When Russia Has Shown You Who They Are

 

All the videos of the Azerbaijan Airlines flight showing the damage show holes in the wreckage have entry holes on the port side and exit holes on the starboard side, likely with a slight angle from below. pic.twitter.com/z4NxEapLWd

— Oliver Alexander (@OAlexanderDK) December 25, 2024

Russia shot down that plane just like they shot down MH17 in 2014 and just like they shot down Korean flight 007 41 years ago. Soviet or Putin, we have a structure of murderousness and lying; and taking no responsibility for the loss of many human lives. 

Russia needs disinformation to exist, and this is why I deplore the idea that the structure for seeking out disinformation is being dismantled in the name of "free speech." Democracy can only exist with a well-informed public, yet US conservatives like the idea of a disinformed public softened up by foreign powers because they have so far benefitted from it. 

If I hadn't in the last 40 years of my political awareness seen a brilliant reason to not support the GOP ever--holy shit! Watergate, Iran/Contra and the yellow cake /WMD's lies are like tiddlers in comparison to any and every pretense that Russia is a reasonable honest nation we can do business with. We are absurdly weakened by such a stance. 

Keystone Problems

 

U.S. pipeline regulator reviewing special permits after Keystone oil spills -source https://t.co/QOLs8JNV2O pic.twitter.com/Ghi2ZJkKLk

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 21, 2022

This is the third spill in five years. It's spilling into Kansas Mill Creek. 

Operators were alerted to an issue with the pipeline on Dec. 7. As of Friday morning, TC Energy says, 4,125 barrels of oil from the creek have been recovered of the estimated 14,000 barrels (about 588,000 gallons) reportedly lost in the spill.

Aerial footage of the leak from Nebraska Public Media shows the leak has affected a nearby pasture and residents' farmland.

Many initial details, like the cause for the spill, are still not clear. What is known is the type of oil that was being transported through the pipeline: tar sands oil, also called diluted bitumen.

Because it's tar sands oil, it's thick and hard to clean up. (It's not easy to convert to gasoline for this reason, too.)

Republicans have been blaming Biden for cancelling further work on the project and claiming it had anything to do with higher energy costs this year (it doesn't--at all)--but this hammers home why this kind of pipeline is a problem: we don't eat or drink oil, and this kind of spill can damage farmland and poison water. For years, my objection to it has been that it runs too close to the Ogallala aquifer, right in the nation's breadbasket. 

Anyway, when Republicans want to start in on Keystone XL--the pipeline that runs through the US to ship Canadian oil for export and complain that Democrats hate cheap energy, I think my response is something along the lines of what my dad told me when he despaired of the sloppy condition of my room. He said, "Only a sick animal shits where it eats." 

That probably won't make a dent in the hard heads of people who doubled-down on "Drill here, drill now" after the Deepwater Horizon spill. But I don't know how much more obvious the keystone problems have to be.

The Russian Mobilization Here in the US

 

After suggesting the US blew up the pipelines, Tucker starts listing possible options for the Russian retaliation pic.twitter.com/XvmHolSSg4

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 28, 2022

There are fifty-somethings being re-enlisted back in Russia, past their prime, grizzled, about to be re-introduced to materiel that they were handling back in their previous service. There are young men, many of them from the various ethnic hinterlands of the Russian Federation, who will be mobilized with barely days of basic training--hardly enough time to acquaint themselves with concepts like, "Here's your left foot, here's your right foot, this is the end the bullets go in, and this is the end the bullets come out." And it's sketchy how well the bullets come out from rusted over rifles, anyway. 

But let me pretend for minute that I was as full of Putinist cope as occasional Tucker Carlson guest Col. Doug McGregor--isn't it likely that Russia is making their mobilization look like a clusterfuck so that everyone will be taken unawares by the crafty scheme of--

Sending underprepared humans who don't want to be fighting a war in Ukraine to either be killed or surrender ignominiously?  Slowing the Ukraine advance to reclaim lost territory by stacking Russian bodies in their way? 

