FRACKING OUR
WAY
TO OBLIVION
More Fracking Insanity
No Limits Growth in Oil
and Gas
or a
Green New
Deal?
SIXTH PART OF THE ‘MORE
FRACKING INSANITY’ SERIES
#FaceTheClimateEmergency
TABLE OF CONTENTS
USA!
USA! That’s what they were trumpeting such a short time ago, the last week of February
2020, when the US produced their record amount of Crude Oil, a staggering
13,100,000 bpd (barrels per day - 42 gallons per barrel), the average daily
output for the week. Trump and Big Oil, the Oil Lobby, and the API (American Petroleum
Institute), and most Republican, and many Democratic, Congressman and Senators,
and, especially Governors of Oil Producing States, were all celebrating it, as
if they had won our country the gold medal at an Olympic event.
And
before Trump, it was Obama, a big champion of fracking, as witnessed at every one
of his State of the Union addresses, though he never mentioned the word, “Fracking”,
and before that, George Bush, with his partner Dick Cheney, whose company,
Halliburton, was the pioneer of Fracking. They all heralded the US, as it
passed Russia in barrels produced per day, and more recently surpassed Saudi
Arabia, and earned the rank of the largest producer of fossil fuels, both in Oil
and in Natural Gas, in the world, the world champion. And many Americans misguidedly
are so proud of the “Energy Independence” this affords us, as if that means
anything 40 years after the last OPEC oil shortage, so proud of this fossil
fuel expansion, in which the objective of massive growth has been achieved.
Nobody
seems to be concerned, but as Greta Thunberg repeatedly reminds us, the world
has a Carbon Budget, as prescribed in the IPCC SR1.5 report, that will be used up in less than 10
years, now 7 ½ years, in order to keep temperature rise below 1.5 Celsius, and
beyond that, once the Carbon Budget is used up, in just a very few years, major
cities and airports, sea ports, many interstate highways and railways, many power
plants including nuclear, which are all at low elevation above sea level, eventually,
not right away, but eventually, will be underwater, and that’s not a good plan.
That would not be good for the ‘Economy’, not to mention the pain and suffering
of people in coastal cities all over the world, whose homes and livelihoods
will also be literally underwater. If we really care about our economy, and if we
still care about our children and their future, and if we hope to leave them a
habitable world to raise families of their own, we better get concerned.
So
back to the story. On February 28, 2020,
the US hit a record in oil production of a staggering 13.1 million barrels per
day, and just weeks later, April 22, 2020, coincidentally, Earth Day, the
bottom fell out of the Oil market. The price of Oil actually fell so low, that
it went negative. The bottom was negative $37.63 per barrel. In other words,
nobody wanted, or would pay for Oil. Theoretically, the supplier would have to
pay someone $37.63 just to take a barrel of their Oil. They had such an
oversupply, they literally had nowhere to put it.
So,
do you blame Coronavirus, or can you blame the shutdowns due to Coronavirus? The
answer is, No. The novel Coronavirus has temporarily reduced demand (On jet
fuel, it killed demand.), so it very much did exacerbate the situation, but the
oversupply and the depressed pricing of Oil and Natural Gas had been going on
for many years, well before anyone ever dreamed of the Coronavirus. It is particularly
important that people realize that, and that they not take solace from the
current, very transitory drop in transportation and industrial emissions,
(which, will indeed save lives, however short the lower levels of air
pollution).
Trump
and Big Oil, and taking their lead, the way mass media reported it, blamed the
precipitous drop in the price of Oil on a Price War between Russia and Saudi
Arabia. Trump always deflects blame. No one mentioned, just weeks before, the
US had hit record oil production, and that the Saudis and their OPEC partners
and Russia had been frustrated for years with the prospect of losing market
share to the US, which had just made it legal in 2016, (after a 40 year ban), to export Oil, and had been ramping up their fracking, and offshore
drilling oil production, like there was no tomorrow.
It
wasn’t supposed to happen this way. In the 20th century, the Science,
and what we were taught in schools, was that somewhere before the year 2000 we would meet Peak Oil and Peak Gas. (Some
call 1970, when production from large deposits started to wane, the first Peak
Oil.), In other words, we would start to
run out of Gas and Oil, and we would be forced to at least begin the transition
to other sources of energy. Even back in the 1970's, we knew about Wind and
Solar, and they were already being used by individuals. But the powerful Big
Oil was not going to give up, even though they knew they were running out.
So,
in order for Big Oil and Big Gas to keep up their gravy train, faced with
running out of their dwindling large conventional deposits, or reserves, they
invented new 'unconventional' technologies, to get to the Oil and Gas, in
tiny deposits trapped within Shale rock (Fracking), and deep under ocean floors
(Offshore Drilling/Fracking), with these deposits
previously thought to be inaccessible.
Besides
the pollution, the waste streams, the health risks, the degradation of the
environment and of quality of life, caused by fracking (and here we refer you
to the More Fracking Insanity series of five articles for a background on
fracking, since we try not to repeat information in our stories. They’re long
enough already without repeating. LOL.), every Fracking well has diminishing
yields, so they often have to be fracked repeatedly, as many as 6 times over
years, to enhance the yields, each Frack job, drilling vertically and then
horizontally, involving explosives to perforate the pipes, and requiring 400
tractor-trailer loads of water (5,000 gallons per truck, transferred to Goliath
tanks for quick access} and 160-200 50,000 pound truckloads of Silica Sand, and
hundreds of toxic and hormone disrupting chemical additives, driven down the well
at 15,000 psi, enough pressure to fracture shale rock, and then requires the
sucking out of as much of that ‘produced’ radioactive toxic water as possible,
before the well is ready to produce Gas and Oil. This process and the waste
streams involved, are very costly. And the diminishing returns, over time, of
each well, leading eventually to unproductive wells having to be plugged and
abandoned. What this means is that, in order to meet projections of greater and
greater production, thousands of new wells must always be built, requiring more
and more investment.
This
Ponzi scheme of Fracking requires the borrowing of more and more money from
banks, using the potential yields, not always realized, of existing wells, as
collateral. All this has just about come to a point where the banks have had
enough, and in 2020, Reuters and many media outlets have reported that the
banks had signaled that they were not going to keep lending endlessly to these
unprofitable fracking companies, and so, we’ve been expecting to finally see
lots of bankruptcies, not Exxon and the majors, but now we’ve been watching fracking
companies, like Chesapeake, Range Resources, and Whiting Petroleum, etc., in
big trouble.
On
April 30, 2020, when the Federal Reserve Bank ruled to allow Coronavirus Relief
Funds to be used to service gas and oil debt, we were afraid that these frackers
would soon be bailed out, and we’re pretty sure, without any transparency, that
Exxon and the majors have already been bailed out. But the recent bankruptcies of
Whiting Petroleum of ND (Bakken Shale) and of Chesapeake (a huge fracking
company operating in five States), indicates that not all of them are being
bailed out. But, the whole model of fracking is on such shaky ground, that if some
of them are bailed out, it’s only a matter of time, before they will have to be
bailed out again.
The
price of Oil is in the dirt, currently at back up to around $40 per barrel, from
a floor of below zero in the recent historic drop, however it is estimated that
the cost of extracting a barrel of oil with fracking in the United States is
$50-$90 per barrel (in our estimates, we usually use $60 per barrel). If we
could get the price back up to over $100 per barrel, which it was last in June 2014,
it could be profitable again. But the experts don’t see it going up to anywhere
near that level anytime soon.
The
Saudi Arabian cost of extracting a barrel of oil from the largest conventional
reserve in the world is said to be less than $10 per barrel, and the Russians,
whose economy depends on oil even more than ours, and most of the other
oil-producing nations, with the high costs of fracking, are at a severe
competitive disadvantage to Saudi Arabia. Despite Trump’s Sword Dance with the Sheikhs
of Saudi Arabia, the Saudis are not going to allow the price to be high enough
to be profitable for us, and allow us to keep taking what they consider their
market share, and it would be naive to think that they would,
The
Saudis aren’t dumb. They are avid readers of all the ins and outs of the future
of the oil business. They are continuing to construct multiple large solar
arrays. They see the handwriting on the wall, in what’s happening to the
Climate in the Middle East with the increasingly intolerable heat and the
extreme weather events taking place, and they realize and see what’s happening
with the divestment movement, and with the youth climate movement all over the
world. They realize their market for oil will not last forever, so they’ve got
to sell all the oil they can, now, or, certainly, before the world starts to
divest, and stops buying it.
And
it’s not as if the Saudis’ costs of extraction are going to go up anytime soon,
causing them to have a need to raise their prices, thus allowing us enough room
to compete and still make a profit. With our high costs of fracking and of offshore
drilling in the US, not only are we losing money on every barrel we sell, but
the Saudis, the Russians, dozens of other oil-producing nations, and we keep
trying to outdo each other in production, causing a perpetual oversupply, as if
that will somehow ramp up the ‘economy’. This is insanity.
If
Capitalism, Supply and Demand, is still operative, and still has any effect on
pricing going up or down, how can we believe that the production of an
oversupply will raise prices above costs? Let me repeat, this all has very
little, if anything, to do with Coronavirus shutdowns. This has been going on
for years, before anyone ever dreamed of Coronavirus. And though some experts
may be aware of some of this, none of this has ever been explained to the
American people or internationally.
And,
as bad as the oversupply and the cost versus price is with Oil, the situation
is just as bad, if not worse, with Natural Gas. Every one of the hundreds of
thousands of fracked oil wells in the United States also produces Natural Gas,
but that gas is so cheap, (the selling price, if you could get it to market, is
so low), that it doesn’t make economic sense for them to capture it and build, and
transport it in, pipelines, so, rather than let it collect and risk explosions,
they vent the gas, or flare, burn, it on site. Fracking fields, including urban
fracking fields, next to people’s homes and schools, can be seen from space,
with their multiple “cigarettes in the sky”, (bearing no Surgeon General Warning),
emitting tons of CO2 and Black Carbon Soot, a black oily smoke, with toxic
heavy metal particulates, and toxic gases like Benzene and radioactive Radon
gas (which is inert, so it does not burn, but falls to the ground, poisoning us,
our children, pets, and livestock, risking lung cancer), and that sounds as
loud as a freight train, 24 hours,7 days a week.. Not a good neighbor to have.
But
according to Sharon Wilson, of Earthworks in Texas, her evidence tells us that
a good deal of the time these flares, whether intentionally or not, are not
lit, they’re not burning, and the unburnt Natural Gas, 95% Methane, is being
released, even though it is not visible. This is worse for the Climate even
though flaring is worse for Health. Fortunately, Sharon Wilson, has the
technology and the camera equipment to back up her anecdotal evidence of
‘venting’ with her training and expertise in OGI (Optical Gas Imaging), so she
can show us six years of photographic evidence, while, otherwise, these emissions
would be invisible. She has ample evidence, as do others of her colleague
activists across the US. This is not confined to just one of the many fracking
fields in Texas with tens of thousands of wells, but is true of every fracking
field in every State, wherever there is fracking. Satellites have also been
able to detect high concentrations of Methane over fracking well fields in
various areas of the US.
Millions
of tons of Natural Gas are being vented or flared, meaning, if you put any
credence in a dollar value for Natural Gas, this equates to millions of dollars
wasted every day. And it’s not just the waste or the toxic emissions we’re
worried about, but Methane (95% of Natural Gas) is a Greenhouse Gas, that is
100 times worse over a ten-year period, ton for ton, as far as warming
potential, than CO2. Releasing Methane in those vast quantities (from the
thousands of wells in each shale play, as much as the Aliso Canyon L.A. Gas
Leak per hour), is criminal, as far as its effect on the Climate. This has been
happening day after day, year after year.
Again,
if you do not want to see our cities, our ports, our airports, our highways,
our railways, the economy, literally underwater, from sea level rise, this is
not a good plan. Just as CO2 has reached record after record high, now at 417.93
ppm, Methane levels are already at 1,875ppb, and continue to rise at the rate
of about 10ppb each year since 2005. (Many other factors contribute to Methane
levels, including landfills, livestock, rice, dams, etc., and increasingly the
feedback effects of melting permafrost, on and offshore.)
The
price of Natural Gas in the US over the last five years has been near a floor
of $2.50 per MMBTU. The measure of MMBTU means ‘Million British Thermal Units’,
but to make it simpler for our understanding, 1 MMBTU takes up the volume of
approximately 1,000 cubic feet (Mcf), so when we say
the
price is $2.50/MMBTU, that means the price is close to $2.50/Mcf. Recently in
April, Natural Gas pricing reached a shocking low of $1.44/MMBTU, the lowest
price since 1997, and it is now hovering well below $2.00 at $1.78/MMBTU, with
forecasts of going back up to the $2.50 range with occasional spikes as high as
$2.80/MMSF, but with no hope of it reaching $3.00 during the next 3 years.
The
problem with the selling price being so low is that 75% (now, and the percentage
is growing) of US gas production is from high cost fracking, where the costs
are said to be in the neighborhood of $2.80 to $3.60/MMBTU, and we’ve even
heard cost estimates as high as $9.00/MMBTU from certain shale regions. Maybe
selling Natural Gas at below cost for the past decade, with no hope of selling
it above costs for at least the next few years, is a reason the Ponzi scheme of
fracking more and more wells is
collapsing, and big Frackers, like Whiting and Chesapeake are already operating
in bankruptcy.
(Another
factor, affecting the price, is the downturn in the international market, where
Russia is the main supplier to the EU, and a major supplier to Asia, and wants
to keep it that way. US LNG exports this year,
at
a time they’re building more export terminals, are way down.)
But
the problem with Natural Gas is not simply that they are selling it at below
costs, but that they also have such an overwhelming oversupply, with their
irrational exuberance to keep fracking and drilling, they have nowhere left to
put the gas. There are new salt caverns being hollowed out several places in
the country to store more gas, but another way they are storing it is by “line
packing”, using the miles of pipelines, (30-42 inches in diameter), as horizontal
storage tanks, pressurized to as much as 1,500 psi (pounds/square inch). Every
new pipeline they build will double as a new storage tank. You can store a hell
of a lot of gas at high pressure in miles and miles of large diameter pipelines
in this manner, going by people’s homes, through urban sections, etc., but if
there is an explosion with the pipelines packed at 1,500 psi, and there are gas
explosions that happen in the United States every year, it could be one hell of
an explosion, and would take out lots of homes, and lives. If it’s a pipeline
going through a city, it could take out thousands.
