April 22, 2024 – 54th Anniversary of Earth Day

Former Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) increased climate warming while President Joe Biden tries to slow it down.

On Earth Day 2024, Biden announced distribution of $7 billion in 60 Solar for All grants to lower energy costs and create good-quality jobs helping 900,000 households and reducing 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. On his visit to Virginia’s Prince William Forest Park, he also announced that almost 2,000 corps positions across 36 states are part of his New Deal-style American Climate Corps green jobs training program. The park was established in 1936 as a summer camp for underprivileged youth from Washington, part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps to create jobs during the Great Depression.

EPA’s new rules to curb carcinogenic emissions at hundreds of U.S. chemical plants will help Blacks and the poor. About 104,000 people live within approximately six miles of these synthetic organic chemical plants in Texas, Louisiana, and other states with St. John the Baptist Parish west of New Orleans one of the largest U.S. sources of these emissions.

A new rule establishes the first national standard to limit dangerous “forever chemicals,” per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), contained by almost half the country’s drinking water, found in the blood of 97 percent of people in the U.S. Water utilities will be required to filter five of over 12,000 types of these chemicals: PFOA, PFOS, PFNA, PFHxS and HFPO-DA, also known as GenX chemicals. Regulations limit mixtures of any two or more of PFNA, PFHxS, PFBS, and GenX chemicals. Used to help products repel water and oil, the chemicals are tied to cancer, thyroid disease, reproductive issues, and heart and liver damage, likely more dangerous at levels thousands of times lower than previously believed. Government of $1 billion in funding are part of a $9 billion investment helping communities manage contaminated water. Small, disadvantaged, and rural communities can also access the EPA’s Water Technical Assistance program.

Chemicals expose people through food, clothing, household products such as nonstick pans, cosmetics, waterproof apparel, dust, etc. Changed food packaging may help, but states are responsible for enforcement. Maine is the first state to establish valid thresholds for these chemicals. More contamination from these chemicals came from DDT’s administration that wrote legal loopholes for their use and exemptions allowing release of additional “foreign chemicals.”   

Another rule requires polluting companies to pay for their eradication. Three chemical companies—DuPont de Nemours, Chemours, and Corteva—have reached a $1.18 billion deal to resolve complaints about polluting U.S. drinking water systems. Chemical manufacturer 3M will begin payments over contamination with forever chemicals.

Changing previous policies to favor the oil industry and livestock on U.S. public lands, Interior Department secretary Deb Haaland finalized a new rule for balanced managing of U.S. 245 million acres, one-tenth of U.S. land and mostly in 12 western states, with protection, restoration, and science-based knowledge. Leases will be issued only to qualified groups, not foreigners or when incompatible with existing uses. Royalty rates for fossil fuel companies to drill and mine on public lands have been increased for the first time since 1920. Perimeters of two national monuments in California between Napa and Mendocino and east of Los Angeles will be increased.

Biden’s administration also banned fossil fuel drilling on almost half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, 13 million acres in the Western Arctic and 40 percent of the remote area NPRA-A, home to protected animal species including polar bears and caribou.

For the first time in over 60 years, the Bureau of Land Management will require oil industry companies to set aside more money for plugging old wells to stop them from leaking oil, brine, and toxic or climate-warming gasses. Previously, money set aside would cover the cost of only 0.5 percent of these tens of thousands of wells, leaving taxpayers on the hook for the remainder. Even the new rule won’t cover all the well clean-ups because of BLM inaccuracies: the mandated bond is $71,000 for each well, but just one well in Alaska cost $13 million to plug. The rule does require amounts to be adjusted each decade to cover inflation.

A failed private project shows the importance of government in the climate battle. About 150 homeowners in Salisbury (MA) paid $600,000 for a sand dune project to protect their homes that lasted three days. The government needs to take action: the Gulf of Mexico covers a football-field sized piece of land in Louisiana every hour. 

