2.5 Million Unplugged Wells – This man wants to plug them

That a nonprofit organization would help clean up Big Gas and Oil’s  mess is not as good as THEM cleaning up and paying for their own messes, but is better than nothing. The fact that they are organizing other such Foundations in other effected States is great news as well. Support these people would you?

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/pennsylvania/articles/2021-11-27/montana-foundation-capping-abandoned-oil-wells

Montana Foundation Capping Abandoned Oil Wells

Curt Shuck of the Well Done Foundation poses near a oil well capping project in Toole County, Mont., on Nov. 18, 2021. Shuck started the Well Done Foundation to raise money and cap abandoned oil wells to prevent them from continuing to release methane gas into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas because it traps heat in the atmosphere, according to the EPA. (Phil Drake/Independent Record via AP)

By PHIL DRAKE, Independent Record

OILMONT, Mont. (AP) — Curtis Shuck remembers a rush of emotions a few years ago when he came across his first “orphaned well” while walking through a field in the Kevin-Sunburst Oilfield.

Shuck, who was no stranger to oilfields, said he was there that day discussing grain with a farmer when they came across a well that had been abandoned.

“I had no idea that this was even a thing,” he said, noting he had more than 30 years of experience in the oil and gas business. “I just thought this was everybody’s dirty little secret.”

He recalls feeling amazed, embarrassed and appalled all at the same time. Shuck said he could not get the image out of his mind and felt it was incumbent upon him to do something about it. Shuck said he learned it’s a huge problem, not only in Montana, but in other parts of the country as well.

He started the Well Done Foundation, a nonprofit group that caps wells across the nation. He said the organization is “making an impact in Montana and across the U.S., one well at a time.”

“Every well is a victory and milestone,” he told the Independent Record newspaper in Helena.

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Go there and give your support. More next week.

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Global Warming And Primary Education – What shall we tell the little children

This could become a heated and useless discussion. One that goes back centuries. To be blunt – Are we molly coddling the little beggars. Lets face it, on one level life has improved immeasurably. Life expectancies, just as an example, show how less brutal life is; and total global populations show how plentiful general life support is. I guess the real question here is, do you believe that global warming will make Earth uninhabitable for humans? If the answer is YES to that question, AND something could be done to change that – then you have an obligations to say something. If the answer is No and NO then I guess – Shut Up. But is it that easy?

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/climate-crisis-doom?utm_source=digg

Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change

Many young people feel like their future is in peril. To make progress on climate change, we must move past doomsday scenarios.

Is climate change the biggest threat to humanity? Many people would say so. Young people in particular feel hopeless. A recent survey asked 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries about their attitudes about climate change. The results were damning. More than half said “humanity was doomed”; three-quarters said the future was frightening; 55 percent said they would have less opportunities than their parents; 52 percent said family security would be threatened; and 39 percent were hesitant to have children as a result. These attitudes were consistent across countries rich and poor, big and small: from the United States and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Philippines, India, and Nigeria.

It’s totally legitimate that young people feel this way. I’ve been there. Today, much of my work focuses on researching, writing, and thinking about climate change. But it’s a field I very nearly walked away from. Fresh out of university with a degree in environmental science and climate change, it was hard to see that I could contribute anything at all. I flipped back and forth between anger and hopelessness. Any effort seemed futile, and I nearly quit. Thankfully my perspective shifted. I’m glad it did. Not only did I continue working on climate, I’m also sure that my work has had many times the positive impact it would have if I’d been stuck in my previous mindset. And that’s why I’m convinced that if we’re to make progress on climate, we need to lift this cloak of pessimism.

