- Autism
- Community
- Poverty
- Nukes
- Interstate 69
- Going to jail
- Environment
- Bloomington Recycles: Fact or Fiction?
- Interstate 69
- How public is our library?
- Who owns downtown?
Who owns Kirkwood?
-- The story
-- The list
Who owns the Square?
-- The story
-- The list
Alternative Features
They're clean! They're green! Or so the industry PR boasts about biomass power plants. If anything, the opposite is true.
Biomass is any substance that isn't a fossil fuel and is arguably organic. Wood waste is one of the primary fuels that biomass incinerators burn. Wood waste includes industrial wood waste (like shipping pallets and sawdust), which is often contaminated with toxic chemicals and plastics that form dioxin, the most potent carcinogen ever studied, when burned.
Biomass power plants aren't built in white, middle-class neighborhoods but in urban neighborhoods populated with poor people of color. Other prime locations are poor, rural areas, such as Crawford County, in southwest Indiana.
You wouldn't know it from the propaganda emanating from the Statehouse, but things are bad in Indiana. Like real bad. Indiana is among the top-tier states in both mortgage delinquency and mortgage foreclosure rates (a strong indicator of economic distress) and is absolutely hemorrhaging jobs. As Morton Marcus pointed out in his column today, in 2008 and 2009 Indiana lost over a quarter of a million jobs -- the third worst percentage decline in the nation.
But the governor seems to be either (blissfully?) unaware of the state's true situation, or he's purposefully ignoring it. Listening to his state-of-the-state speech, I couldn't help but feel I'd been transported to an Orwellian neverland, where bad is good and good is all around.
The costs associated with the autism epidemic are often hard to quantify. No dollar amount can be broadly ascribed to the personal, familial and social costs that will be extracted by the generation of disabled kids America has produced since the Reagan Revolution of the early 1980s. No one claims to know for sure how many of them there are, let alone what they cost.
But 30 years worth of data recorded in annual "Special Education Statistical Reports" from the Indiana Department of Education (DoE) offer some hints. And when the State Board of Education approves the 2009-2010 Report on Feb. 2, 2010, it will mark the 32d year in a row that special ed funding has risen in Indiana.
This Modern World
by Tom Tomorrow
by Brian Garvey
