Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Dirty Snow - 6/29/07

When I first heard about Charlie Zender’s theory that dirty snow contributes significantly to global warming, I got worried.  Not, however, about the environment, but about the ways in which the know-nothings might be able to use this to make fun of the facts and confuse the issue.  Can’t you just hear Rush Limbaugh, or one of the other foghorns of the far right, having a great time ridiculing this study?

“Now get this. A team of so-called atmospheric physicists from the University of California thinks the main threat to the planet is dirty snow.  “You heard that. Dirty snow. I suppose they think we need President Hillary to launch a massive program to wash the nation’s snow.  Or maybe the liberals would like to pay unemployed polar bears to work on it. Give a subsidy to Canada.”

You get the drift. But when you look at the results of this study, the clear indication is that the effects of blackened snow are now something well beyond a theory. The study, by the way, was not paid for  by a liberal think tank, but by the Bush Administration, through NASA.

Scientists don’t like to call anything established fact. But to a layman, the data presented here leave essentially no doubt that contaminated snow does, in fact, help warm up the globe. How can that be?

Well, you know why you don’t want to wear a black suit to a summer garden party, right? Dirty snow works much the same way. As the scientists put it, “Snow becomes dirty when soot from tailpipes, smokestacks and forest fires enters the atmosphere and falls to the ground.”  Soot-infused snow is darker. Dark surfaces absorb sunlight and cause warming, while bright surfaces reflect heat back into space, and cause cooling. What happens after the snow melts?  The effect continues, because the ground surface is darker and retains more heat.

This is clearly happening, as is global warming itself. We have enough recorded temperature data over the last few hundred years to confirm that. Even the Bush Administration doesn’t seriously contest the reality of what they prefer to call “climate change.”  The only real question is what to do about it.

As of now, we don’t have any way of rolling back global warming, any more than we do fixing the damage to a person’s lungs done by years of cigarettes.  What we do know is that no matter how badly you have abused your body, it is better to quit smoking, right now.  Ditto, global warming.

Charlie Zender also noted that “any increase in shipping through the Arctic Ocean is likely to exacerbate these effects by putting soot emissions right in the middle of the remaining snow and sea-ice.”  He suggests we might want to think very carefully about this. If you have children, I suggest you take his advice. 

For me, there’s no choice. I have to be against melting the polar ice caps.  After all, I have a basement.

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Interview: Charlie Zender - 6/29/07

Could a significant amount of global warming be caused by … dirty snow?  That may sound like a joke, but it’s actually the very serious conclusion of a team of U.S. scientists who have studied the problem.  Charlie Zender is an atmospheric physicist, who is a co-author of a new article explaining the findings in the Journal of Geophysical research.  Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Ozone Action - 6/28/07

As they say, nothing is certain except death and taxes, but I am reasonably confident of one other thing. Someone, somewhere, will listen to the interview I just did on the fight to reduce ozone levels.

And that person will e-mail me with a vituperative attack on …Al Gore. I am not quite sure why the anti-environmentalists blame Gore for everyone who tries to save the planet, but they do.

Actually, while I admire Gore, this time he doesn’t deserve any credit. Someone else does, the man who got the second-highest number of votes in the 2000 presidential election. Bush.

That’s right. President George W. Bush. He is helping save our air, at least accidentally. That’s because two years ago, he named Stephen Johnson administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, usually known as the EPA. His first two appointments were politicians; a former governor of New Jersey, and a former governor of Utah whose background was in real estate.

But Stephen Johnson is the real deal, a career environmentalist who spent a quarter century at the EPA before getting the top job two years ago. When he was appointed, the President proudly said that Johnson was “the first professional scientist to lead the EPA.”

Bush said he wanted Steve Johnson to use his credentials “to set clear, rational standards for environmental quality, and to place sound scientific analysis at the heart of all major decisions.”

One has to wonder, given this administration’s track record, if that’s what the President really wanted. But that is what he got. Last week, Steve Johnson announced new, tougher ozone standards. “Based on the science before me today, the current standard is insufficient to protect the public health, and I’m proposing to tighten it,” Johnson said. He wants to take the current permissible smog standard from 84 parts per billion to 70 to 75 parts per billion.

Naturally, the business community began to howl. Former Gov. John Engler, not widely seen as an environmentalist, said the agency was “moving the goal posts in the middle of the game.”