But
line packing and more salt caverns are still not enough to relieve the pressure
of the accumulating oversupply, so the US Department of Energy, hand-in-hand
with the Big Energy and Big Gas corporations, has devised a plan to allow the
US to keep fracking and extracting more and more natural gas, in a time when
demand for natural gas is waning, not because of Coronavirus shutdowns, but
because of everything we’re doing to warm the Climate, including the burning of
Natural Gas, causing shorter Winters. We are still getting the cold spells,
having upset the Jet Stream to give us Arctic blasts like never before, but,
overall, we are using less Gas for Heating, and less Heating Oil, and that
trend will no doubt continue.
So,
what are they going to do to sell, to relieve the pressure of all that excess
Natural Gas? The Energy Department and Big Energy corporations have big plans
to create new markets for Natural Gas, and urgently, since they’re running out
of places to store it, and, heaven forbid the thought of any curtailment.
A.
They have been building billions of dollars of Pipelines and Compressor Stations
and LNG Export Terminals to supply the world with boatloads of cheap US LNG,
Liquid Natural Gas, which they hope to be able to export.in massive quantities,
despite the fact that LNG exports have been way down this year, and so has the
price of LNG.
B
They are ramping up plans to expand the
production and export of boatloads of Liquid Natural
Gas Condensate, to feed Plastics plants in Europe, Asia, and Africa..
C.
The government has developed a plan to have 334 new Petrochemical Plants built
by 2025 (each one will turn the American community surrounding it into a
brand-new Cancer Alley) to provide the world with more Plastic, just what the
world, whose oceans and waterways are filling up with Plastic, doesn’t need.
Single use plastics being marketed in every developing country, in Asia and
Africa, is one of the ‘new markets’ for our Natural Gas oversupply.
There
is so much Plastic in the world already, where we’ve been producing 300 million
tons of Plastic every year for the last 50 years, that our oceans and waterways
are accumulating, and filling up with Plastic. Fishermen are reporting 40% of
their catch in weight of plastic, soon predicted to be 50%. 85% of all tap water
and 95% of all bottled water contains Microplastics. Microbeads in toothpaste
and cleaning products, though now outlawed, are covering the floors
of the Great Lakes, and will be there forever, for one example. So, we are
consuming plastic just drinking water, besides eating seafood, and within the
last few weeks, we’ve learned of crops being able to draw up Microplastics. The
world is drowning in plastic, and now, in order to sell our oversupply of natural
gas, the US government, with its colonialist attitude, has come up with an
urgent plan to shove more plastic down the developing world’s throats, by
promoting single use packaging.
This
plan is ecocidal, and unethical, and must be stopped. Each of the planned 334 new Petrochemical Plants, Ethene Cracker
Plants, etc. will require a ‘Hub’ of hundreds of miles of Pipelines to connect
and feed the Natural Gas in, directly from the wells, and to transport the
Liquid Gas Condensate for Plastic production and the LNG out to the Export Terminals.
Every Pipeline means, millions of Trees will have to be cut down, in ‘right-of-ways’
for these Pipelines, and every one of these new plants will require land and
trees to be cleared.
It
is well known, per numerous academic studies, that higher cancer rates, low
birth weights, higher miscarriage rates, nosebleeds, rashes, asthma, and a
range of other maladies, are concentrated around oil and gas wells, facilities,
refineries, compressor stations, and petrochemical plants. causing sickness and
death. And though Americans will pay the price in lost health, this plan is not
for the benefit of Americans, but for export, benefiting mainly only a very few
large corporations. And they seem to expect us to be OK with that, to go along
with it,
Now,
I’m going to tell you, as briefly as I can, a story, relevant to our
discussion, that you’re going to find hard to believe. But let me assure you, I
(or you) can easily confirm every part of it, and Rachel Maddow reported on
some of it, specifically relating to Tillerson and Putin, in her new book,
‘Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and The Richest, Most Destructive Industry On Earth’, a book I highly recommend. Let me make this
clear, I am using her book only as a fact witness, and not representing her conclusions.
Read the book.
In
2012, Rex Tillerson, then CEO of Exxon Mobil, visited Putin’s home to sign a
letter of intent, to jointly, with Putin’s national oil company, Rosneft,
exploit their discovery of an area of Shale rock in Northwest Siberia, that had
been recently found to contain 80 times the amount of Oil and Gas as the Bakken
Shale of North Dakota, one of the most productive fracking fields in the US. And
in 2013, Putin awarded Tillerson the ‘Order of Friendship’, one of the highest
honors bestowed by Russia. Then, in early 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine and
annexed Crimea, causing the US and the EU to impose Sanctions, preventing this Exxon/Rosneft
oil deal from proceeding, and Russia, with their financial problems, didn’t
have the resources to do it without Exxon. In 2017, before Trump’s
inauguration, Flynn advised the Russian ambassador in a recorded conversation,
implying, not to worry, Trump would soon, upon taking office, ease the Sanctions.
After the inauguration, both Republicans and Democrats were so worried that
Trump would unilaterally lift those Sanctions, that they actually legislated a
veto-proof (97-2 in the Senate) edict to prevent Trump from doing that. In July,
2017, after CEO Tillerson had resigned from Exxon, and now had assumed the post
of Secretary of State of the United States, Exxon was fined $2 million (chump
change for Exxon) by the Trump Treasury Department for violations of those same
Russian Sanctions, for violations that took place while Tillerson was still CEO.
Trump continues to this day to do everything he can to please Putin, including
turning his back on bounties paid by Russia for American heads, without even a
verbal rebuke. Trump has been single-mindedly concentrating on helping Putin
lift those Sanctions for all four years of his Presidency, and surely, he will
find a way to lift them if we allow Trump four more years. It is well-known
that Trump never does anything for nothing, and we present the Bazhenov Shale
as a possible quid pro quo, with 80 times more Oil and Gas as the Bakken Shale
in the US. Do you realize how much money we’re talking about here? Perhaps Trump
has some assurance he could get in on that action. Draw your own conclusions.
We
told you that story in order to use the Bazhenov Shale as an example of what we
have to guard against. When Dr. James Hansen, one of the foremost climate
scientists and a former director of the NASA Institute studying the Climate,
got himself arrested protesting the building of the KXL Pipeline to transport
Canadian Tarsands Oil to US Koch Refineries for export, (which, by the way,
Trump may still be an owner of TransCanada, the corporation building the KXL Pipeline)
he warned it would be, GAME OVER for the Climate. Likewise, exploiting the Bazhenov
shale would be GAME OVER for the Climate. And the oil companies are continuing
to explore for new, on and offshore, deposits all over the world. And who knows
where, when, or how big the next discovery of deposits of oil Gas and Coal will
be?
Unless
much of each nation’s reserves, those already counted, and those yet to be
discovered, are sidelined, and we “keep it in the ground”, we will be in grave
danger. If we allow every gallon of oil, every cubic foot of gas, and every
pound of coal, to be mined, it will all eventually be burned, and we will roast, and will be devastated by storms and droughts, and the sea levels will drown our
cities. It’s that simple.
As
Greta Thunberg reminds us, the “Carbon Budget” for keeping the warming under
1.5° Celsius, will be used up so fast, already by 2028, that if we continue to
emit 42GT (gigatons) of CO2 per year, we will soon be looking at catastrophic temperatures,
weather extremes, and commensurate feedback loops, that will serve to
accelerate the warming.
If
the Wet Bulb temperature exceeds 95°F, at 100% humidity, humans can no longer
survive. In other words, we can survive 120°F at 35% humidity, but if it goes
up to 40% humidity, at that high of a temperature, the Wet Bulb temperature
will be above 95 Fahrenheit, and thousands will die. Also, please note that the
temperature inside a city building can be much higher, than the temperature
outside, and the humidity, particularly if they are cooking or bathing to stay
cool inside, could be significantly higher inside the apartment. A Wet Bulb Calculator
is available. Check it out. At the current 1.1 to 1.2°C above pre-industrial
levels, even before we reach a 1.5°C or 2°C level, (or with current Paris Agreement
commitments, if every nation actually achieved them, the warming is projected
to be a disastrous 3 to 4°C), we are already dangerously close to the Wet Bulb
survival limits in the Middle East, India and Australia. This is for real. People
will be dying, just from the heat and humidity, because they won’t be able to
cool themselves sufficiently through sweat, under those conditions, to keep
their body temperature from rising too far above normal.
This is all profoundly serious, and presents a real emergency, that the world had better face, and start acting with the urgency of a real emergency in mind. (Another factor of survival in high heat and humidity is the need for abundant clean, safe, drinking water. Many of the poor in drought-stricken areas are forced to choose between dying of dehydration or getting sick or dying from dysentery. The higher the heat and humidity, the more water a person needs, just to cool the body through sweat to survive. Meanwhile, even in drought-stricken areas, they’re wasting 2 Million gallons of precious Water in one shot each time they Frack a well.)
This is all profoundly serious, and presents a real emergency, that the world had better face, and start acting with the urgency of a real emergency in mind. (Another factor of survival in high heat and humidity is the need for abundant clean, safe, drinking water. Many of the poor in drought-stricken areas are forced to choose between dying of dehydration or getting sick or dying from dysentery. The higher the heat and humidity, the more water a person needs, just to cool the body through sweat to survive. Meanwhile, even in drought-stricken areas, they’re wasting 2 Million gallons of precious Water in one shot each time they Frack a well.)
On
November 28, 2019, while Greta Thunberg was still sailing across the Atlantic,
almost to Lisbon, Portugal, on her way to Madrid, Spain, for the COP25, the twice
relocated UN Climate Talks, the European Parliament declared a Global Climate
and Environmental Disaster”, and warned that the world may have already reached “a series of climate tipping points”
resulting in a “state of planetary emergency” and vowed to take “concrete
action”.
We
were excited to see this Climate Emergency Declaration, hoping, maybe the EU Parliament
had finally listened to the 7.5 million Youth Climate Strikers, inspired by
Greta, many of whom were future EU voters,
that took to the streets in every city and village on five continents..
In September 2019, at the Battery in NYC,we witnessed 250,000 protesters, there to hear Greta speak, and to support her at the UN, among millions of strikers worldwide. Maybe the world would actually start treating the Climate Crisis and the Biodiversity Crisis as the real Emergencies they are. We realized it was only the EU, and not the rest of the world, but perhaps, if the EU really started to take the leadership role, others would follow.
In September 2019, at the Battery in NYC,we witnessed 250,000 protesters, there to hear Greta speak, and to support her at the UN, among millions of strikers worldwide. Maybe the world would actually start treating the Climate Crisis and the Biodiversity Crisis as the real Emergencies they are. We realized it was only the EU, and not the rest of the world, but perhaps, if the EU really started to take the leadership role, others would follow.
But
when Greta attended the European Parliament on March 4 2020, on the day they
adopted, with grand flourish, their ‘European Climate Plan’, which includes
their goal of ‘Net Zero by 2050’, and when she was given an opportunity to
respond, her speech labeled their plan, nothing less than complete “surrender”.
We urge you to view the video, and read the transcript of her speech, Her words
are so much more eloquent than mine. And, also, read the letter, issued the day
before, written by 34 youth climate strikers, including Greta, explaining why
the European Climate Plan is insufficient and useless, and would prove to be as
ineffectual as the Paris Climate Agreement, where the goals are aspirational
and voluntary, with no oversight, and without even the reporting being uniform
from one nation to the next. Clever accounting tricks, like ”Emissions Offsets”
and “Carbon Trading’ and other loopholes, would allow them to adopt False Solutions to the Climate Crisis, allowing polluters to continue to pollute, and to harm
our prospects for a future, while, with creative accounting and public relations, make it look like they’re really taking Climate Action.
One
of the most absurd examples of this fakery is the burning of “Biomass” for
Electricity. At the huge DRAX Biomass Power Plant in the UK, they’re burning boatloads
of wood chips from freshly cut US Southeast Forests, without counting the emissions,
as if they were “carbon-free” and “renewable”, when, actually, burning wood
chips is no more carbon-free, than the increasing raging Wildfires around the
world each summer. Their twisted reasoning, on how burning wood creates no CO2
emissions, is that trees are derived from photosynthesis, pulling CO2 from the
air to grow trees, so the burning of wood is just putting it back in the air, and they
conclude, there is no ‘net’ gain. Each of the 10 False Solutions to the Climate
Crisis have lobbyists and corporations behind them, that stand to gain, so each
of them is being promoted endlessly. Knowing this, when the media parrots a
Press Release on the great strides the UK is making in “Renewables”, realize
that part of what they’re counting as “renewables” is the burning of “Biomass’,
without counting the emissions, as if there were none. The UK is also priding
itself with their post-Paris Agreement deemphasis on Coal, and with the quadrupling
of their use of Natural Gas, as if burning Natural Gas were a real solution.
Not
inconsistent with the European Climate Plan and their goal of Net Zero by 2050,
Germany is actually planning to build a new Coal plant, now, starting in 2020,
however, to ease the shock value, they claim that they will only operate it for
25 years, once built. Their plan allows new Pipelines, new Gas-powered Power Plants,
major destructive Hydroelectric plants, new Fossil Fuel Infrastructure to be
built, and new Wells to be drilled, and essentially proceed with business as
usual. Somehow, they think that they have the time to expand, before they start
to contract. And their idea of ever eventually reaching Net Zero Carbon Emissions
by 2050 relies heavily on Negative Emissions Technologies at grand scale, to
suck massive tonnage of CO2 out of the air, technologies that haven’t yet been
invented, and if ever they are invented, and become available, might not be
affordable.
Greta,
who has always been committed to following the science, contends that we don’t
need Net Zero emissions, we need Real Zero emissions, and if we really want to
“limit emissions” enough to make a real impact, we need to start immediately,
by making goals to actually cut emissions at the source, by keeping it in the
ground, knowing every bit extracted will eventually be burned, and that we have
a Carbon Budget to consider, with very little left in the account, if we want
to limit the warming, so we have to start now, not 30 years from now. If you
read the Science, and acknowledge the fact the Climate Emergency is actually happening,
then you’ve got to start acting with the urgency of an Emergency. Every nation
must come up with concrete goals for 2020, for 2021, 2022, and for each year
forward to actually, not just theoretically, limit fossil fuels and their
emissions. That is the only way that we can have any possibility of slowing the
progression of the Climate Crisis.
