What I am Looking At: Masaccio
May 31st, 2010
Archive
Archive for May, 2010
{ What’s The Right Thing To Do? } A Comparative Statement
May 31st, 2010
via [ Harvard Ethics Course ] By Michael Sandel
About Justice:
Justice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history. Nearly one thousand students pack Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre to hear Professor Sandel talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship. Now it’s your turn to take the same journey in moral reflection that has captivated more than 14,000 students, as Harvard opens its classroom to the world.
This course aims to help viewers become more critically minded thinkers about the moral decisions we all face in our everyday lives.
In this 12-part series, Sandel challenges us with difficult moral dilemmas and asks our opinion about the right thing to do.
He then asks us to examine our answers in the light of new scenarios. The result is often surprising, revealing that important moral questions are never black and white.
Sorting out these contradictions sharpens our own moral convictions and gives us the moral clarity to better understand the opposing views we confront in a democracy.
Global Politics > Warming Up
May 31st, 2010
Israeli forces have attacked aid ships attempting to break the blockade of Gaza. Commandos lowered themselves from helicopters and onto the Mavi Marmara - the lead ship in a flotilla of six vessels which are carrying humanitarian aid for the Palestinian territory
How We Move Through The World
May 31st, 2010
{ Mod. Western Civ. } college curriculum - week 16
May 28th, 2010
{ Energy } Oil Has Become a Problem All Around Us
May 27th, 2010
{ BP } Then / Now
May 27th, 2010
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
{ BP } Huffington & Public Sentiments
May 22nd, 2010
via [ Huffington Post ]
As BP’s Earth Day Disaster continues to spread beyond the Gulf more and more questions are being asked.
Quotes: Somethings Are Too Good Not To Share
May 21st, 2010
I was told recently by someone who sat on BP’s Citizen’s Advisory Board and lost their $30,000/year government job that:
You can tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans, Republicans go back into the private sector while Democrats become unemployed.
Ahahahah - He now has a six figure job in the oil industry.
{ BP } How Will BP’s Earth Day Disaster Impact Expansion Plans Here?
May 21st, 2010
via [ WBEZ - Chicago Public Radio ] Worldview Segment “Will the Gulf Spill Affect BP Investment in Chicago Area? By Michael Puente.
Officials with the oil giant BP say it’s recovering about 3-thousand barrels of oil a day from that huge leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The company is spending millions to stop the leak and may have to shell out billions more in cleanup costs and economic losses to the region.
Closer to home, in Northwest Indiana, there’s concern that all this expense may affect BP’s multi-billion-dollar investment in its Whiting, Indiana refinery, just a few short miles from Chicago’s city limits.
The Gulf catastrophe also has emboldened BP’s local critics about the company’s environmental record here.
WBEZ’s Michael Puente brings us this report from our Northwest Indiana bureau in Chesterton
Michael’s Interview with me comes toward the end at the 6:10 minute point
Infographics: State Income Tax Rates
May 21st, 2010
Calumet Icon: Marian Byrnes
May 20th, 2010
Early this morning, Marian Byrnes, the longtime environmental activist of the Calumet Region passed away.
“Her incredible legacy will be remembered in all of our hearts, and future generations will hear stories about her strength, vision, wisdom, and compassion for nature. Without her endless pursuit of open space protection in the Calumet region, many acres of invaluable wetlands, prairies and forests would surely have been lost. A debt of gratitude is owed to her for her years of dedication and service to both people and nature. I am simply humbled by all she accomplished.”
- Nicole Kamins
{The Water I Drink} Additional Releases into the Grand Calumet River
May 20th, 2010
via [ Post Trib ] “Anti-pollution plan subject of hearing - Grace Davison wants to install diffuser to reduce the toxicity of salt discharges” By Gitte Laasby
EAST CHICAGO — Enough people were concerned about Grace Davison’s proposal to put a diffuser in the Grand Calumet River to dilute pollution that the Indiana Department of Environmental Management has decided to hold a hearing on it.
As the Post-Tribune reported on March 26, the chemical manufacturer in East Chicago has been allowed for the past four years to discharge enough acid salt into the Grand Calumet River to kill at least 85 percent of certain small water critters. To make the salt less toxic, the company wants to put in a diffuser to dilute the pollution.
IDEM didn’t initially plan a public hearing but decided to hold one after five Post-Tribune readers requested it.
“The public meeting… is being held to address the concerns of all interested parties prior to a final determination on the proposal,” IDEM said in a public notice.
The hearing will be held on May 26 and is supposed to provide information about the application and allow public participation. IDEM has also made the company’s application available for public review at various local places including IDEM’s Merrillville branch.