Global heating is pushing the world’s coral reefs to a fourth planet-wide mass bleaching, the worst one on record. About 54 percent of ocean waters with coral reefs have enough heat stress to cause bleaching. The first event in 1998 exposed 20 percent of the ocean’s coral reef corals to heat stress causing bleaching. In 2010, 35 percent reached that threshold, and the third from 2014 to 2017 ended up at 56 percent. The fourth one will soon surpass that one with a one percent increase per week. Rich in biodiversity, coral reefs, one percent of the ocean, provide habitat for one-fourth of all marine species. Coral containing tiny algae build the reefs, but heat causes coral to expel the algae and then starve. At the current rate, 99 percent of the reefs will die off by the end of the century.

Moths, important pollinators, also show the negative effect of an air pollutant tied to car exhaust and wildfires that changes the smell of flowers and makes the nectar unrecognizable. In addition, diesel exhaust disrupts honeybee pollination; traffic noise stifles bird calls and therefore mating; the draw of streetlights kills; and highways keep bats from hunting.

This year, the earth broke many climate records—flooding, snowfall, heat, hurricane speed, melting icebergs, etc. Snowpack and groundwater are declining, and hurricanes need a sixth category for increased wind speeds over 192 mph. Examination of sclerospones, an ocean creation living for hundreds of years, shows the Earth warming at a faster rate for the past two decades than expected, and 2023 was the hottest year on record.

Extreme heat also hurts the economy. Last summer, the heat wave in Texas cost the state $9.5 billion, a 0.47 percent lower growth rate and second only to the pandemic on small businesses. Meanwhile, home energy bills increased by 11.7 percent. With climate change disasters, insurance companies are also underpaying claims but charging higher premiums.

In 2023, researchers predicted that the Atlantic Ocean system of currents could collapse this century, resulting in natural disasters and change Western Europe into Alaska. Currents deliver warm water from the equator to the poles and return with cold water back south, heating up Europe and cooling the tropics for milder and stable climate in both regions. The tipping change could occur anytime between 2025 and 2095 if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced.

Since 2000, 4 million people have died from climate change, an under-estimate and health emergency. Low-income countries lack mortality data, but another 14.5 million are estimated to die globally from climate change by 2050, again conservative figures. Climate-induced medical costs will be $1.1 trillion for healthcare systems.

An experiment in the effect of climate change on gene expression shows that it can result in depression, autism, schizophrenia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Women pregnant during the 2012 Superstorm Sandy bore children with an extremely high risk of psychiatric conditions as early as preschool through changes in the brain. Fossil-fuel-induced changes from rising temperatures to extreme weather to heightened levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide alter brain health from memory to language. Heat increases aggression, decreases memory, and limits brain coordination. It is also associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Continued burning of fossil fuels produces more dementia in younger people.

Shell oil company knew about alarming climate change from fossil fuel as far back as the 1960s, according to former Shell staff, people close to the company, and public archives from 2017 to 2022. In the 1980s, Shell scientists gave two pathways: “one where energy companies undertook a smooth transition to clean energy and one where fossil fuel demand continued to rise, creating ‘more storms, more droughts, more deluges.'” A Shell spokesperson said that Shell “did not have unique knowledge about climate change.” The company made $40 billion profit in 2022, and the former CEO Ben van Beurden received $11.7 million last year, up from $7.9 million the previous year.  ExxonMobil also knew about the damage of fossil fuels several decades ago.

Darren Woods, ExxonMobil CEO, declared the public is to blame the world’s failure to meet climate goals. He claimed that they could make fuels with lower carbon “but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that.” Woods’ company lobbied to fend off provisions in an earlier version of the legislation that would have levied heavy taxes on polluting companies to pay for climate efforts. Exxon received subsidies from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to build its clean energy, but Woods said it “is not a long-term sustainable strategy.” Most of Exxon’s investments go into fossil fuel expansion while the company spends billions to influence public opinion.  

