At least at an intellectual level I understand the GOP fixation with “reducing the regulatory burden on businesses,” and how that leads to wanting to slash environmental regulations. But that doesn’t explain some of what’s going on here.

A Henry County corn field inundated with flood water. Source: Flickr user boodie131. Creative commons non-commercial, attribution.

Also thumbs up to the Senate for passing 49-1 (Chelgren voting against) providing tax credits for the installation of small solar and wind production facilities for homes and businesses. The bill will provide tax credits of up to $3,000 for homeowners and $15,000 for businesses. This bill is awaiting action by the Republican-controlled House.

But the trend at the highest level both in Iowa and in the nation is one of distinct hostility by Republican governors and legislatures not just for onerous regulation but for environmental protection at large. Oh, it is always sold as a brand of fiscal prudence or streamlining of government. Those are smoke screens. The trend is to sell back to industry decades of progress on environmental protection, safe drinking water and clean air.

Witness Iowa Senate File 500, a bill that would remove responsibility for water quality regulation from the Department of Natural Resources to the Department of Agriculture. Consider that agricultural sources contribute to the great majority of Iowa water quality issues. Saying that an industry can regulate itself is about as realistic as trying to convince teenagers not to have sex. It might sound good if you live in a bubble of religious or political dogma, but out here in the real world where everyone actually lives, it is knows as a crock.

This is nothing more than a sneaky attempt to kill water quality enforcement in Iowa. Of course no one would support repealing water quality regulations. So, let’s just “transfer” the responsibility for those regulations to a department that has largely been captured by the industry which it primarily regulates.

Or how about the bill that would ban people from investigating conditions at agricultural facilities? The bill essentially suspends the First Amendment with regards to writing or reporting on the agriculture industry. HF 589 passed the House 66-27 and stands before the Senate.

Iowa is not alone in this. The New York Times outlines efforts by the GOP in many states to undo environmental protections. In Maine, Tea Party Governor, Paul LePage, announced that he wants to open up 3 million acres of north woods protected wilderness area for development and to suspend laws that protect children from toxic products in their toys. That’s an effort that is getting some pushback even from his fellow party members, by the way. ‘Cause you know, that’s just crazy on its face.

In Florida, another Tea Party favorite, Governor Rick Scott, wants to dismantle (by starving this joint state-federal effort of the state share of funding) the program to restore the Everglades. This program was negotiated by both the Clinton and Bush II administrations with industry, real estate and environmentalist support.

Taken together, all of this is just more evidence — if such were needed — of the capture of the GOP by intellectually and spiritually deluded factions that aren’t just advocating smaller government, but actively hostile to all government.

So, this dude, Reid Gower, decided that NASA does a pretty poor job of promoting itself and took it upon himself to school the geeks over there on how to, you know, make space exploration sexy again. Very simple really, take the voice of the late, beloved Carl Sagan from his Cosmos TV series and mash it up with some of the better video of recent decades. Done.

Carl Sagan of course is known universally to Americans of a certain age who were either depending on your outlook at the time forced or allowed to watch Cosmos in school in the early 1980′s. Cosmos is available to watch for free online at Hulu and Netflix. If you have children in the 12-16 year age range do yourself and them a favor and sit down with them – bind them to the couch and prop their eyes open Clockwork Orange style if you must – and watch this with them. It is probably the best eight hours you will ever spend with them in terms of making them smart people.

Gower has since made a second video in the same series. Check them out on Facebook.

A couple of quick things on our domestic space program, ’cause this is a politics and policy blog after all. The entirety of the NASA budget for FY 2009 was $17.3 billion. Yes that sounds like and it IS a lot of money. However, this is sixth-tenths of one percent (.6 %) of the Federal Budget and is less than one tenth of the Defense Department budget and barely one fifth of the amount spent on agricultural crop subsidies. This budget includes the manned space program as well as a goodly amount of support for Department of Defense space operations.

