Casualties of Misplaced Thoughts

About a year ago I heard this poem on NPR's "Writer's Almanac," hosted every morning at 630 by Garrison Keillor. I wrote it down and came across it again this morning while adding something to my journal.

Casualties of Misplaced Thoughts

i offer my apology
if my words burned your trust,
and if my actions betrayed my intentions,

sometimes the ones nearest to us,
the ones we wish belonged to us,
they become casualties of our misplaced thoughts,
and yet the sound of their tears
is bereft of hatred.

- dodinsky -

The Real Slumdog Millionaires

I recently saw Slumdog Millionaire.

It brings to light the terrible, horrible conditions for India’s child beggars.

Take Mumbai – formerly Bombay when under the rule of the British empire – a chaotic urban sprawl that is now India’s largest city and home to more than 20 million people. More than nine million of them live in slums, raising families in shacks built from rubbish on top of open sewers. It is a terrifying place to be, and I have been to Detroit.



Mafia gangs drug children take them to the hospital and have their arms or legs amputated. Why? So they will be more sympathetic while begging. Think about it: organized gangs of adults kidnap and intentionally cripple poor children and then put them back on the street begging. Of course, the gangs then take all of the money the children earn.



So just who would chop off the leg of a healthy child? The boys are victims of India’s so-called ‘beggar mafia’ — criminals so violent and amoral that they are prepared to hack the limbs off children, as well as steal new-born babies from hospitals.



They use the children as begging ‘props’ to maximize their earnings from sympathetic passers-by. The plight of India’s child beggars has been thrust into the international spotlight by Slumdog Millionaire.



Their suffering comes down to one thing: money. Goddamn money.



In a country of 1.2 billion people, where the gulf between rich and poor is vast, there are an estimated 300,000 child beggars. Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost all of these child beggars, whether mutilated or not, are addicted to solvents, alcohol and charras (a powerful Afghan hashish, often laced with opium), which are supplied by the gang masters to keep the children docile and obedient.



The shocking truth about the beggar mafia emerged last year. In what was dubbed the ‘arms for alms’ scandal, doctors were filmed by Indian journalists agreeing to cut off the healthy limbs of children for just $200. The maiming of children is now so widespread that even devoutly religious locals refuse to give disabled children money, knowing that it is passed straight to their ‘handlers’ and that they are the pawns of a growing organized crime syndicate.



In my travels to India, when I was approached by beggars – several times a day; if you go there, count on it – I never gave them money. I would offer them food, which they don’t want. I know that may sound harsh, but I quickly found that there is little room for emotion. This is a business — a mafia. These children are taught how to look as pitiful as possible to get money — and what they earn just gets taken from them.



Despite India’s economic boom, the future looks bleak for millions of the nation’s children. They never really get old, they just get replaced with new ones — and cast out on to the street to become beggars or die. That’s the way life is in India. It never changes.

Lisa Jackson's Priorities as EPA Administrator

Today the US Senate confirmed Lisa Jackson as the new Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Immediately after her confirmation, Ms. Jackson issued a memorandum to EPA employees outlining her top five priorities:

1. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The President has pledged to make responding to the threat of climate change a high priority of his administration. He is confident that we can transition to a low-carbon economy while creating jobs and making the investment we need to emerge from the current recession and create a strong foundation for future growth. I share this vision. EPA will stand ready to help Congress craft strong, science-based climate legislation that fulfills the vision of the President. As Congress does its work, we will move ahead to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision recognizing EPA’s obligation to address climate change under the Clean Air Act.

2. Improving air quality. The nation continues to face serious air pollution challenges, with large areas of the country out of attainment with air-quality standards and many communities facing the threat of toxic air pollution. Science shows that people’s health is at stake. We will plug the gaps in our regulatory system as science and the law demand.

3. Managing chemical risks. More than 30 years after Congress enacted the Toxic Substances Control Act, it is clear that we are not doing an adequate job of assessing and managing the risks of chemicals in consumer products, the workplace and the environment. It is now time to revise and strengthen EPA’s chemicals management and risk assessment programs.

