Fracking wastewater now endangers both drinking water and the wells that regurgitate the wastewater

There's an old saying that I won't spell out completely, but which most readers will certainly have heard at least once in their lives, to wit: "Don't sh-- where you eat." It is an all-purpose warning about not pursuing incompatible activities in the same place, particularly activities that produce either physical waste or emotional complications.

In this case the waste part is wastewater emitted by oil wells drilled into shale deposits which must undergo extensive hydraulic fracturing (often called fracking) before the oil can be freed. What most people do not know is that for every barrel of shale oil extracted, three to five barrels of water laden with fracking chemicals and salt, toxic minerals and radioactivity (from the deep rock) also comes up, most of it water originally injected under high pressure to fracture the shale and release the oil.

Some 9 millions barrels a days of shale oil is currently produced in the United States each day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That means between 27 and 45 million barrels of fracking wastewater is produced EACH DAY; in gallons that's between 1.1 and 1.9 billion gallons. And, of course, multiply by 365 and you'll get yearly totals. That's a lot of wastewater and it has to go somewhere and that somewhere is starting to pollute underground water supplies and surface soil and water, and to interfere with oil production itself.

Can authoritarians solve our environmental problems?

If you are deeply concerned about our environmental future, if you believe climate change is an existential issue, if you think toxics in soil, water and air are a major contributor to disease and to rapid fertility decline in humans and perhaps other animals, if you believe that the catastrophic decline of insect populations is something more than a convenient development for outdoor living but rather a sign of biodiversity collapse, if you wonder how increasingly over-exploited natural resources including water, soil, fossil fuels and metals can keep up with growing populations and growing demand, if you are worried about some or all of these things, then you may have been wondering in the last couple of decades whether democratic governments will actually do anything significant to reverse the negative trends in these areas.

The answer so far is not much. Perhaps you have asked yourself if the public and corporations need to be forced to do the right things when it comes to addressing our existential environmental threats. Well, democracies can force them with laws; but so far the laws and their enforcement in most countries do not appear to be anywhere near enough to change the crisis trajectory all of human civilization is now on.

That may be part of why more countries are turning to authoritarian leaders. There are, of course, many other reasons: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, poor response to natural disasters, anger over stagnant or falling living standards, and cultural conflict over the role of women and minorities in society to name a few. But when you look at this list you can see that it can be linked in most cases with proliferating climate change effects (such droughts that lead to migration), rising prices due to over-exploitation of resource supplies including energy (which can lead to falling living standards and crime), and cultural retrenchment which occurs in times of societal stress (in this case, the reassertion of male dominance and dominance for racial majorities that feel they are losing out to racial minorities).

The myth of managing the biosphere

A recent piece in New Scientist has reminded me that it is a myth that humans, if they are wise and clever enough, can learn to "manage" the biosphere.

The piece is about the unfortunate trade-off between pollution reduction and global warming. It has been known for some time that successful efforts to reduce air pollution have resulted in fewer particles in the atmosphere, particles that reflect sunlight back into space. This reduction has actually accelerated global warming even as it has improved air quality and reduced illness and death.

The warning in the New Scientist piece comes from imagining a scenario in which world governments somehow agree on global action to curb warming climate by "spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere that dim the sun. The strategy works: temperatures at ground level stabilise, and life goes on as normal despite escalating carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere."

Wars and rumors of wars: America, Europe, Russia and China

We have the ancient Roman writer Vegetius to thank for the phrase: "If you want peace, prepare for war." The phrase itself was adapted from one found in Vegetius' book on Roman military strategy, De Re Militari (circa 450 AD), the only complete work on the topic to survive to the modern era. The phrase translated literally reads, "Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war."

Whether that is good advice seems less relevant than whether those who prepare for war actually desire peace. I am thinking of something Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, said to Colin Powell, the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to wit: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

Which brings us to today: a world decidedly more under the sway of Albright than Vegetius, a world in which everyone seems to be preparing for war, but with little intention of preserving the peace.

