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Community Energy Systems

Seize Their Assets And Put Their Executives In Jail – Big Fossil Fuels have come to the end of their line

If I have aired this piece before I apologized. But it is important and needs to be said again. Big Oil, Gas and Coal are the big nasty. They shit in our air, they pee in our politicians and they spit on our lawyers. They have know what they were doing pretty much all along. We should seize their assets and put their Executives in jail.

Special thanks to the GUARDIAN for the valuable work they do.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price

Communities are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels.
Communities are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels. Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images

Via an unprecedented wave of lawsuits, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for the devastation caused by fossil fuels

Are you a fossil fuel industry insider? We want to hear from you

Supported by
guardian.org

About this content

After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes.

An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way.

Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern states watching “mega-rains” destroy crops and homes, and fishing communities losing catches to warming waters, are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels.

But, even more strikingly, the nearly two dozen lawsuits are underpinned by accusations that the industry severely aggravated the environmental crisis with a decades-long campaign of lies and deceit to suppress warnings from their own scientists about the impact of fossil fuels on the climate a decades-long campaign of lies and deceit to suppress warnings from their own scientists about the impact of fossil fuels on the climate and dupe the American public.

The environmentalist Bill McKibben once characterized the fossil fuel industry’s behavior as “the most consequential cover-up in US history”. And now for the first time in decades, the lawsuits chart a path toward public accountability that climate activists say has the potential to rival big tobacco’s downfall after it concealed the real dangers of smoking.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Climate Change Started In The 1960s – People spoke up

Just like CANCER. That was the first thought I had when I read this article. Evidence was gathered 60 years ago. People spoke up, and the oil and gas industry killed any discussion. Now we are stuck with more powerful Hurricanes. We are stuck with the American west being consumed by droughts and fire. The Arctic is gone and the Antarctic going. The world should confiscate their wealth and apply every dime to remediating the effects. Unfortunately the whole world never does anything. I mean the UN could pass a resolution but Pfffhh.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/05/sixty-years-of-climate-change-warnings-the-signs-that-were-missed-and-ignored?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored)

The effects of ‘weird weather’ were already being felt in the 1960s, but scientists linking fossil fuels with climate change were dismissed as prophets of doom

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In August 1974, the CIA produced a study on “climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems”. The diagnosis was dramatic. It warned of the emergence of a new era of weird weather, leading to political unrest and mass migration (which, in turn, would cause more unrest). The new era the agency imagined wasn’t necessarily one of hotter temperatures; the CIA had heard from scientists warning of global cooling as well as warming. But the direction in which the thermometer was traveling wasn’t their immediate concern; it was the political impact. They knew that the so-called “little ice age”, a series of cold snaps between, roughly, 1350 and 1850, had brought not only drought and famine, but also war – and so could these new climatic changes.

“The climate change began in 1960,” the report’s first page informs us, “but no one, including the climatologists, recognized it.” Crop failures in the Soviet Union and India in the early 1960s had been attributed to standard unlucky weather. The US shipped grain to India and the Soviets killed off livestock to eat, “and premier Nikita Khrushchev was quietly deposed”.

But, the report argued, the world ignored this warning, as the global population continued to grow and states made massive investments in energy, technology and medicine.

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Go there and read. More next week (if we are still here)

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Springfield Wants To Keep Burning Coal – They have come up with an insidious way to do it

Springfield IL has always been opposed to renewable energy. It took a Friend of mine with a degree in Solar Power 20 years at CWLP to get the City to erect a modest Solar Farm. 700 panels, I think. There is no Wind Power because the county changed the zoning ordinances to make turbine placement unfeasible. There is modest geothermal. For homeowners, the City Council is always trying to tax smart meters to Solar more expensive. So why does it not surprise me that CWLP came up with  “program to prevent global warming” by continuing to burn tons of coal daily.

https://www.sj-r.com/story/news/politics/state/2020/06/04/cwlp-could-become-worldrsquos-largest-carbon-capture-research-station/114279824/

State

CWLP could become world’s largest carbon capture research station

Kade Heather Staff Writer

JUNE 4, 2020

City Water, Light & Power is on path for constructing the world’s largest research and development pilot for a new carbon capture system.

The U.S. Department of Energy had about 30 responses from power plants across the country when it initially proposed the idea about three years ago. The DOE has narrowed it down to about five competitors – CWLP being one.

While CWLP is not guaranteed to host the pilot system, Kevin OBrien, director of the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center at the University of Illinois, and the principle investigator overseeing the project, said DOE is “very impressed by the team,” and by CWLP’s facility.

“They toured the plant, they feel it’s a very, very well-run plant and they’re impressed by that, and that’s an important factor when you’re competing for these types of projects. So there’s no guarantee, but we think we’ve got a really high probability of winning this one,” OBrien said.

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Go there and read. Then write letters to the Mayor and the City Council condeming the idea. More next week.

