2012 January 03

Art And The Occupy Movement In 2012

Marissa Gluck has a cool piece up at Atlantic Cities about how Los Angeles, in the midst of dismantling its citiy’s Occupy encampment, took the time to preserve a mural created by people who were living there or passing through (the mural also had a functional purpose to protect a fountain):

The mural’s preservation is thanks to the efforts of Matthew Rudnick, a budget bureaucrat with no formal art education but with a keen sense of historical import. During the park clean up, Rudnick coordinated efforts between General Services, (which was responsible for cleaning the park), and the Department of Cultural Affairs. “It would be a tragedy to have it thrown away,” says Rudnick. “The work is dynamic.” [...]

The Department of Cultural Affairs is now beginning the process of finding a permanent home for the mural. Interested parties will soon be invited to submit offers to display the mural publicly.

It’s relatively new terrain but one the city viewed as necessary for an artwork that had become an emblem. “We felt giving it to a [caretaking] entity without a public process would come back to haunt us,” says Olga Garay-English, Executive Director of the Department of Cultural Affairs. “It’s more appropriate to have a transparent system in place.”

There’s a radical chic element to all of this, of course, and it’s worth keeping that in mind as Occupy-created and Occupy-inspired art is turned from political expression into commodities. But that doesn’t meant that the work isn’t worth making, or that Occupy-inspired art can’t provide a valuable public example of the connection between artistic expression, political argument, and change. Flavorwire, as one of their 2012 cultural resolutions, hopes the novelists, poets and playwrights who have signed up as part of Occupy Writers will start producing work inspired by their own commitments and in some cases reawakenings. It goes without saying that I agree. Yes, there’s a lag time between events and art inspired by them. But if the 99 percent movement’s going to continue, artists can play a role in sustaining it and looping more people into the conversation, and processing what is past, and passing, and yet to come.

Energy News Recap: Keystone XL Whistleblowing, BP Spill Fingerpointing, Shale Gas Rising

Investment in UK Renewables Will Reach £2.5bn

Ford Targets 30% Reduction in Water Usage per Car by 2015

New York City’s Bike Count is Up 289% Since 2001!

Deadline Extended to January 5th — Submit Your Nomination for the 2012 Excellence in Renewable Energy Awards!

The Smug Moralism And Unattractive Class Politics Of ‘The Descendants’

If I was in possession of a large amount of extremely valuable and beautiful beachfront Hawaiian land that I wasn’t allowed to continue owning, and if I cared about my family’s legacy and the future of my state, I would have a number of options. I could sell it. I could work with the National Parks Service to set up the first National Seashore in Hawaii. I could collaborate with the Hawaii State Parks agency to preserve the land and make it accessible to people other than my family. I could spin it off into an independent charity. I could donate it into a university. I could sell some of it and purchase a small piece of it at market price to preserve as a family compound. Matt King, the wealthy lawyer portrayed by George Clooney in Alexander Payne’s smug The Descendants, considers only that first option. It’s a movie that ultimately argues that the highest moral cause is a rich man keeping what’s his. And that’s not the only thing that I disliked about the second painfully politically-misguided (and oddly out of touch) movie George Clooney gave us in 2011.

That conviction that Matt’s only options are turning the land into money or keeping it for himself doesn’t just give us a narrator who is painfully self-absorbed. It’s of a piece with the movie’s odd tendency to treat the land deal part of the plot as if it’s hugely momentous and then to dissipate all the tension surrounding it. There’s essentially no debate about what to do with the land because the positions of the family members who don’t want to sell are never articulated: it’s just asserted that there are people out there who would prefer to hold on to the land even though the law says they can’t. The closest thing there is to an argument is about whether to sell to a local developer or one based out of another state. We know that Matt thinks some of his relatives are shiftless spendthrifts who would prefer to take a higher price from the non-local developer, but no one on the other side talks about what it means to them to support the Hawaiian economy, or what, if any, responsibilities they feel they have to their state. They’re just bodies there to indicate that there are substantial votes on each side. And ultimately, the big decision we’ve been told has to be made at this family gathering is actually seven years away from its deadline and pushed aside until King can find another solution.