4. Cleaning up hazardous-waste sites. EPA will strive to accelerate the pace of cleanup at the hundreds of contaminated sites across the country. Turning these blighted properties into productive parcels and reducing threats to human health and the environment means jobs and an investment in our land, our communities and our people.

5. Protecting America’s water. EPA will intensify our work to restore and protect the quality of the nation’s streams, rivers, lakes, bays, oceans and aquifers. The Agency will make robust use of our authority to restore threatened treasures such as the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake Bay, to address our neglected urban rivers, to strengthen drinking-water safety programs, and to reduce pollution from non-point and industrial dischargers.

EIA Predicts No Growth In US Oil Consumption for the First Time in 20 Years

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) yesterday released its Annual Energy Outlook 2009, presenting U.S. energy consumptions and production projections for the next few decades.
Among EIA’s predictions:

• No growth in U.S. oil consumption. This is the first time in over 20 years that the EIA did not project a growth.


• The natural gas industry will expand but will rely less on foreign imports less. EIA projects that the total net share of imported natural gas will drop from 16 percent in 2007 to less than 3 percent in 2030.


• Energy-related CO2 emissions and energy usage will continue to grow, but at a much slower rate, due in part to higher energy prices and new efficiency policies.


• Oil prices will continue to rise, costing $130 per barrel by 2030 ($189 per barrel, adjusted for inflation).


• The renewable fuel industry will grow, with U.S. consumption rapidly rising by 3.3 percent every year.


• Hybrid vehicle sales will jump from 2 percent in 2007 to 38 percent in 2030. By that time plug-in hybrids will also account for 2 percent of all new car sales.

The full report will be available for download later this month on the EIA website. EIA also issued its International Energy Outlook report containing predictions about wind power, world oil prices, etc.

President Obama

A Dust of Snow

I went for a walk in the woods last week after a light dusting of snow. It was beautiful and reminded me of a Robert Frost poem, "A Dust of Snow"

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued

Our New Exxon Valdez

We are an energy greedy nation. A few weeks ago we vomited out the fruits of this greed in Kingston, Tennessee, home of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill shocked Americans into regulating the oil shipping industry, and caused us to cast a wary eye on all offshore oil development. Double-hulled tankers are now the rule, not the exception, and the standards for oil production are tighter, if imperfect. Exxon also faced decades of criminal and civil litigation, leading to a multimillion-dollar payout to fishermen and others affected by the spill, two decades later (though the final payout was a fraction of that ordered by lower courts, thanks to a 2008 industry-friendly ruling by the Supreme Court).

So what will result from the Tennessee Valley Authority's massive coal ash spill, which has blanketed hundreds of acres near Kingston, Tenn., with a sludgy and likely toxic mess? (USA Today has the latest on the fear inspired by the spill, while the New York Times details test results showing high levels of toxic contaminants in streams near the spill.)

Will TVA and its Kingston, Tenn., power plant become synonymous with an environmental disaster on the scale that the Exxon Valdez is?

It should.

The accident highlights the serious, but often hidden, risks of coal. The coal industry has launched an advertising blitz in recent years, particularly during the presidential campaign, lauding the fossil fuel for keeping America's lights on, and for the promise of "clean coal."

"Clean coal" has nothing to do with coal itself. Rather, the term is typically used to refer to next-generation (that is, not this generation) technology that will capture the pollution — the emissions that cause acid rain, smog and, critically, global warming — that spews from smokestacks. It says nothing about the real-world damage from coal mining or, in this case, the management of coal waste. "Mismanagement" would be the better term in this case.

The air pollution from coal-fired power plants is the largest contributor to America's greenhouse gas emissions, its acid rain and much of the nation's smog. Smog, lest anyone forget, leads to asthma and other lung diseases, heart attacks and premature death.

The spill highlights the need for the American economy to evolve. We have to do more with less energy — an easy challenge, given the wastefulness in our energy consumption today. And we have to generate our electricity with clean sources, like the sun, wind and tides.

In the meantime, government has to get serious about regulating the power plants currently in operation so that — at a minimum — they safely contain their wastes.

Adios