I'm not seeing a strategy in that, and I don't see a strategy in a US led false flag damaging Russian pipelines to Europe to trigger a NATO response. It seems like it's been Russia who has been suggesting that much of northern Europe couldn't do without their fuel--but is it not worth it to consider that dealing with Russia is financing genocide anyway? Maybe Russia shouldn't think they have all of Europe's ass over a barrel, or a pipeline. I don't think it matters. For the sake of our democratic ideals, for the sake of acknowledging sovereignty and rejecting bullies, there is no question but to support Ukraine. 

I don't know what the effect of maybe 300,000 warm bodies (for however long they stay warm) joining the fray is (if they get there, given how many are trying to leave for Mongolia, Finland, Georgia, etc. ) I suspect when the bodies start returning home, regardless of the mobile crematoria and the idea that field deaths are a part of op sec, as well as propaganda, and the people know for sure that Mad Vlad decided to fuck over at least a generation to stay in power and to see a stupid vision of Russian greatness come to fruition. And failed and kept failing. And offered bodies to fail some more.  

The one thing that Russia has effectively mobilized, I guess by their own media paying attention to him, is Tucker Carlson's mouth. Of course, he's never facing bullets. I just wonder at what juncture he faces facts. Or when Fox News decides his version of the news is a perversion of it and can't take his lies anymore. 

Nothing trivial, I hope.

 

An oil facility directly responsible for the flow of #Russian oil to Europe is on fire in #Bryansk, #Russia. Next to it, just a few km away, a Russian military base is on fire.

Glory to #Ukraine✊🏻🇺🇦.

No typo this time.

Videos below. pic.twitter.com/jVQbahezgx

— Canadian Ukrainian Volunteer 🇺🇦🇨🇦✊🏻 (@CanadianUkrain1) April 25, 2022

Lest I sound flip, obviously such fires are very bad for the envoronment. There are also forest fires in Siberia, but for some reason, the usual firefighters are not on hand to put them out. I think they should be re-deployed, but what do I know? 

 UPDATE: Moscow's ambassador to the US says that further arms supplies to Ukraine from the US are going to escalate the conflict and in other news, when I was small and wanted things I wasn't going to get, my dad would ask me "What's it like to want?" Russia is going to escalate from killing women and babies and flattening cities to what? Has escalating even done anything for them so far?

UPDATE: Lavrov wants people to know he thinks NATO is involved in a proxy war and nukes aren't off the table. I'd like to ask him who he thinks started the war and whether he's aware if anyone else has them. No one is as afraid of Russia as a conventional power as they were before they decided to engage in a short bloody little going on months-long war in which they've lost as much as other counties have (yes, like the US) in wars nearly twenty years long. It lacks a certain punch. 

The Jumper Reality

 

Mario Draghi: “Do you prefer peace or the air conditioning on? That’s the question we should ask ourself”. pic.twitter.com/ErT6E5X4aq

— David Carretta (@davcarretta) April 6, 2022

There is a similar complaint--would we be willing to freeze if Russian oil demanded it? Like, seriously--is it worth freezing not to support genocide? Is it worth putting on a jumper and extra blankets?  When portable crematoria might be disappearing the evidence of bodies in Mariupol? So, now that it is spring, and we don't need to think about the cold as much, what if summer was a good reason to partially fund genocide? 

I would say, no. The temperature is never a reason to actually ever support genocide. Supporting genocide is always bad. Air conditioning can also be contributing to climate change so we should think good and hard about how we achieve our very temporary tolerable temperatures, and what we are willing to sacrifice for that limited comfort. 

We aren't presented with peace or AC, however. We are presented with genocide and an eventual desert called peace, and the future where we are always getting our commodified energy resources from monsters unless we try to do better and fully engage in renewable energy and become really self-sufficient. Anywhere. 

I like the idea of energy that isn't monster-fueled and doesn't fuck up the environment. We can do it. We seriously can. 

