This is what greed for profit above all other considerations looks like, and it pretty much defines the carbon industries. We are not going to be able to deal effectively with climate change as long as corporations like the two reported on in this article are allowed to continue as they do now. Unfortunately, neither the EPA, the states or the Congress is really willing to take on corporate greed, since it finances so many politicians.
These days the Pecos River barely fills its dry, sandy bed where it crosses West Texas, but the river could be poised to flow again — with treated oilfield wastewater.
Companies are racing to figure out what to do with the tremendous volume of noxious water that comes up from underground during oil and gas drilling in the Permian Basin, but a growing cohort of companies say they’ve developed a means to purify that fluid and release it in the Pecos and other watersheds.
“This is new ground for all of us and we know it’s got to be done the right way,” said Robert Crain, executive vice president of Texas Pacific Water Resources, a company seeking to discharge treated water. “We’re not the only folks that are chasing […]
Under the Biden administration, and the Trump administration before that, and the Obama administration before that the Department of Agriculture which is the submissive servant of Big Agriculture, as it is called, has been destroying the earth’s matrix of life in America so you can eat steaks. It is a horrible policy mistake that has been going on for a generation and it is leaving the U.S. in a growing crisis as our ecosystem is torn apart by greedy agriculture corporations and individuals. What can you do? Stop eating mammals.
A red fox killed with a cyanide bomb. A gray wolf gunned down from an airplane. A jackrabbit caught in a neck snare. These are just a few of the 1.45 million animals poisoned, shot, and trapped last year by the euphemistically named Wildlife Services, a little-known but particularly brutal program of the US Department of Agriculture.
The program kills wildlife for many reasons, including poisoning birds to prevent them from striking airplanes and destroying beavers that sneak onto golf courses. But one of the primary purposes of the mostly taxpayer-funded $286 million program is to serve as the meat and dairy industries’ on-call pest control service.
“We were the hired gun of the livestock industry,” said Carter Niemeyer, who worked in Wildlife Services and related programs from 1975 to 2006. Niemeyer specialized in killing and trapping predators like coyotes and wolves that were suspected of killing farmed cattle and sheep.
Wildlife Services has also killed hundreds of endangered gray wolves, threatened grizzly bears, and highly endangered Mexican gray wolves, often at the behest of the […]
I have been looking at how The Great Schism Trend is affecting cities in the U.S. as the climate changes. The first thing that stands out is how poorly many urban centers in Red states are preparing for what is happening. The second thing that stood out for me was how poorly America is doing overall. You would think this would be a major topic of concern in Congress, but it is not. I do think the Biden administration is making a serious effort but it will only work if the House authorizes the money, and the House under TCP/Republican control is more a playground for spoiled ignorant brats than a real legislative body interested in fostering wellbeing. Then I started doing research on what is happening in Europe since it has been severely impacted by the increase in temperatures, and the population of Europe is overwhelmingly in cities. Here is what I found. They are taking it seriously, and using nature based strategies. Good news for them.
Credit: Laurent Cipriani / AP
Cities are home to a majority of Europe’s population and are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of climate change.
Europe’s cities are facing the impacts of climate change ever more regularly and severely. After 2023’s record summer heat, flooding and heatwaves, the need to invest in resilience has never been clearer.
A new report from the European Environment Agency (EEA) has taken stock of adaption across Europe’s urban centres, looking at what actions cities are taking and what is already working.
It finds that almost all European cities are using nature-based solutions as their tool of choice to improve resilience. Of the 19,000 climate action plans surveyed, 91 per cent included options like maintaining parks, urban forests or green roofs and facilitating natural water retention.
Not only are they “effective for cooling and water retention”, the report says, they also provide other benefits like more recreational spaces or a reduction in pollution.
One of the things that stands out for me about states governed by Republicans is the sheer nastiness of their governance. Take the authorization of government murder of prisoners. Only five states — Texas, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Alabama — authorize such killings and, of course, they are all Red states. As this report describes this government authorized murder is so traumatic that the employees who have to carry it out are traumatized and complaining about it.
An arm restraint on the gurney in the execution chamber of the Oklahoma state penitentiary in 2014. Credit: Sue Ogrocki / AP
The relentless pursuit of “non-stop executions” by a rump of US death penalty states is exposing prison staff to extreme levels of psychological and physical stress, according to traumatized corrections officers who are appealing for help.
Though capital punishment is generally on the wane in America, with only five states carrying out executions last year, those states that remain active are showing a renewed determination. In some states, the pace of judicial killings is now so intense that prison guards are kept in an almost permanent state of readiness, with mock executions staged on a rolling basis.
Pursuit of ‘non-stop executions’ causing psychological distress to corrections staff as states urged to widen gap between executions
The relentless pursuit of “non-stop executions” by a rump of US death penalty states is exposing prison staff to extreme levels of psychological and physical stress, according to traumatized corrections officers who are appealing for help.
Though capital punishment is generally on the wane in America, with […]
Joel Kotkin, Columnist and RC Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University - Spiked
Stephan:
I found this a very interesting take on the worldwide population decline in births by a man who seems to be a scholar and a materialist. It is not just what it says, and the links to research sources it provides, which is good and useful, but also for what he does not say. Joel Klotkin seems to be on the conservative, although not MAGAt side, and he is definitely a materialist. That is he has no concept of the Matrix of Consciousness or the nonlocal nature of consciousness. My own view on why fewer people are marrying and having children is the precognitive, but unconscious, anxiety and fear created by the onrushing catastrophe of climate change, and the destruction of the earth’s ecosystem caused both by human greed, and indifference to the matrix, and the climate change it is producing. I have done two podcasts on this because as I have been telling readers for decades now, the only way we are going to get through climate change and preserve the planet’s ecosystems is by recognizing the matrix, and the fact that all life is interconnected and interdependent, and developing new technologies that do not degrade the ecosystems, and developing social policies that foster wellbeing at every level.
Over a decade ago, I led a team of Singapore-based researchers to investigate why families were declining. Back then, we were experiencing a historic shift away from population growth and familial ties, towards individualism. Since then, the post-familial age has entered full swing.
This situation would have been unthinkable in the 1960s, when ‘overpopulation’ was seen as inevitable. In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted that the number of people on Earth would rocket to unsustainable levels, resulting in global famine.
Yet the disaster Ehrlich predicted has not materialised. In fact, the trend is now reversing. Last year’s global population growth was the smallest since 1950. Far from humans breeding themselves out of existence, today almost half of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level. This week, the US Census announced the lowest birthrate in American history. Rather than relentlessly continuing […]
