Stephan: I am running this story to make the point that the remnants of the carbon energy era are going to haunt us for decades. The worst, of course, are nuclear installations and waste sites, which may be a problem for centuries. But old oil pumps and coal plants are going to be their own nightmares, and it is going to cost hundreds of millions maybe into billions to clean up this era.
Abandoned oil pumps. Credit: Martina Birnbaum / Getty
When Weatherly Oil and Gas filed for bankruptcy in February 2019, the company was walking away from several hundred Texas wells. Many hadn’t produced a drop of oil in years. Companies are legally required to “plug” wells that they’re no longer using to extract oil and gas by pouring concrete into all their openings and cracks; this prevents them from leaking fossil fuels or harmful pollutants into the air and water sources nearby. But many companies that abandon wells say they no longer have the financial means to do so, leaving government regulators on the hook for the cost. The problem is massive: There are approximately 2.1 million unplugged abandoned wells across the country.
The Texas Railroad Commission, or RRC, which oversees the state’s oil and gas industry, tried to make sure Weatherly would pay up, objecting to the state’s bankruptcy plan because it didn’t include sufficient information about the amount of money that would be set aside for well cleanup and for the company’s various creditors. Ultimately, Weatherly struck a deal […]
In 2020, 47% of U.S. adults belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque
Down more than 20 points from turn of the century
Change primarily due to rise in Americans with no religious preference
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ membership in houses of worship continued to decline last year, dropping below 50% for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade trend. In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.
Line graph. U.S. church membership was 73% in 1937 when Gallup first measured it. It stayed near 70% through 2000 before beginning to decline, to 61% in 2010 and 47% in 2020.
U.S. church membership was 73% when Gallup first measured it in 1937 and remained near 70% for the next six decades, before beginning a steady decline around the turn of the 21st century.
Stephan: And here we have today's Republican Scum Award. The thing about Ted Cruz is: How could any group of voters choose this man as their representative? He is so despicable, that even his fellow senators by all reports think he is scum. What is it about Texans that they elect people like Cruz, Greg Abbott, and Louie Gohmert. Is it they don't care about democracy, or that they aren't smart enough to see these men for who they are, or do they actually like them and think of them as competent leaders.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) answered questions about the border and voting rights on Sunday by repeatedly accusing Democrats of enabling child rape.
Cruz made the remarks on Fox News after host Maria Bartiromo asked him about his recent trip to the U.S-Mexico border to highlight the seasonal surge in migrants.
“The problem for Democrats, they start from a premise the more illegal immigration the better,” Cruz insisted. “Because they believe if you let all the illegal immigrants in and then you make them all citizens that they will eventually vote Democrat and keep Democrats in power.”Tired of ads? Want to support our progressive journalism? Click to learn more.
“But they also don’t understand incentives,” he continued. “It’s projected that over 100,000 unaccompanied minors will come in. And I’ve got to say, anyone who puts a little boy or little girl in the custody of a human trafficker. You know, Maria, 11-, 12-, 13-year-old girls are put on birth control pills before they come because the odds are so high they’ll get raped. That is not compassionate when the Biden administration has all these kids in the custody of traffickers.”
Damian Carrington, Environment Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Most urban people think of indigenous tribal people in the rain forest as primitives, and they are if knowing how to do a Google is your criterion. But there are many ways to be a human, and I assure you 99.9% of urban Americans are so primitive in the skills of those tribal people that if you took them out of their normal environment and put them down in a tropical forest their understanding of how to survive for more than a few days would be so primitive almost all of them would be dead in a few weeks, and I say that as someone who used to teach survival skills in wilderness
In the same way, these indigenous tribal people also know far better than you and I (I only taught survival skills in North America) about how to manage their environment. This report describes what I mean. The smart move would be to support them not condescend to them.
Indigenous tropical forest tribal people
The embattled indigenous peoples of Latin America are by far the best guardians of the regions’ forests, according to a UN report, with deforestation rates up to 50% lower in their territories than elsewhere.
Protecting the vast forests is vital to tackling the climate crisis and plummeting populations of wildlife, and the report found that recognising the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples to their land is one of the most cost-effective actions. The report also calls for the peoples to be paid for the environmental benefits their stewardship provides, and for funding for the revitalisation of their ancestral knowledge of living in harmony with nature.
However, the demand for beef, soy, timber, oil and minerals means the threats to indigenous peoples and their forest homes are rising. Hundreds of community leaders have been killed because of disputes over land in recent years and the Covid-19 pandemic has added to the dangers forest peoples face.
Demands by indigenous peoples for their rights have become increasingly visible in recent years, the report said, but this has come with increasing […]
Stephan: As we move into a post-carbon-energy era there will be many false starts. T get through climate change we are going to need to rethink all of our technologies and stop seeing the earth as an exploitable bank account. Technologies must foster wellbeing above all other considerations.
Credit: Mehmet Demirci
NORTHAMPTON, NORTH CAROLINA — Here’s a multibillion-dollar question that could help determine the fate of the global climate: If a tree falls in a forest—and then it’s driven to a mill, where it’s chopped and chipped and compressed into wood pellets, which are then driven to a port and shipped across the ocean to be burned for electricity in European power plants—does it warm the planet?
Most scientists and environmentalists say yes: By definition, clear-cutting trees and combusting their carbon emits greenhouse gases that heat up the earth. But policymakers in the U.S. Congress and governments around the world have declared that no, burning wood for power isn’t a climate threat—it’s actually a green climate solution. In Europe, “biomass power,” as it’s technically called, is now counted and subsidized as zero-emissions renewable energy. As a result, European utilities now import tons of wood from U.S. forests every year—and Europe’s supposedly eco-friendly economy now generates more energy from burning wood than from wind and solar combined.
Biomass power is a fast-growing $50 billion global industry, and it’s not clear whether […]
