France: The Light Green Society

It is easy, now that I live in France, to feel proud that I am part of a society that has less of a destructive impact on the Earth than I did when I lived in America. For example, in America, by my actual count in Oklahoma, about one-third of the vehicles on the road were pickup trucks, most of them with empty truck beds and not used for work. In contrast, in France, almost nobody drives big pickup trucks around. Instead, they drive small cars. Pickup trucks could simply not fit on most of the roads in cities, though trucks still transport merchandise on highways between cities. In addition, the French have a lot fewer cars. The country that leads the world in car ownership per capita is San Marino, with 1,606 vehicles per 1,000 population. In France, there are only 671 cars per 1,000 people, compared to America’s average of 850.

France has recently moved away from fossil fuels, especially since Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine (which exports much fossil fuel to Europe), but not very far.

In France, fracking for natural gas is illegal. In America, in contrast, fracking is celebrated even by environmental organizations because natural gas is less carbon-intense than coal or oil. But fracking unintentionally (one could say uncontrollably) produces gas leaks, and methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. At least as important a reason is that fracking can destabilize dormant faults and produce earthquakes. For a while around 2013, Oklahoma was the most earthquake-prone part of the United States, surpassing even California, a fact noted by numerous scientific articles. When I was growing up in Cushing, Oklahoma, we worried about earthquakes in California, to which we were moving, not imagining that Cushing would be an earthquake epicenter a half century later. By the time I left Oklahoma, when I drove between Durant and Tulsa on rural highways, I saw dozens of new fracking facilities.

But France is not as good as it looks, though much greener than America. And although in France there are more small cars (and fuel-efficient work vans) and fewer trucks than in America, a lot of these small cars smell strongly of fumes.

France gets 64.8 percent of its power from nuclear energy, and is building new nuclear plants. France leads the world in the percentage of nuclear power. The principal reason for this is energy security. France considered decommissioning many of its nuclear plants, but when Russia invaded Ukraine, threatening fossil fuel supplies, France decided to keep its nuclear plants open. It uses more nuclear energy per capita than America (18.6 percent). In this way also, France does not appear to be as green as one might think. France gets more of its energy from hydropower (10.4 percent) than America (5.5 percent), but not a lot. In America, though not as much as in China, much of the hydropower comes from big dam projects. In France, a lot of the electricity comes from small-scale projects, such as the Fessenheim facility on the Rhine River, which has not require the construction of a huge dam or expensive maintenance. I have even seen tiny micro-power stations along creeks in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace in France, from which just a single cable conveyed electricity.

Is France doing enough to be environmentally responsible? Is it a light-green society, as Michael Bess referred to it in his 2003 book? But that’s better than being, like America and China, superstars of environmental degradation. When I go walking in France, I can breathe a little easier than I could in America, knowing that I am in a society that is preparing seriously, if imperfectly, for a future of environmental constraints.

A Beautiful Scientific Mind: Charles Darwin and His Fossils

I recently skimmed through Adrian Lister’s book Darwin’s Fossils: The Collection that Shaped the Theory of Evolution (Smithsonian Books, 2018). I am not aware that any previous book has gone through all of the specimens that Darwin collected while traveling around the world on H.M.S. Beagle in 1832-1835. Nearly every science-literate person has heard about the finches Darwin saw on the Galápagos Islands, and how these observations eventually led him to think of natural selection. But what about the fossils that he collected and sent back to England?

Previous authors such as Niles Eldredge have noted that Darwin’s fossils included the bones of numerous large extinct mammals from South America, and that it was from this that Darwin concluded what could be called the succession of forms. That is, in the past, the kinds of fossilized mammals lived in the same locations that they are currently found. Glyptodonts (giant armadillos) lived in South America; armadillos lived there today. Giant llamas lived there in the past; llamas live there today. Giant sloths lived there in the past; sloths live there today. Darwin concluded, and scientists widely agreed, that when species become extinct, they are succeeded by similar species in the same location. Today, we can hardly force ourselves to avoid saying that modern species live in the same places that their ancestors lived. But “ancestors” means “evolutionary ancestors” and this is the very thing that Darwin eventually concluded from his observations. But he had to gather the evidence first.

