Category Archives: green wash. corporate cover ups

Leave It In The Ground – Biden should not tap the Petroleum Reserves

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But he will because he is afraid. Generally I have liked the policies that Biden has enacted and the results. But tapping the Petroleum Reserves is not one of them. He is doing it because he is afraid of the effects of inflation on the mid term elections. But it will not change that. Those effects are already present. “Leave it in the ground”, is a slogan for a reason. Once you let fossil fuels out, they will be used. That Biden doesn’t get this is a sign that he is old. Please! Will some of the younger people around him shake him and wake him up. Like Greta says, Old People talk – blah blah blah but they DO Nothing. Wake up Biden, Wake up. Yes the costs may fall but will it be worth the Price.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/21/1056835748/u-s-emergency-oil-stockpiles-spr-gas-prices

Energy

The U.S. emergency oil stash is in the spotlight as gas prices surge. What to know

A recent surge in gasoline prices has left President Biden scrambling for options to do something about it.

One that’s getting a lot of attention is the possibility that the Biden administration will release crude oil from the country’s emergency oil stockpile, known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Much will depend on oil prices, which have soared over the past year, recovering to their pre-pandemic levels and then some. But after rising to more than $86 a barrel in October, they have since dropped to less than $80.

A lot of factors are affecting prices — including the fact that the White House is now talking about tapping the stockpile.

Here’s an explainer on the country’s oil reserves and whether tapping them would actually be effective.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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We Don’t Need No Stinkin Baseload – What we need is more storage

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By more storage I do not mean Batteries. I mean things like gas and liquid Compression, or liquid transportation. There are other possibilities that are well known like winding springs, etc. The idea of Baseload is in fact obsolete but you can’t tell. She locked into the past when she gushes about building a small Nuke next to an OLD coal plant. She just wants to “substitute” one source for another not write the Future. This administration is so OLD it is frightening. (quick aside – like for the last 100 yrs – how do get rid of the waste?)

https://news.yahoo.com/us-very-bullish-on-new-nuclear-technology-granholm-says-110016617.html

U.S. ‘very bullish’ on new nuclear technology, Granholm says

Ben Adler

·Senior Climate Editor
·6 min read

GLASGOW, Scotland — In an interview at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told Yahoo News on Friday that the Biden administration is “very bullish” on building new nuclear reactors in the United States.

“We are very bullish on these advanced nuclear reactors,” she said. “We have, in fact, invested a lot of money in the research and development of those. We are very supportive of that.”

Nuclear energy is controversial among environmental activists and experts because while it does not create the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, it has the potential to trigger dangerous nuclear meltdowns and creates radioactive nuclear waste.

Most of the Biden administration’s effort to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and almost all the rhetoric at the climate change conference, also known as COP26, is about promoting other clean forms of energy, such as wind and solar power.

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Go there and scream. I mean read. More next week.

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The Oil Companies Have Poisoned The World – I am not talking about their refined fuels

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I am talking Plastics. A friend of mine once remarked to me that he thought he probably would be carrying around a pound of DDT by the time he died. That may be true but think about a pound of plastic by-products circulating around your body. 60 years again the stuff didn’t even exist. Bakelite did exist and other form forms as well. But not the “soft” stuff. The stuff that universally breaks down. Now plastic and it’s by-products are everywhere AND there is more coming. Yum!

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-world-is-stuck-with-decades-of-new-plastic-it-can-t-recycle?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The World Is Stuck With Decades of New Plastic It Can’t Recycle

We’ve been hoodwinked into thinking recycling is a solution.

Quartz

  • Zoë Schlanger

Ants are useful creatures. As the most numerous insects on Earth, they have colonized nearly every habitat on land. So when a researcher wants to understand how far a contaminant has spread, they turn to ants.

In 2012, a group of French researchers found phthalates in the body of every ant they sampled. Ants from France, Hungary, Spain, Morocco, the Greek island Egine, and Burkina Faso all had at least some of the common plastic additive embedded in their skin. In the conclusion to the paper announcing their findings, they added a restless-sounding note: “In an attempt to find ants bearing no phthalate on their cuticle,” they wrote, they would next look farther afield. There had to be ants out there not yet full of plastic.

But there were not. Five years later, the team published their follow-up. They had sampled ants from the most remote forests of Guyana, and the areas in the Amazon rainforest farthest from any urban center. Again, phthalates were embedded in their skin. “These findings suggest that there is no such thing as a ‘pristine’ zone,” they wrote in a 2017 paper.

Or, as Pete Myers, an environmental health expert and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University put it, “there is no untouched centimeter.”