If
we really want to “limit emissions”, we can’t now, today, in the year 2020, be
building more Pipelines, Compressor Stations, Export Terminals, Drilling and
Fracking New Wells, or be building New Refineries and Petrochemical Plants, all
of these billions of dollars in investments locking us into at least 30 more years
of future emissions, with some distant plans to eventually curtail emissions.
That is nonsense! Nothing but “greenwashing” and corporate double-speak.
Just
think of what we could do, if the billions they had planned to invest in that
foolish ramp up of fossil fuel infrastructure, were to be diverted into Wind
and Solar. It’s hard to believe that we could be so inconsiderate to be wasting
our children’s inheritance, and not using it to invest in their futures,
despite our children telling us, that to them, the Climate Crisis is a matter
of life or death. Greta will be only 47 years old in 2050, so those projections
of 1.5C, or 2C, or 4C, of warming by 2050, and the consequences of us taking
action, or not, and how soon we start, is very real to her generation. Instead
of locking us into harming their future, investing those billions in
Wind and Solar would benefit them for many years into the future.
On
February 4, 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced HR5857,
the Fracking Ban Act, into the US House of Representatives, with Senators Bernie
Sanders and Ed Markey and others’ support, to start the phase out of Fracking, to be
completed on-shore and offshore by 2025, to ban the expansion of Fracking and
related infrastructure, and to ban all fracking operations within 2500’ of
homes and schools by February 2021,
There
may be few who are really taking seriously the passage of this act, but let me
tell you another reason why this new law is so urgent. If the US is the biggest producer in
the world of Fracking for Gas and Oil, that means that we are also the biggest
producer of toxic, saltier than seawater, radioactive Frack Waste in the world,
trillions of gallons of it, every year, year after year., Nobody will take this
waste, we can’t export it, no one wants it, The injection wells, that take lake-sized
injections of waste, supposedly injecting it under high pressure below the Groundwater
line, are being used over and over again, in many areas that never had them
before, causing Earthquakes. The unlined or poorly lined ponds of waste, that
overflow with the rains of the Climate Crisis, are full, threatening the
toxicity and the radioactivity of the Groundwater. 95% of all Americans in
rural areas rely on well water, groundwater, for their drinking water supplies.
With nowhere to put all this accumulating and backing up wastewater, whether
permitted to do so, or not, gas and oil wastewater is being delivered to
wastewater treatment plants, which do absolutely nothing to remove many of the chemicals
and toxins, and certainly, nothing to reduce the radioactivity, and is being
discharged in the effluent into our rivers and streams. Also, many dumps don’t
want to take the solid waste that is highly radioactive. If we keep fracking,
we will surely poison this country, that we supposedly love, not to mention her
citizens, and children. #WaterIsLife
We
urge you to read our post, Living in a Toxic World, where the effects on the
health of our citizens from Fracking is covered: part 5-Radioactivity, part 6-Toxic
and Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, part 7-Toxic Gases and Particulates, and
part 9-Respirable Silica Sand. Fracking, per numerous studies, is most
definitely harming the health of Americans working onsite, and living, working,
and going to school or church nearby. 17 million Americans live within one mile
of Fracking. Setbacks from Fracking wells in some communities are as small as
600’. That means, they can drill a well 600 feet from a pre-school, or from your
home, and do so with impunity. AOC’s Fracking Ban Act would change the
setback to 2500’.
American
citizens, who in many cases are homeowners or renters, and who lived, and their
parents lived, in those neighborhoods long before fracking moved in, are having
their rights trampled, and having their peaceful properties, they worked so
hard to own or rent ,being turned into industrial sites, where you can’t even
sit on your porch without the roar and stench of gas flares and hundreds of
tractor-trailers rumbling by your home 24/7.
Corporations
and Government are colluding to seize property by Eminent Domain, to build
pipelines, as if there was some sort of Emergency Shortage of Gas and Oil. The US
Department of Transportation treats drilling and fracking and building
pipelines and fossil fuel infrastructure, as Essential Businesses, allowing the
workers, during a Pandemic, to freely travel into indigenous and local
communities, and that designation and practice is also insane, and it is immoral,
since, there is no reason this industry should be given such priority. There is
no shortage, no emergency of not enough oil and gas, just the opposite. There’s
too much.
Americans
are waking up with nosebleeds and headaches. Their kids are getting cancer.
Anecdotally we’ve heard of whole neighborhoods with multiple cases in clusters
near Gas and Oil and Petrochemical facilities. And they expect us to go along
with them ruining people’s lives, and just be gratified by the US being the King
of Gas and Oil.
We
need a Green New Deal, as bad as we needed the New Deal to get us through the
first Great Depression. There are so many changes we need to make in this
transformation. If we are going to limit Fracking and the Extraction of Fossil
Fuels, we have a lot of work to do to urgently build enough alternative Wind
and Solar to make up the difference, in order not to have to limit our use of
Electricity. To accomplish this, we will need to create lots of jobs, and hire lots
of people, and to start that work as soon possible, to.
There
cannot be a Green New Deal without addressing the way we grow our Food, the
need for us to grow food without dozens of AgroPoisons, and the need for us to regenerate our Soil, one of any nation’s most precious assets. With Conventional Chemical Agriculture,
our Soil is degrading, and tons of Soil are literally washing away with the massive torrential
rains of the Climate Crisis. Ponds and. lakes are getting green toxic algae blooms from all the synthetic fertilizers flowing into them.
Regenerative Organic Agriculture can actually eliminate the greenhouse gases (including N2O, a GHG , 400 times worse than CO2 80% of which is emitted by Synthetic Fertilizers, that are not necessary, if we switch to using Compost). The average age of an American farmer is now well into their 60's. We need a whole new generation of farmers to come up and grow us healthy food. All this transformation needed in the Agriculture, Energy, and Industry sectors, means the Green New Deal will create lots of jobs.
Regenerative Organic Agriculture can actually eliminate the greenhouse gases (including N2O, a GHG , 400 times worse than CO2 80% of which is emitted by Synthetic Fertilizers, that are not necessary, if we switch to using Compost). The average age of an American farmer is now well into their 60's. We need a whole new generation of farmers to come up and grow us healthy food. All this transformation needed in the Agriculture, Energy, and Industry sectors, means the Green New Deal will create lots of jobs.
But
we’re up against an awful lot, the most powerful industry and lobby in the
world, the fossil fuel industry. And their supporters will do everything they
can to malign and stop the Green New Deal.
People
will characterize the Green New Deal with every pejorative name in the book,
calling it “radical”, “left-wing”, “socialist”, “unrealistic”, “crazy”, ‘the Mark
of the Devil, you name it. They will label us as “terrorists” and “insurgents”,
and in many States, have imposed unconstitutional laws, that make it illegal for
us to protest. Bots and Trolls will endlessly trash the Green New Deal on
social media. They shudder at even the thought of banning Fracking, or of the Green New Deal, or, heaven forbid,
actually reducing emissions.
They
look at us, for demanding a Green New Deal, like we are crazy, but we contend
that their current strategy of expanding the drilling and fracking for gas and
oil, regardless of market conditions, in
order to sell their oil and gas at below costs, which they been doing for at
least the last five years, and projected to do at least three years into the
future, at Americans’ expense, health-wise and quality-of-life-wise, while threatening
our drinking water supplies, with their overuse and their spills of oil and
radioactive toxic wastewater, is totally insane, and totally unethical.
While
we have been dealing with Coronavirus, everybody has been talking about getting
“back to normal”.
We
don’t want to get back to normal:
–
if normal means, continuing to subsidize, and not to divest from an insane
system of the losing scam of Gas and Oil.
–
if normal means, going back to supporting Systemic Racism and Eco-Racism.
–
if normal means, Living in a Toxic World, and normalizing and supporting the
poisoning of our children and fellow human beings.
–
if normal means, not doing everything we can to slow the Climate Crisis and
Biodiversity Loss Crisis.
–
If normal means, Trump’s neutering of OSHA, the EPA, the FDA, the Department of
Agriculture, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act,
NEPA, and of every institution and regulation designed to protect workers and citizens.
We
want better than that for ourselves, for our brothers and sisters, here and all
over the world, and especially for our children, and for their children, and
for the seven generations. To do any less would be unethical.
In maybe five years, hopefully less, the Coronavirus will be history. The Climate Emergency and the Biodiversity Loss Emergency will still be raging, having progressed that much further along. These crises haven’t been put ‘on hold’, while we had to deal with Coronavirus. But the Coronavirus has taught us, that, as Greta says, in an emergency, you change your behavior., And we have seen that we have the power to drastically change our behavior, if it means staying alive. The same goes for the Climate Crisis.
The Coronavirus has also taught us, that if we don’t change our behavior, we will never get ourselves out of the Emergency, and regarding Climate, I’m not just talking about personal behavior, but the behavior of our society, our society that seems to want to extract, and to burn every bit of fossil fuels we can get our hands on, and under the power of the oil lobby, seems to want to resist, by all means possible, the switch to cleaner, safer and less expensive Wind and Solar. With Coronavirus, if we don’t wear masks and distance, we will swamp the hospitals and health care workers, to a point where people will be dying on the sidewalks, without ever getting into a hospital bed. The same is true of the Climate Crisis, where, if our society doesn’t change its behavior, and continues to resist the changes needed and to ignore the clear problems, massive Deaths are predicted, and we will soon find ourselves irretrievably Beyond The Tipping Points, if we don’t #FaceTheClimateEmergency.
But it’s not going to be easy. We’re up against the most powerful corporations
in the world and the governments that support them. But if we want to do something
about it, we’ve got to make people aware, of how the Gas and Oil Corporations
and our Government, in their support, are taking advantage of us, and harming
our health and ruining people’s lives.
The Coronavirus has also taught us, that if we don’t change our behavior, we will never get ourselves out of the Emergency, and regarding Climate, I’m not just talking about personal behavior, but the behavior of our society, our society that seems to want to extract, and to burn every bit of fossil fuels we can get our hands on, and under the power of the oil lobby, seems to want to resist, by all means possible, the switch to cleaner, safer and less expensive Wind and Solar. With Coronavirus, if we don’t wear masks and distance, we will swamp the hospitals and health care workers, to a point where people will be dying on the sidewalks, without ever getting into a hospital bed. The same is true of the Climate Crisis, where, if our society doesn’t change its behavior, and continues to resist the changes needed and to ignore the clear problems, massive Deaths are predicted, and we will soon find ourselves irretrievably Beyond The Tipping Points, if we don’t #FaceTheClimateEmergency.
Just like with Black Lives Matter movement, what it takes is people being made aware, and being as outraged as many of us are, at what they see, not just some people, but most people. The same goes for Climate, it’s not enough that we, you and me, are aware of what’s going on, but all of the young people of the world, all colors, all religions, all gender identifications, all economic strata, whether or not educated, have got to be made aware, to a point, where they become as outraged as we are.
It’s not so complicated. This is not something you can’t explain, and not something that most people can’t understand. Just let them know, if we burn, we fry. It’s that simple. And the point is, just like in the Black Lives Matter movement, we’ve got to get together and demand change relentlessly, and never give up.
If the people of the world, some in the crosshairs of the Climate Crisis right now, suffering Drought, Wildfires, Record Heat, Floods, or Storms, (and the way the Jet Stream is acting up, it could happen to any of us, wherever we live, at any moment), could be made aware and unite behind the youth of the world, and hopefully with their parents and grandparents, along with them, trans-nationally, without borders, maybe we can make something happen, despite the massive powers we’re up against.
It’s all about education, not just in schools, but out in the streets, person to person, friend to friend. That’s a much deeper kind of learning, and that’s what it’s going to take. The People of the world, led by the Youth of every nation, have got to be made aware, in order to get them to know what’s at stake, and to get them to unrelentingly get out and VOTE, because, facing the specter of Fascism, even that won’t be easy, and do it with the same energy and persistence we’ve witnessed with Black Lives Matter, and, in the spirit of Congressman John R Lewis, we take it to the streets.
#FaceTheClimateEmergency
The
US Energy Department and the Energy Industry have developed a plan to ramp up
production of boatloads of Natural Gas Condensate for export to Plastic
manufacturers worldwide, but the most scandalous part, of their plan to sell
the oversupply of Natural Gas, is the building of hundreds of Petrochemical Plants
in the US to produce Plastic. Most Americans are not aware of this, other than locally,
as it has not been extensively reported in mass media as a national story.
Without having been made aware, the American people has not had the opportunity
of giving their consent to lock in 30 years of increased Fracking, in order to
feed the Plastics industry. They promote it to the investors, 68% foreign owned,
as the ‘Shale-Advantaged Chemical Industry’, as though the American people were
in on it.
The
plan is to have 334 new Petrochemical Plants built by 2025 (each one will turn
the American community surrounding it into a brand-new Cancer Alley) to provide
the world with more Plastic, just what the world, whose oceans and waterways
are filling up with Plastic, don’t need. Single use packaging being marketed in
every developing country, in Asia and Africa, is one of the ‘new markets’
they’re developing for our Natural Gas oversupply.
There
is so much Plastic in the world already, where the world has been producing 300
million tons of Plastic every year for the last 50 years, with less than 10%
ever recycled, so that our oceans and waterways are accumulating and filling up
with Plastic. Fishermen are reporting 40% of their catch in weight of plastic, soon
predicted to be 50%. 85% of all tap water and 95% of all bottled water contains
Microplastics. Microbeads in toothpaste and cleaning products, though now outlawed
in some areas, are covering the floors of the Great Lakes, and will be there
forever, for one example. So, we are consuming plastic just drinking water,
besides the eating of seafood, and within the last few weeks, we’ve learned of
crops being able to draw up Microplastics. The world is drowning in plastic,
and now, in order to sell our oversupply of natural gas, the US government,
with its colonialist attitude, has come up with an urgent plan to shove more
plastic down the developing world’s throats, by promoting single use packaging.
