seems like courting disaster and asking for trouble.
Behind the many catastrophic examples of TransCanada's incompetence that a quick internet search can reveal, we have the inside information from Evan Vokes, who worked for TransCanada from 2007-2012 in the engineering department that has responsibility for construction standards. Mr. Vokes has spoken out about the company's lack of compliance with industry welding standards, and about how TransCanada's management preferred to try to silence him rather than to work to improve their standards compliance. In light of these revelations, it's not that surprising that the completed Keystone Southern section already has substantial problems, which Public Citizen has compiled in a recent report, available at:
http://www.citizen.org/documents/Keystone%20report%20November%202013.pdf
I also instinctively don't trust any project EIS compiled by people who stand to gain substantial income from the approval of that project, any more than I would trust defense contractors to make decisions about war and peace.
Furthermore, recent findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicate that levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emissions into the air from tar sands operations may be 2 to 3 times higher than industry estimates. The industry's officially-reported emissions for the oil sands area show an emissions density that's lower than just about anywhere else in the world, including Greenland, and such findings insult the intelligence of anyone concerned with industrial pollution. I would trust the word of a man like James Hansen much more than what self-interested and short-sighted petrochemical hacks have to say.
We don't need to endanger our environment simply so that some wealthy Texas refiners can pay less for their raw materials by getting them from Canada instead of Venezuela, and in so doing, encourage greater tar sands development. What's good for a few rich Texas oil barons will not be good for the rest of humanity.
Sincerely,
-Dave Elder
Friday, February 28, 2014
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Connecting the N-word with the S-word
In the Upstate New York conservative Republican household I grew up in, we did not use the N-word. My family did not champion the cause of integration, but when we saw the TV news clips of Bull Connor's dogs attacking black people on the streets of Birmingham, the naked racism shocked us all, and none of us approved of it or made excuses for it. The actions and words of black leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., sometimes made my family uneasy, but we all still experienced his assassination as an epic tragedy and a racial injustice.
No one in my circle of high school friends used the N-word either. In a world of the latest Doors LP, the Ford Mustang, nuclear fission, the Apollo space program and fast food 15-cent hamburgers, the N-word sounded like a relic from the era before Hiroshima. The only kids at my high school who used the N-word were a few hicks from the sticks, and it was understood that their gears moved a bit slower than the fast times we were currently living in.
My Christian-fundamentalist family had regarded the N-word as gutter talk, on the same level as the F-word and its four-letter cousins, but as a young adult no longer living with that religious family, I soon added the F-word and other four-letter oaths to my working vocabulary, though I felt no great need to also take up the use of the N-word. My circle of friends rarely included anyone who used it regularly, and even watching Lenny Bruce's comedy bit about it didn't change my mind. I understood Lenny's point about the power of repression, but I just couldn't personally connect with the idea of over-using the N-word to defuse its power.
During the era when it came into common use among black musicians and singers, I still had no interest in using it myself, and I didn't feel deprived because I didn't use it. With the N-word, context matters, and I instinctively understood that it carries a much different weight when used by a white person than when used by a black person.
Beginning to reconnect it with the S-word, I was there at the moment when my grandfather learned that his wife's sister's husband had attended a local KKK recruiting drive back in the 1920s, and he reacted to this news about his already-deceased brother-in-law by saying, "I didn't know Lou was that stupid." The couples had socialized on a number of occasions over the decades, but somehow he had missed knowing something very basic about his brother-in-law. At that moment, I knew them both a bit better, and I respected my grandfather even more than I had before.
More on the S-word connection came my way soon after I joined the Southern Poverty Law Center, when their quarterly Intelligence Report began showing up in my mail box. After a few issues, I had a much clearer impression of the type who make up the core of racist gangs and groups -- mainly, the guys who like to hang out in bars and pick fights with people they don't know. On the dumb-dumber-dumbest scale, they usually fall pretty close to the est end, but all these losers have to do to give their sad shallow lives some depth of meaning is to tell themselves that they're fighting not simply because they enjoy violence, but for the higher purpose of defending the white race.