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The Cheeto Burrito Seeks To Destroy Tsongass National Forest – Destruction is his legacy

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(please note that i use tsongas and tongass interchangeably)

Destroy, Destroy, Destroy. That is what this President does because he has bought the general idea of “Disruption and Replacement” coming from Silicon Valley as a good thing for society. He doesn’t not understand that Disruption with out planning is BAD for society in general and only makes a few men (and women) rich. Or maybe, he actually does understand and just doesn’t care. One makes him evil by nature and the other makes him evil by nurture. I’ll leave it up to you to decide. One thing for sure is that his whole Presidency has been a disaster for the environment and the Earth, and that will be his lasting legacy.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/10/28/tongass-national-forest-alaska-exempt-roadless-rule-usda/6065610002/

USA Today

Feds end road, logging restrictions in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, one of the world’s largest temperate rainforests

Becky Bohrer
The Associated Press
Published 11:00 pm Oct 28, 2020

JUNEAU, Alaska — The federal government announced plans Wednesday to lift restrictions on logging and building roads in the country’s largest national forest, a pristine rainforest in Alaska that provides habitat for wolves, bears and salmon.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it has decided to exempt the Tongass National Forest from the so-called roadless rule, which bans road construction and timber harvests with limited exceptions. It applies to nearly one-quarter of all U.S. Forest Service lands.

Conservation groups vowed to fight the decision, describing it as short-sighted and driven by politics.

“The decision to roll back the roadless rule on the Tongass was made in spite of, not in support of, southeast Alaskans and our communities,” said Meredith Trainor, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. “In making this decision, the Trump administration and the sham rulemaking process they undertook in our region ignored economic realities, environmental imperatives, and worst of all, the will of the people who actually live here.”

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What Could Go Wrong With A Russian Nuke – That’s what Lithuanian thought

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After Chernobyl who would trust the Russians to build a Nuclear Power Plant? Nobody that’s who. Except the blind, the feeble, the retarded, the old and Belarus. I need to say no more. This is a very bad idea.

https://news.yahoo.com/belarus-cranks-1st-nuclear-plant-122609420.html

Belarus cranks up 1st nuclear plant; Lithuania is fearful

Associated Press

MOSCOW (AP) — Belarus’ first nuclear power plant began operating Tuesday, a project that has spooked its neighbor Lithuania, which immediately cut off importing electricity from Belarus at the news.

The Russian-built Astravyets nuclear power plant, 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, has been connected to Belarus’ power grid and has started producing electricity, according to Belarusian electricity operator Belenergo.

Lithuanian authorities long have opposed the plant’s construction, arguing that the project has been plagued by accidents, stolen materials and the mistreatment of workers. In line with the country’s law banning electricity imports from Belarus once the plant starts, Lithuania’s Litgrid power operator cut the inflow of electricity from Belarus upon receiving data that the Astravyets nuclear reactor had started producing energy.

Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom, which built the plant, has rejected the Lithuanian complaints, saying the plant’s design conforms to the highest international standards as confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Recycling Plastic Was Always A Lie – There is only so much plastic furniture and astroturf the world needs

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So the shell game for the oil companies was always – who can we get to take this stuff? Meaning solid supposedly recyclable plastics. For awhile anybody would take the “stuff” to burn it and Americans are like – out of sight out of mind. When they got caught at that, then they started exporting for “conversion” to other substances and China bought that one big time. Don’t get me wrong, plastic can be recycled but it is MORE expensive to do so than to throw it away. PLUS you can only recycle it once or twice and then it has to be thrown away anyway. YUP recycling was always a lie. But ain’t capitalism grand.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled?utm_source=digg

Investigations

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

 

Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.

None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.

“To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust,” she said. “I had been lying to people … unwittingly.”

Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.

But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn’t want to hear it.

“I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage,” she says, “and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You’re lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It’s gold. This is valuable.”

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Go there and read. Next time you see an empty gallon milk jug. Light it on fire in protest. More next week.

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P.S. Today is recycling day in Riverton and they just took my plastic away. hahahahaa

 

Michael Sellenberger Is A Lying Fool – He is a huge supporter of Nuclear Power

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As one of the commenters on Peak Oil said, “yah and smoking cures cancer”. Or as another said. ” a deniers denier, whose paying him”? His editorial is so wrong in so many ways. Yes, we ARE causing the next big extinction by habitat destruction and this pandemic is a perfect result of that habitat destruction and it’s results. Global warming IS the biggest crisis facing humans. Its true – not the biggest crisis facing the Earth cause after we are gone and all the smoke gets reabsorbed the Earth will be just fine. This guy is raising money by spreading feel good skepticism (and that’s all it is) and making himself famous by telling lies.

https://environmentalprogress.org/who-we-are

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

The author in Maranhão, Brazil, 1995

The author in Maranhão, Brazil, 1995

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

  • Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

  • The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

  • Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

  • Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

  • The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

  • The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

  • Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s

  • Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level

  • We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

  • Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

  • Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

  • Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

 

 

 

 

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The Darkside Of The Green Revolution – Lithium extraction really messes things up

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I should very quickly say – the way things are done now. The mining industry, as it functions in the past and now, destroys things no matter what it is extracting – gold, lead or lithium. So if we are going to have a real revolution we are going to have to change the entire extraction industry. This point is larger for me than this article implies because capitalism is the problem. We as a society can achieve a carbon negative atmosphere and humans will still threaten the planet because that it what capitalism does – destroys thing. Still you have to start somewhere.

https://logicmag.io/nature/what-green-costs/?utm_source=digg

Issue 9 / Nature

December 07, 2019

What Green Costs

Thea Riofrancos

Deep in the salt flats of Chile lies the extractive frontier of the renewable energy transition.