The same shallow approach applies to every other discussion of Hawaii’s economics in the movie. The Descendants deserves credit for getting lots of non-white people into the camera frame, often on planes next to Matt King’s head as he jumps from island to island. But the movie focuses most directly on native Hawaiians during Matt’s opening monologue, as illustrations of troubles in the paradise that he declares “can go fuck itself.” The vacant, the indigent? These are things that Matt King has to endure, along with his wife’s coma. If what makes one Hawaiian is a fondness for comfortable clothing and a sense of noblesse oblige without the oblige, there are regional and ethnic identities I’d be more interested in spending time exploring.

Family dynamics, too. There’s a decidedly odd attitude towards substance abuse running through a number of scenes in the movie, as when Matt asserts that his wife used alcohol inappropriately to bring excitement into her life; a reference to the fact that Matt’s oldest Alex is at an expensive private school in part because of prior drug and alcohol abuse; or a scene where Matt’s younger daughter Scottie cheerfully presses Alex to admit that she is an alcoholic. While Matt spends a great deal of time trying to find and understand the man with whom his wife had an affair before the boating accident that put her in a coma, he seems singularly uninterested in trying to know her. And while he tells Alex that, mostly in good ways, she is like her mother, he never articulates what those characteristics are, or how they’ve changed in the alchemical transition from one generation to the next. The Descendants has next to nothing to say about family and how it develops the mark that it places on individuals over time.

There’s not nothing worthwhile in the movie. I never thought it would have been possible to say this, but Matthew Lillard is quite good as Brian Speer, the man Matt’s wife planned to leave him for. He’s sad, and frightened, and guilty, and there may be a career for Lillard beyond turn-of-the-century teen movies. While Clooney spends much of the movie looking like his handsome, let-down self, there’s one nice break when he actually seems to be playing a character, running madly down the road to the friends he hope will confirm the news that he’s been cuckolded.

But really, this may be the year that George Clooney stopped being able to turn himself into someone other than George Clooney in a way that convinced me. And The Descendants joined The Ides of March in a singular class for me among 2011 movies: films that thought they’d discovered a profound truth in the obvious, generating their dramas out of false problems, and ending in a place of deep self-satisfaction. Clooney is, apparently, one of the most charitable celebrities in America. His work in Sudan is unquestionably admirable and he got a case of malaria for his pains. It’s too bad some of that energy isn’t going into movies that argue actual progressive things, other than marinating in sentiments like the ideas that all politicians are unbearably corrupt, or that the rich are more put-upon than the rest of us. It may be self-knowledge to realize you don’t want to give up the precious things you’ve inherited. But that doesn’t mean you should be satisfied with what you see when you can finally look at yourself with some clarity.

Fishing Suspended in Nigeria As Cleanup After Offshore Shell Spill Continues

Ten Clean Energy Stocks for 2012

January 3 News: Expert Links Oil and Gas Wastewater Well With Series of Ohio Earthquakes

Other stories below: Court puts cross-state air pollution rule on hold; California farmers and skiers fret about a dry spell

Expert: Wastewater well in Ohio triggered quakes

A northeast Ohio well used to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling almost certainly caused a series of 11 minor quakes in the Youngstown area since last spring, a seismologist investigating the quakes said Monday.

Research is continuing on the now-shuttered injection well at Youngstown and seismic activity, but it might take a year for the wastewater-related rumblings in the earth to dissipate, said John Armbruster of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.

Brine wastewater dumped in wells comes from drilling operations, including the so-called fracking process to extract gas from underground shale that has been a source of concern among environmental groups and some property owners. Injection wells have also been suspected in quakes in Astabula in far northeast Ohio, and in Arkansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, Armbruster said.

See Shale Shocked: “Highly Probable” Fracking Caused U.K. Earthquakes, and It’s Linked to Oklahoma Temblors.

Thousands of gallons (liters) of brine were injected daily into the Youngstown well that opened in 2010 until its owner, Northstar Disposal Services LLC, agreed Friday to stop injecting the waste into the earth as a precaution while authorities assessed any potential links to the quakes.