So then I recently heard about the white people who feel constrained when they can't use the N-word, and it took me a while to decode what they meant when they said they weren't racist, until I realized that they define racism as committing acts of violence against black people (or brown people, etc.). These kinder, gentler racists assume that all of us white people (which, according to at least one Fox News host, includes Jesus and Santa Claus), we understand that black people are inferior to whites, so what's the big deal about one of the superior types using a word that refers to the inferior ones?
How stupid is that? Now in the modern era of Spotify, Tesla, the GPS and the iPad, we have the benefit of recent scientific evidence to prove that race is an artificial human construct. The human animal does not have race genes, but simply genetic adaptations to time and place, and all humans share a common genetic ancestry that originated in Africa. So it has become increasingly clear to me that the white people who want use the N-word express their proximity to the S-word when they do, and the more they use it, the dumber they are. If you can find a notable exception, I'd love to hear about it, but I haven't seen one myself, and coming to the recent understanding of this equation has added a bit more 20-20 to my own hindsight.
No one in my circle of high school friends used the N-word either. In a world of the latest Doors LP, the Ford Mustang, nuclear fission, the Apollo space program and fast food 15-cent hamburgers, the N-word sounded like a relic from the era before Hiroshima. The only kids at my high school who used the N-word were a few hicks from the sticks, and it was understood that their gears moved a bit slower than the fast times we were currently living in.
My Christian-fundamentalist family had regarded the N-word as gutter talk, on the same level as the F-word and its four-letter cousins, but as a young adult no longer living with that religious family, I soon added the F-word and other four-letter oaths to my working vocabulary, though I felt no great need to also take up the use of the N-word. My circle of friends rarely included anyone who used it regularly, and even watching Lenny Bruce's comedy bit about it didn't change my mind. I understood Lenny's point about the power of repression, but I just couldn't personally connect with the idea of over-using the N-word to defuse its power.
During the era when it came into common use among black musicians and singers, I still had no interest in using it myself, and I didn't feel deprived because I didn't use it. With the N-word, context matters, and I instinctively understood that it carries a much different weight when used by a white person than when used by a black person.
Beginning to reconnect it with the S-word, I was there at the moment when my grandfather learned that his wife's sister's husband had attended a local KKK recruiting drive back in the 1920s, and he reacted to this news about his already-deceased brother-in-law by saying, "I didn't know Lou was that stupid." The couples had socialized on a number of occasions over the decades, but somehow he had missed knowing something very basic about his brother-in-law. At that moment, I knew them both a bit better, and I respected my grandfather even more than I had before.
More on the S-word connection came my way soon after I joined the Southern Poverty Law Center, when their quarterly Intelligence Report began showing up in my mail box. After a few issues, I had a much clearer impression of the type who make up the core of racist gangs and groups -- mainly, the guys who like to hang out in bars and pick fights with people they don't know. On the dumb-dumber-dumbest scale, they usually fall pretty close to the est end, but all these losers have to do to give their sad shallow lives some depth of meaning is to tell themselves that they're fighting not simply because they enjoy violence, but for the higher purpose of defending the white race.
So then I recently heard about the white people who feel constrained when they can't use the N-word, and it took me a while to decode what they meant when they said they weren't racist, until I realized that they define racism as committing acts of violence against black people (or brown people, etc.). These kinder, gentler racists assume that all of us white people (which, according to at least one Fox News host, includes Jesus and Santa Claus), we understand that black people are inferior to whites, so what's the big deal about one of the superior types using a word that refers to the inferior ones?
How stupid is that? Now in the modern era of Spotify, Tesla, the GPS and the iPad, we have the benefit of recent scientific evidence to prove that race is an artificial human construct. The human animal does not have race genes, but simply genetic adaptations to time and place, and all humans share a common genetic ancestry that originated in Africa. So it has become increasingly clear to me that the white people who want use the N-word express their proximity to the S-word when they do, and the more they use it, the dumber they are. If you can find a notable exception, I'd love to hear about it, but I haven't seen one myself, and coming to the recent understanding of this equation has added a bit more 20-20 to my own hindsight.
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