Taking a holiday break - no post this week

I am taking a holiday break this week and plan to post again on Sunday, September 7.

Dog days in D.C.

As a child I believed that the so-called Dog Days of summer were called that because the intense heat causes dogs to pant more than usual to keep their body temperature down. And while my observation was not entirely misguided, I found out later that the appellation comes from the approximately six-week period when the rising of the sky's brightest star, Sirius—the so-called Dog Star associated with the constellation Canis Major, the "greater dog"—occurs before the Sun, making it visible to observers in the Northern Hemisphere.

The modern starting date is usually said to be July 3, and the ending date is August 11—though most people think of the Dog Days as extending into late August or even early September since they associate this period with exceptionally hot, humid weather in the Northern Hemisphere.

It was in preparation for such days that during my first summer in the District of Columbia, my landlady instructed her handyman to install an air conditioner in the window of the room I rent in a cavernous home in northwest Washington. She insisted that I would never make it through a hot, humid D.C. summer without air conditioning. I told her that I was pretty heatproof and that I would make it just fine. After all, I grew up in Michigan and managed the hot, humid summers there without air conditioning.

Two presidents, dementia and the 25th amendment

A friend of mine, who many years ago used to be a nurse caring for dementia patients, has impressed a very important point on me in recent months: Dementia just keeps getting worse. It never gets better.

It seems the United States has now had two presidents in a row around whom stories of diminished capacity and dementia have proliferated. Recently, a contributor to The Hill wrote about President Donald Trump's confabulation regarding his uncle John Trump, long deceased and formerly a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Now it's important to know the meaning of confabulation to understand this anecdote, so here's the dictionary definition:  "the replacement of a gap in a person's memory by a falsification that they believe to be true." The author of the piece in The Hill believes Trump was simply relating something Trump believed to be true from his direct experience.

Taking a break - no post this week

I am taking a break this week and plan to post again on Sunday, August 17.

Living through the second Gilded Age

While watching the HBO series "The Gilded Age," I was reminded that for most of my adult life I have been living through America's second Gilded Age. The appellation comes from the title of a 1873 novel of the same name by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. As the Encyclopedia Britannica explains:

The title was a provocation: the word gilded describes something covered in a thin layer of gold, shiny on the outside but, perhaps, cheap or rotten underneath. That’s how Twain and Warner saw the United States. Their book—part comedy, part critique, set in Washington, D.C.—mocked a society that looked bright and successful but that, underneath, was corrupt, driven forward by self-serving politicians and grasping businessmen. The title stuck because it captured the contradictions of the era.

This description might seem just as apt for America since the early 1980s as it does for America of the late 19th century. And, while the cast of characters seems similar, the results are very different. The robber barons of America's first Gilded Age left the country with a sprawling infrastructure of railroads, steel mills, mines, telegraphs and telephones, sturdy physical infrastructure much of which is still in place today.

The robber barons of our current era—the tech overlords who control vast software and information empires—have created ephemeral apps and information products designed to manipulate us and steer us toward a kind of digital indentured servitude, one marked by endless subscription fees and paywalls and constant surveillance of our behavior, both online and off. The tech overlords are in the process of enclosing the digital commons so that everything on it will come at a price, either to our wallets or our privacy.

Transformer bottleneck: Can the U.S. maintain and expand its electric grid?

Electric transformers aren't something most people think about unless one attached to the power lines serving their home or business is damaged resulting in a power outage. Most of the time power is back on quickly indicating that the transformers were not the problem. It takes longer to replace a transformer damaged beyond repair.

And that can be a problem if large numbers of transformers are damaged at once such as occurred in the recent California wildfires. That's because the waiting time for new transformers is now 127 weeks.

In case you don't know, transformers are typically used to bring down voltage. Utilities use high voltages to transfer electricity long distances because it's more efficient. The electricity voltage must then be "stepped down" to the level that most homes and businesses use.