Darwin collected a lot of other fossils as well. He collected petrified wood. He found a petrified forest in Patagonia. He noted that the bases of the trunks were inclined away from the Andes, and so were the sedimentary layers in the rocks, which implied that the Andes had been pushed up out of the Earth since those sedimentary layers had been formed. He also found a few carbonized leaves such as those that can today be found near Clarkia, Idaho, about which I wrote in 2014.

Darwin also found fossilized seashells far above the high tide line, some of them even high in the Andes. The conclusion that was obvious to him, as to us, is that land that was once below the sea has risen. But Darwin was not satisfied with drawing the obvious conclusion. He wanted to eliminate other possible explanations, and to do so before his critics might attempt it in print. Suppose, for example, that the fossilized seashells above high tide were not actually fossils, but were modern middens? That is, what if fishermen hauled seashells up onto land (which they did in fact do) and that what Darwin was seeing was just a pile of leftover shells? Darwin observed midden heaps that were produced by fishermen, and found that the shells were in piles, while the putative fossil shells were individually spaced out, not in piles. In fact, when Darwin asked local fishermen if the putative fossils could have put the shells there, they laughed at the idea.

Darwin suspected that the fossil seashells far above high tide were not deposited in the places where they had lived but had been dead at the time the waves deposited them on an ancient beach. He needed evidence for this. He saw that some of the shells had dead barnacles on the inner surface, which means the shells had been dead for a while before being buried in sediments. If Darwin had not looked for this evidence, he might not later have been able to distinguish fossil shells from an ancient seashore vs. fossil shells from an ancient shell bed.

Darwin also thought that earthquakes caused the successive stepwise uplift of land in South America. But he wanted evidence for this. He got it. In 1835, he witnessed a severe earthquake in Concepción on the Pacific coast of Chile. This one earthquake lifted the land surface at least eight feet. Such earthquakes happen about every century; these earthquakes could easily have produced the Andes. If Darwin had not seen one of these earthquakes for himself, he would have had to depend on second-hand accounts. In fact, an earthquake at least as strong as the 1835 quake, in almost exactly the same place, occurred in 2010.

My point is that while he was on his voyage, Darwin was not just collecting fossils but testing scientific hypotheses about them while he was there rather than wishing he had done so when he got back home. Until I looked through Lister’s book, I had not known this.

Lister’s book also told the story of Darwin’s discovery that coral atolls formed as volcanoes subsided in the ocean floor. This would explain not only their roughly circular shape but also why the atolls were not perfectly circular, like volcanoes, and why they were much larger than volcanoes. The new corals built their reefs on top of old reefs, each new reef being in a slightly different location from the old reef. (A delightful story: When prominent geologist Charles Lyell read Darwin’s theory of coral reefs, he danced around with wild contortions. I’d always thought Lyell was kind of a stick-in-the-mud but I was wrong.) Darwin could not actually prove that there were volcanoes at the bases of coral atolls, however. This was first done in 1952 when geologists drilled a hole down into a coral reef, piercing through thousands of feet of coral limestone, until they hit volcanic rock.

I would not recommend buying this book, unless you are a paleontologist, because it is heavy reading for the rest of us. But it is well illustrated and taught me some new things that, even though I have read dozens of books about Darwin, I’d never known. Get it from your library.

Darwin had a beautiful mind. He was always questioning everything, including his own assumptions. This made him a happy man, because he noticed so many beautiful details of the natural world that he might otherwise have overlooked. The natural world is full of surprises, but only to the person who looks closely and thinks carefully.

Oklahoma, You Are Famous!

I live and work in Oklahoma. It is one of the reddest and most fundamentalist states. But we could look down our noses at California and say, at least we don’t have earthquakes.

But that has changed recently. And I don’t mean over geological time. According to an article in the March 16 (2018) issue of Science, Oklahoma has had a 900-fold increase in earthquakes just since 2009. Thea Hincke, Willy Aspinall, Roger Cooke, and Thomas Gernon begin their article (“Oklahoma’s induced seismicity strongly linked to groundwater injection depth”) begins with this sentence (in the abstract): “The sharp rise in Oklahoma seismicity since 2009 is due to wastewater injection.” They indicate that Oklahoma is “the most seismically active region in the contiguous United States.”