Gaslighting and Gas Prices

 

The above screenshot from Twitter (because I don't think his account is liable to stay up forever as this situation progresses) shows Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the following statement: "The goal of Russia's special military operation is to stop any war that could take place on Ukraine territory or that could start from there. "

Great shades of "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The kids who don't remember the Cold War might not know that one, as well, but they will probably recognize a few bars of what else the Russian narrative is trying to lay down--the potential of a dirty bomb made in Ukraine (if I knew that was coming, I'd have baked you all a yellow cake) and biowarfare labs (but were they dangerously on wheels, I wonder?).  There's even a laptop! (Is it Hunter Biden, secret Burisma NATO undercover spy's laptop? inquiring minds might indeed venture to ask at this idiotic point in time.)

It almost feels like the laziness of the Russian disinfo spree is to throw the US's own war lies back in our face, as if to say, well, why can't we do it as well? To me, it makes no difference. I was as opposed in 2003 to stupid big countries laying waste to smaller countries who didn't deserve it, so they aren't fucking me up, any.  And actually, I kind of did want the Bush Administration to get their feet held to the fire and still do, because of torture and indiscriminate killing of civilians and use of mercs like Blackwater and all that. I still do.

I was a baby during Vietnam and I still feel some kind of way about it. My father's working class neighborhood all went and a lot them had health issues including mental health issues from that. They drank, they got cancer, they lived recklessly sometimes and my dad doesn't have a lot of friends still alive in his early 70's. One of my mom's brothers went and he was a bad alcoholic and died in his 60s and I don't think those things weren't unconnected. I don't like stupid wars. They kill human beings, sometimes for a long time after we are still counting the death toll of them. 

Anyway, it isn't about NATO and it wasn't about WMDs and it isn't about preventing a war because honey, if this isn't a war I don't know what one looks like, and it had nothing to do with denazification because these assholes sent an actual neo-Nazi group into Ukraine. Probably to kill their Jewish president. 

It might make more sense for Putin to activate his deep-rooted sense of imperialism because Ukraine's pipelines exist. I mean, he doesn't have any use for the people. But just like the Iraq/Kuwait issue, there are other equities to consider? 

So with all this disinfo and intentional bullshit in the ether, this obviously one-sided decision to wage actual war by Putin's government and all that, and what are our journalists going to talk about? The gas prices going up like 50 cents over the past week. And isn't that a Biden problem? Let me turn to my bete noir, Sara Carter, for why this is fucking stupid. 

Federal land is already open for drilling, and all the portions of Keystone that bring oil from Canada to the US have already been built (and that oil is low-grade and not even fit for use in fuel anyway.)

Also the U.S. is a net energy exporter.

Learn what you're talking about. https://t.co/YlZvMgDy6R

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) March 7, 2022

She is literally wrong on every point. US oil companies can drill here, drill now, as conservatives have been saying since the Obama Administration, but they would rather price gouge. They are managing a finite and climate-disruptive resource in its end-stage.  Keystone XL isn't the problem. Whether we sanctioned Nordstream wasn't the Russian problem. Our addiction to fossil fuels on a dying planet and our love of money over human lives is. 

I'm getting sick of the gaslighting. I'm sick of the gaslit foo dogs of war. When you talk about scarcity--talk about renewables and why it didn't have to be this way. When you talk about Putin's invasion and war against Ukraine, talk about how it probably boils down to greed and backfired because Putin and his kleptocrat state never bothered to adapt to the 21st century, but we all have to. 

Every part of this debacle is everything I hate. Lies, greed, death and massive human stupidity. 

Flailing

I don't actually think the way Trump Tweets conveys anything of reassurance that he is a capable and competent leader who can actually handle a single crisis, let alone several at once.  One of the reasons for this being that, when shit is hitting the fan, he's hitting the shitter and Tweeting.

Trump Doesn't Know Anybody

Wall Street Journal reporter Shelby Holliday has the best thread regarding Lev Parnas' Instagram account, because it destroys the idea that the recently arrested crime comedy team of Parnas and Fruman were completely unknown to Trump World. Lev Parnas actually has a long Trump history.

But Trump said he never knew these guys.  So weird!

Also, as we might have noticed earlier, former Trump attorney Dowd indicated that they were part of Trump's legal team and had attorney client privilege--how is that possible if he doesn't know them? Right?

