Tag Archives: White House

Climate change adversely affecting U.S. power grid

Yes, and moving away from baseload coal, nukes, and natural gas and towards distributed solar and wind power will help with that, both directly by making the grid more resilient, and indirectly by slowing climate change.

Clare Foran wrote for NationalJournal 12 August 2013, Climate Change Is Threatening the Power Grid: So says the White House, in a new report that recommends strengthening the grid.

Just days away from the 10-year anniversary of the worst power outage in U.S. history, the White House and the Energy Department released a report on Monday evaluating the resiliency of the nation’s electric grid and recommending steps to prevent future blackouts.

The report called storms and severe weather “the leading cause of power outages in the United States,” and warned against the steep cost of weather-related damage to the electric grid. It put the price tag for electrical failures caused by inclement weather at between $18 billion and $33 billion annually, and noted that costs have increased in recent years, jumping from a range of $14 billion to $26 billion in 2003 to $27 billion to $52 billion in 2012. Storms exceeding a billion dollars in damages (electrical and otherwise) have also become more frequent in the past decade, as the chart below shows.

Well, Entergy’s Arkansas Nuclear 1 (ANO1) is still down more than four months after a fatal accident (hey, look at that; Continue reading →

Protests about “trillion dollar incarceration machine” crash White House web site

W.E. Messamore wrote for caivn.org 18 June 2011, Internet activists crash White House phone lines calling for an end to the War on Drugs:
On Friday June 17th, exactly 40 years after President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs,” Internet activists organizing from the social news and activism website, Reddit.com, called the White House en masse to demand an end to the War on Drugs, calling it a “trillion dollar incarceration machine” with a measurable failure to reduce drug use, or harm from drug use.
The original post included this:
This is also the last vestige of Nixon’s fight against the civil rights and anti-war movements: And if you look at US incarceration rates, it’s been incredibly effective. . .
  • 4,919 Black males per 100,000 population
  • 1,717 Latino males per 100,000 of population
  • 717 White males per 100,000 of population.
  • South Africa under Apartheid (1993) – 851 Black males per 100,000
That’s right, almost six times as many black males per capita get locked up in the U.S. than in South Africa under apartheid. The numbers are even worse for young people and especially young black males, leading to this summary:
This isn’t a War on Drugs: It’s a Race War; It’s a War on the youth, likely to protest controversial policies (a war that conveniently takes away those groups voting rights). It’s a war on the American People, paid for by the American people, for the American people’s own good.
Yep. Except a majority of the American people don’t want the “war on drugs” any more. It’s time for the laws to change.

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