The El Reno City Council has unanimously approved a “Voluntary Recycling Program” for the OEMA to run a new curbside recycling service that would entail city utility customers paying an additional $5 a month for an extra bin to put out recyclable items.

An ad promoting the program in the local newspaper was “sponsored by C2S Environmental Service, Inc.” which I can find nothing about. OEMA’s web site is pitifully absent of content, so no help there.

This program would not actually get underway until a minimum of 500 customers (suckers?) sign up for it, promising to pay the monthly fee in addition to their regular trash service cost.

Currently, the only recycling in the city is on Saturday morning from 9 to Noon, and you have to take the items to the recycling location. But there is no charge. According to (low-level) city employees I spoke to, this free service may be ended if the for-pay service is activated.

I am very skeptical about this. It sounds like a scam that OEMA has come up with to increase their profits. Obviously, they are going to collect and sort the items, and sell them. They will thus make money on both ends. Nice work if you can get it, it seems to me.

Most recycling programs include some up front costs to the municipality, I would guess. I would also think that there are some variety in how recycling programs are paid for, whether the city pays a contractor, or a contractor pays the city for the opportunity to collect items they can sell for a profit. I have no problem with some kind of business arrangement that makes sense for the entities involved.

But this seems beyond reasonable to me. If this is as scurrilous as it sounds, is the El Reno City Council a bunch of innocent dupes, are they aware of what’s going on, or are they also getting something out of it? Who’s contributing to their re-election campaigns?

I know I’m jumping to conclusions here, but I’ve never heard of this kind of set up for recycling. I wasn’t able to attend the council meeting where this was discussed. I need to go down and get a transcript to see if any substantive questions were asked by those making the decision.

The bottom line on recycling is that it SAVES the government money, not to mention the savings and other benefits to the citizenry and environment, involving land use, health, quality of life, etc.

If anyone has heard of anything like this, or has any insight, please let me know. I plan to go to the city council and/or OEMA, and write to the local paper to voice my impression and concerns, but want to have as much info as possible.

John Sutter isn’t letting his recent firing by the Oklahoman keep him down. He’s started a new blog to help educate Oklahomans about their state’s ecology, and the state government’s impact on it.

Just a couple of days before his last day with OPubCo, I did a little review of his blog for the paper, Going Green. I was very impressed by his work there, and glad he will continue in that vein.

Naming Concrete Buffalo after a mural along a barrier wall on Broadway Extension in OKC, Sutter introduces it thusly: (more…)

Well, we can hope, anyway.

One of the blogs on the Oklahoman’s web site is “Go Green” and actually, despite my considerable reservations about it going in, it’s good. The worst thing I can say about it is that there’s not enough promotion of it in the company’s more visible operations, the dead-tree newspaper and main site, NewsOK.com (for the life of me, I can’t find links to any of the blogs on the new version of that site.)

The main writer is John Sutter, “environment reporter” for OPubCo. Did you even know that the Oklahoman had an environment reporter? Me, either.

Also contributing is Micah Gamino, whom I met several years ago when he was a journalism student. He’s a committed environmentalist, but again, doesn’t seem to be well utilized by his employers.

But the real blame for the lack of attention to environmental issues doesn’t really lie with OPubCo, but with the state itself. There is a tragic lack of attention to and leadership on this issue. And Go Green itself addressed this problem on Sept. 23 with OKC and Tulsa Among Least Green Cities.

One of the entries of Go Green that caught my eye was E-Waste in Oklahoma, which talks about a new law going into effect in 2009 to deal with the potential toxicity of discarded electronics.

The Oklahoma Legislature made a move to address the issue by passing a law last session will require computer companies in Oklahoma to take back and recycle worn-out computers. The law, which goes into effect Jan.1, will encourage the development of companies that can recycle e-waste in Oklahoma, said Fenton Rood, of the state Department of Environmental Quality (see video above). The law only applies to household computers, not those in office buildings, and it doesn’t cover other e-waste, like cell phones and televisions.

Before the law goes into effect, people in Oklahoma City can take their old computers and electronics to the city’s hazardous waste center. There’s only one other permanent hazardous waste collection center in the state, in Midwest City. Towns and cities in rural Oklahoma hold recycling events from time to time. Rood said the law is designed so that it hopefully will be more convenient for people to recycle their computers in the future.

About time, but more is needed. I know that the recycling program in my community is a joke. There is a three-hour window on Saturday morning when I can take items to a designated location. I’m actually thrilled to see as many people take advantage of this as do, but I know the vast majority of my neighbors could not be bothered. Most locals think like my brother, that they’ll recycle when they get paid to. What the government needs to do is educate its populace how much they are paying by NOT recycling.

I would encourage anyone interested in sustainability for Oklahoma to read Go Green and let its corporate sponsor know you appreciate the attention to environmentalism and sustainability in our state.

Meta note: the Oklahoman’s blogs use the Wordpress MU platform.

Plutonium Page has posted to Daily Kos a diary which helps to expose some important background information about T. Boone Pickens and his "plan" that supposedly will liberate us from foreign oil. T. Boone Pickens' Fancy Sales Pitch

Devilstower and I just went to a talk here at the DNC featuring T. Boone Pickens. Everyone was under the impression that the event would involve an actual discussion (as in, a Q & A session, like nearly all of the other Big Tent special topic sessions). We had a really energetic live blog thread going, where all of you were submitting questions. Sorry, guys. Apparently, the whole thing was just a sales pitch. T. Boone hightailed it out of there before anyone could even raise their hand.