This
plan is ecocidal, and unethical, and must be stopped. Each of the planned 334
new Petrochemical Plants, Ethene Cracker Plants, etc. will require a ‘Hub’ of
hundreds of miles of Pipelines to connect and feed the Natural Gas in, directly
from the wells, and to transport the Liquid Gas Condensate for Plastic production
and the LNG out to the Export Terminals. Every Pipeline means, thousands of
Trees will have to be cut down, in ‘right-of-ways’ for these Pipelines, and
every one of these new petrochemical plants will require land and trees to be
cleared.
It
is well known, per anecdotal evidence and numerous academic studies, that
higher cancer rates, low birth weights, higher miscarriage rates, nosebleeds,
rashes, asthma, and a range of other maladies, are concentrated around oil and
gas wells, facilities, refineries, compressor stations, and petrochemical
plants. causing sickness and death. And though Americans will pay the price in
lost health, this plan is not for the benefit of Americans, but for export, benefiting 68% direct foreign investors in
those new petrochemical plants and only a very few large US corporations.
As
I mentioned in the first paragraph of this section, we Americans, that were not
even made aware of this plan to lock in 30 more years of fracking for gas,
never gave our consent to this. That’s why I’m begging you to get this story
out, to make more people aware, so that they can, hopefully, take action, on a
local level, or on a national level, to fight this evil plan to spread more
Plastic across the world, in order for the US to sell a continuous oversupply
of fracked Natural Gas.
For
a more in-depth discussion on, and history of, Plastic, we refer you to our
post about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and four more garbage patches around
the globe in huge Gyres (circular currents), where millions of tons of Plastic
accumulate in our Oceans. And, not only the ocean surface and floor, but in
some nations, the rivers and streams are so full of plastic, that you can’t
even see the water, but just the flow of plastic garbage. We’ve got to put a
stop to the ecocidal insanity of wrapping the whole world in Plastic.
Now,
I’m going to tell you, as briefly as I can, a story, relevant to our
discussion, that you’re going to find hard to believe. But let me assure you, I
(or you) can easily confirm every part of it, and Rachel Maddow reported on
some of it, specifically relating to Tillerson and Putin, in her new book,
‘Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and The Richest, Most
Destructive Industry On Earth’, (speaking of the Oil industry), a book I highly
recommend. Let me make this clear, I am using her book only as a fact witness,
and not representing her conclusions. Read the book.
In
2012, Rex Tillerson, then CEO of Exxon Mobil, visited Putin’s home to sign a
letter of intent, to jointly, with Putin’s national oil company, Rosneft,
exploit their discovery of the Bazhenov Shale in Northwest Siberia, that had
been recently found to contain 80 times the amount of Oil and Gas as the Bakken
Shale of North Dakota, one of the most productive fracking fields in the US.
And in 2013, Putin awarded Tillerson the ‘Order of Friendship’, one of the
highest honors bestowed by Russia. Then, in early 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine
and annexed Crimea, causing the US and the EU to impose Sanctions, preventing
this Exxon/Rosneft oil deal from proceeding, and Russia, with their financial
problems, didn’t have the resources to do thi extensive project without Exxon.
In 2017, before Trump’s inauguration, Flynn advised the Russian ambassador in a
recorded conversation, implying, not to worry, Trump would soon, upon taking
office, ease the Sanctions.
After
the inauguration, both Republicans and Democrats were so worried that Trump
would unilaterally lift those Sanctions, that they actually legislated a
vetoproof (97-2 in the Senate) edict to prevent Trump from doing that. In July,
2017, after CEO Tillerson had resigned from Exxon, and now had assumed the post
of Secretary of State of the United States, Exxon was fined $2 million (chump
change for Exxon) by the Trump Treasury Department for violations of those same
Russian Sanctions, for violations that took place while Tillerson was still
CEO.
Trump
continues to this day to do everything he can to please Putin, including
turning his back on bounties paid by Russia for American heads, without even a
verbal rebuke. Trump has been single-mindedly concentrating on helping Putin
lift those Sanctions before and for all four years of his Presidency, and
surely, he will find a way to lift them, if we allow Trump four more years. It
is well-known that Trump never does anything for nothing, and we present the
Bazhenov Shale as a possible quid pro quo, with 80 times more Oil and Gas as
the Bakken Shale in the US. Do you realize how much money we’re talking about
here? Perhaps Trump has some assurance, if he were able to lift those
sanctions, he could get in on that action. Draw your own conclusions.
In
2018, Trump, with Mitch McConnell’s help, was successful in having the new Sanctions,
for interfering in the 2016 elections, lifted from billionaire Russian oligarch,
Oleg Deripaska, known as the King of Aluminum in Russia, with close ties to Vladimir
Putin. Shortly after Mitch McConnell shepherded through Congress the lifting of
those Sanctions for Deripaska, and for all of his Russian based businesses, Deripaska
invested $200 million in an aluminum mill in McConnell’s Kentucky, and now owns
a 40% share of that business. Deripaska is now also an owner of the Russian
state-owned oil company, Rosneft. but the US Sanctions for taking Crimea from
Ukraine, as far as whether they could allow an Exxon to help Rosneft exploit
the Bazhenov Shale. are still on, at least, for now.
In
2019, Rosneft announced that it still had plans to drill (which means frack)
the Bazhenov in 2022. This would be disastrous for the warming of the planet,
but how do you get a leader like Putin to sideline a potential huge asset like
that? Russia, which has the area of 170% of the US, and about half the
population, has a GDP of less than that of California, New York, or Florida,
and that economy is very dependent on revenues from fossil fuels, the largest
supplier of Natural Gas and Oil to the EU.
The
only way to get Putin to shelve any of Russia’s fossil fuel assets would be to
kill the demand. Russia is still actively exploring and seeking to expand
Arctic drilling, both on and offshore, and the western Siberian Arctic was home
of one of the biggest oil spills ever, just in recent months, threatening to
spill into the North Sea Their record of environmental destruction is long.
When
Trump first took office, one of his first international trips was to Saudi
Arabia, where MBS, along with the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia famously did their Sword
Dance, with Trump joining in, and took a photo with everyone touching a glowing
Crystal Orb. Trump may have considered it a huge diplomatic accomplishment, but
the Saudis, playing to his ego, were the real winners. It even enabled them to
kill a Washington Post reporter and carve up his body with no repercussions
from Trump, and in fact, Trump engaging in the cover-up, and has enabled them
to continue their genocidal war against Yemen, (one of the most tragic
genocidal stories in the world that the US and the EU are enabling, by not
demanding they stop the genocide). Even so, the Saudis have not been won over
by Trump to the extent of allowing the price of oil to be high enough for the
US to make a profit, considering their high fracking costs.
The
Saudi Arabian cost of extracting a barrel of oil from the largest conventional
reserve in the world is said to be less than $10 per barrel, and the Russians,
whose economy depends on oil even more than ours, and most of the other
oil-producing nations, with the high costs of fracking and “enhanced” drilling,
are at a severe competitive disadvantage to Saudi Arabia. Despite Trump’s Sword
Dance with the Sheikhs of Saudi Arabia, the Saudis are not going to allow the
price to be profitable for us, and allow us to keep taking what they consider
their market share, and it would be naive to think that they would,
The
Saudis aren’t dumb. They are avid readers of all the ins and outs of the future
of the oil business. They, and many Gulf Nations, have even read the Woodstock
Earth Blog, with the UAE, being among our top 10 readers lately, so we can
attest to that. The Saudis are continuing to construct multiple large Solar
arrays. They see the handwriting on the wall, in what’s happening to the
Climate in the Middle East, with the increasingly intolerable Heat and the Extreme
Weather events taking place, and they realize and see what’s happening with the
divestment movement, and with the youth climate movement, all over the world.
They realize their market for oil will not last forever, so they’ve got to sell
all the oil they can, now, or, certainly, before the world starts to divest, and
stops buying it.
And
it’s not as if the Saudis’ costs of extraction are going to go up anytime soon,
causing them to have a need to raise their prices, thus allowing US producers enough room
to compete and still make a profit. With our high costs of fracking and of
offshore drilling in the US, not only are we losing money on every barrel we
sell, but the Saudis, the Russians, dozens of other oil-producing nations, and
we keep trying to outdo each other in production, causing a perpetual
oversupply, as if that will somehow raise prices, or will ramp up the
‘economy’.
In
the 1970's, when the oil executives were concerned that they were going to run
out of oil, huge deposits of oil were found in the ground in Alberta Canada,
but this oil was in the form of a solid, so they had to develop ‘unconventional’
technologies to mine this slab of ‘Tarsands’, otherwise known as ‘Oilsands’ or
‘Canadian Crude’, and to liquefy it enough to get it into pipelines, so that
they can move it to refineries, and to export terminals. In order to get to the Tarsands, they had to employ open pit mining, with heat and steam to extract it,
and then they had to add a diluent, in order to dilute it, to get it to be
liquid enough to be able to flow through pipelines.
They
employ natural gas condensate as the diluent for Tarsands, much of which is
being delivered in new pipelines North from the US, in order to get this very
low-grade oil, that is highly sulfurous, and full of heavy metals, lead and mercury,
to be able to flow South to Koch Refineries in the US, and through more pipelines
to export terminals. The end product is so inferior, and so polluting when
burned, that, as long as Light, Sweet Crude is available, nobody would burn it
in the US, so it is for export only.
And
who cares about the rest of the world? (Sarcasm.)
Another
problem with Tarsands is, if the pipeline breaks, and there is a spill, this
oil is so heavy, that it will go down to the bottom of a body of water, so that traditional booms on the
surface of water are totally ineffective. We’ve already seen Tarsands oil spills
in the United States, and they are environmentally even more damaging than
light sweet crude oil spills, and though right-wing supporting Koch Industries
might benefit, it only harms Americans.
A
byproduct of Tarsands refining is a black powdery residue, called petroleum
coke, or Petcoke, (just coincidence that it rhymes with Koch), that they sell
cheap, and export to be used to generate electricity as if it were coal. The
problem is that the burning of Petcoke yields upwards of 10% more CO2 than
normal coal.
The
biggest problem for profitability is that the technology and logistics of this ‘unconventional’
mining technique is very expensive. Just 10 years ago it was estimated that the
cost of a barrel of Tarsands oil was close to $100. Within the last 10 years
they’ve supposedly come up with technologies that allow them to bring the cost
all the way down to $40 a barrel, but if the selling price is $40 a barrel,
which it happens to be now, and this oil is so problematic, that nobody would
buy it, if it were even cheaper than light sweet crude, getting their costs
down, won’t help them make a profit.
Wildlife
in Alberta, an essential part of the food supply of indigenous Canadians, is
being contaminated with dangerous levels of heavy metals by Tarsands mining.
In
every way, this product is damaging. After years of selling this product at
below cost, and with the whole Tarsands industry in danger of collapse, the
Canadian government stepped in, and decided to nationalize part of this industry.
While this whole project should be shelved, rather than spending good money
after bad, the Koch billionaires are heavily invested in the Tarsands in
Canada, and in Tarsands refineries in the United States, and as long as the
Canadian government props it up, this insanity will continue.
As
long as there is light sweet crude in this world, there is no need for this
godforsaken black tar, and the project should be abandoned, and it should be
left in the ground, and the world would be a lot better off.
The
Amazon and the Congo Rainforests are under attack, and Western Banks are
financing the destruction through their financing of the oil industry and meat
industry, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. The Banks are financing
pipelines and drilling, and the building of large fossil fuel infrastructure
projects, and the clearing of huge tracts of land for agriculture.
In
order to clear land in the Rainforest, which is essentially a very thick jungle,
they utilize intentionally set fires, that often get out of control. In doing
so, they are destroying our Rainforests, and all of their inhabitants,
including indigenous peoples and the wildlife.
The
Rainforests are the lungs of this earth, and the cradle of Biodiversity. Not just the residents, but all people
of this world need the Rainforests to survive. to produce Oxygen, and to
provide a Carbon Sink for all the excess carbon dioxide, that we’re still continuously
pumping into the atmosphere, and that is warming the planet.
With
leaders like Bolsonaro, who, bolstered by Trump, is encouraging the ecocide in
the Brazilian Amazon, in the hopes of pumping up his economy, the only way that
we can stop this destruction is to stop this endless flow of financing.
In
April 2020,.in the Ecuador Amazon, an ill-planned hydroelectric dam failed,
causing a landslide, that ruptured 3 pipelines from oil drilling nearby, spilling
15,800 barrels of oil, plus toxic, radioactive produced water, poisoning the
food and drinking water and bathing water for indigenous inhabitants, with
hardly any industry or governmental effort to clean it up, or to feed or provide
water to or help the tribal people. And this is all happening during the
Pandemic, while the tribes have been trying to self-isolate, and, hopefully
survive. Some of the oil has flowed down the Coca River, and into a tributary
to the Amazon River, and has already found its way to Peru. This is Genocide
and Ecocide, and not just the leaders and executives, but the Banks, are guilty.
Before
we start this discussion, let me remind you that next to every fracking field
on land, you’ll find ponds of toxic, salty, radioactive wastewater. So, if
that’s the case, where do they put the wastewater when they’re drilling and
fracking offshore? Well that’s easy. They just spill it into the Ocean or Gulf,
where our seafood lives, and our children swim. The more offshore drilling we
do, the more trillions of gallons of toxic, hydrocarbon and heavy metal filled,
radioactive, tainted wastewater we pour into our oceans.
Our
oceans are vast, but we have seen more, and growing, huge dead zones from toxic
pollution, where the water is deoxygenated, and nothing can live.
Offshore
drilling and extraction has been going on in the Gulf for many years in shallow
areas, however over the years, again spurred on by their fear of running out of
oil, they have developed new ‘unconventional’ technologies, which allow them to
drill in an area where the ocean floor is more than a mile deep. The wellhead
is a mile below the surface of the ocean, and they can drill further down below
that ocean floor as much as a mile or more, and then drill horizontally. and
Frack underwater.
