According to a press release sent  out Friday by his office, “In recognition of Sacramento’s leadership in preparing for the impacts of climate change, Mayor Kevin Johnson was selected as a member of President Obama’s Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience.”

Mr. Arena, shown at right with activist Van Jones, is also Mr. Green.

Scientific data be damned

Despite recent scientific data which contradict government claims that carbon energy and emissions cause climate change, Obama continues with climate alarmism.

Titled “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change,” the new executive order was issued at a strange  time — much of the rest of the world has finally caught up to the fact that global warming is a fraud, and based on a myth.

“Average temperatures have leveled for more than a decade, despite the sharply rising use of carbon energy in China and other countries,” the Daily Caller reported. “U.S. use of carbon energy has stabilized with increasing market-driven efficiency and tightening regulations.”

Bypassing Congress once again, the executive order will be implemented by Obama’s czars and appointees.

The council is officially intended “to prepare the nation for the impacts of climate change by undertaking actions to enhance climate preparedness and resilience.”

KJ the Green Czar

By Chris Reed

So the Washington Post has a 1,500-word-plus analysis of why leaders and members of environmental groups — starting with the biggest of all, the San Francisco-based Sierra Club — are “more like that of the Republican Party they so often criticize for its positions on the environment than that of the multiethnic Democratic Party they have thrown their support behind.”

But reporter Darryl Fears‘ analysis is, well, vanilla. He focuses initially on the angle that outreach is lacking and that having diverse leaders and members is not a priority of the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Riverkeepers, etc.

What about the angle that cleaning up polluted minority communites in industrial areas is infinitely less of a priority for white enviros than protecting coastal view planes, gnatcatchers, snail darters, etc?

Greens pushed polluters into minority communities

That’s referenced, but only in paragraphs that offer telling detail but superficial insight:

“’We essentially have a racially segregated environmental movement,’ said Van Jones, co-founder of the nonprofit Rebuild the Dream and a former adviser on green jobs to the Obama administration. ‘We’re too polite to say that. Instead, we say we have an environmental justice movement and a mainstream movement.’

“The Sierra Club, billed as the nation’s oldest and largest grass-roots environmental organization with 1.3 million members, was founded in 1892. Like groups that followed, such as the Nature Conservancy in 1915 and the National Wildlife Federation in 1936, they were largely white, upper- and middle-class, and focused on the protection of wilderness areas.

“Two decades later, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, ‘Silent Spring,’ alerted Americans to the impact of pesticides and toxic pollution on the environment.

“Acting on Carson’s revelations, the mainstream environmental groups helped to push chemical warehouses, pesticide companies and coal-fired power plants from rural and exurban areas, and many polluters migrated to low-income urban areas where people of color live.

“In the 1980s, the Government Accountability Office, the United Church of Christ and the Commission for Racial Justice each issued reports that established a direct link between race and the location of toxic-waste sites, according to a study on power plants and their proximity to minorities released in December by the NAACP. …

“Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University said that in 1980 all five of Houston’s landfills were in minority communities, as were six of the city’s eight incinerators. He said mainstream environmental groups he approached for help did not seem concerned.”

‘Environmental justice’ for plants and birds, not people

And why would that be? Why would those holding “mainstream environmental values” be so unconcerned about “environmental justice”? How could the suffering of humans seem less crucial than the suffering of flora and fauna?

Maybe because some humans don’t exactly trigger empathy among enviros.

Fears doesn’t go near the incendiary topic. But as I noted in a Dec. 31 article for Cal Watchdog, the fact is white environmental groups’ indifference to the interests of minorities used to be a lot worse than indifference:

“The environmental movement for decades called for zero population growth — seen as code for making minorities have fewer kids and for curbing illegal immigration. Now the rhetoric has shifted, but the history isn’t going away. Check out this Southern Poverty Law Center dossier on John Tanton, a Sierra Club activist who led’s the club’s population committee in the early 1970s before it was revealed that he was a white nationalist.”

This matters. Greens pine for the way things used to be — in many, many ways.

I think that by any objective measure, “environmental justice” — fighting the history of sticking heavy polluters in minority communities — is more important than fretting about declining numbers of gnatcatchers and snail darters. But Democratic leaders defer to environmentalists, and enviros don’t agree. Save the obscure fishies! Bugs are people too!

As for poor minorities, well, let them eat cake.

By Chriss Street

Al Gore opened his 2006 movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” with an apology for not having already saved the world from global warming: “I have advocated policies to promote renewable energy and accelerate reductions in global warming pollution for decades, including all of the time I was in public service.”