He now heads the National Association of Manufacturers. My guess is that most of his clients can afford to buy personal oxygen tanks, if it comes down to that. Most of the rest of us can’t.

There is a lot of evidence that ozone harms people’s lungs and respiratory systems, and may be a factor in other health problems.

Most of it comes from factory emissions, gasoline vapors and car exhaust. It can be deadly to those with asthma. The EPA has already made a difference. Ozone levels are much lower than in 1980. But they need to be lower still.

Whether the new standards will ever become reality is an open question. They are supposed to be phased in between 2013 and 2030. It’s anyone’s guess how many Presidents and policy shifts we’ll have in the meantime. But perhaps a journey to clean air begins with a single cough. So we might as well start here.

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Interview: Stephen Chester - 6/28/07

The U-S Environmental Protection Agency says the nation’s air needs to have less ozone and that’s going to have a major impact on Michigan. Can the state manage to clean up its air? What happens if it doesn’t? Steven Chester is director of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, otherwise known as the D-E-Q. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Michigan on the Rocks - 6/27/07

I have been a political junkie since, at the age of ten, I hid a transistor radio under my pillow to listen to the returns in the Romney-Swainson race for governor in 1962. I have written widely about Michigan government for many years.

And I have never seen anything even remotely like this. We have two major crises that are threatening to damage vast sections of the state of Michigan, perhaps even beyond repair. First, we have the worst state government financing crisis in modern history.

That’s something that threatens our colleges and universities, our roads and our bridges. We are heading for a complete meltdown next year unless some hard decisions are taken really soon.

At the same time, we have the worst leadership crisis I have ever seen. We are being led -- and that’s the wrong word -- by a governor and legislature who seem to lack both courage and a clue.

Just look at what happened yesterday.

The governor sent a letter to State Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, a Republican, and House Speaker Andy Dillon, a Democrat. The letter “reminded” them that a deal had been made to raise the income tax and expand the sales tax to some services.

Bishop then flat out said she was lying. That‘s right, lying. The actual words he used were “outright mistruth.” He said there was no agreement, nothing even close. Did the Speaker then stand up and rally to the support of his governor and fellow Democrat?

Not on your life. He ran and hid, sending an aide out to say that he “would not comment on ongoing negotiations.”

What does this tell us? First of all, that Jennifer Granholm is close to proving that she is an utter failure as a leader.

You don’t have to be a management whiz to know that you never, ever, announce a controversial agreement - if you have one - unless you have everybody on board. And you don’t do it in a letter. You have a press conference before the cameras.

You have all the parties there, for solidarity, to rally support and to put them on the record as supporting whatever the agreement is.

But this also tells us that the top priority of our legislators, especially the Republicans, is not our best interests. It is not our children’s future. It is their narrow, selfish political agenda. Which in the case of Mike Bishop, apparently means running for governor.

If Michigan is to have a future, we have to have a tax increase, or risk crippling forever the institutions, especially the colleges and universities, that we need to get us out of the mess caused by the collapse of the old muscle car and muscle power economy.

We also must have elected leaders with courage, who think that in the final analysis, we are more important than they are.

We don’t have either now.

And that just may be the biggest crisis of all.

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Interview: Charles Ballard - 6/27/07

The budget crisis is not over. Last month, Michigan lawmakers cobbled together a balanced budget for the present fiscal year but they did so mainly by shoveling most of the deficit onto next year. Now what happens? Charles Ballard is a professor of economics at Michigan State University. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: CAFE, anyone? - 6/26/07

Michigan’s Carl Levin is one of the longest-serving and most powerful members of the Senate. His Democrats are now in the majority, and both he and Debbie Stabenow worked long and hard lobbying their colleagues on the new energy bill for weeks.

Their goal, and the goal of the domestic auto industry, was to try and win more of a compromise on fuel economy standards. But it was absolutely shocking to see the way in which the Senate gave Michigan the back of its hand, passing this bill by more than two to one.

For Detroit’s automakers, it was another blow falling on a bruise. Chrysler wailed it would drive them into bankruptcy. Ford and General Motors seemed numb, but then neither has posted a profit in years. Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t have happened, and even If it had, the automakers wouldn’t have worried much.

After all, this bill now has to go to the House, where the first stop is the Energy and Commerce Committee. That’s the personal fiefdom of Chairman John Dingell, otherwise known as “The Truck,” the car industry’s congressman since before tail fins became popular. Ford Motor company is in his district; his wife is a lobbyist for General Motors.