But that's normal, Trump also doesn't know the State Department employees that are testifying against him right now. He doesn't know a lot--he gave this discursive speech of sorts today in front of people:

But we’re going to bring our soldiers back home.  So far, there hasn’t been one drop of blood shed during this whole period by an American soldier.  Nobody was killed.  Nobody cut their finger.  There’s been nothing.  And they’re leaving rather, I think, not expeditiously — rather intelligently.  Just leaving.  Leaving certain areas.  Leaving. 

We’ve secured the oil.  If you remember, I didn’t want to go into Iraq.  I was a civilian, so I had no power over it.  But I always was speaking against going into Iraq.  It was not a great decision.  But I always said, “If you’re going in, keep the oil.”  Same thing here: Keep the oil.  We want to keep the oil. 

And we’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, they have some cash flow.  Maybe we’ll get one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.  But they’ll have some cash flow, which they basically don’t have right now.  Everybody is fighting.  It’s not a big oil area, but everybody is fighting for whatever there is.  So we have a lot of good things going over there, and they’re going very well. 

He secured the Kurdish oil that Assad gets with the handful of hundreds who will ultimately remain in Northern Syria? Or he secured the Saudi Arabian oil with the extra couple of thousand people he sent in?  Or both, because he sees securing oil as very important, and maintaining allies--actual human relationships, as not as important? But maybe "we'll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money". Because that will fix their being displaced, and their slaughtered people. Money. You throw money at them, champ. See how that will fix anything. You jowly orange peel fuck.  You low-lying fungal spore-cluster; you fetid earthen vomit.

He doesn't know. He doesn't know the policy advisors who would tell him to say anything but that bullshit. He thinks they are fighting over sand and oil, and not an actual place where humans have lived, and made history, because he only found this place right now.

He doesn't know these people. He doesn't know foreign policy advisors who would tell him all of this is wrong. He doesn't know anyone in his own home who will let him know he fucked it up. He will look in the mirror, and the face in the mirror will smile fakely and toothily back at him.

He doesn't know what any Ukrainian would have said to him in any situation. He doesn't know what the whistleblower really said, and why this anonymous person is still a blur to him. He doesn't know...

But if you listen to the wind blow through  him, the FOX News wind, the grievance, the stupidity--

You know him a lot. You really do. It isn't good. It isn't making America Great.

Wagging, Like a Dog!

It is still a little amazing to me that Saudi Arabia, whose defense spending is pretty enormous, managed to have half their petroleum capacity imperiled by a drone strike (which was temporary damage) from either the Houthis or Iran (or on behalf of the Houthis by Iran, or the Houthis with Iran's help--whatever)--because shouldn't they have more hardened defenses around an obvious target like that, given the length of time they have been engaging on war with Yemen? (Or was reporting on this incident a little magnified?)

I don't know. I have a hard time understanding why Saudi Arabia is waging genocide in Yemen and why the US has continued being complicit with that, I only know that Trump used a veto to keep sending weapons to Saudi Arabia-- and the reaction of Donald Trump, on a day when the talk was all about whether he tried to extort a foreign leader into investigating a potential political rival, was to announce that the US was now going to send US military personnel.

Because the oil was hurt, you guys. Thoughts and prayers for the oil.

I'm just saying that the timing is interesting, is all. I'm not suggesting that this president would try to transform the news cycle from a scandal about some violation of campaign finance and abuse of power and the high crime of bribery (which would not be new, in this presidency, am I right?) by trying on the gravitas of being a "war president", because that isn't what Trump is doing, exactly.  I will suggest that Trump is pulled by his need to appeal to his base, which means appearing strong, even if that means strong and wrong, just as much as it means changing the subject. And then there is his unique take on US military power as a protection racket.  Trump has long seen it a waste of US resources that the American military is world cop--and would prefer to see it be more profitably used as "hired muscle"--by preferred customers willing to pay cash.

I think this Iran/Saudi Arabia thing was in play whether or not the whistleblower story became news or not, but the timing of the deployment isn't lost on me. This also scuttles the possibility of Iran nuclear talks, verifying as certain the knowledge that we'd be better off if Trump just stayed with the damn Obama deal. And Trump has demonstrated he can't help but plunge us deeper into every level of the suck--whether in Afghanistan, or anywhere else.