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gained fame from environmental protection, but his conspiracy theories have led to former colleague on the Natural Resources Defense Council to ask him to withdraw from the 2024 presidential election. A dozen other national environmental organizations issued a letter calling him a “dangerous conspiracy theorist and a science denier” who promotes “toxic beliefs” on vaccines and on climate change. Kennedy now thinks that the free market will solve the climate crisis.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) opposes windmills for energy because they kill whales. He also ranted against Biden’s “racist” agenda supporting a solar project in Angola. According to Johnson, believers in climate science are “driven” by the desire to take “control over our lives.”

The News for July 19, 2018

Today is the 170th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, when about 300 people–mostly women–gathered to address “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman.” They persisted, and one of those who attended managed to vote for the first time when women gained the right to vote 72 years later. On this day 170 years later, the current administration is attempting to rapidly reverse the accomplishments of the 21st century.  Following is an overview of a few political highlights for today, July 19, 2018:

Once again, Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) has been forced to back down, this time from his anti-U.S. intention to turn U.S. government employees over to Vladimir Putin. As the Senate prepared to vote on a resolution opposing DDT’s honoring Putin’s request, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated that DDT “disagrees” with the “proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin.” He had suggested swapping the 12 Russians indicted last week for 11 current former U.S. officials. The resolution stopping many government officials from being turned over to Russia for questioning passed the Senate by 98-0. Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Richard Shelby (R-AL) were absent for the vote. Republicans did reject efforts to support the intelligence community’s assessment, Mueller’s probe, and implementation of congressional sanctions. None of these resolutions would have been binding on DDT.

Republicans plan to keep Russian meddling: the House refused to increase election security spending. The GOP prefers voter ID to stop non-existent voter fraud and repress non-GOP voting. The commission administering the election security grant program is missing half its four members. Without a quorum, it cannot approve testing of voting systems for required standards, and the patchwork of voting systems has differing degrees of reliability. It’s a policy to “Keep American Republican.”

Two years ago, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stopped President Obama from making public the information about Russia’s hacking and election interference with accusations that it was a partisan move. No more. Despite the indifference of Republicans in Congress, DOJ’s Rod Rosenstein has a new policy to tell the U.S. companies, organizations, and others who are being attacked by foreign hacking and disinformation campaigns. He said, “The American people have a right to know if foreign governments are targeting them with propaganda.” A Microsoft executive told the audience at the Aspen Security Forum today that Russia has target at least three candidates this year.

In another interview at the Aspen Security Forum, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen explained that removal of thousands of children from their parents is “to protect children.” She added that the courts—that actually require her to reunite children—are preventing families from staying together. In another noble move on her part, “we give a pregnancy test at DHS to every girl over 10.” It is her agency that imprisons pregnant girls to keep them from having any abortions unless courts manage to allow them to see doctors. Her claim that DHS gives aid to members of radical extremist groups who want to be non-violent is negated by her administration rolling back funds for this rehabilitation. The outstanding part of her responses was the support for “both sides” being to blame for the Charlottesville violence: “It’s not that one side is right, one side is wrong.” The official DDT administration position is that white supremacists are not wrong.

DDT has found another way to get rid of people he considers undesirable. Applicants for asylum visas no longer have 30 days to take care of missing or inaccurate information on their applications. The new policy is to immediately deport them with no advance warning—just a final statutory denial. They will be treated like criminals, who are also deported on a fast-tracked basis. [If only we could automatically reject DDT’s nominees who provide forms with missing or incomplete information!] The new policy politely states that it is “not intended to penalize filers for innocent mistakes.” AG Jeff Sessions also disallows domestic and gang violence claims as bases for asylum; those seeking asylum must provide evidence that they fear persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion. Fear of death doesn’t count.