After the latest and largest quake Saturday at 4.0 magnitude, state officials announced their beliefs that injecting wastewater near a fault line had created enough pressure to cause seismic activity. They said four inactive wells within a five-mile (8 kilometer) radius of the Youngstown well would remain closed. But they also stressed that injection wells are different from drilling wells that employ fracking.

Court puts on hold regulation to reduce power plant pollution spoiling air downwind

A federal court Friday put on hold a controversial Obama administration regulation aimed at reducing power plant pollution in 27 states that contributes to unhealthy air downwind.

More than a dozen electric power companies, municipal power plant operators and states had sought to delay the rules until the litigation plays out. A federal appeals court in Washington approved their request Friday.

The EPA, in a statement, said it was confident that the rule would ultimately be upheld on its merits. But the agency said it was “disappointing” the regulation’s health benefits would be delayed, even if temporarily.

Republicans in Congress have attempted to block the rule using legislation, saying it would shutter some older, coal-fired power plants and kill jobs. While those efforts succeeded in the Republican-controlled House, the Senate — with the help of six Republicans — in November rejected an attempt to stay the regulation. And the White House had threatened to veto it.

Coastal villages in Nigeria protest as crude oil washes ashore

Nigerian villagers say oil washing up on the coast comes from a Royal Dutch Shell loading accident last month that caused the biggest spill in Africa’s top producer in more than 13 years.

Shell denies that any of the oil is from its 200,000 barrel per day Bonga facility, 120 km offshore and accounting for 10 percent of monthly oil flows, which was shut down by the spill on Dec. 20.

Shell says five ships were used to disperse and contain the spill and that this kept any oil from washing ashore.

But local villagers, as well as environmental and rights groups, dispute this account, saying the oil is still at large, coating parts of the coast, killing fish and sparking protests.

California Farmers, Ski Areas Fret About Dry Spell

California’s wet season has started off bone dry, leaving water managers and the state’s huge agriculture industry nervously eyeing the prospect that a dry spell could turn into another drought.

The shortage of snow, which has already hurt ski resorts in a number of states, follows an unusually heavy snowfall last year that has left adequate water supplies in reservoirs.

Lake Oroville, for example, stood at 115% of its average level as of Dec. 29, compared to 49% on the same date in 2009, when California was still locked in a three-year drought. As a result, California officials remain hopeful that new restrictions on water usage won’t be needed, but they aren’t ruling out the possibility entirely.

“It’s too early to hit the panic button,” said David Rizzardo, chief of snow surveys for the state Department of Water Resources.

The season’s precipitation totals could still come in normal if the storm floodgates open in mid-January, officials say. Preliminary forecasts point to improving chances of snow following a high pressure ridge that has been stubbornly parked off the Pacific coast for weeks, routing storms far to the north.

Acid rain’s blind spot

University of Michigan researchers say future generations of sugar maple trees are at risk unless soft spots in the federal Clean Air Act are strengthened to address an old nemesis: acid rain.

Precipitation that is highly acidic from burned fossil fuels has been largely under control since the early 1990s. In 1989, the federal government adopted a system to control acid rain through large reductions of sulfur dioxide. Electricity-producing coal-fired power plants were allowed to meet tougher limits through swaps of so-called emission credits.

Industrial leaders and environmentalists agree that cap-and-trade has worked well for acid rain. But it isn’t suitable for all forms of pollution. In particular, it wasn’t designed to address nitrogen.

World-first hybrid shark found off Australia

Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world’s first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.

The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.

“It’s very surprising because no one’s ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination,” Morgan, from the University of Queensland, told AFP.

“This is evolution in action.”

Colin Simpfendorfer, a partner in Morgan’s research from James Cook University, said initial studies suggested the hybrid species was relatively robust, with a number of generations discovered across 57 specimens.

The find was made during cataloguing work off Australia’s east coast when Morgan said genetic testing showed certain sharks to be one species when physically they looked to be another.

The Australian black-tip is slightly smaller than its common cousin and can only live in tropical waters, but its hybrid offspring have been found 2,000 kilometres down the coast, in cooler seas.