We
explored what happens when that ‘unconventional’ technology goes wrong, in an
article called, ‘Clean-Up or Cover-Up?’, about the Gulf Oil Spill of 2010, when
the Deepwater Horizon oil rig spilled 200,000,000 gallons of crude oil into the
Gulf, over 87 days, before they finally were able to stop the flow, after many
attempts. After that oil spill, Obama declared a moratorium on deep ocean
offshore drilling, which was relaxed later in his administration, and has been
further relaxed, as far safety and equipment standards. by the Trump
administration.
It’s
not a matter of if we’re going to have another oil spill of that magnitude, it’s
just a matter of when. In fact, we have found out about an oil spill in the
Gulf, that has been ongoing for the last 20 years, that they have not been able
to stop to this day, as well as other slow, but over time, very
substantial spills. Also, please note that Dispersants, like the one used in
the Gulf Oil Spill, don’t make any of the oil go away, they just make it disappear
on the surface. Also, they are toxic EDC, hormone disrupting, chemicals, that, in combination with
toxic oil, harm the long-term health of clean-up workers, not to mention their
effects on marine life.
In
order to explore for additional deposits of oil under our oceans, they use
explosions and sonar techniques, which, due to the amplification of sound
traveling through water, are very loud, and may deafen animals, like whales and
porpoises, which depend on their hearing for navigation.
2.6
billion people depend on seafood as their principal source of protein, and
billions more eat seafood as a portion of their food supply.
For
all these reasons, exploration for new deposits of offshore oil must be
stopped. All offshore drilling must be stopped as soon as possible, but, certainly,
there is no way that we should be allowing new drilling, which would increase
the amount of toxic, radioactive wastewater we’re pouring into our oceans.
The
strongest new reason to stop all Arctic drilling, is, now that the Arctic is
warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, the permafrost is
melting, or has melted, on land, and underwater on the Arctic shelf, leaving
the ground and the ocean floor very spongy. No pipeline or structure once
anchored into solid permafrost, now that it’s melted, is safe. And there’s no
way that an oil spill can be cleaned up in the remote Arctic, whether on land
or at sea. Offshore drilling platforms have got to be connected to land through
pipelines, and those underwater pipelines are no longer safe.
Just
within the last few months the largest ever Arctic oil spill took place in
Western Siberia, along the North Sea, where a tank holding a massive amount of
diesel fuel completely collapsed, perhaps related to the melted permafrost that
it was sitting on.
It’s
bad enough that the Arctic ice and glaciers are turning gray from all the soot,
the black carbon, in the air from the burning of fossil fuels. This gray cast
on the ice cap and glaciers makes them absorb heat, more than if they were white,
(the albedo effect), but now we’re talking about turning the ice and glaciers
black, from globules of spilled oil.
Trump
has huge plans to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR),
and it looks like his administration is rushing to organize a sale of oil
leases on a staggering 1.5 million acres, before the end of 2020, to avoid the
possibility of having this plan stopped. All you have to do is look next-door
at the destruction of Prudhoe Bay, and see what will happen to our nation’s
beautiful treasure.
The
indigenous people in the Arctic, and the wildlife that they hunt and fish and
rely on for food, are already being severely impacted by the severe warming and
melting of the ice. An oil spill in that fragile ecosystem could be the last
straw for them.
All
Arctic drilling should be banned immediately, if we are to preserve this
planet.
In
every state in the US where there is fracking, there are hundreds of reported
spills annually, large and small, of oil, or produced water, or toxic drilling
mud. And that’s not to mention the unreported spills, which we know are
happening, while nobody is really watching.
The
overwhelming majority of the nation’s pipelines are old and corroded, in many
cases, close to, or above, a pipeline’s projected lifespan of 50 years. If a
pipeline was built before 1970, it is already older than 50 years, and on that
basis could be more subject to failure.
We
can’t count on the regulators to keep us safe from pipeline spills and
explosions. There are 2.8 million miles of interstate Gas and Oil Pipelines in
the US, that are being “regulated” and “inspected” by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety
Administration, part of the DOT, with only 209 federal inspectors, who, in 2019
performed 1,395 inspections. All it takes is one bad weld, and a Gas Pipeline,
even a new one, pressurized up to 1500 psi, can result in quite a big explosion,
and if it is a pipeline going through a big city, like, for an example, the new
Spectra Pipeline going into and through New York City, going by playgrounds and
residential apartment buildings, you could see a mini - Beirut.
Every
year, there are small gas service line explosions in communities across the
United States, but they usually only flatten one or two homes at a time.
But
sooner or later these old rusty corroded pipelines, both the gas service lines,
and the large diameter transmission pipelines must be replaced, but doing so
would be folly, and nobody has the money. The expense would be untenable, and
replacing pipelines would lock us into another 50 years of fossil fuels, 50
years, that we do not have.
Why
waste billions on building new pipelines and fossil fuel infrastructure, where
it’s clear, to our children, at least, or to any educated person that doesn’t
have blinders on, based on the science of the impending Climate Crisis, that in
a very short time, our children will not want to use these pipelines and this infrastructure?
Why invest billions in 20th century Fossil Fuel Infrastructure,
when, if we really wanted to leave our children something beneficial for them, for
their interests, we would invest that money in Wind and Solar and in Electrical
Storage and Transmission?
For
decades, the Republican leadership has been all about Deregulation. Many
Democrats, especially those that take financial support, as do the Republicans,
from the Gas and Oil and extractive industry lobbies, have also, perhaps less
openly, but as robustly, supported Deregulation. One of the sure applause lines
at every Trump rally, and at his party members’ rallies, has been the promise
to end all “Regs”, as though Regulations were the ‘mark of the devil’, as they tout their removal as a great accomplishment of the Trump Administration.. And the
American people cheer, as if the loss of their own protections for health,
welfare, and safety is something to celebrate.
As
ineffective as Trump’s amateur, unqualified, sycophantic, no experience
government has been in many areas, like on the Coronavirus, as a glaring
example, his administration has been very effective at tearing down, not just
the rules put into effect during the Obama administration, but 40 years of
environmental law. Laws like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act are
difficult to change without an act of the Congress and the Senate, and without
being signed into law by the President, but it is relatively easy for an agency
of the government, like the EPA, the FDA, or the USDA, to change the
regulations by which the law is enforced. All they’ve got to do to change a
regulation is for the agency to unilaterally propose the change, provide a
comment period, and then issue the new regulation. And there is no democracy
here when it comes to the comments received. 90% of the comments in response to
the proposed change could be strongly against making the change, and the agency
can announce whatever they want in their new rule, and publish it in the new Federal
Register, (with all the rules from every federal agency), as long as they have
followed the proper procedures.
Organizations,
like Earthjustice, NRDC, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and other environmental
organizations, can sue, and sometimes delay, or win an injunction against the
change, that is, if they don’t run up against a Trump appointed judge, so many
unqualified, but approved by McConnell.
The
New York Times has listed 100 regulations, that have already been changed to
benefit Gas and Oil and other polluters. Every one of these changes risks
American’s health and safety, and the environment.
And
laws and regulations don’t matter, whether changed or not, if they’re not being
enforced. The agencies designed to protect our health and welfare, the EPA, the
FDA, every agency and institution have been so corrupted, to a point where they
have reduced inspections, and reduced violations. And this can be borne out through
statistics, by comparing the number of violations and inspections performed by
each agency year after year.
In
a world without regulations and enforcement, a polluter’s “dream come true”,
when asked, the politicians and corporate stooge regulators propose “Self-regulation”.
Our answer to that myth is, that even reputable companies, will only self-regulate,
as long as it doesn’t start cutting into their profits, especially if they have
no fear of an occasional pop-up inspection, putting them subject to fines and
penalties for their indiscretions.
Especially
now, with the excuse of the Coronavirus Pandemic, the agencies have ceased
practically all inspections, and have announced that they’re doing so. The
executives and managers of the polluters realize this, and are taking full
advantage of the “free-for-all”, that this provides.
Every
Agency, every Institution, of our Federal Government has been perverted by the
Deregulation and Non-enforcement policies of the Trump administration. Even
OSHA, the Agency designed to protect workers’ health and welfare, has curtailed
inspections and violations, and again this can be borne out by their own
statistics.
Even
if we are successful in having Trump removed from the equation, it will take
years to undo the damage that he and his destructive government has already committed.
17
million Americans live within one mile of Fracking. Americans are waking up
with nosebleeds and headaches from breathing in the toxic fumes. They and their
kids are getting cancer with greater frequency, perhaps due to the breathing in
of Air Pollution, as well as drinking from wells tainted by Water Pollution, all
as a direct result of Fracking.
It
is well known, per numerous academic studies, that higher cancer rates, low
birth weights, higher miscarriage rates, nosebleeds, rashes, asthma, and a
range of other maladies, are concentrated around oil and gas wells, facilities,
refineries, compressor stations, and petrochemical plants. causing sickness and
death. In studies geographically pinpointing cases, we’ve learned of whole
neighborhoods with multiple cases of cancer in clusters near Gas and Oil wells
and facilities. And though Americans will pay the price in lost health, this
plan of unlimited expansion of fracking is not for the benefit of Americans,
but for export.
We
urge you to read our post, Living in a Toxic World, where the effects on health
from Fracking is covered: part4-Heavy Metals,
part 5-Radioactivity, part 6-Toxic and Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, part 7-Toxic Gases and Particulates, and part
9-Respirable Silica Sand. Fracking, per numerous studies, is most definitely
harming the health of Americans working onsite, and living, working, and going
to school or church nearby. And we’re not just talking about the 17 million who
live within a mile of fracking. Contaminated groundwater flows, and air
pollution in the wind, move well beyond a mile from the source. ‘We are all
downstream.'
Before
we leave the subject of health, let’s remind ourselves that we’re not just
talking about the health of humans. All vertebrates, all animals with a backbone,
even fish and birds, have endocrine (hormone) systems much like ours, and can
be equally affected by EDC’s, Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, used in fracking.
And the toxins and the radioactivity can also promote sickness and cancer in
animals. Pet owners know of the more frequent risk of cancer in pets, and
though we’re not aware of any studies on this specifically, we have heard much
anecdotal evidence of animals accidentally drinking puddles of toxic fracking
wastewater and losing patches of hair and dying from these exposures. We are
certain that wildlife and livestock are equally subject to the many health
risks posed by Fracking.
The
Environment is a big subject, the Air Pollution, Soil Pollution, the Loss of
Biodiversity, but, for the purpose of this article, let’s focus on Water.
#WaterILife
In the Lakota language: #MniWiconi. That was the call to action and assembly at
Standing Rock in South Dakota in 2016 to protest the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) being built to go under the Missouri River at their land, without the
indigenous people’s consent. This was a moment of unity for all indigenous
tribes and sovereign First Nations, and
for the environmental movement, in solidarity with them.
Four
days after Trump’s inauguration, his first Executive Order was to have the DAPL pipeline and the KXL pipeline completed, and 30 days later, Trump launched his
first militarized assault against unarmed Americans, both indigenous and
non-indigenous protesters, we called, Water Protectors, at the Standing
Rock encampment, to ruthlessly and violently remove us, not dissimilar to the
way the Trump's new secret police has been operating lately. This assault on unarmed
protesters was a sign of things to come.
Although the DAPL was recently ruled in federal court to have been constructed
illegally, and the operator was ordered to halt operations and empty the pipeline, it
has, so far, been allowed to continue to operate, at the risk that a breach in
the pipeline could devastate the tribe, and pollute the Missouri River, and the
Mississippi River, that it flows into.
ETP, the owner the pipeline, has since taunted us with the promise to increase
the flow in that pipeline of fracked oil from the Bakken Shale, from 1 Million
to 1.2 million barrels per day. Trump was a former owner of stock, if not a
current owner, ETP, Energy Transfer Partner, the builder and operator of
this pipeline. It should also be noted that Trump also was a former owner of
stock, if not still an owner, of TransCanada, the company that is building the
Keystone XL Pipeline (KXL).
We
urge you to read “Fracking the Holy Land with the Holy Water”, where we
explored the subject of Water, and how essential and sacred it is, both
factually and spiritually (the major religions on Water in one of the final
sections, Spiritual Notes For Geeks). And many aspects in the nexus of Water and Fracking.
The
fact is, that we are robbing the hydrological cycle of trillions of gallons of
fresh water, 2 million gallons at a shot, to frack wells, in areas of the
country that have a scarcity of fresh water, like in New Mexico and California.
Even where records show sufficient precipitation, like perhaps areas of Texas,
these days it all comes down at once, in months’ worth of rain in hours, with
much of it flowing away in runoff, and not recharging aquifers sufficiently. And
so, where it might look like water is plentiful, it doesn’t rain for weeks or
months at a time. This is criminal to rob 2 million gallons at a time, when
it’s clear that, Water is Life.
But
the biggest problem to the Environment, that Fracking presents, is the poisoning
of our precious Water with toxins, EDC’s, radioactivity, hydrocarbons and salt
(brinier than sea water), as they dream up ways to dispose, safely or not, of
this ever-accumulating waste stream. If the US wants to continue to be the biggest
producer in the world of fracked Gas and Oil, that means that we will also have
to be the biggest producer in the world of toxic, saltier than seawater, radioactive Frack
Waste, trillions of gallons of it, every year, year after year.
Nobody
will take this waste, we can’t export it, no one wants it, The injection wells,
that take lake-sized injections of waste, injecting it under high pressure,
supposedly below the Groundwater line, are being used over and over again, as
if these injection wells were ‘bottomless pits’, that will never fill and back
up, and these injections are causing Earthquakes, in many places, that had never experienced them before. Most Americans are not aware Oklahoma has become the State with
the most Seismic activity in the US, And
that is a direct result of the increase in fracking. There have already been
Earthquakes measured as high as 5.2 on the Richter scale, causing cracks in
walls and foundations.
The vast unlined or poorly lined ponds of waste next to every group of fracking well, that overflow
with the torrential rains of the Climate Crisis, are full, threatening the
toxicity and the radioactivity of the Groundwater. 95% of all Americans in
rural areas rely on well water, groundwater, for their drinking water supplies.
