Itzl Alert Network, Tuesday, 6th of May, 2025: The Environment and Climate Change

The inspiration for this week’s diary is four books.

Obviously, I will not get too deep into any of them, just a little overview of each one.

Here we go:

The little dog is named Itzl.

As you can see by Itzl’s concerned look, this group is for us to check in at, to let people know we are alive, doing OK, and not affected by such things as heat, blizzards, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, power outages, or other such things that could keep us off Daily Kos. If you’re not here, or anywhere else on Daily Kos, and there are adverse conditions in your area (floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, etc.), we are going to check up on you. If you are going to be away from your computer for a day or a week, let us know here. We care!

IAN is a great group to join, and a good place to learn to write diaries. Drop one of us a PM to be added to the Itzl Alert Network anytime! We all share the publishing duties, and we welcome everyone who reads IAN to write diaries for the group! Every member is an editor, so anyone can take a turn when they have something to say, photos and music to share, a cause to promote or news!

This is our current schedule of regular IAN diary writers:

Monday:          Youffraita

Tuesday:          bigjacbigjacbigjac

Wednesday:    Pam from Calif

Thursday:        art ah zen

Friday:             FloridaSNMOM

Saturday:        FloridaSNDad

Sunday:           loggersbrat

The first one is:

Living Downstream, by Sandra Steingraber, published in 1997.

At the age of 20, she was diagnosed with bladder cancer.

I will now post a quote from the foreword to the second edition, published in 2010: 

Bladder cancer is considered a quintessential environmental cancer, meaning that more evidence exists for a link between toxic chemical exposure and bladder cancer risk than for almost any other kind of cancer, with data going back a hundred years. I also learned that the identification of bladder carcinogens does not preclude their ongoing use in commerce. Just because researchers discover, through careful scientific study, that a chemical contributes to cancer, does not mean it is automatically banished from our economy.

Skipping a paragraph: 

A 2007 investigation published by the American Cancer Society identified 216 chemicals known to cause breast cancer in animals. Of these, 73 are found in food or consumer products; 35 are air pollutants; and 29 of them are produced in the United States in large amounts every year. 

I just skimmed over a few pages in various chapters.

The book has a lot of detailed information about cancer and what causes it.

My father, Don, and my oldest sister, Adonna, both died of cancer.

Both of them had smoked for decades, so I naturally blamed the smoking.

My father had cancer in all his organs already, when they said it was cancer, so I do not know for sure it was smoking.

My sister had kidney cancer, so I am not certain about the cause of her cancer.

This feels rather depressing.

On to the next book: 

The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler, published in 2005.

This book seems to predict the end of the world as we know it, within not too many decades from 2005.

We are now at 2 decades from that year.

One of the reasons he gives is this: 

The key to understanding what is about to happen to us is contained in the concept of the global oil production peak. This is the point at which we have extracted half of all the oil that has ever existed in the world.

From what I have been reading about recent times, our fracking, and offshore drilling, here in the USA, has given us more oil than anyone thought was available.

I just now skimmed over many more pages.

All gloom and doom, no way out, he says.

On to the next book: 

Hot: Living through the next fifty years on Earth, by Mark Hertsgaard, published in 2011.

As you might guess, the main point of this book is that global warming triggers climate change.

I am sure you know the details, hotter summers, rising sea level, etc.

As I was skimming though many of the pages, I noticed that the author considered moving to The Netherlands, because they know how to deal with these things.

My nephew, Nic, lives in The Netherlands, with his lady, Kim, and their son, Luc.

So, it is actually possible that I, Uncle Mark, might do just that someday.

Now for the 4th book: 

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, by Michael Shellenberger, published in 2020.

Quoting the inside of the jacket: 

Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. 

Skipping ahead: 

Carbon emissions have peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for more than a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of the Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas. 

I read about half of this book about two years ago.

I will now write from memory:

Before oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, the east coast folks would kill whales, to use the whale blubber in their oil lamps.

With the oil wells, they could use kerosene instead.

For a very long time, piano key tops and billiard balls were made from elephant tusks.

The plastic industry, which is part of the oil industry, now makes the piano key tops and the billiard balls.

I stopped reading when I got to the chapter on nuclear energy.

I have seen recent news that many green folks are now embracing nuclear energy.

My personal favorite would be a big power plant, made of acres of sodium ion batteries, and solar panels that always aim at the sun, and lots of wind turbines.

If it is done right, at least in my daydream, when the sun goes down and the wind dies down, the batteries would keep feeding the grid at the same level.

That is my daydream.

I hope you enjoyed the diary.

Hugs!