In support of his continuing political agenda, Al Gore joined Van Jones last week to argue for wind power’s “clean energy” as a replacement for fossil fuels’ “dirty energy.”  Inconveniently for Mr. Gore, the truth is that mining and processing key materials to make the magnets in wind power turbines are releasing massive amounts massive amounts of air, water and ground pollution, including enormous quantities of radioactive waste into the global ecosphere.

California’s deserts and mountains are rapidly being blanketed by wind farms with huge turning propellers that spin large magnetic coils to produce electricity.  Rare Earth Elements are an essential ingredient needed to manufacture these magnets.  REEs, such as Neodymium, Samarium, Gadolinium and Dysprosium, are in limited supply. Which brings into question both of Mr. Gore’s “renewability” and “sustainability” marketing claims.

California was the world’s largest producer of REEs until 2002, when the huge Mountain Pass open pit mine was closed after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined that 600,000 gallons of highly radioactive mining wastewater had been spilled onto the surrounding desert between 1984 and 1998.  The water contained highly concentrated amounts of radium, which has a half-life of 1600 years, and thorium, which has a half-life of 14 billion years.

Today, 95 percent of all REEs are mined and processed in remote Western China.  Once shrouded in secrecy by China’s autocratic leadership, the environmental dangers of unregulated REE mining have caused so much damage it is now an acknowledged national concern.  According to Wang Caifeng, China’s Deputy director-general of the Materials Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, producing one ton of REEs creates 2,000 tons of mine tailings.  It is also estimated that, within Baotou, where China’s primary rare earth production occurs, REE enterprises produce approximately 2.5 billion gallons of highly polluted wastewater per year and most of that waste water is   “discharged without being effectively treated, which not only contaminates potable water for daily living, but also contaminates the surrounding water environment and irrigated farmlands.”

Rare Earths

According to an article published by the Chinese Society of Rare Earths:

“Every ton [2,000 lbs.] of rare earth produced generates approximately 8.5 kilograms (18.7 lbs.) of fluorine and 13 kilograms (28.7 lbs.) of dust; and using concentrated sulfuric acid high temperature calcination techniques to produce approximately one ton of calcined rare earth ore generates 9,600 to 12,000 cubic meters (339,021 to 423,776 cubic feet) of waste gas containing dust concentrate, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid, approximately 75 cubic meters (2,649 cubic feet) of acidic wastewater plus about one ton of radioactive waste residue (containing water).”

This inconvenient environmental holocaust seems to have been exempted from Gore’s evaluation of wind power as source of “clean energy.”  Recently, physicist John Droz Jr. consulted with nuclear experts to compare the radioactive waste generated from a 3 gigawatt (GW) wind farm with that of a nuclear reactor to generate the same amount of electricity.  Their conclusions:

Wind Energy

Fact 1: Wind turbines require about 2000 lbs. of REEs per megawatt of rated capacity;

Fact 2: U.S. Army reports that mining 2000 lbs. of REE creates about 2000 lbs. of radioactive waste;

Assumption 1: The available Capacity Factor of these turbines will be about 33 percent (very optimistic);

Assumption 2: Water is about 50 percent of the weight of the REE mining radioactive waste. 

Therefore, the radioactive waste for a 3 GW wind facility:

—> Twenty year expected usable life of wind turbine (optimistic);

—>  50% of waste is water that will evaporate away; 

Total of wind power radioactive waste (3000 MW x 2000 REE/MW x 1 x .5) = 3,000,000± pounds

Nuclear Power

Fact 1: Nuclear reactor is Pressurized Water Reactor;

Fact 2: Radioactive waste is spent fuel rods that are permanently stored in deep earth repository;

Assumption 1: GW Nuclear facility generates about 60,000 pounds per year of “spent” uranium;

Assumption 2: Twenty years is used as that is the generous expected life of a wind turbine.

Therefore, the radioactive waste for a 1 GW single-pass nuclear power plant:

—> Average 60,000 pounds per year;

—> Twenty years of operations.

Total of nuclear generator radioactive waste (60,000 lbs. x 20 yrs.) = 1,200,000± pounds

So compared to the radioactive waste from wind energy to the radioactive waste in an “equivalent” nuclear power facility to produce the same amount of electricity, wind energy is dirtier — with 250 percent the amount of radioactive waste!  The next time you hear someone promote wind energy as a renewable, sustainable, clean, green source of energy that will give us energy independence, ask if it will also help the earth glow in the dark.

Note: The writer is indebted to John Droz Jr. for the technical research and analysis provided for this report.  Mr. Droz has been a physicist and an environmental activist for over 25 years.  He received undergraduate degrees in physics and math from Boston College and a graduate degree in physics from Syracuse University.  John has been a participating member of the Sierra Club and the Adirondack Council.

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Chriss Street’s latest book: “The Third Way”; now available at www.amazon.com