With
nowhere to put all these trillions of gallons of accumulating and backing up toxic wastewater, whether legally
permitted to do so, or not, gas and oil wastewater has been known to having been
delivered, without regard to regulations, to wastewater treatment plants, which
do absolutely nothing to remove many of the chemicals and toxins, and
certainly, nothing to reduce the radioactivity, and is being discharged in the
effluent into our rivers and streams. Also, many dumps don’t want to take the
solid waste, that is highly radioactive. And the liquid waste, as they dream up
ways to dispose of it, safely or not, is accumulating, a liquid cocktail of
water, toxins, EDCs (chemicals that disrupt hormones), hydrocarbons, and
radioactivity in this never-ending toxic liquid waste stream.
If
we keep fracking, we will surely poison this country, that we supposedly love,
not to mention her citizens, and children, and pets, livestock and wildlife. #WaterIsLife #WeAreAllDownstream
When
Fracking moves in, quality of life suffers. Since the Fracking boom began in
2005, and has been ramping up in more and more States ever since, the country
way of life has changed. I call it the “citification” of the country,
bringing the problems of the city into the country. We’re not just talking
about the Water Pollution, the risk to people's well water (95% of Americans
in rural communities depend solely on well water.), and not just the Air Pollution (the high
levels of Benzene and Radon both carcinogenic, the smoke from gas flares from
every fracked oil well, and the dust and diesel fumes from hundreds of
tractor-trailers going by people’s homes every day.), we are also talking about
the Noise Pollution, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from all that truck traffic,
and from the Gas Flares, (that sound like locomotives), and the Light
Pollution, (the lights around fracking compounds, and the light from the gas
flares burning.).
Some
people don’t want to live in the city, much less the suburbs. They want to live
out in the "woods". They want to be able to sit on their porch, and enjoy
the fresh air and the solitude, or maybe play some bluegrass with folks. For a
lot of people, whether they grew up and own their home, or rent, life after
fracking is not at all the same.
Before
I leave the subject of Quality of Life, another part of the “citification” of
the country is the Vice, the Rapes, the Prostitution, the Abductions (mostly of
indigenous women), the unrestrained Humiliation of Women, and by the Crime,
that is being perpetrated by the overwhelmingly male fracking and pipeline
workers, who are brought in, and housed in “Man-Camps”, set up by these
companies to support their labor needs. These man-camps and the lack of
restrictions on travel for these workers, who have special authorization, as
Essential Workers, in this time of Coronavirus, present a constant danger to
the local and indigenous communities, that are trying to self-isolate.
Fracking
and Pipeline companies are hiring mercenary paramilitary private security
forces, employing strong arm techniques, like vicious dogs, as we saw in
Standing Rock, where Taxpayer-paid Federal, State, and County law enforcement officers
and the National Guard military troops cooperate, actively exchange information,
and coordinate with the mercenary corporate Security forces. The Police are
more and more being militarized, with tanks, pepper ball guns, and teargas,
chemical weapons and irritants, that are illegal to use against enemy
combatants under the Geneva Convention, but used freely on unarmed American
citizens. In the military and paramilitary security force manuals, they characterize
protesters, as we call them, ‘water protectors, as ‘insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’,
making the abuse of protesters seem all the more acceptable. Federal, State,
County Police, instead of protecting our rights as citizens, are working
directly for the benefit of the Corporations.
Fracking
and Pipeline companies are also hiring military trained psychological
operations personnel to “soften the terrain”, to infiltrate into and make the
communities more malleable to Fracking and Pipeline interests. With ‘psy ops’,
techniques, their job is to mold the community, through whatever means
necessary, including direct, and more subtle, intimidation, ranging from having
pro-fracking neighbors not sit with you
in church, to direct intimidation at school against the children of
anti-fracking parents.
States
and Counties across America are legislating and instituting ‘preemptive laws’
making protest against projects, like pipelines and fossil fuel infrastructure,
an illegal act, despite the fact that this is totally unconstitutional, flying
in the face of the first and fourth amendments, (Freedom of Speech and Freedom
of Assembly). However, until these unconstitutional laws are challenged, they
are the law, and will result in heavy fines and potential long imprisonment for
non-violent protesters. Some of the many new, mostly unqualified, Trump
appointed, McConnell approved, Federal Judges may uphold these laws, but
ultimately, we hope, the Constitution will prevail. We refer you to Thumbing Their Noses At Society, where we explore the depths of the anti-environmental
attitude being exhibited, unfortunately, in many parts of the world today.
More
and more, brave indigenous environmental activists, in various parts of the
world, but mostly in South America, are being murdered, relating to their
activism. Much of the time, they are activists for Biodiversity for the
Rainforest, for their Land, and for their Water, and not just for the Climate,
but they are also fighting, not just for their own people, but for all of us,
and for all of our children and their futures.
In
Subsidies to Fossil Fuels, the US spends more than the $60 billion we spend on
Education.. I got this from an article in Forbes magazine, a publication that
is not known to be anti-business. If this is true, it reveals a deep perversion
in our prioritization, by spending more to benefit the fossil fuel industry,
one of the richest, most powerful, industries in the world, than for our own
children’s Education. One of the reasons for this lopsidedness is that this
industry also has the largest lobby, with the greatest amount of donations to
politicians, of any other industry. This is true, not just in the United
States, but in nations all over the world.
Despite
Obama’s, and the rest of the G 20’s, pledge in 2009 to end fossil fuels and
transition to renewables, the G 20 nations are still spending $444 billion
annually on Fossil Fuel Subsidies, between direct national subsidies, domestic
and international finance, and state owned enterprise investment. And the G 20 still
spend 4 times more on subsidies to fossil fuels, than it does for renewables.
Instead
of ending fossil fuels, the US, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, and all the G 20 oil
producing nations have been ramping up production, and ramping up the payment
of subsidies. The G 20's hypocrisy of spending $78 billion of the full $444 billion in subsidizing exploration, while
they are fully aware that they can’t possibly burn all of their current
reserves without breaking the Carbon Budget, as they boast of their Paris Agreement
commitments to act to limit climate change, is the height of irresponsibility.
If we can agree that the science says, that, if we burn all we’ve got, we will
go over the limit, why should we subsidize exploring for more? Why should taxpayers
around the world be expected to continue to prop up this currently unprofitable,
polluting, health cost multiplying, climate killing industry, by direct
subsidies and handouts?
And, besides the subsidies and handouts, the world’s Big Banks are financing the
major expansion of fossil fuels, through their funding of pipelines and fossil
fuel infrastructure. They are funding the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest
and the Congo Rainforest, and the genocide of indigenous tribal people, who are
being negatively impacted, (especially with Coronavirus), by huge investments
in Gas and Oil and Agriculture. To the extent of their lending, the Banks are
responsible for the dire consequences of their actions, and the only way to
curtail this destruction is by cutting off capital investment.
Thanks
to the efforts of activists like Bill McKibben, of 350.org, and many other
activist organizations forming the Divestment Movement, we have seen some major
successes in convincing large universities, municipal governments, unions, and
funds to divest of fossil fuel stocks in their profiles. Divestment sends a
strong message to the Banks, and to these Funds, that further investment is
simply not in their own best interest, as far as public relations is concerned,
or otherwise.
Finally,
unless the world sidelines an estimated 75% of current Oil, Gas, and Coal
reserves, not including additional reserves that might be found through
exploration, temperature rise and sea level rise will be exponential, and
commensurate to the amount of our reserves that are allowed to be burned
With
current voluntary commitments to reduce emissions, pursuant to the Paris
Agreement, we are looking at a catastrophic 3 - 4° Celsius of temperature rise,
but if we allow every gallon of Oil, every cubic foot of Natural Gas, and every
ton of Coal, in the world’s current reserves, to be burned, we are looking at an apocalyptic 7 to 8° C, or even higher rise in temperatures, and at sea
levels beyond what you could imagine. (Conservatively, according to Sea Level Rise predictions of US Government scientists, 2' by 2050, 4' by 2070, 8' by 2100, 18' by 2150, and 31' by 2200.)
But
how do we get irresponsible leaders like, Trump, Putin, or Bolsonaro of Brazil
to sideline their reserves, which they consider their assets, turning them into
“stranded assets”? To that question, our reply is, that they won’t strand their
assets, unless we are able to cut off the funding by banks, directly, and
through the repercussions of divestment. But the only way to give any hope that
they might actually curtail extraction is to kill demand, through a massive
transformation to less expensive Wind and Solar. If nobody wants to buy their
Gas and Oil and Coal, and the resulting drop in prices makes it financially
untenable to continue, that’s the only way that these they might actually leave it in
the ground.
Environmental
Racism is one aspect of Systemic Racism, making it more likely that a Black,
Hispanic, Indigenous, or Immigrant person lives near the worst polluters, oil
refineries, chemical and petrochemical plants, coal and natural gas power
plants, CAFO factory farms, slaughterhouses, bus depots, etc. Besides the stink
of having to live near these polluters, there are documented health risks, with
studies mapping out the sicknesses and cancers in these neighborhoods with
proximity to polluters. Industrial developers, even if they could find
affordable real estate, wouldn’t even consider putting a fracking well, or a
refinery, or a factory farm, in a wealthy white neighborhood, and the zoning
board would probably never allow it.
Environmental
Racism springs out of a historical context in the US, with real estate rated in
the 1930s , A, B, C, or D, and with the more recent development
of “redlining” of real estate, determining where people live. I use the word, “determining”, because it’s
not a matter of choice. It’s where people end up, where they can afford, and
where they are not restricted, by whatever means, overt and illegal, or not,
from renting and buying. Residential segregation has always been a feature in
America, and it is only increasing.
Recently,
Total Oil, a French multinational corporation, that is currently drilling new
wells near Dallas Texas, tried to get a waiver from the 600’ set-off from homes
or schools, in order to drill a fracked well 400’ from an existing preschool, with
mostly non-white preschoolers. Thanks to the activism of Earthworks and many
others, Total Oil was turned down on that request, but if it were white
preschoolers, they would not have even considered asking for that waiver. However, they
don’t even give it a thought, when they’re looking at non-white, poor (and that includes white), or
immigrant neighborhoods.
A
recent study, in NYU Langone Medical Center, on Racial Disparity and Coronavirus,
found that both Coronavirus infections and Coronavirus deaths were least likely
in people that were, according to Census information, from ‘predominantly white’ neighborhoods (82%
to 97% white), and patients from ‘predominantly non-white’ neighborhoods (more than 45% non-white) were the most
likely to be infected and to die. In fact, whether the patients were from more
affluent or less affluent areas made less of a difference, but the racial
disparity was as much as eight or nine times more of a factor. This is the
result of a lifetime, subjected from birth, to more Air Pollution, more Water
Pollution, more Lead Paint, etc., a lifetime of being poisoned more freely, and
the scarcity of healthy unprocessed food in their diets, and the scarcity of preventative healthcare , and
not just emergency healthcare, for our citizens. Environmental Racism is as
urgent an issue as are Gun Control and Policing.
There is no doubt that the poor of the world, most of them people of color, will bear the brunt of the Climate Crisis and Sea Level Rise.
Internationally,
environmental racism can also refer to the bad effects of the Global Waste
Trade, E-Waste, Plastic Waste, Garbage, and Industrial Waste. Developed nations
want to continue to use Africa and Asia as their dumping grounds.
Internationally,
when we talk about Environmental Justice, we are often talking about the
inequity the people in the “Global South” are facing, where many times, they
are bearing the brunt of sea level rise and extreme weather events, which
wasn’t caused by them, but by the Developed Nations (the US, with 4% of the
world’s population, has contributed 25% of all carbon emissions). Over the
years, many of the less developed nations have expressed that they should have
the right to develop, even if that means raising their emissions for another
period of time, and that it would be inequitable otherwise.
Unfortunately,
the world doesn’t have 20 or 30 years to play with, by condoning their
investment of billions into old 20th century fossil fuel
infrastructure. Even the less-developed nations will have to cooperate in
cutting
emissions, and it will be to their advantage, to invest money as soon as possible into 21st century Wind and
Solar, in order to build renewed resilience, rather than waste any of the money they have for investment on antiquated fossil fuel technology.
emissions, and it will be to their advantage, to invest money as soon as possible into 21st century Wind and
Solar, in order to build renewed resilience, rather than waste any of the money they have for investment on antiquated fossil fuel technology.
#BlackLivesMatter
We
ran into Jamie Margolin, and the first-ever Youth Climate March, while we were
researching Beyond The Tipping Points, about Climate Change and Biodiversity
Loss, with part 10 of that article on the Our Children’s Trust (21 kids suing
the US Government) Climate Lawsuit, that we will cover later in this section,
and part 11 about the This Is Zero Hour Youth Climate March, planned for 7/21/2018,
so, in order to support the march, with lots of evidence of the impending
Climate and Biodiversity Loss Crises, we rushed the publication of our article,
to get it out by 6/15/2018, a full month before the March.
The 'This Is Zero Hour' Youth Climate March was a world-class, 3-day event, with 20
sister marches in US cities and internationally. The main event was in Washington,
DC, and included a Youth Climate Lobby Day, where the kids met at the Capitol
Building with Congressman and Senators, who were asked for their pledge to
protect the youth, an Art Build Day, to prepare banners and signs and artwork (and
decorated parachutes) for the March,. They had even prepared a 'Platform' with 'Demands'.
The
day of the March, there was a massive rainstorm in DC, classic to the deluges
of Climate Change, but that did nothing to damper their spirits. It was an
awesome event, and a huge success, planned and executed by This Is Zero Hour,
an organization formed by a 16-year-old, Jamie Margolin, with the help of her associates, Nadia Nazar, Iris Gillingham, and numerous others.
At
the time of that March, 7/21/2018, we had never heard of Greta Thunberg. Her one-person
School Strike for Climate in front of the Swedish Parliament had not begun until 8/20/2018. Just a little over 1 year later on 9/20/2019, with Greta in New York
City, having sailed there, because she won’t fly, on an Invitation from the
Secretary General of the UN, Greta addressed 250,000 people in New York City, in
Battery Park, with 7.5 Million participating in the strike, on every continent,
in the biggest School Strike for Climate ever.