On Fox’s Tucker Carlson show, DDT accused Montenegro of being responsible for starting World War III if it joins NATO because its people are “very aggressive.” Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic came into the limelight a year ago when DDT aggressively pushed him out of his path at the 2017 NATO meeting. [Full video here.] The country of 630,000 alienated Russia because it planned to join NATO: the Kremlin may have meddled in its elections, and pro-Russian militants planned a failed 2016 coup. NATO has an agreement that the other 28 members will support any one member attacked from outside. In its 69-year history, that agreement has been invoked only once—when 28 members went to the aid of the United States after the 9/11 attack. NATO members are still in Afghanistan after 17 years of the U.S. war there.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced DDT to drop out of the Iran deal, according to a video of Netanyahu’s speech to his Likud party.

Poverty is no longer a problem in the United States. At least, that’s what DDT’s administration claims. A few facts they missed:

• About 40.6 million people—12.7 percent of the population—lived below the official poverty line in 2016.
• The Supplemental Poverty Measure shows that 14.5 percent of people in the U.S. are impoverished.
• Over 20 percent of children in the U.S. live in poverty.
• The United States was second only to Israel of the richest countries with the percentage of people in poverty in 2014.

DDT maintains that income data doesn’t reflect poverty because poorer people underreport their income, and interviews about consumption make poverty in the U.S. disappear. In that way, DDT can declare “mission accomplished” on the War on Poverty and do away with the entire safety net. Refuting this claim is a study tracking economic adversity, including reports of difficulty in paying for food, utility bills, rent, or medical care that comes out about the same as official poverty rates. DDT’s method shows a decline in poverty as more households struggle with costs of food and shelter. The chart below shows the how DDT’s system skews the facts:

Reasons for the inaccuracy of DDT’s report:

• Poor people finance their spending with debt—payday loans, second mortgages they can’t afford, etc.
• The cost of living for DDT’s report is adjusted more slowly than the official Consumer Price Index, making household spending appear to be growing faster.

EPA Scott Pruitt and his corruption may be gone, but the United States still has Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. After several reports of his illegally using taxpayer money, his own department’s IG is investigating the man responsible for protecting public lands about his real estate deal with Halliburton Chair Davi Lesar. The foundation run by Zinke and his wife granted Lesar’s real-estate development the permission to put a parking lot on land donated to the foundation for a Veteran’s Peace Park in Whitefish (MT). Zinke is also under investigation for a violation of the Hatch Act after tweeting himself wearing socks with DDT’s face and “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. Halliburton is one of the world’s largest fracking and offshore drilling companies; Zinke repeatedly opened up federal lands and coastal waters for fossil fuel drilling.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), known for his frequently obnoxious grilling of Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Peter Strzok, and others regarding their possible connections with foreign countries, has been revealed as a beneficiary of foreign monies for his election from his superpacs, including Great America PAC, that may also fund Russia’s attack on the U.S. election. The PACs’ major donors have direct ties with Cambridge Analytic, now defunct, that helped elect DDT through data collection, hacking, and social media manipulation. As chair of the Oversight Committee, Gowdy refused members 52 times to request subpoenas for interviews in the Russia probe. He will not be running for re-election.

ALEC, the powerful organization that writes conservative legislation for lawmakers, has lost ExxonMobil after Ford, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and many others left the group. The biggest oil and gas company in the world followed BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips in abandoning the Koch Brothers’ group after a disagreement about an ALEC resolution that would ask the feds to reconsider its findings that greenhouse gasses are harmful to human health. A major contributor to the secretive organization since 1981, Exxon has given millions to promote the conservative corporate agenda. Its departure comes in the midst of state investigations into its connection with hiding evidence about its climate impact from its shareholders as well as the public.

The classic for today comes during an interview at the Aspen Security Forum when NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell tells Director of National Intelligence Director Dan Coats the breaking news that Vladimir Putin is coming to Washington this fall. The video is not to be missed. The best part may also be that McConnell said that Put will not be coming to Congress. I’m sure that DDT wants to be alone with Putin anyway. The question is how long Coats will keep his job.

