Ten A Dozen Essential Ideas For Fixing The American Economy — Robert Reich

Robert Reich has completed, not his scheduled ten, but an even dozen videos succinctly expressing the great ideas essential to making the American economy more robust for all its participants and transforming American society into one more committed to equality of treatment of all its members under the law.

The 12 Videos appear (in reverse order) in the right-hand column of Reich's blog, and each video runs about 2-3 minutes. I can't think of a better way for an adult or adolescent American to spend about a half hour than in watching these videos. (In addition to his insight, Reich has a great hand as a cartoonist, which he exercises along with voiceovers on the current topic. You'll have fun learning some excellently framed talking points!)

All That Garbage: What Will Houston Do To Itself?

I'm going to let the Texas Campaign for the Environment (TCE) tell the story from its beginning (H/T Frank Blake of Houston Sierra Club for pointing me to this source):

What is “One Bin for All?”

In 2012 the City of Houston applied for a Bloomberg Mayors Challenge grant for what it calls “One Bin for All,” a program the City claims will provide recycling to everyone in the City. The proposal is to build a facility which would allow City of Houston residents to throw all of their discards—trash, recycling, yard waste, food waste, etc.—into a single bin for sorting later. This type of facility is what is known as a “dirty MRF.”

In other words, we go back to what we used to do with trash in the pre-recycling days. Why am I not surprised this idea emerged from something with Bloomberg's name on it. Anyway...

What is a dirty MRF?

MRF stands for materials recovery facility, and all recycling centers are MRFs. This is a place where recyclable materials are sorted into their various types so they can be sold on the market—plastics of various types, metals of different types, paper, cardboard, glass, etc. A dirty MRF also sorts out trash. All discards—trash, recycling and organics—come in mixed through the front door, and separate categories of materials come out sorted through the back door.

Except... they don't. The process produces a wet, dirty mess which, unlike single-stream recyclables (i.e., all recyclables in one bin, all wet or nonrecyclable trash in another), has no commercial value as-is.

...

Why are dirty MRFs a bad idea?

Wet plus dry equals wet. If you take dry, clean materials and throw them in the same bin as wet, messy trash, all of the materials get wet and dirty. Most recyclables are only valuable on the market if they are clean and dry. This means that much of the paper and cardboard you throw in this “One Bin” cannot be sold, and will not be recycled. ... Even plastics collected from real recycling are sometimes considered too dirty. Dirty MRF plastic may not be able to be recycled at all.

Will China take this?

That's because China, our biggest customer for recyclables (they need the plastics to mix into food and sell back to us [/irony]), insists on ultra‑clean plastics for recycling. So...

How much material in a dirty MRF is really recycled?

Estimates from the Royal Society of Chemistry are that 10-30% of dirty MRF materials can be recycled. ...

So we go from recycling, say, a good majority of our recyclable wastes to recycling 10-30%, right? Wrong, based on the experience of the city of Toronto; they managed at best 5-10%. Don't believe everything you're told, and don't believe a damned thing you heard from Bloomberg & Co.

But that's not the last implausible claim:

How can the City of Houston promise 75% diversion in two years?

Dirty MRFs in the past have used trash incineration to claim big “diversion.” The City of Houston has called for the new dirty MRF to use “gasification” and “catalytic conversion” technologies, both of which are defined as incineration by the EPA.

INCINERATION. Finally, the truth comes out. They're gonna burn the dirty MotheRF... I mean, the dirty MRF. Just like the old days. And also just like the old days, incineration of trash is one of the single most polluting processes in the world. Period. Through the "good" offices of some Bloomberg foundation, Houston is proposing to do with trash what our parents and grandparents did with trash.

What an improvement, eh? Eh?

North Dakota Is Fracked... Poisoning Farm Animals And People

Read about it in Elizabeth Royte's article at The Nation. Here's what happened at one ranch near a fracking site:

...

Ambient air testing by a certified environmental consultant detected elevated levels of benzene, methane, chloroform, butane, propane, toluene and xylene—compounds associated with drilling and fracking, and also with cancers, birth defects and organ damage. [Rancher Jacki Schilke's] well tested high for sulfates, chromium, chloride and strontium; her blood tested positive for acetone, plus the heavy metals arsenic (linked with skin lesions, cancers and cardiovascular disease) and germanium (linked with muscle weakness and skin rashes). Both she and her husband, who works in oilfield services, have recently lost crowns and fillings from their teeth; tooth loss is associated with radiation poisoning and high selenium levels, also found in the Schilkes’ water.

State health and agriculture officials acknowledged Schilke’s air and water tests but told her she had nothing to worry about. Her doctors, however, diagnosed her with neurotoxic damage and constricted airways. “I realized that this place is killing me and my cattle,” Schilke says. She began using inhalers and a nebulizer, switched to bottled water, and quit eating her own beef and the vegetables from her garden. (Schilke sells her cattle only to buyers who will finish raising them outside the shale area, where she presumes that any chemical contamination will clear after a few months.) “My health improved,” Schilke says, “but I thought, ‘Oh my God, what are we doing to this land?’”
...

What, indeed. So is it just in North Dakota?

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Healthy Cows

In Louisiana, seventeen cows died after an hour’s exposure to spilled fracking fluid. (Most likely cause of death: respiratory failure.) In north central Pennsylvania, 140 cattle were exposed to fracking wastewater when an impoundment was breached. Approximately seventy cows died; the remainder produced eleven calves, of which only three survived. In western Pennsylvania, an overflowing waste pit sent fracking chemicals into a pond and a pasture where pregnant cows grazed: half their calves were born dead. The following year’s animal births were sexually skewed, with ten females and two males, instead of the usual 50-50 or 60-40 split.

...

And in Ohio, which is IMHO full of good people, they're raising holy Hell about fracking.

So how much fracking fluid does it take, per well? And what do they do with it when it's done the job?

...

Fracking Waste Pond,
Wise Co., TX

Fracking a single well requires up to 7 million gallons of water, plus an additional 400,000 gallons of additives, including lubricants, biocides, scale and rust inhibitors, solvents, foaming and defoaming agents, emulsifiers and de-emulsifiers, stabilizers and breakers. About 70 percent of the liquid that goes down a borehole eventually comes up—now further tainted with such deep-earth compounds as sodium, chloride, bromide, arsenic, barium, uranium, radium and radon. (These substances occur naturally, but many of them can cause illness if ingested or inhaled over time.) This super-salty “produced” water, or brine, can be stored on-site for reuse. Depending on state regulations, it can also be held in plastic-lined pits until it evaporates, is injected back into the earth, or gets hauled to municipal wastewater treatment plants, which aren’t designed to neutralize or sequester fracking chemicals (in other words, they’re discharged with effluent into nearby streams).

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I don't know how many ways I can say this: recovery of ever more challenging deposits of fossil fuels, in this case oil and gas, is killing the biosphere. We can have the remaining petroleum to burn in our inefficient cars, or we can have air safe to breathe, water safe to drink, and... yes... food safe to eat. We can't have both. Fracking has got to stop. Just say NO... frack NO!