Starting just 3 months after her School Strike began, with the first ever Extinction Rebellion event in London on 11/2/2018 (see
video – extraordinary speech, done with Occupy Wall Street’s Mic-Check technique
to amplify her voice), during the 13 months before this biggest global school
strike on 9/20/2019, from the day she began her school strike in front of the
Swedish Parliament, Greta had spoken at numerous events, had addressed numerous
governments, world trade conferences, and UN Climate Talks, a whirlwind of
events. (I was going to put together a timeline of all her major speeches, and
events, but suffice it to say, there were too many entries, and I’m sure, I
would miss some.) Her itinerary and what she and her associates have been able
to accomplish in a union of organizations, many with Fridays for the Future or School Strike for Climate in their names, that span every continent, is extraordinary and
very powerful..
In
the 11 months since her trip to NYC on 9/20/2019, Greta has addressed the UN Climate
Talks in Madrid, and the EU Parliament, among numerous other speeches and appearances,
in an effort to try to foment action, that might save her generation from
certain catastrophe, if governments and industries don’t wake up, if the world
does not wake up, and take real, not pretend, action.
Recently
in an open letter, written by a group, including
her, they kicked off the #FaceTheClimateEmergency campaign, with the
recognition, that all of their success, all of their efforts so far, have
accomplished nothing substantially, as far as reduction of carbon emissions.
The Carbon Budget is rapidly being used up, and the policies of the governments
continue to support, not the reduction, but the expansion of the extraction and burning of Gas and Oil.
More meetings, more Climate Talks, will do nothing, until the world comes to an
understanding that NetZero2050, or even NetZero2040, allowing them to continue
to expand gas and oil, while pretending to some distant reduction of emissions, using all sorts of accounting tricks, like offsets, while making the politicians and executives pleased with themselves for 'responding', is really no response at all. This is not the first group letter Greta has published, where the kids get together on-line from around the
world, and collaborate on a letter. Greta insists, this is not about her, and
even when she recently won €1 million award for her activism, with a smile on
her face, she donated all of that money to various climate and environmental
organizations, and she did this within the first 24 hours.
From
my perspective, by creating a platform on social media to reach millions of
kids, millions of people, Greta and her friends have set up what it takes to
mobilize millions around the world, as prescribed in this article, and in Greta
and her associates’ new campaign, #FaceTheClimateEmergency.
One
of the first events Greta participated in after she arrived by sailboat in New
York City, was an event on 9/9/19, sponsored by the Intercept, where Greta was
interviewed on stage extensively by Naomi A Klein, distinguished author and
climate activist. That inspirational event took place, aptly located at the
Ethical Cultural Society on Central Park West, and besides the screening of the
Sunrise Movement’s animated video, with an animated AOC presenting the Green
New Deal, it also featured an indigenous activist from the Ecuadorian Amazon, another indigenous activist, Xia Bastida, and also Vic Barrett and Xiuhtezcatl, (youth director of Earth Guardians), 2 of the 21 kids involved with the
historic Our Children’s Trust lawsuit against the US government for violating
their generation’s right to a habitable planet.
Just
8 months previous to that night, I was sitting, on 1/31/2019, in that same
antique auditorium, and in an event, again located aptly at the Ethical Culture
Society, called Changing Tactics in the Face of Climate Emergency. There I was
able to see, in person, all 21 kids suing the US Government, many of whom I
felt I already knew for 4 years, since the lawsuit began, through the wonderful social media of @youthvgov, Our Children’s Trust, and, especially, I got to hear Julia Olson’s
update, the lead attorney and the major force behind Our Children’s Trust.
We
first wrote and included a video about Our Children’s Trust, in an article
called, Weather Extremes and the Jet Stream, in 2014, before Julia had filed
the suit in 2015 against Obama, President at that time, and against the US government. And we
included part 10 of our 2018 article, Beyond The Tipping Points, dedicated to
the Our Children’s Trust Climate Trial. Please read that update, and check out the videos in part 22, and don't miss their website, OurChildrensTrust.org, for detailed updates, since June of 2018.
The
remedy the plaintiffs have been seeking all along has not been money for damages, but
simply a change in policy away from supporting fossil fuels.
The
US government, both Obama and the Trump administrations, did everything they
could to have the trial thrown out of court, including the Trump government
complaining that a trial would be too big a hardship on the government, and
including, close to the trial date, striking Trump’s name from the lawsuit, which
the plaintiffs went along with, in order to hopefully get it finally to trial.
All
21 kids in this case, Juliana v USA, the lead plaintiff being Kelsey Juliana,
have remained plaintiffs throughout all 5 years, during which they’ve had to endure
a roller coaster of dozens of ups and downs, each time the government sought to
have the trial thrown out, through the many disappointing stays, and through
all the minor victories, where a Judge or multiple Judges, decided to rule
against the Government, and to continue the trial.
Unbelievably
enough, the full trial actually got to within 10 days of the final scheduled start
date, 10/29/2018, and the District judge presiding over the trial warned the
Government, that this date could not be extended. In order to prepare for that
major trial, having come so close, thousands of pages of testimony were
presented and dozens of depositions from expert witnesses on
climate change, economics, and of many disciplines, among others, Nobel prize winner, Dr.
Joseph Stiglitz, Economist, and Dr.
James Hansen, renown Climate Scientist, much of whose testimony was deposed by
his granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, 1 of the 21 plaintiffs in that trial. In preparing, to
that degree, to get ready, for what really would have been the Trial of the
Century (the 21st century, but as consequential as the Darwin 'Scopes' Evolution Trial), Our Children’s Trust, and in many cases, the witnesses themselves, spent
thousands of dollars on airfare and hotel rooms, in order to offer these
depositions, not to mention all the hours that were volunteered.
So,
just 10 days before this Kids’ Climate Trial was scheduled to begin, with all
the preparations made, the
Supreme Court stayed the trial, in response to the Justice Department complaint,
that a full trial would be a hardship in running the government.
Days
later, on 11/2/2018, the Supreme Court lifted their stay, but after a series of
legal events, the District Court, instead of allowing the case to go on to
trial, decided to rule on whether the case could proceed, by a three-judge
panel of the Court of Appeals, that would hear the arguments of the Plaintiffs,
and those of the Justice Department, and rule on whether it could proceed to
trial. The arguments were delivered to the Court in 2/2019 and then, finally,
on 1/17/2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, decided
not to allow the trial to proceed. Since then, the plaintiffs have requested an
‘en banc’, full court, review of this decision. But, whether or not it
ever goes on to trial, this case, Juliana v USA, has already made history, and
will continue to be studied and referenced in law schools and courts across
America, and beyond.
Twice,
it went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and twice, they decided to allow
the case to continue to trial, first time, unanimously, on 7/30/2018, with
Trump appointee, Gorsuch, already on the Court, and on 11/2/2018, a 7-2
decision, with new Trump appointee, Kavanaugh, remarkably ruling with the majority,
and only Gorsuch and Thomas dissenting. This alone, the fact that it stood up
to Supreme Court scrutiny twice, shows the kids’ case to have been
constitutionally sound.
And
this is the best part, that I feel I must share with you. I am including a link
to the full Decision in the Documents section of this report, but in case you
don’t get to push through it. I've got to include two sections of it here, that
highlight how important this Constitutional Rights trial has been, and will
continue to be in subsequent trials in the US, and internationally, for the
rights of generations of youth to have a future.
Despite
the fact that the trial did not yet proceed, though the 21 kids and Julia are
still fighting the fight, and have not given up, it is remarkable, and heroic,
that this trial actually got so close, with the federal court acknowledging the
Science of Climate Change and that these quotes, and this entire case, are now
in the permanent record of US Jurisprudence, thanks to Julia Olson, Dr. James
Hansen, and these 21 young heroes.
Before
we end this section with those quotes from the Court’s Decision, let me
congratulate the Sunrise Movement for their great victory in helping Ed Markey,
a champion of the Green New Deal, win another term in the Senate, and for all
their powerful actions to raise awareness and mobilize. Also, a shout out to Extinction
Rebellion, for putting your asses on the line in our defense. Also, we are pleased to hear of many new youth
organizations for Climate and for Biodiversity sprouting up. And we've got to report an exciting piece of news, that 16 children from around the world, including Greta, are petitioning The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to hold 5 nations accountable for inaction on the Climate Crisis. And finally, more equally exciting news, we just heard of a lawsuit, filed in the European Court of Human
Rights, by Portuguese children, against the US and 32 other big polluting nations,
for violating their human rights to a future. The good news is, that all the
expert witness testimony, all the evidence, presented in the Our Children’s
Trust's Juliana v USA trial, is open-sourced, and available to be used by attorneys around the world.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These quotes are from the Decision on 1/17/2020, by all 3 Federal Judges on the panel,
for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Juliana v USA, with the proviso, that
this is not necessarily the opinion of the Court. Nonetheless, these were printed
in the Decision. The 2 judges, of the majority decision not to allow the trial
to proceed, would have objected to the assertion that they had all agreed that Climate Change was happening, and that the plaintiffs had already incurred damages, and would be subject to future damages, if that were not the case. You’ll note that in
Judge Staton’s dissenting opinion, in her second paragraph, she again states
that all 3 Judges have accepted the Science of Climate Change, and that the
Trump Justice Department also does not contest. This is all quite remarkable.
The full PDF of this Decision is linked in the Documents section of this
report.
Full
3 Federal Judge Panel: Mary H. Murguia and Andrew D. Hurwitz, and Josephine L. Staton
“The panel held that: the record left little basis for denying
that climate change was occurring at an increasingly rapid pace, copious expert
evidence established that the unprecedented rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide
levels stemmed from fossil fuel combustion and will wreak havoc on the Earth’s
climate if unchecked; the record conclusively established that the federal
government has long understood the risks of fossil fuel use and increasing
carbon dioxide emissions; and the record established that the government’s
contribution to climate change was not simply a result of inaction.”
Judge Josephine L. Staton’s
Dissent:
“In these proceedings, the government accepts as fact that the
United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted
response—yet presses ahead toward calamity. It is as if an asteroid were
barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only
defenses.
“As the majority recognizes, and the government does not
contest, carbon dioxide (“CO2”) and other greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions
created by burning fossil fuels are devastating the planet. Maj. Op. at 14–15.
According to one of plaintiffs’ experts, the inevitable result, absent
immediate action, is “an inhospitable future . . . marked by rising seas,
coastal city functionality loss, mass migrations, resource wars, food
shortages, heat waves, mega-storms, soil depletion and desiccation, freshwater
shortage, public health system collapse, and the extinction of increasing
numbers of species.” Even government scientists project that, given current
warming trends, sea levels will rise two feet by 2050, nearly four feet by 2070,
over eight feet by 2100, 18 feet by 2150, and over 31 feet by 2200. To put that
in perspective, a three-foot sea level rise will make two million American
homes uninhabitable; a rise of approximately 20 feet will result in the total
loss of Miami, New Orleans, and other coastal cities. So, as described by
plaintiffs’ experts, the injuries experienced by plaintiffs are the first small
wave in an oncoming tsunami—now visible on the horizon of the not-so-distant
future—that will destroy the United States as we currently know it.
“What sets this harm apart from all others is not just its
magnitude, but its irreversibility. The devastation might look and feel
somewhat different if future generations could simply pick up the pieces and
restore the Nation. But plaintiffs’ experts speak of a certain level of global
warming as “locking in” this catastrophic damage. Put more starkly by
plaintiffs’ expert, Dr. Harold R. Wanless, “[a]tmospheric warming will continue
for some 30 years after we stop putting more greenhouse gasses into the
atmosphere. But that warmed atmosphere will continue warming the ocean for
centuries, and the accumulating heat in the oceans will persist for millennia”
(emphasis added). Indeed, another of plaintiffs’ experts echoes, “[t]he fact
that GHGs dissipate very slowly from the atmosphere . . . and that the costs of
taking CO2 out of the atmosphere through non-biological carbon capture and
storage are very high means that the consequences of GHG emissions should be
viewed as effectively irreversible” (emphasis added). In other words, “[g]iven
the self-reinforcing nature of climate change,” the tipping point may well have
arrived, and we may be rapidly approaching the point of no return.
“Despite countless studies over the last half century warning of
the catastrophic consequences of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, many
of which the government conducted, the government not only failed to act but
also “affirmatively promote[d] fossil fuel use in a host of ways.” Maj. Op. at
15. According to plaintiffs’ evidence, our nation is crumbling—at our
government’s own hand—into a wasteland. In short, the government has directly
facilitated an existential crisis to the country’s perpetuity.”
We
need a Green New Deal, as bad as we needed the New Deal to get us through the
first Great Depression. There are so many changes we need to make in this
transformation. If we are going to limit Fracking and the Extraction of Fossil
Fuels, we have a lot of work to do to urgently build enough alternative Wind
and Solar to make up the difference, in order not to have to limit our use of
Electricity. To accomplish this, we will need to create lots of jobs, and hire
lots of people, and to start that work as soon possible.
There
cannot be a Green New Deal without addressing the way we grow our Food, the
need for us to grow food without dozens of Agro-Poisons, and the need for us to
regenerate our Soil, one of any nation’s most precious assets. With
Conventional Chemical Agriculture, our Soil is degrading, and literally washing
away tons of Soil, with the massive torrential rains of the Climate Crisis.
Ponds and. lakes are getting green toxic algae blooms from all the synthetic fertilizers flowing into them.
Regenerative Organic Agriculture, without toxic pesticides and herbicides and synthetic fertilizers, can actually eliminate the greenhouse gases (including N2O, a GHG , 400 times worse than CO2, 80% of which is emitted by Synthetic Fertilizers, that are not necessary, if we switch to using Compost). The average age of an American farmer is now well into their 60's. We need a whole new generation of farmers to come up and grow us healthy food. All this transformation needed in the Agriculture, Energy, and Industry sectors, means the Green New Deal will create lots of jobs.
Regenerative Organic Agriculture, without toxic pesticides and herbicides and synthetic fertilizers, can actually eliminate the greenhouse gases (including N2O, a GHG , 400 times worse than CO2, 80% of which is emitted by Synthetic Fertilizers, that are not necessary, if we switch to using Compost). The average age of an American farmer is now well into their 60's. We need a whole new generation of farmers to come up and grow us healthy food. All this transformation needed in the Agriculture, Energy, and Industry sectors, means the Green New Deal will create lots of jobs.
But
we’re up against an awful lot, the most powerful industry and lobby in the
world, the fossil fuel industry. And their supporters will do everything they
can to malign and stop the Green New Deal.