And that’s just one day for DDT’s administration.

Keystone Pipeline, Destructive

The decision on building the Keystone Pipeline project, designed to send oil from north of Montana through 1,700 miles and six states, is coming to a head. Since its inception, conservatives have advocated for this disaster—unless it crossed their own land—and environmentalists have fought it.

The issue exploded when the Exxon Pegasus pipeline ruptured last Friday in Mayflower (AR), flooding a residential neighborhood with tens of thousands of gallons of diluted bitumen. Twenty-two homes were evacuated, and the noxious odor, similar to that of asphalt, wafted for five miles. The Keystone Pipeline is designed to carry nine times as much as the Pegasus pipeline.

The Arkansas disaster was just one week after the Senate voted to support the Keystone Pipeline, perhaps persuaded by a State Department draft report, authored by a person with extensive ties to oil companies, claiming that the Keystone Pipeline will have no environmental impact. Congress has no control over the project; it is the State Department that makes the final decision.

Two days before the Pegasus spill, a train carrying tar sands oil spilled 15,000 gallons in Minnesota. During that week, Exxon got a $1.7 million fine for its pipeline that dumped 42,000 gallons of oil in the Yellowstone River in 2011. The fine is miniscule, 0.004 percent of Exxon’s $45 billion profit last year.

The pipeline transports diluted bitumen because bitumen is in a solid or semi-solid state that can be sludge or rock-like and must be diluted into a liquid to move through the pipe. The industry won’t tell anyone what it uses to dilute the bitumen.

The first Environmental Impact Statement gave Keystone an “inadequate” rating because of no information on the diluents. In 2011, Cynthia Quarterman, the agency director of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, testified in the House of Representatives that her agency, the regulatory one for the pipeline, had no idea whether dilbit is more dangerous in transport than ordinary crudes and had not studied the issue.

The second EIS, released this past month, shows that no one knows anything more about the contents of the diluents or how it will react to a spill. Instead the report waffled by saying that the diluted bitumen does “behave as a conventional crude oil.” The EPA does report on the damage to animals, plants, and humans of benzene, a very toxic chemical remaining in the air after the Enbridge tar sands spill of 2011.

This spill in Michigan, which released a million gallons of dilbit in the Kalamazoo River and cost more than $820 million, still challenges scientists and regulators as they try to remove submerged oil from the riverbed. Thirty-two months after the Enbridge spill, the Kalamazoo River still has oil, and the cost has risen to over $700 million dollars. Conservation groups, with evidence, that sands oil leads to more spills because it is “highly corrosive, acidic and potentially unstable.”

So back to the oil spill in Arkansas. Exxon-Mobil expressed regret and apologized. But who will fix it? The state Oil and Gas Commission can’t do anything because the U.S. Department of Transportation is in charge. That means that the state can’t inspect the spill or the pipeline and that the state has no oversight over this disaster.

Exxon won’t have to pay one cent for the clean-up. The company confirmed that the pipeline was carrying “low-quality Wabasca Heavy crude oil from Alberta” that had to be diluted. According to a 1980 law, diluted bitumen is not classified as oil, and companies transporting it in pipelines do not have to pay into the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. Other conventional crude producers pay 8 cents a barrel to ensure the fund has resources to help clean up some of the 54,000 barrels of pipeline oil that spilled 364 times last year.

The Keystone Pipeline is bad for United States economy:

The building of the pipeline won’t provide the number of jobs that the GOP promises: The State Department has estimated the project would create about 5,000 to 6,000 jobs for two years. After that it would require about 35 jobs a year.

Much of the oil refined in Texas will be exported to other countries: At least 60 percent of the gasoline produced in 2012 at Texas Gulf Coast refineries, the same ones the Keystone pipeline will serve, was exported. Exports will only rise because U.S. production is rising but consumption is declining and the industry can make more money through exports.