In 2006, IDEM permitted Grace Davison to discharge an average 39,000 pounds of sulfates (salt) per day into the Grand Calumet River just east of Kennedy Avenue.
As a condition, the company had to conduct monthly lab tests for six months on how toxic the discharge was to two kinds of water fleas and the fish fathead minnow.
The company’s 2007 lab tests showed that at least 85 percent of the critters died when exposed to undiluted wastewater.
The wastewater had well below the concentration of salt that IDEM allowed.
{ BP } Live / Work Conditions
May 20th, 2010
25-years-ago BP abandoned its professional training facilities in Robertsdale, donating the facilities to Calumet College, and moved to a 200-acre LEED certified campus in Naperville. They did so because they could no longer attract professionals to this location due to Quality of Life issues. Quality of Life issues they had a major hand in creating.
Today BP’s professional staff enjoy the healthy work environment of a green campus with ample buffering between office buildings and roadways, while residents adjacent to the BP’s refinery are not so fortunate. Today BP is constructing a whole new facility at their East Chicago / Whiting Refinery to refine the “No Good, Very Bad, Dirty” heavy sour crude from the Alberta Tars Sands and to do so they are constructing 6 cokers directly across the street from the Marktown Historic District where more than 120 children under the age of 18 live, play and sleep.
BP likes to refer to the project as a modernization or retooling project. This is an important distinction to them because to call it what is, a “new facility” or “new construction,” would trigger all sorts of regulatory reviews and permitting, including a new-source review requiring an environmental and health risk assessment. I am not certain if there has ever been a risk assessment done on the impacts the BP refinery has the neighboring communities. I don’t know if that is because they have been grandfathered in or what. I just know that new construction ought to trigger a new source review and that is not happening.
For labor purposes BP calls the project a “maintenance project.” Thus they bypass all sorts of labor rules in terms of pay, scheduling, and work conditions as would be the case for new construction. Let’s make this simple, if I tore down my house to construct a brand new home, I could not go to City Hall seeking a maintenance permit for the new construction. I would be required to seek the proper permits and follow requirements for new construction. This is just one way in which BP has been cutting corners here to save themselves costs. I can’t say what other cost cutting measures BP is making, but I do know they did not do this without the aid of regional leadership. I wonder what our regional leadership is thinking now as we learn more about the costs of BP practices to the gulf region.
This is a good environmental justice example of how benefits-without-risks are created and separated from risks-without-benefits in a free-market economy. Free-market corporations and present day land use policies have a very intentional consequent of accumulating wealth and benefits in one location while clustering risks and blight in another. All too often the geography of separation is as clear as the “Northshore” and “Southshore” designations.
It makes me wonder if anyone working in office complexes similar to the BP complex in Naperville feel any sense of culpability for the lives negatively impacted on the other side of their company’s production line. What about Kraft Foods? what about Grainger? what about Cargill? and U.S. Steel? and ArcelorMittal? Boeing? GATX? or Ryerson?
[ Wikipedia list of Corp HQ in the Chicago Met area ]
Compounding problems, BP extracted an additional $165 million in tax abatements from the mostly poor people of Marktown and East Chicago. They did this behind closed doors, and without a single public hearing, all while lecturing the region on “Good Government.” Despite efforts, residents, who pay the highest property taxes in the state at 7.4%, still do not know that they gave up $165 million to BP. BP accomplished this feat by spreading the wealth to voting districts outside the plume of negative externalities while taking advantage of their partnerships with corrupt local political enterprises under the plume. BP is well known for this form of philanthropic activity and I could go on about “to whom” and “how much” was given, but that will have to be for another post. Let these two examples suffice for now.
Three years ago a $25-million donation from BP capped Phase 1 of a three-part expansion and renovation campaign. Since 2002, BP had agreed to more than $125 million in state and regional legal settlements over pollution problems.
Art museums are often the beneficiaries of largess from corporations wishing to polish their sometimes less-than-gleaming image. (Cigarette, anyone?) Oops.
via [ LA Times ] BP Grand Entrance at LACMA looking not-quite-so-grand
In 2009 BP gave to Napperville for $1 an extremely expensive Hydrogen fueling station with multipliers of positive effects.
East Chicago Portrait Series, Energy, Environment, Tar Sands
{ BP’s } Rules
May 19th, 2010
This video reminds me a lot of how political and regulatory authorities in Northwest Indiana behaved when BP was seeking permits to retool their facilities to refine the Alberta Tar Sands in East Chicago
Inforgraphic: Food Budgets By City
May 17th, 2010
Recent Work:
Lake Effect Series 0006: Summer 2010
Oil and Wax on board
12" x 8"