This process, also known as “fracking,” uses high pressure wastewater to push oil out of tiny pores in the rock. To the Oklahoma government, oil production is the one and only energy policy for the future. Alternative energy, such as solar and wind, or increased energy efficiency, were unthinkable. The only possibility was to increase oil production and to keep using oil, and only oil, as inefficiently as ever, no matter what the consequences. The oil companies could get anything they wanted from the Oklahoma government, including the lowest gross production tax in the country. Of the nine major oil-producing states, Oklahoma has the lowest tax rate for oil companies, according to this graphic from okpolicy,org:

And the government of Oklahoma will do almost anything, including destruction of the quality of education, to keep that rate low, and to discourage energy efficiency and alternative energy sources. Therefore, the Oklahoma government considered fracking to be our only hope.

Starting in 2009, Oklahoma experienced a massive increase in earthquake frequency and intensity, especially in the very locations that had the most fracking, according to this graphic published in the Science article:

For several years, the government officially denied that there was any connection between fracking and earthquakes. When the state seismologist Austin Holland said that the evidence was conclusive, the dean of University of Oklahoma’s College of Earth and Energy told him that the results were unacceptable. A vast amount of the College’s funding comes from oil companies. In 2013 Holland was summoned to a meeting with OU President David Boren and Harold Hamm, CEO of an oil company, where he was also told that he should not say anything negative about fracking, according to this article in the Norman Transcript, the newspaper of the city in which OU is located. Late last year, Holland testified that this pressure was his principal reason for leaving Oklahoma. He was assured that he had complete academic freedom, but the university also had the freedom to make him shut up or leave.

In 2016, the frequency and intensity of earthquakes became so bad that the Oklahoma Corporation Commission shut down 37 fracking sites, but only after a large earthquake caused so much damage that even the oil companies could not ignore it.

According to the Science article, the chance of an earthquake is greatly reduced if the wastewater injection is kept away from the hard, base rock layer underneath the oil-bearing layers. While placing depth limits on fracking, it may be possible to continue fracking without having as many earthquakes. But my point is that it took a catastrophe for Oklahoma to even admit that fracking ever caused any earthquakes at all.

Meanwhile, residents of central Oklahoma continue to experience earthquakes. Oklahoma residents pay all the costs for the damage, while the oil companies get all the profit from the fracked oil. Support structures are beginning to tilt, and floors to crack open, even outside of the earthquake zone. We are simply used to this in Oklahoma; we simply recognize that corporations can do almost anything they want no matter what damage it may cause to ordinary citizens.

Oklahoma is now world-famous. The authors of this study were British and Dutch. Science is read worldwide. I suspect, however, that most Oklahomans do not know or care what anyone else in the world thinks about our state.

Update on Oklahoma Earthquakes

Oklahoma has seen a dramatic increase in earthquakes in central Oklahoma. Oklahoma is on track to surpass California as the earthquake capital of America. In California it is due to the San Andreas fault, at which the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate rub against one another. But in Oklahoma it appears to be overwhelmingly due to wastewater injection, a practice associated with oil fracking. To see just how dramatic the increase is, click here.

Oklahoma has a state seismologist. Part of his job is to investigate the patterns and infer the causes of earthquakes in Oklahoma. Scientists at the Oklahoma Geological Survey know that the evidence that wastewater injection has caused the dramatic increase in earthquakes is very clear. Yet the Oklahoma State Seismologist  Austin Holland has been very hesitant to say anything about it. One reason, of course, is that the fossil fuel corporations do not want him to, and they are major employers and major sources of tax revenue in Oklahoma. As a state official, Holland is caught between the science and the politics. His hesitation to say anything about it caused one Oklahoma Geological Survey official to say in a private email that the state seismologists “couldn’t track a bunny through fresh snow.” Of course, they can, but they dare not say so.

Despite his unwillingness to speak out for the connection between wastewater injection and earthquakes, Holland has also come under criticism for not speaking out against it. The pressure for Holland to speak out against any culpability that fossil fuel corporations may have became very clear when he was called to a conference with oil company executives and with David Boren, president of the University of Oklahoma. While they did not tell him he had to speak out against the scientists at the Geological Survey, but Boren made it very clear that oil companies were major donors to the University. You can read about the events in this and the preceding paragraph at this link.

Holland has admitted, in at least one interview (with the Washington Post), that the oil industry has tried to influence his conclusions (see here).

Corporations extract tremendous profits and leave the public with the consequences. The consequences of fracking in Oklahoma are now getting to be as good an example of this as coal mining in the Appalachians for years.

Science is Alive and Well in Oklahoma, part two.