Let’s be clear: Climate change is one of the biggest problems we face. It comes with many risks—some certain, some uncertain—and we’re not moving anywhere near fast enough to reduce emissions. But there seems to have been a breakdown in communication of what our future entails. None of the climate scientists I know and trust—who surely know the risks better than almost anyone—are resigned to a future of oblivion. Most of them have children. In fact, they often have several. Young ones, too. Now, having kids is no automatic qualification for rational decision-making. But it signals that those who spend day after day studying climate change are optimistic that their children will have a life worth living.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Kyrsten Sinema Should Be Staked Out In The Desert – Stripped naked

and covered in Honey so the Fire Ants come. Again, why do these people call themselves Democrats? She started out in the “Green” party forgodsakes and now she is fronting for Natural Gas. Arizona is one of the first places to feel Global Warming and she dithers. I say, “String her UP”. This from June and things have only gotten worse.

https://apnews.com/article/voting-rights-government-and-politics-04909b913669631abd3c5a3ed99ee2c7

AP NEWS

Biden calls out 2 Democratic lawmakers for blocking agenda

June 1, 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden called out two fellow Democrats on Tuesday in explaining why he hasn’t enacted some of the most ambitious elements of his agenda, noting that slim majorities in the House and evenly divided Senate have hamstrung legislative negotiations around key issues like voting rights.

Biden, speaking during an event marking the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, responded to critics who question why he hasn’t been able to get a wide-reaching voting rights bill passed.

“Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House, and a tie in the Senate — with two members of the Senate who voted more with my Republican friends,” he lamented.

It appeared to be a veiled reference to Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom have frustrated Democrats with their defense of the filibuster — the rule requiring most legislation to win 60 votes to pass, making many of Democrats’ biggest priorities like voting rights and gun control bills dead on arrival in the 50-50 Senate. While Sinema is a sponsor of the voting rights bill that passed the House, known as the For the People Act, Manchin has refused to sign on, calling the measure “too broad.

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Go there and scream in rage. Oh I mean read. More next week.

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I Hope You Rot In Hell Joe Manchin – Why do you even call yourself a Democrat

Let me very quickly say, that I wish no immediate harm to the simpering moron (sigh). I am not urging anybody anywhere to do any harm to the coal toad.  All I am say is that after he dies of Black Lung, I hope bad things happen to him.

He is not even a Democrat. He is a DINO: Democrat In Name Only. He knows the majority is thin and thus his power is great. So behind the flag of Fiscal Responsibility he argues for a smaller bill. A Bill that can “get paid for”. What gets dropped out of that smaller bill? Surprise! Surprise! The Climate Change program that his coal sucking buddies hate. I mean this is from Vanity Fair for God’s sake.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/joe-manchin-is-about-to-make-life-worse-for-his-own-constituents-and-the-planet

Infrastructure

Joe Manchin Is About to Make Life Worse for His Own Constituents—And the Planet

The West Virginia senator’s reported opposition to programs aimed at helping working families and combating climate change would dramatically dilute the Democrats’ infrastructure plans.

Although Joe Manchin has been holding up Joe Biden’s infrastructure plans for a while now over the price tag, the West Virginia senator has been somewhat cagey about his actual demands. Not as guarded, perhaps, as Kyrsten Sinema, his fellow Democratic holdout; where she has refused to state her terms to anyone outside the White House, Manchin at least engages with his colleagues and speaks publicly about his objections to the reconciliation bill. But he’s been difficult to pin down nonetheless, adding to the frustrations of Democrats as they seek to deliver on the centerpiece of Biden’s domestic agenda.

Finally, while his terms are coming into clearer view, they’re only casting the future of the infrastructure bills in a thicker cloud of uncertainty. Now, the question isn’t only if the Biden bills will pass. It’s whether the bills will be recognizable if they do. Axios on Sunday reported that Manchin has given something of an ultimatum to the White House: He’ll support the child tax credit that would be one of the package’s biggest boosts to working families, but only if it…well, does less to help working families. Manchin is asking for the credit to include a work requirement and an income cap that would make families earning more than $60,000 ineligible for assistance—a demand that would weaken a key part of the spending bill. He is also, as Axios reported, continuing to rail against provisions of the reconciliation bill that are crucial to addressing climate change, supposedly because of concerns that the shift to clean energy the Biden plan would help usher in could cost jobs in the coal state of West Virginia. The Times reported Friday that Manchin, who personally has financial ties to the coal industry, opposes “a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy” that’s seen as key to Biden’s climate agenda.