Many Canadians are opposed to the Keystone Pipeline: A year ago, a poll showed that nearly 42 percent of Canadians don’t want the pipeline. It is one of the world’s most environmentally damaging activities, wrecking vast areas of forest and sucking up huge quantities of water from local rivers before making it toxic and then dumping the contaminated water into ponds that now cover 70 square miles.

The Keystone Pipeline project will hurt both national and local economies: The increase of the earth’s temperature from burning tar sands oil can permanently cut the U.S. GDP by 2.5 percent at a time that 67 percent of U.S. counties have been hurt by at least one of the eleven $1 billion extreme weather events. Superstorm Sandy alone cost an estimated $80 billion, and the drought that affected 80 percent of farmland last summer destroyed one-fourth of the corn crop and did at least $20 billion damage to the nation’s economy. NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen said if all the oil was extracted from the oil sands it would be “game over” when it came to the effort to stabilize the climate.

The fossil fuel interests pushing the Keystone pipeline have cut, not created, jobs: While garnering $546 billion in profits between 2005 and 2010, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP reduced their U.S. workforce by 11,200 employees. Forty percent of U.S oil-industry jobs consist of minimum-wage work at gas stations.

Unemployment will rise because of increasing disasters: Mark Zandi, the Chief Economist of Moody’s Analytics, reported that “Superstorm Sandy [sliced] an estimated 86,000 jobs from payrolls.” Two weeks after Hurricane Irene, the number of workers filing unemployment claims in Vermont rose from 731 to 1,331. Hurricane Katrina erased 129,000 jobs, almost 20 percent, in the New Orleans region. For the U.S. economy as a whole, 2011 cost US taxpayers $52 billion.

Poor and working people will be disproportionately affected: Keystone and projects like it have a disproportionately negative impact on already struggling working families. Sixteen states were afflicted by five or more extreme weather events in 2011-12; households in disaster-declared counties in these states earn $48,137, or seven percent below the U.S. median income.

Building the sustainable economy, not the Keystone pipeline, will create far more jobs: The solar industry creates jobs six times faster than the overall job market. Research shows a 13-percent growth in highly skilled solar jobs including installations, sales, marketing, manufacturing, and software development, bringing total direct jobs to 119,000 people. According to the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, investment in a green infrastructure program would create nearly four times as many jobs as an equal investment in oil and gas.

Congress is more inclined to vote in favor of Keystone, however, because of the lobbying money. At least fifty oil companies, business trade associations, labor unions, and political groups with combined lobbying budgets of more than $178 million paid politicians to suppport the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in 2012. The dozen groups lobbying against the environmentally risky project had 2012 lobbying budgets of less than $5 million total.

How likely is it that the new Keystone Pipeline will have spills in addition to the 14 that they’ve had on the first part of the project? Isabel Brooks knows. When she and two friends locked themselves one night inside part of the pipeline in Winona (TX), they were amazed to see sunlight coming through gaping holes in the pipe the next morning from faulty welding. Law requires independent inspection, but TransCanada pipeline contracts can pick their own inspectors.

Brooks got her photographs of the holes in the pipeline shortly before the three protesters were arrested and jailed for 24 days. That gave TransCanada time to bury the pipeline without inspecting it. This is the same pipeline that runs under the Ogalalla aquifer which provides drinking water to millions of people in the United States.

Utah kids are being taught to support the use of oil. As a part of Earth Day, the Department of Oil, Gas, and Mining is sponsoring a poster contest for all kids grades K-6 with the theme, “Where Would WE Be Without Oil, Gas, and Mining?” State winners get $500 for their schools and are honored at the Earth Day Awards Luncheon.

The sponsors—and teachers—probably won’t be telling students that the EPA has ranked Salt Lake City among the worst U.S. metropolitan areas for air pollution close to Los Angeles. Other Utah cities–Logan, Provo, and Brigham City respectively — took the top three spots on the EPA’s worst air quality list in January.

Of course, the Keystone Pipeline won’t be going through Utah.