This is probably the last post for 2014. Normally I would think about how to summarize the past year, but it is not different enough from any other year for me to do so. I suppose, then, it is good to end the year with the second essay about the Oklahoma Academy of Science meeting. Science is alive and well and actively responding to the challenges of the modern world. I focus here on a symposium that was an overview of the present and future scientific challenges in Oklahoma, which are not that different from the ones faced by other states. I posted a version of this essay on the Oklahoma Academy of Science blog.

Among the afternoon activities at the 2014 Technical Meeting of the Oklahoma Academy of Science was a well-attended symposium about science-based issues in Oklahoma. About forty people were in the audience to learn the latest about evolution education, climate change, conservation of natural areas, fracking and earthquakes, and water issues.

It wasn’t just scientists or students in the audience or on the panel. We included speakers from citizens’ groups as well. You didn’t have to be at the symposium very long before you realized how important it is to understand science in order to make the right decisions about these issues, which are among the most important that Oklahoma (and every place else) now face and will continue to face in the future. This is an important fact that, I think, most politicians and perhaps also most members of the press overlook. Fracking, for example, is not something that oil companies have the sole competence to judge. Citizens need access to scientific information. Perhaps even more, they have to know that they need scientific information.

Vic Hutchison, a retired zoology professor from the University of Oklahoma, is the grand old man of evolution education in Oklahoma. He started Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education (OESE), which may be the most active state-level anti-creationist group in the country. He summarized recent creationism-inspired bills that have come before the Oklahoma legislature and have, thus far, failed, mainly due to the persistent efforts of OESE members. Because OESE focuses on the importance of science, rather than attacking religion, we have been able to convince not just the Democrats but some of the Republican majority as well. A couple of years ago, Vic received an award from the Academy for his many years of work. Such an award is not an annual event but given only for special reasons. OESE leaders will have a hard time even collectively continuing the work that Vic has started.

Monica Deming, a researcher at the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, summarized the scientific evidence of current and future climate change and how it will affect Oklahoma. Oklahoma is facing higher temperatures and droughts in upcoming decades that will have a major effect on the economy. As an employee of a state scientific agency, she did not address any political issues. She didn’t have to. The facts speak for themselves.

Jona Tucker, a project manager for The Nature Conservancy, told about the conservation efforts of the Conservancy, which works with private land owners—conservation problems simply cannot all be solved by the state or federal government. She called on any scientists present to conduct some of our research on Conservancy properties. Nothing proves the usefulness of Nature Conservancy work as well as having scientific research done in areas that the Conservancy has saved, and having this research published.

Amberlee Darold, one of Oklahoma’s two state seismologists (scientists who study earthquakes), explained that Oklahoma has begun to rival California as the earthquake capital of the United States. While from 1882 to 2008, Oklahoma experienced an average of 0.1 earthquakes per year of magnitude 4.0 or greater, there were three per year in 2009 to 2013, and 2014 by itself has had twenty-four such earthquakes—and the year isn’t even over yet. This corresponds precisely with the recent acceleration of new oil extraction techniques. The earthquakes correlate closely with wastewater injection for oil extraction, but not actually with hydraulic fracturing (fracking) itself. A member of the audience, representing the Sierra Club, pointed out that these were not mere numbers, but reflected significant damage to the homes of people who cannot afford to rebuild their damaged homes. Amberlee just presented the science, but it was obvious to all of us that the explosion of earthquakes in Oklahoma represents a cost shared by nearly everyone in the earthquake-damaged regions of Oklahoma that pays for the profit enjoyed by corporations, mainly by its wealthy directors and investors.

Amy Ford is president of Citizens for the Protection of the Arbuckle Simpson Aquifer (CPASA). The Arbuckle-Simpson is a very important aquifer in south-central Oklahoma. Amy told us about the long struggle to prevent this water, upon which several large and many small communities depend for their survival—many thousands of people—from being sold and piped away for the profit of just a handful of land owners. The passionate efforts of this citizens’ group, and its legal work that is funded by private donations, has resulted in laws and policies that now protect this aquifer. CPASA shows that citizens need not be the helpless victims of corporations. (And it helps to have rich donors helping out as well.) Amy emphasized the importance of science in this effort. CPASA had the scientific evidence on its side. When corporate interests challenged them, CPASA invited them to present their scientific evidence—of which they had none. As unlikely as it may have seemed, science won the day against political and economic shouting matches—even if just barely.