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Biden’s Got A Shitload Of Work To Do – Saving the environment from the cheeto burrito will be hard

From the XL Pipeline, to “saving” coal, to selling off Public Lands Trump did everything he could to gut environmental regulations and destroy the Environment. Here is some of what it is going to take to undue it, including probably 30 or 40 Executive Orders.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/on-climate-biden-must-do-more-than-undo-trumps-damage/

Climate

On Climate, Biden Must Do More Than Undo Trump’s Damage

The new administration cannot just go back to the future on carbon emissions

On Climate, Biden Must Do More Than Undo Trump's Damage
Credit: Egle Plytnikaite

One word sums up what the Biden administration must do to address climate change: restart.

In 2015 nearly 200 nations committed to the Paris Agreement, which aims to prevent the worst impacts of climate change by limiting global warming by 2100 to less than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The U.S. pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Then Donald Trump was elected president. He soon announced that the U.S. would pull out of the accord, and his administration spent four years relentlessly rolling back regulations intended to curb emissions and protect the environment. Dozens of coal-burning power plants, the worst carbon polluters, shut down anyway as market forces expanded the role of cheaper, cleaner natural gas, wind and solar power. And various states, cities and industries cut emissions. Yet even with that progress, Trump’s rollbacks could add the equivalent of 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2035, according to the Rhodium Group, an independent research organization.

Joe Biden must now make up for lost time, and last November he said the U.S. would rejoin the Paris Agreement immediately after he became president. This commitment is important because the U.S. is still the world’s second-largest emitter, behind China, and it can return as a world climate leader. But Biden will also have to ratchet up the original U.S. pledge because warming—and its effects—has only sped up since the Paris Agreement was established. Biden promised to issue an executive order calling for net-zero emissions by 2050, but he will need to set specific interim targets. The World Resources Institute says reducing emissions to 45 to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 could put the country on track.

Congressional legislation is the most effective way to create the concrete policies needed to achieve those goals because it gives federal agencies clear priorities, is much harder to override with presidential actions, and can better withstand legal challenges that might be brought by industry or special-interest groups. But the divided U.S. Senate will make sweeping laws hard to pass. Biden will have to work through executive orders and will have to charge federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency with issuing new regulations under existing laws such as the Clean Air Act. He will need to “turn every stone possible,” says Narayan Subramanian, an environmental lawyer working with the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at Berkeley Law. The most immediate focuses are transportation, power plants, methane emissions and pesky hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

With coal plants retiring, transportation has surpassed power generation as the country’s largest carbon emitter. The quickest action Biden can take to tackle those emissions is to reinstate California’s waiver to the Clean Air Act, allowing the state to enforce its Advanced Clean Cars regulations. The regulations set fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light-duty trucks that are tougher than federal rules, which means fewer emissions. In the past, automakers have built their nationwide fleets to meet the state’s standards to avoid making two versions of their vehicles, and some states, such as New York, typically follow California’s lead. The Rhodium Group estimates that reinstating the waiver would save about 573 million metric tons of emissions by 2035.

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Go there and sob. (at least he is gone) More next week.

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Energy Subsidies Are A Waste Of Time – Do you want to live in the past

The fact that we are still subsidizing old dirty forms of Energy says a lot about us and how the Energy Giants have corrupted our culture.

www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/opinion/oil-gas-companies-public-land.html

End the Taxpayer Giveaway to Big Oil and Gas

Congress should raise the royalty rates on federal lands.

By Tom Udall and

Senator Udall is a Democrat from New Mexico. Senator Grassley is a Republican from Iowa.

One hundred years ago, Congress passed the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, setting up a system in which companies lease public lands to wrest valuable oil and gas from the ground. In the century since, the royalties and rent that those corporations pay to the American people for access have remained essentially unchanged even as the scale of development and profits has grown hugely.

As senators from different parties, we have our share of policy differences. But we both believe in sticking up for the public interest and the taxpayer. In this case, we agree that oil and gas companies should pay fair market value for the public resources they extract and sell. They aren’t doing that now — not even close — and the American public is the big loser.

That’s why we introduced the Fair Returns for Public Lands Act this year to reform the antiquated law that governs royalties and the leasing of public land.

The country’s economy and the oil and gas industries have changed significantly since 1920. Automobiles had just started to replace the horse and buggy, and the oil industry was a relatively new enterprise dominated by the successors of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Yet, since then, the federal royalty rate for oil and gas on public lands has remained steady, at a bargain-basement 12.5 percent of the value of what’s extracted.

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Go there and read more. More next week.

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No Such Thing As The Greatest Generation – I prefer to call them the Great Destroyers

Please see this reference for the greatest generation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation

They were the Great Destroyers of the Earth. If you were an alien and you flew by in 1944, What would you see? Mass destruction everywhere. If you knew nothing of Earth’s politics you would conclude that everyone on Earth was conspiring to to destroy it. Ruined cities, smashed food systems, and destroyed food supplies. Men and Women in chains; babies slaughtered.

If you flew by 60 years later (a blink of an alien eye), say on a return trip, what would you see? A continued pattern of destruction. Befouled air. Fossil Fuels being sucked out of the ground and spewed everywhere, including most destructively, the Oceans. Food systems collapsing. Filth piled in heaps and buried or burned. Men and Women in chains; children being caged, trafficked, and killed. What would you conclude? That a Generation of Destroyers was coming to its “natural” conclusion.