People
will characterize the Green New Deal with every pejorative name in the book,
calling it “radical”, “left-wing”, “socialist”, “unrealistic”, “crazy”, ‘the
Mark of the Devil, you name it. They will label us as “terrorists” and
“insurgents”, and in many States, have imposed unconstitutional laws, that make
it illegal for us to protest. Bots and Trolls will endlessly trash the Green
New Deal on social media. They shudder at even the thought of banning
Fracking, or of the Green New Deal, or, heaven forbid,
actually reducing emissions.
They
look at us, for demanding a Green New Deal, like we are crazy. but we contend
that their current strategy of expanding the drilling and fracking for gas and
oil, regardless of market conditions, in
order to sell their oil and gas at below costs, which they been doing for at
least the last five years, and projected to do at least three years into the
future, at Americans’ expense, health-wise and quality-of-life-wise, while
threatening our drinking water supplies, with their overuse of water, and with their
spills of oil and radioactive toxic wastewater, is totally insane, and is
totally unethical.
In
maybe five years, hopefully less, the Coronavirus will be history. The Climate
Emergency and the Biodiversity Loss Emergency will still be raging, having
progressed that much further along. These crises haven’t been put ‘on hold’,
while we had to deal with Coronavirus. But the Coronavirus has taught us, that,
as Greta says, in an emergency, you change your behavior., And we have seen that
we have the power to drastically change our behavior, if it means staying alive.
The same goes for the Climate Crisis.
The Coronavirus has also taught us, that if we don’t change our behavior, we will never get ourselves out of the Emergency, and regarding Climate, I’m not just talking about personal behavior, but the behavior of our society, our society that seems to want to extract, and to burn every bit of fossil fuels we can get our hands on, and under the power of the oil lobby, seems to want to resist, by all means possible, the switch to cleaner, safer and less expensive Wind and Solar. With Coronavirus, if we don’t wear masks and distance, we will swamp the hospitals and health care workers, to a point where people will be dying on the sidewalks, without ever getting into a hospital bed.The same is true of the Climate Crisis, where, if our society doesn’t change its behavior, and continues to resist the changes needed and to ignore the clear problems, massive Deaths are predicted, and we will soon find ourselves irretrievably Beyond The Tipping Points, if we don’t #FaceTheClimateEmergency.
The Coronavirus has also taught us, that if we don’t change our behavior, we will never get ourselves out of the Emergency, and regarding Climate, I’m not just talking about personal behavior, but the behavior of our society, our society that seems to want to extract, and to burn every bit of fossil fuels we can get our hands on, and under the power of the oil lobby, seems to want to resist, by all means possible, the switch to cleaner, safer and less expensive Wind and Solar. With Coronavirus, if we don’t wear masks and distance, we will swamp the hospitals and health care workers, to a point where people will be dying on the sidewalks, without ever getting into a hospital bed.The same is true of the Climate Crisis, where, if our society doesn’t change its behavior, and continues to resist the changes needed and to ignore the clear problems, massive Deaths are predicted, and we will soon find ourselves irretrievably Beyond The Tipping Points, if we don’t #FaceTheClimateEmergency.
While
we have been dealing with Coronavirus, everybody has been talking about getting
“back to normal”.
We
don’t want to get back to normal:
–
if normal means, continuing to subsidize, and not to divest from an insane
system of the losing scam of Gas and Oil.
–
if normal means, going back to supporting Systemic Racism and Environmental
Racism.
–
if normal means, Living in a Toxic World, and normalizing and supporting the
poisoning of our children and fellow human beings.
–
if normal means, not doing everything possible to slow the progression of the
Climate Crisis and Biodiversity Loss Crisis.
–
If normal means, Trump’s neutering of OSHA, the EPA, the FDA, the Department of
Agriculture, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species
Act, NEPA, and of every institution and regulation designed to protect workers and citizens.
We
want better than that for ourselves, for our brothers and sisters, here, and
all over the world, and especially for our children, and for their children,
and for the seven generations. To do any less would be unethical.
But
it’s not going to be easy. We’re up against the most powerful corporations in
the world and the governments that support them. But if we want to do something
about it, we’ve got to make people aware, of how the Gas and Oil Corporations
and our Government, in their support, are taking advantage of us, and harming
our health and ruining people’s lives.
Just
like with Black Lives Matter movement, what it takes is people being made
aware, and being as outraged as many of us are, at what they see, not just some
people, but most people. The same goes for Climate, it’s not enough that we,
you and me, are aware of what’s going on, but all of the young people of the
world, all colors, all religions, all gender identifications, all economic
strata, whether or not educated, have got to be made aware, to a point, where
they become as outraged as we are.
It’s
not so complicated. This is not something you can’t explain, and not something
that most people can’t understand. Just let them know, if we burn, we fry. It’s
that simple. And the point is, just like in the Black Lives Matter movement,
we’ve got to get enough people 'awoke' to the catastrophic path we're on, in order to have them mobilize, and demand change relentlessly, and never give up.
If
the people of the world, some in the crosshairs of the Climate Crisis right
now, suffering Drought, Wildfires, Record Heat, Floods, or Storms, (and the way
the Jet Stream is acting up, it could happen to any of us, wherever we live, at
any moment), could be made aware and unite behind the youth of the world, and
hopefully with their parents and grandparents, along with them, trans-nationally,
without borders, maybe we can make something happen, despite the massive powers
we’re up against.
It’s
all about education, not just in schools, but out in the streets, person to
person, friend to friend. That’s a much deeper kind of learning, and that’s
what it’s going to take. The People of the world, led by the Youth of every
nation, have got to be made aware, in order to get them to know what’s at
stake, and to get them to unrelentingly get out and VOTE, because, facing the
specter of Fascism, even that won’t be easy, and to do it with the same energy and persistence we’ve witnessed with Black Lives Matter, and, in the spirit of
Congressman John R Lewis, we take it to the streets.
#FaceTheClimateEmergency
This
story has never before been told to the public. There are plenty of articles
about Fracking, and about Oil, and about Gas, and about each of the aspects of
this story, and these articles may be more eloquently written and more
complete, but many of them are academic, and are written with language
unintelligible to the common person, nonfiction that most people find boring,
and even if you slog through them, you only learn that aspect, and not the
whole story. That’s what I trying to tell, the whole story, and an important
one at that, and, hopefully, it’ll be easier to absorb, when told as a complete story.
And,
since I doubt that most people will read beyond part 1, we put the whole
story in that first part. We don’t hold back any of the punchlines for later,
to keep you reading. We tried to put it all into part 1, as little as we need,
to tell the whole story as quick as we can, including our conclusions. The
other 19 parts, before the Documents and Video sections, we had to include, in
order to tell the whole, whole story, but here, too, each of these subjects we
have just touched on, with information we felt must be included to cover this story. Each of these parts, like for an example, Offshore Drilling, is such a
huge subject, that it could be a whole book, but that’s not what we're up to here.
We just want to try to tell that story, so we apologize about how incomplete
each part is, and for all the omissions.
The
most important thing for all of us to do is to vote, and to get all our friends
and family to vote. In 2015, before anyone thought Trump would win the
Republican nomination, we wrote Thumbing Their Noses at Society, and though we
tried to keep Trump’s name out of it, (I think I only spelled it out twice in
the whole report), all the quotes in the first section, like not wanting to be
“nice” people or to be “losers”, etc., are direct quotes from Trump. That was
the year Pope Francis, whose message was so antithetical to Trump’s, came to
the UN in NYC to deliver his Encyclical, that took him a year to research and
write, to warn all the nations of the world about the need for us to take
action on the Climate, previous to the Climate Talks in Paris that resulted in
the Paris Agreement.
Pope
Francis reminded us what it means to be a Society, including loving our
neighbor, even if that neighbor is poor, or is an immigrant. In that article, we
characterized it, just that as they did at the Democratic Convention in 2020,
as the fight of Goodness, Light, against Evil, Darkness, and warned about the
“God of Money, the God of Greed”.
In
2016, previous to the election that year, we wrote, Revolution from the Toxic Status Quo, with Bernie Sanders’ picture on the cover, begging people to vote
for Clinton in the general election, even though she was decidedly not our
first choice,. I included predictions of what would happen if we let Trump win,
and, sadly, we’ve seen all these predictions, our worst nightmares, all come
true, and then some. Even if he loses this time, and we are able to get him out
of office, it will take years to undo all the damage he has done.
If
Trump wins another four years, like I said in 2016, and please read that
article, the Supreme Court, with just one more right-wing Supreme Court Judge, now
that he has already put two on the bench, would be disastrous for so many issues. And, he and his
government will continue trashing of all of our laws, including, to me, most
importantly, Environmental Laws, and all of our institutions, and Democracy
itself.
I’m
not sure that Biden will deliver all we need him to (he has already asserted, more than once, that he is against a fracking ban), but I assure you, that none
of what we need done will get done with another four years of Trump. Please
vote for Joe Biden, and get all your friends and family out to vote. So much is at
stake. Unless we win in an absolute landslide, he will not leave the White House
voluntarily.
The
youth from every country in the world, who take Climate Change as a real
‘existential threat’, are our best hope for change. They’re done accepting the
‘BullShit’, and as soon as they can, you can bet, they will join us in voting
for Climate Action.
We thank all of our US
and international readers (from over 150 nations). We really do
appreciate you taking the time to read our articles. And we extra-appreciate
when you refer them to friends. That’s where our readers can really
make a difference. If we can make people aware of the scandal of
supporting and subsidizing Growth in Big Oil and Big Gas, when we know that the
consequences are catastrophic for our children, and for so many species, and people
gain an understanding, and share that understanding with enough of their friends,
we’ll have more of a chance of taking real #ClimateAction, and actually doing
something about it.
We love getting feedback. Our email address
is: woodstockearthblog@gmail.com, or if you prefer Twitter, you can use:
@Mikethemikeman1. For the sake of our people, our families, and Mother Earth,
we encourage all of you, as charter members of Woodstock Earth, to spread the
word and help get these stories out.
Legal
Documents
1. Decision of
9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Juliana v US – 21 Kids suing the US
government for violating their Constitutional Rights with policies that
knowingly harming them and their futures. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/571d109b04426270152febe0/t/5e22101b7a850a06acdff1bc/1579290663460/2020.01.17+JULIANA+OPINION.pdf
2. COMMUNICATION
TO THE COMMITTEE ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD
16 YOUTH PLAINTIFFS
v ARGENTINA, BRAZIL, FRANCE, GERMANY & TURKEY
3. “NO ORDINARY
LAWSUIT”: CLIMATE CHANGE, DUE PROCESS,
AND THE
PUBLIC TRUST DOCTRINE
4, Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Economist, testimony on why
transitioning from fossil fuels is good for the Economy, presented in support of youth
climate plaintiffs
Full Reports
5. STILL WASTING
AWAY: The failure to safely manage oil and gas waste continues.
May
2019
6. Drilling Towards Disaster: Why U.S. Oil and Gas Expansion Is
Incompatible with
Climate Limits - Oil Change International
7. GROWING
OPPORTUNITIES - REFORMING THE FARM BILL FOR EVERY AMERICAN
by
US Congressman Earl Blumenauer (Essential part, for Jobs and Health, of a Green
New Deal.)
8. WHAT LIES BENEATH THE UNDERSTATEMENT OF EXISTENTIAL CLIMATE
RISK
Environmental/Regulatory Articles
9. Standing Rock
is Everywhere (wherever they are building pipelines, and wherever the
people stand in the way) by Chief Orval Lookinghorse #WaterIs Life
10. Amazon Watch Names the Banks Financing Destructive Oil Projects
in the Amazon
11. Pollution on purpose? Unlit flares in TX harm health &
climate-during a public health & climate crisis – Sharon Wilson of Earthworks
12. Fossil Fuel Subsidies: Overview - Oil Change International
13. Fossil-Fuel Subsidies
Must End – Scientific American
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/fossil-fuel-subsidies-must-end/
14. The Trump Administration Is Reversing 100 Environmental
Rules. Here’s the Full List. - The New York Times
15. Triple
Threat: Petrochemicals and Plastics, Power Plants, and Exports
Drive a New
Fracking Boom
16. U.S. Oil and Gas Emissions Could Nearly Erase Environmental
Gains From
Decline in Coal
Youth Climate Movement Articles
17. The Teenagers at the End of the World - The New York Times
18. Climate Emergency Europe! Fridays for Future - Open Letter and
List of Demands
and Rejection of the surrender of NetZero2050 to EU Leaders.
19. Children vs Climate Crisis – 16 Children
Suing 5 Nations in the
UN’s Committee for the Rights of the
Child
20. Portuguese children sue 33 countries over climate change at European
court of human rights - The Guardian
After two years of school strikes, the world is still in a state
of climate crisis denial
by Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer, Anuna De Wever, and Adelaide
Charlier - Guardian
A Message from the
Future
Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez in an animation video introduction to the
Green New Deal
Greta Thunberg Addresses
the European Parliament on NetZero2050
as Complete “Surrender’ - 04/03/20
Greta Thunberg at UN Climate
Talks – COP25
Climate Emergency Event
– Madrid 03/04/2020
Greta Thunberg Calls
for Climate Action
at World Economic Forum
- Davos Switzerland 01/21/2020
Greta Thunberg at Battery Park in NYC
Global Climate Strike 09/20/2019
Greta Thunberg at the First Extinction Rebellion
Rally in London 03/04/2018
(Using Mic-Check
technique for sound reinforcement - Check it out)
Juliana v United
States: The Climate Lawsuit
60 Minutes Overtime
Juliana v United
States:
Meet the Kids Suing
Over Climate Change
Children of the Climate Revolution
60 Minutes Australia
Inside the Sunrise Movement:
How Climate Activists
put the Green New Deal on the Map
Still Wasting Away video
accompanying Earthworks Report
On Gas and Oil
Wastewater
Testimony at Dallas EPA Methane Public Meeting
Sharon Wilson of Earthworks
The Youth Climate Movement Around the World
With Alexandria Villasenor, Greta Thunberg, and 14 other
youth activists, suing 5 nations in
UN’s Committee for the Rights of the Child. KCET’s Earth
Focus Series
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