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Go there and get mad; I mean read and get mad. More next week.

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The United States Is Unprepared For The Heat Of Now – Let alone the future

Forget about Humans interaction with our Warming Climate. Think about the infrastructure we build  for the last hundred years where one hundred degree Fahrenheit days ARE NOT THE Norm. Now every State in the union will have days over 1 Hundred Degrees and maybe weeks over one Hundred Degrees. Bear in mind that Minnesota had fires this summer around the Northern Lakes Region for the first time in memory. What is it gonna be like when the phone lines and the power lines come down. What is it gonna be like when the roads blow up. I do not mean catastrophic. I mean disruptive. I think disruptive is worse.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/portland-seattle-heatwave-warning/619313/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Nowhere Is Ready for This Heat

The Pacific Northwest is melting now, but all across America the infrastructure we have was built for the wrong century.

The Portland Streetcar is 20 years old, making it relatively sprightly for infrastructure in the United States. Yet it was built for a different geological epoch. On Sunday, while Portland suffered through what was then its hottest day ever, the system started to melt. As the temperature reached 112 degrees Fahrenheit, a power cable on a major bridge warped, twisted around some metal hardware, and scorched. Elsewhere, the wires that run above the track expanded and sagged so much that they risked touching the train cars. By mid-afternoon, the streetcar system had shut down. The trams, which run on 100 percent renewable energy, seem to offer exactly the sort of urban fast transit that the country needs to reduce carbon pollution. But they were not prepared for—they could not withstand—one of the region’s first wrenching encounters with the remade atmosphere.

At first blush, there isn’t much to say about the “heat dome” settled over the Pacific Northwest like a shroud. Here is the story: It is very hot. Portland’s hottest three days on record have been the past three: The city broke its all-time record on Saturday (108 degrees Fahrenheit), smashed it on Sunday (112 degrees), and broke it again yesterday (116 degrees). Seattle-Tacoma International Airport also set an all-time heat record yesterday (108 degrees). Farther north, the temperature in the town of Lytton, British Columbia, yesterday reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit, or 47.5 degrees Celsius—the hottest temperature ever measured anywhere in Canada. America’s northern neighbor now has the same all-time heat record as Las Vegas, hundreds of miles to the south. Portland’s all-time record now exceeds the all-time records for Dallas, Austin, Houston, and Atlanta. It is very hot.

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Go there and sweat. More next week.

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Antarctica Is Melting – Just like the wicked witch of the East

People all over the world have been saying, “When Antarctica melts then I will believe in Global Warming”. Well it is melting!

Yah I know Nobody Ever Said That. I thought it was a cool lead, or as they say cool lede, now. AND I know Antarctica is hard to care about. It’s just like Greenland. So what if it melts. I live in the mid west. When we flood, the world will really be flooded. No Florida, no Louisiana, no Southern Georgia, and no Southern Alabama and Mississippi. AND no Beaches.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/journey-to-antarctica-is-this-what-a-climate-catastrophe-looks-like-in-real-time?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Journey to Antarctica: Is This What a Climate Catastrophe Looks Like in Real Time?

Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watched a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea.

Rolling Stone

  • Jeff Goodell

This is a dispatch in a series from Jeff Goodell, who was aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer in Antarctica in 2019 , investigating the effect of climate change on Thwaites glacier.

Yesterday, the Nathaniel B. Palmer left Antarctica behind and made the turn toward home. The last science experiments were completed, and the ship headed north, toward Punta Arenas, Chile, where our two-month journey will end. Scientists on board are packing up equipment and writing rough drafts of papers based on discoveries they made during our adventure into uncharted waters around Thwaites glacier. But an almost existential question looms above it all: Did we just witness what amounts to a climate catastrophe playing out in real time?

On March 3rd, 2019, Bastien Queste, an oceanographer at the University of East Anglia who is a key member of the science team aboard the ship, got a WhatsApp message from a colleague back in the UK. She had sent him a satellite image of Thwaites glacier and the surrounding region in West Antarctica. At the time, we had just completed our own close encounter with the awesome craggy blue glacier and were only a few miles away, mapping the seabed in front of the glacier with the ship’s sonar device.