I'll post some excerpts below, but really, go to the original, where you can also read the comments, which are just as illuminating.

Maybe he was afraid we'd ask questions like:

In 2004, you helped pay for the Swift Boat ads, along with fellow billionaire Harold Simmons, who's funding the Ayres attack ads this cycle. If you're willing to tolerate, and even encourage, that level of dishonesty in political discourse, why should we trust you on any subject?

(From Devilstower) I wanted to ask him:

Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma is well known for saying that global warming is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," and is one of the most outspoken climate change science deniers around, as well as being joined at the hip with the oil companies.

In your presentation today, you specifically said that you "believe global warming is real".

However, you have heavily funded James Inhofe's campaign. How do you reconcile your support for Inhofe with your promotion of renewable energy programs?

From an energy expert acquaintance via email:

Can you please explain why people should take your plan seriously when, for example, you do not include any energy efficiency measures within it?

For a real and honest debate on the topic of energy policy, see the liveblogging thread. On which Devilstower summed up the Pickens Plan with this update: Update [2008-8-27 15:7:47 by Devilstower]: And T. Boone heads for the door without taking a single question. Which makes the whole presentation worth about as much as day old spit.

CNN’s mega-hyped special series on the environment, called Planet in Peril, and hosted by Anderson Cooper, is sponsored by Conoco Phillips.

I haven’t been watching the series, just caught a glimpse after Countdown tonight, enough to catch the sponsorship info. But someone who did watch said this:

It was disturbing to see the onslaught of American Petroleum Institute and pro-Coal commercials playing during Planet In Peril last night. Why are they lobbying so hard right now? Is there energy legislation on the table?

American’s For Balanced Energy Choices - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQSqviu9_7k

and another had the same reaction I did with this

If they want to be taken seriously, one would think that CNN would have sought a corporate sponsor who was more concerned about the environment than CP.

According to Wikipedia, the Conoco Phillip’s environmental record is mixed:

On April 11, 2007, ConocoPhillips became the first U.S. oil company to join the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an alliance of big business and environmental groups that in January sent a letter to President George W. Bush stating that mandatory emissions caps are needed to reduce the flow of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. ConocoPhillips has said it will spend $150 million this year on the research and development of new energy sources and technologies— a 50 percent increase in spending from 2006.[4]

A recent University of Massachusetts study has ranked ConocoPhillips third among U.S. corporate producers of air pollution. According to the researchers, ConocoPhillips facilities release more than eight million pounds of toxic chemicals annually into the air.[5] The company has also been implicated in some of the United States’ worst toxic waste dumps; the Center for Public Integrity has announced that United States Environmental Protection Agency documents link ConocoPhillips to 52 Superfund sites.[6]

In 2003, ConocoPhillips was named as a defendant in a lawsuit brought by a Georgian environmental group called Green Alternative. The suit claimed that a number of foreign oil companies colluded with the Georgian government to induce authorities to approve a $3 billion pipeline without properly evaluating environmental impact.[7]

In 2007, a number of environmental groups including the Sierra Club and the Prairie Rivers Network announced their support for ConocoPhillips’ plan to expand its Wood River oil refinery. A spokesperson for the group said that, despite ConocoPhillips’ history of environmental policy violations, she was optimistic that the corporation would comply with pollution laws as it expanded the refinery.[8

I’ve watched or listened to so little commercial media for so long, that I am extremely biased against it. Unlike a lot of regular viewers, I cannot tune out the corporate propaganda. And I would be extremely suspect of any program on the environment that depended on an energy company to be broadcast.

Some more things to read on the topic:

http://www.environmentalintegrity.org/pub460.cfm

http://www.deusexmalcontent.com/2007/10/its-so-easy-being-green.html

An Oklahoma travesty, via Joni:

May 2005 Engineer Update
In the 50-square-mile part of Oklahoma known as the Tar Creek Superfund Site, tainted waters run orange in creeks and streams, poisonous mountains of chat (mining cast-off) define the horizon, hundreds of dangerous and deteriorating open mineshafts dot the landscape, sinkholes constantly threaten, and children have high blood lead levels.

A partnership including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Interior, with support from the state of Oklahoma and Quapaw Tribe, is stepping in to clean up the area.

An unprecidented coalition of federal agencies, the state of Oklahoma and tribal governments are working on addressing this really critical area. No mention, of course, of the mining companies that created the problem.

The LeftCoaster has a good rundown of the very nasty Earth Day present delivered by the House yesterday. What a disaster.

I remember the first Earth Day in 1970. The Catholic High School I attended let us out for the day to go to the march. It was fantastic, joyful and full of hope. A few years later, quite a lot of good legislation had been passed, and folks were becoming conscious and future-thinking. Then Reagan came in with his anti-intellectual, pseudo-populist bullshit and now my brother, like millions of other mis-informed people, think the hole in the ozone, and anything else associated with “treehuggers,” is a hoax. And he won’t recycle until they pay him to do it, like getting your deposit back on bottles (yeah, they used to do that).

I remember when McDonald’s stopped using Styrofoam to wrap Big Macs due to public pressure. And being seen at the store getting your groceries bagged in plastic was a social disgrace (paper wasn’t much better; you brought your own canvas bags, thank you very much). Boy, those were the good old days. If we’d seen the parking lots full of SUV that awaited us 30 years hence, I don’t think we would have been quite so excited by what we were doing.