Editorial 10.7, July 2008, by Deirdre Helfferich Summer Omnibus Liquifying to Slime in the Sunlight With John Cowdery’s recent indictment, the noose is tightening around the remaining batch of Corrupt Bastards yet to be indicted or convicted. There’s plenty of incentive for these little trapped birdies to sing, and that will help trap more of them. Good for us, bad for them. What I’d like to know is when VECO and the oil companies it represented are going to get slammed. The Voice of the Times, that cheerleader for VECO, is still in existence, amazingly, as a blog, www.voiceofthetimes.net. You’d think that having been so wrong for so long and so loudly that they’d be embarrassed to keep on going and would just quietly fold up shop and slink home to their owners. But no. Apparently you can fool enough of the people enough of the time to keep in business, at least in the virtual world. Father of the Republic Yes, it’s true: Joe Ryan is back in town. He’s apparently been here for a while now, but George Riley ran into him at a local coffeeshop shortly before the Fourth of July and invited him to come on out and be a parade judge. Ryan was a little nonplussed, apparently, that Ester, as a former municipal nemesis on zoning issues, would want him to even set foot in the village, but, as George pointed out to him, he was the “Father of the Republic,” in all senses of the word, among them in bestowing our moniker upon us as well as in attempting to foist rude zoning plans upon our streets. For that lively name, we owe him a debt. Or at least a ribbing. For those of you who don’t know, Ryan is known by this paternal nickname because, once upon a time (late 1980s), as a then-member of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly (he later went on to become an Anchorage legislator), proposed that land in the borough, lots of it, be rezoned for mining, including downtown Ester. And not just mining—mining only. Ester business owners and residents turned out in force at the assembly hearings on the matter, telling Assemblyman Ryan where he could put his idea. It was quite the lively assembly meeting, as such are when Ester gets up in arms. Ryan got annoyed and later, in a letter to the editor, accused those good citizens of living in “the People’s Republic of Ester.” The proposal failed, and, unfortunately for him, a lot of said Esterites were capitalists with a perverse sense of humor, and took to referring to their village by his epithet. It stuck. Now we actually own the land upon which Village Road was built, and it has been suggested by more than one person that we should build a little border post there and require passports or entry visas (or at least good bribes) for those wishing entry to the Republic of Ester (as I’ve said before, we are in different country than the rest of the borough—Ryan was certainly right about that). The gazebo could serve in such capacity for special occasions… At any rate, Ryan said he would consider it, but he didn’t show up for judge duty on the appointed day. Too bad. He missed out on a lot of high-quality bribes. Perhaps we can convince him next year. G-8 Ghastlies George Junior went to the G-8 summit in Japan recently, and actually admitted that gee, maybe he represented the world’s biggest polluter, ho ho ho. Other than that, however, the “success” in calling to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is pretty pathetic, given that no baseline year was established, no short- or medium-range targets were set, and there’s no requirement that the biggest polluters make the biggest effort. In fact, there’s no requirements of any sort. So this is a meaningless statement of “vision.” According to Kate Raworth, Oxfam’s senior researcher on climate change, “we need global greenhouse gas emission cuts of at least 80% against 1990 levels by 2050.” And that is just to have a one in three chance of staying below 2˚C of warming. The increase in CO2 is already causing acidification of our oceans, adding to the stress on coral reefs—and the science on that is not controversial. The shift in acidity, about ten percent since the beginning of the Industrial Age, is due to ocean water absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere. As the water becomes more acidic, the calcium skeletons of plankton and coral literally corrode—and the creatures upon which all ocean life depends will die. So forget warming—it’s the oceans’ pH that we have to worry about. | ||
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