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Go there and cry. 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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Do Carbon Credits Work – In some cases, NOT

Mitigation efforts always sound sensible to sensible people. There are always people who have a knee jerk, industry involved NO WAY reaction. Just like with cigarettes: doesn’t cause it -you can’t prove it, to ok maybe it exists but there is nothing you can do about it, to those methods won’t work, to if you outlaw it you will put people out of work. But most people (as far as the carbon economy goes) Carbon Taxes, Carbon Trading and Carbon Reduction methods all seem OK. But how can you tell if they work, or in this case DON’T?

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-climate-solution-actually-adding-millions-of-tons-of-co2-into-the-atmosphere?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Environment

The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere

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New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.

This story was co-published with MIT Technology Review.

Along the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, wet woodlands, creating a canopy hundreds of feet high.

But if you travel inland the mix of trees gradually shifts.

Beyond the crest of the Klamath Mountains, you descend into an evergreen medley of sugar pines, incense cedars and still more Douglas firs. As you continue into the Cascade Range, you pass through sparser forests dominated by Ponderosa pines. These tall, slender trees with prickly cones thrive in the hotter, drier conditions on the eastern side of the state.

All trees consume carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen and storing the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots. Every ton of carbon sequestered in a living tree is a ton that isn’t contributing to climate change. And that thick coastal forest can easily store twice as much carbon per acre as the trees deeper inland.

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Go there and read probably a gazillion words. Take a weekend. More next week.

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Mothers Against Climate Change – April Fools joke – or Serious Movement

MACC doesn’t sound nearly as good as MADD but I suppose it could always work. I mean mothers are a potent source of social change. However, it took 100 years for them to get the vote and we do not have 100 years. I guess if my Grandma, Mable Ross, had started such a movement we would be in pretty good shape now. It also seems like a pretty “white” movement. I suppose that is where you have to start. GOOD LUCK LADIES!

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-moms-who-are-battling-climate-change?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The Moms Who Are Battling Climate Change

A new initiative seeks to tap into mothers’ concern for the world their children are inheriting.

Three years ago, I had a baby. I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that she is extremely cute, and I enjoy being her mother. A few months after her birth, I was scrolling on my phone, and I came across news of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It described a future world that will have experienced 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming. In this world, the oceans are acidifying, and most coral reefs have been bleached to death; hundreds of millions of people face severe drought, and even more face deadly heat waves. The kicker? This planet—the 1.5-degree-warmer one—was the best-case scenario. Scientists were using the report to argue that we should try to shoot for that. The Paris climate accord aims to limit the global-temperature increase to “below 2 degrees Celsius.” At present, both goals seem like a stretch. According to the U.N., all of the world’s current pledges would only cut carbon emissions by one per cent—a far cry from the nearly fifty per cent needed this decade in order to meet our goals. So, 1.5 degrees is coming. According to some researchers, we could get there around 2030, when my daughter will be entering middle school.

I did some further Googling: What will the world look like when she’s middle-aged? When her children are middle-aged? I found a Web site that lets you plot major events in your child’s life against the projected global-temperature increase. Even the “optimistic” scenarios show the world warming two degrees during her lifetime. The more realistic scenarios—the ones based on what countries are actually doing to reduce emissions, not what they’ve pledged—show it heating up to three degrees. There is a universe of difference between those numbers, but they are both awful, bringing rising seas, heat waves, food and water shortages, wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes, not to mention the loss of biodiversity. Naturally, this line of research prompted a nervous breakdown. I had always understood, intellectually, that climate change was an existential threat, but it was only after my daughter’s birth that it became real to me.

I’m not alone. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications, twenty-six per cent of Americans report feeling “alarmed” about climate change, up from less than half that number six years ago. About the same number of people describe themselves as “concerned”—which seems like the way you should feel about your child’s “Animal Crossing” addiction, not the fact that the Thwaites Glacier could slide into the ocean during his lifetime, flooding coastal cities.

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

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