Clean energy advocates envision an electrified home running on 100 percent renewable energy with a Tesla parked in its garage, solar shingles gleaming on its rooftop, and a smart meter dutifully collecting usage data and uploading it to the cloud. But swim upstream and eventually you arrive at the extractive frontiers of the renewable energy transition.

It was 8:45 am on the first day of the 11th Lithium Supply & Markets Conference in the basement level of the W Hotel in Santiago, Chile. There was no way for me to blend in. “Providence College” on my name tag rendered me a curiosity. Still, I was glad I remembered to wear lipstick and that my backpack had straps that converted it into a tote.

I found an empty seat in the sea of suits, almost all men but of different ages. They hailed variously from China, Australia, Chile, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Argentina. They were market analysts and prospectors; equipment salesmen and regulators; executives, consultants, and peddlers of information in the notoriously opaque world of lithium, a “space,” in Silicon Valley talk, not quite meriting the word “market.”

As I slid into my seat, the chairman of one of the largest lithium companies in the world, with a sordid past in a corrupt privatization process under Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, took to the stage. “Mining is the spine of Chile; mining runs through our veins.” I might have been the only person in the room who immediately thought of Eduardo Galeano’s anti-colonial page-turner, Open Veins of Latin America?—?incidentally penned the same year Pinochet came to power, brutally crushing the dream of democratic socialism in Chile. But I don’t think the chairman meant to call to mind the vampiric iconography of global capital. The dead sapping the living; the blood and sweat and tortured landscapes of extraction, especially in its colonial variant.

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Go there and read. More next week, if there is a next week.

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Pacific Gas & Electric Cuts Power To 600,000 – They are bankrupt as well

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This is a travesty on so many levels. First at the corporate level, who ran this company into the ground? I mean seriously there are all kind of remedies for years, including burying power lines, and cladding power lines or leasing solar on customers roofs. To not do anything but take profit for thirty years should get someone jail time. Second, what about the employees? The Camp Fire was cause my a Power Pole that was ONE HUNDRED years old. Why did someone not take the damn thing down on their own initiative? Again – Jail Time. Where were the regulators? That should have made them create a revitalization and safety plans 30 years ago. Again – Jail Time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/us/pge-outage.html

PG&E Power Outage: Live Updates as Californians Face a Blackout

The second phase of a safety plan intended to prevent wildfires left hundreds of thousands more without electricity.

By Thomas Fuller

Right Now

Around 600,000 electricity customers were without power on Thursday morning.

Here’s what you need to know:

SAN FRANCISCO – Large areas of Northern California remained without power on Thursday as a major outage rocked the region for a second day. About 600,000 electricity customers were affected on Thursday morning after the state’s largest utility carried out the second phase of its intentional power cut.

Pacific Gas and Electric said extreme winds overnight forced the additional shutdown, which the utility organized to prevent equipment from sparking fires.

The second phase affected bedroom communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and added to the hundreds of thousands of customers who had lost power on Wednesday. As of Thursday morning, the company had restored power to 137,000 customer

 

And here is a map to see if you or someone you love is effected.

http://critweb-outage.pgealerts.com/?WT.mc_id=Vanity_pge-outages

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Go there and weep. More next week.

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Nuclear Power In China – The new frontier

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OK. It never fails to be true. The Nuclear Power Industry always has “A new safer problem free” Nuclear Reactor, and it never is true. But they sold China, and I am sure they are trying with India. Look out! South America and South Africa.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-france-nuclear/china-launches-worlds-first-epr-nuclear-project-in-taishan-idUSKBN1OD0Y4

China launches world’s first EPR nuclear project in Taishan

BEIJING (Reuters) – The world’s first third-generation “Evolutionary Power Reactor” (EPR) has gone into operation at Taishan in China’s Guangdong province, the French and Chinese developers behind the project announced on Friday.

The 1,750-megawatt EPR, formerly known as the “European Pressurised Reactor” and designed by France’s Areva, completed a 168-hour trial run on Thursday evening, said state-owned China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN).

Its commercial launch can be “a source of inspiration” for other next-generation reactors, Guo Limin, general manager of the Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture Company, said at a press briefing in Beijing.

https://phys.org/news/2019-05-world-epr-nuclear-reactor-china.html

World’s second EPR nuclear reactor starts work in China

A next-generation EPR nuclear reactor in China has carried out its first chain reaction, French energy giant EDF announced Wednesday, becoming the second using the much-delayed European technology to reach the milestone.

The fission reaction at the Taishan 2 reactor on Tuesday follows the Taishan 1 becoming last year the first of its kind to advance to the operational stage.

“The was authorised and yesterday the Chinese reactor carried out a for the first time,” EDF chairman and CEO Jean-Bernard Levy told Europe 1 radio on Wednesday.

As a side note, if you are interested in a Guide To Solar Power, the replacement for nukes. Please look here.

https://www.flexible-solar-panel.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-solar-energy/

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Go to all of those places and read. More next week.

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