Greatest Generation? Hardly. Then there is Nuclear Power – which they created and they used. Think about it.

I rarely write original material. But after seeing the current National Geographical article on Veterans I could not help myself.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/05/last-voices-of-world-war-2/

Go there and read.

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Please think about this. More next week.

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Could Coronavirus Save The Planet – Well it certainly has reduced pollution

Oil prices are actually at an all time low as supplies are on at an all time high. This article argues however that the oil corporations are so big that they will just diversify as climate change looms larger. In the end they will sell worthless reserves off to unregulated startup oil companies and oil will become like drugs.Those startups will function like drug cartels function today. Selling oil to those addicted to oil. Pretty picture? NO. Our future. Maybe.

PS – this is an enormously loooooog read.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1?utm_source=digg

Business

Shell Is Looking Forward

The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.

We think democracy is better,” said the jet-fuel salesperson. “But is it? In terms of outcomes?”

In a conference room overlooking the gray Thames, a group of young corporate types tried to imagine how the world could save itself, how the international community could balance the need for growth with our precarious ecological situation. For the purposes of our speculative scenarios, everything except for carbon was supposed to be up in the air, and democracy’s track record is mixed.

A graph from Chinese social media showing how many trees the country is planting — a patriotic retort to the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg — had a real effect on the room. Combine that with the Chinese state-led investment in clean-energy technology and infrastructure and everyone admired how the world’s largest source of fossil-fuel emissions was going about transition. That’s what the salesperson meant by “outcomes”: decarbonization.

Regional experts from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East–North Africa also entertained the democracy question, pointing to Iraqi disillusionment with voting and economic growth in Rwanda under Paul Kagame (“He’s technically a dictator, but it’s working”). The China expert said the average regional Communist Party official is probably more accountable for his or her performance than the average U.K. member of Parliament, a claim no one in the room full of Brits seemed to find objectionable. The moderator didn’t pose the question to me, the American expert, presumably because our national sense of democratic entitlement is inviolable.

Go there and read and read and read. More next week.

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Climate Change Is Speeding UP – Those pesky Feedback Loops l

Only speculated on several years ago. Feedback Loops are things that speed up or slow down climate change. The two that concern us here are the most obvious, clouds and ice shrinkage. The more water in the atmosphere the more clouds and the hotter the earth – the more water. But the killer one is, ice is very very reflective. What replaces it it is not and in the case of “dark” water, it is incredibly absorptive. The question has always been when would they kick in? I always said we would know when it was too late. Here we are.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-03/climate-models-are-running-red-hot-and-scientists-don-t-know-why?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why

The simulators used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time.

There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations.

Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5°C, a nightmare scenario.

The scientists involved couldn’t agree on why—or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began “talking to each other like, ‘What’d you get?’, ‘What’d you get?’” said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model.

“The question is whether they’ve overshot,” said Mark Zelinka, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  Researchers are starting to put together a­nswers, a task that will take months at best, and there’s not yet agreement on how to interpret the hotter results. The reason for worry is that these same models have successfully projected global warming for a half century. Their output continues to frame all major scientific, policy and private-sector climate goals and debates, including the sixth encyclopedic assessment by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due out next year. If the same amount of climate pollution will bring faster warming than previously thought, humanity would have less time to avoid the worst impacts.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Pollute Till People Die _ Why does every developing Nation have to go through this

Pollute till rivers catch fire.(like America) Pollute till people die and slums burn down. (like England) Blow up a Nuclear Power Plant. (like the Soviet Union or Japan) Pollute until thousands die. (like India). But does India Come around after Bhopal. Hell no!

There is this:

https://www.dw.com/en/new-delhi-schools-closed-as-air-pollution-worsens/a-51235841

Then there is this:

DW recommends

 

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Go there and read and read and read. More next week.

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Murray Coal Goes Bankrupt – Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy

Mr. Coal goes down and the media want us to cry over his breathing difficulties. What do you want to bet it ain’t black lung. This is the guy who pioneered Mountain Top Removal. This is the guy that was responsible for the biggest mine disaster in recent history that killed men and women. This is the guy who got Trump to be “Pro Coal” and roll back environmental regulations that have poison our air. Now people’s pensions are threatened. It doesn’t get nastier than this.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/01/business/murray-energy-coal-bankruptcy-pension/index.html

‘Nervous and scared.’ Coal workers fear for pensions after Murray Energy bankruptcy

New York (CNN Business)Tom Kacsmar worked underground at a coal mine for nearly four decades. The promise of a decent pension and healthcare for life kept him at this dangerous job.

Now, Kacsmar fears those benefits will get washed away by the bankruptcy of Murray Energy, America’s largest private coal mining company.
“I was a proud, hard-working coal miner my entire life. With the stroke of a pen, they’re going to cut my healthcare,” the 76-year-old retiree told CNN Business.
Kacsmar never worked a day for Murray Energy, the mining giant founded by coal king Robert Murray. But like countless other retirees, the fate of his benefits is inextricably linked to the company, which is seeking to “dramatically” slash its liabilities, including $8 billion of pension and retiree healthcare obligations.

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Go there and read. More next week. Coal is dying. YAA

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