As for manned space exploration, the difficulties of placing and sustaining people in space are huge. It turns out that people, while perfectly suited to walk around naked on most of their home planet, die within seconds above about 45,000 feet unless supported by 10,000 years’ worth of technological progress and millions of dollars worth of equipment. This kind of thing is probably something that should mostly be done away with on the individual nation-state level. We are no longer in any kind of space race and in tough economic times, we can’t really afford that kind of nationalistic chest-thumping. This kind of space program should be shared with like-minded nations (Japan, the Europeans, Russians, Indians and Brazillians to name just a few) in order to spread the cost. It would also be quite beneficial from a brotherhood-of-man, were-all-one-planet standpoint.

As for unmanned exploration, there can be no question that the billions that have been expended on Earth imaging and communications satellites has been money well-spent. And the robotic probes at a few million a pop? Well, I’ll leave you with these and you decide for yourself.

This enhanced color image of Saturn eclipsing the Sun was taken by the Cassini Probe. Earth is visible as a tiny dot between the outer ring and the inner ring in the upper left. Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

This scene was recorded on the surfance of Saturn's moon, Titan, by ESA's Huygens probe after a 2 1/2 hour descent through a thick atmosphere of nitrogen laced with methane. Bathed in an eerie orange light at ground level, rocks strewn about the scene could well be composed of water and hydrocarbons frozen solid at an inhospitable temperature of - 179 degrees C (-290 F). Scientists hypothesize that the early Earth had an atmosphere of a similar composition, albeit much warmer. At 832 million miles from Earth, Titan is the most distant object that humans have ever landed upon and imaged. Source: European Space Agency.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/06/betting-on-longshots.html is funny and serious about how we underestimate the probability and cost of low probability events

An oil company doesn’t just wake up one day and say “Gee, I think I’d like to drill for oil 5000 feet below the ocean’s surface! That sounds like fun!” They do it because they’ve run out of easy oil. They’re throwing every bit of technological know-how into projects that are just at the edge of human ingenuity and technology to get out the energy and keep the party rolling. And they don’t stop drilling at 5000 feet, that’s where they start. Sometimes, they go as deep as 35,000 feet.

That’s amazing technology. It’s also called going after the scraps.

And that’s pretty much it in a nutshell isn’t it?

This profile of his new young-adult novel, Ship Breakers also includes a nice Environment 101 analogy that also hits the nail right on the head with regards to the problem of energy consumption, carbon emission reductions and why it is so hard to get global agreement on such things.

Image: The Boston Globe, via The Big Caption

My problem isn’t so much with the whole “Drill Baby, Drill” chanting crowd. My problem is that most are shocked and appalled at the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I mean, come on.

It is a testament to the very good safety measures in place on the thousands of super tankers and thousands of ocean oil rigs that this kind of thing doesn’t happen all the time. All that safety stuff is there because the failure modes of supertankers and oil rigs are catastrophic. But nothing is foolproof, people. When the gods of probability rolls snake-eyes, its pretty disingenuous to start laying blame all over the place.

Oh sure, BP leased the rig so it’s their problem and honestly or not they downplayed the scale of it until last Thursday. So, everyone — including the government — took them at their word. But when they finally went, “oh, shit!” people are all like, “Why didn’t the government act earlier? This is just like Katrina!”

Bullshit. We asked for this. You want to blame someone? Look in the mirror. We’re junkies for the black stuff. This kind of thing is just the usual cost of doing business for people with the monkey on their backs.

As part of this long series, the NYT has compiled data on more than 200,000 facilities that have permits to discharge pollutants and collected responses from states regarding compliance. Information about facilities contained in this database comes from two sources: the Environmental Protection Agency and the California State Water Resources Control Board. The database does not contain information submitted by the states.

A search of Clinton area permit holders is here. The list shows the City of Clinton, Ailliant Energy’s Kapp coal station, ADM, and the various petrochemical plants along Hwy 30. Although there are violatons noted on many of the facilites (most dating from 2004) very few of these facilites have been inspected since the 1980′s or early 1990′s.