Yet the Truck is out of alignment with much of the House leadership. He says he has no plans to hold hearings on this bill till the fall. But he almost certainly can’t bottle it up forever.

The domestic auto industry has lost a lot of clout. It has closed a lot of plants in a lot of states, and eliminated a lot of jobs. Michigan and Ohio, the states where the auto industry is centered, have lost ten congressional seats in the last forty years.

California, home to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, has gained fifteen seats over the same period of time. You don’t see many American-made cars in California. They don’t feel they need Detroit.

President Bush doesn’t need us either; he tried to win this state twice, and we said no both times. What I am afraid may happen is a battle royal between the auto industry’s dwindling defenders and everyone else. And the numbers seem to indicate that this time, they may roll over the Truck, Even if I am wrong, John Dingell is about to turn 81. He won’t be in the House when these standards fully kick in.

What I would like to see him do is concentrate on the parts of this bill that are the most harmful. The idea of quintupling ethanol production makes sense to no one except Archer-Daniels-Midland.

Nearly as bad was the fact that Senate Republicans killed a provision in the energy bill that would have provided $32 billion in tax incentives for alternative energy producers. They blocked that because Big Oil wanted them to. If John Dingell manages to whack ethanol, and get money for alternatives, he’ll prove that he is more than a truck.

Indeed, he’ll be a true American classic.

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Interview: Jim Hall - 6/26/07

Last week, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly passed an energy bill mandating tough new fuel economy standards, despite frantic lobbying by the domestic auto companies. But will the proposed new standards become law? And if so, what will that mean? Jim Hall is vice president for the consulting and forecasting firm AutoPacific Inc. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Factory Farming - 6/25/07

The old joke is that there are two things you never want to watch being made: Legislation and sausage. So what about proposed legislation that regulates how sausage is made?

In my opinion, those are exactly the kind of laws we need to pay the most attention to. Most of us don’t know very much about where our food comes from. The truth is, we don’t want to know.

When it comes to unpleasant things, we love euphemisms and acronyms. Take CAFO, for example, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Does that sound like a super-size trough?

What it really means is animals packed together in dreadful cruelty and squalor. It means a place where calves are fattened in pens where they don’t even have room to turn around; where chickens have their beaks cut off so they won’t peck and pigs have their teeth pulled out without anesthesia so they won’t bite the bars.

I have never been inside a factory farm, but a few years ago I was close to one, in Hillsdale County. The smell was so bad I did not get it out of my nostrils for days. This farm, which was far from the worst of them, produced 120,000 gallons of manure every day.

Eventually, after a state lawsuit, it agreed to build a treatment plant to manage its vast river of cattle exhaust. Yet other farms, some of which produce as much waste as entire cities, still spread their stuff in nearby fields, where it can run off into the water table.

Protecting our water ought to be our top concern.

Yet there are other reasons to call for a serious look at the nature of these operations. Gary Yourovsky, who bills himself as the most radical animal rights activist in the Midwest, is not easy to be around.

He thinks that our society’s treatment of animals means that we are no better than the Nazis. He thinks anyone who eats meat – and that would include me -- is an immoral hypocrite at best.

Yourofsky spends his life living on a shoestring and traveling the nation, speaking to college students. He is strident, abrasive, and may turn off almost as many people as he converts. He is a strict vegan who calls factory farms eternal Treblinkas.

He doesn’t have mainstream views. But he does have videotapes of life inside factory farms, which he has shown to my students.

If you saw them, you would never forget them. You probably wouldn’t eat lunch, either. But factory farms are, indeed, why we can buy a whole cooked chicken for $4.99.

You may feel that my attitude is sentimental hogwash and that that they are the price we have to pay for our lifestyle.

However, are you really comfortable with a law that allows an operation that produces vast oceans of waste to dispose of it without a permit, operating on the honor system?

If the answer is yes, you are a lot braver than I.

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Interview: Gerald Van Worekom - 6/25/07

The most controversial farms in Michigan are called CAFOs Concentrated Animal Feeding Units, or factory farms. There have been complaints that they pollute waterways and cause other environmental hazards. This week the state Senate passed a bill to change the way these farms are regulated. But are the changes for the better? Gerald Van Worekom is a Muskegon Republican and he was the bill’s sponsor. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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