The panel participants are important people and I am glad they accepted our invitation to speak. It wasn’t always easy. For example, the governor of Oklahoma appointed Amy Ford to a panel that is evaluating Oklahoma reading and math education standards (and eventually, I assume, science education standards as well). Because at some point she may be confronted by creationists, she had to avoid any appearance of favoritism with OESE, and had to politely leave the room while Vic was talking. In order to have all of these fine people on the same panel, we found a way to work things out.

The presentations generated some lively discussion. Although I had to step in at least once and direct the energies of some audience members in a constructive direction, I believe that the occasional strong feelings were a good thing: it means that these issues matter! Even some inconvenient comments were, in my opinion, welcome (to a point).

Here is a photo (sorry, it is not of the greatest quality) of the panel members. L to R: Amberlee Darrold; Jona Tucker; Amy Ford; Monica Deming; Vic Hutchison.

I think symposia of this nature are going to become a new tradition in OAS. Terry Conley, president-elect of OAS, is already planning a symposium about endangered species, which is an important issue in Oklahoma, where many citizens do not realize that it is an important issue.

I end the year with this thought: in upcoming years, scientists and science activists will continue in their passionate work to make the world a better place for everyone.

Oklahoma, the New Earthquake Capital of America?

See the previous essays about the Climate Workshop for educators sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education. One of the messages that we all took away is that America and the world are too dependent on petroleum. There is plenty of money to be made in energy resources that do not contribute, or not contribute as much, to global warming. But as it turns out global warming is far from being the only danger associated with our continued dependence on fossil fuels.

According to several recent studies, Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California, a trend beginning in 2010. And these are not all small quakes; the 2011 quake near Prague, Oklahoma, had a magnitude of 5.7.

Everyone reading blogs such as this one probably knows why California has so many earthquakes. California, despite its beauty, has its faults. The Pacific Plate and the North American Plate rub up against one another in California while they slowly move, making earthquakes inevitable. But Oklahoma is right in the middle of the North American Plate. Why, then, does Oklahoma have earthquakes?

Many millions of years ago, what is now the North American Plate was (as I understand it) separate plates, which have now crushed themselves together into a single unit. One of the focal points of the crush was what is now the Arbuckle Mountains in south central Oklahoma; another is the Mississippi River bottom in the vicinity of New Madrid, Missouri, where a huge earthquake occurred in 1811.

But this does not account for why there has been a sudden increase in earthquake activity in Oklahoma starting in 2010. A new study published in the July 25, 2014 issue of Science documents that this ongoing cluster of earthquakes has occurred just at the same time and place, and at the same depth, as the new frenzy of fracking activity, where corporations use high-pressure water (containing other chemicals as well) is used to push fossil fuel out of the sedimentary rocks. The authors could not provide proof, the reason being that corporations are unwilling to disclose the details of their fracking activity. But they used all the geological and seismological information that was available to them to associate the earthquakes with fracking. While many of the fluid injection wells appear to produce no earthquakes, there are four big fracking wells that account for about 20 percent of the earthquakes. The authors did not name the corporation that owns these wells.

Since this article was published, northern California had a big earthquake that, I presume, put it back ahead of Oklahoma in the earthquake sweepstakes.

In Oklahoma we endure wild swings of weather, including tornadoes. But at least, we think, we do not have earthquakes like California. Our patriotic fossil fuel corporations have now corrected this omission. According to Figure 1 in the article (unfortunately this figure is available only to subscribers), Oklahoma now surpasses California in the number of earthquakes per 1000 square kilometers.

There are two things we can learn from this. First, if we want to continue our frenzy of fossil fuel dependence, to continue wasting energy and producing carbon emissions that are harmful to the rest of the world, we have a steep price to pay—among many other things, earthquakes. But the second point is that fossil fuel corporations can earn enormous private profits while passing many of the expenses—which includes earthquakes—off onto everybody else at public expense. I have not heard that these corporations have donated money sufficient to clean up earthquake damage that their operations have caused. This is just one more example of how large corporations, even though they boast about being the beacons of free enterprise, earn their profits in large measure at public expense.

Religious conservatives often refer to fossil fuels as a gift from God that we ought to use as much as possible. But what they don’t say is that they believe fossil fuels are a gift from God to conservative corporate leaders, and that the other 99 percent of Americans need to pay the cost. They believe, even if they do not openly say, that God blesses only rich people.