I don't like it. Trump is a man of few tricks (misdirection and frauds--like birtherism and his voter fraud claims), but the press sometimes gives him belly rubs for them. Like a dog! So weird for a man who uses "Like a dog!" in the way he does.

(No insult intended to actual dogs, who deserve better.)

Climate Tuesday: Clean Energy is the Future, Anyway

What outgoing president of a major economic powerhouse nation just wrote an article that provided significant economic justification for pushing ahead with a clean energy agenda? Our outgoing bad-ass intelligent president, Barack Obama, who has tried on the environmental question and I think has done pretty ok. Mostly because his core strategy was making his difference, where he could, last.

And there's only so much a Trump presidency could do, to, for example, bring back coal.  The thing is--I don't understand why people with intimate experience with this industry would want it to be revitalized--let's talk about black lung.  This disease is a way an industry gets profit off of neglecting the safety and health of employees. It's not some romantic cross some blue collar workers have to bear--it's systemic abuse that leaves people thinking getting maimed by their job is part of their right to have a paypacket at all. Add to this a withholding of access to health care, and you have a horrific situation for hard-working Americans.  

Or sometimes people get caved in and blown up. Or their pretty home is razed and poisoned. There's only so much damage a Rex Tillerson, oil exec, could do. Or any other Trump appointee, who prefers an exploitation model of energy extraction and sale. Disregarding workers. And their lives.

Hopefully, the various industries recognize the real future is in renewables and clean fuels. Because without this understanding, real folks will suffer.

Why yes! The Russian Hacking Thing is a BFD!

So, I guess one of the Strangely Blogged style-sheet things is that I try to be consistent--and I've always been on board with of course Russia was behind the hacks of the DNC because OMG! There were MSM reports of spy agency consensus that Russia was behind this thing in July. And there were adequate questions regarding Trump's campaign connections with Russia--yep, in July. We knew this stuff early on, so hearing that there is "high confidence" now regarding Russia being behind the breach only can mean so much.

So what if independent digital security outfits recognized what was going on even earlier? It really isn't for me to analyze the forensic computer stuff because I'm simply not personally equipped and the raw stuff isn't out there, but I think we know why Putin might have been Team Trump. And I think a planned foreign campaign against one of our political candidates should maybe matter. What came out wasn't dezinformatsiya exactly--but it was framed as leaks that could be applied in this way, which RW bloggers and fake news peddlers obligingly did (not that there isn't so much overlap between these groups).

It's disingenuous for the Trump transition team to pretend that there is no validity at all to the claims that Russia tried to meddle in our election process. The claims of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia isn't new, but the connections seem to be growing, not shrinking. It's likely, for example, that Secretary of State pick Rex Tillerson has a pretty strong investment in sanctions against Russia being lifted.

I do understand the reason for the denial that the hack was even Russian--even if I dismissed (which I don't as yet) the possibility that there was Trump campaign/Russian collusion. After all, Donald Trump as president needs to be viewed as legitimate and decidedly so, because he can't possibly be unaware that America is deeply divided. But there is an asterisk here, because he doesn't have as commanding an electoral college vote as he wants to project, and despite what some of his supporters might believe, he did lose the popular vote very badly.  He can pretend that his failure to win the popular vote is due to "illegal votes", but it isn't so. He lost with the majority of voters. He might have won, for example, if you just look at "counties" or "districts"--but that would only make him the steep favorite if cows could vote. And given that only one candidate ever put their name on a line of steaks, the outcome in cow country would be dubious with the bovine electorate factored in.

Now, this whole thing doesn't mean a lot regarding tomorrow's vote of the electors. Just as with the Jill Stein-headed recount efforts, I think some liberals are hoping there can be a do-over of something that went very wrong.  It may be possible that at some later date, impeachment could be a possibility of some of the more dire speculations regarding the relationship between Trump and the hack come out.  But that is a very dumb thing to hope for when the Congress is currently held by Republicans. I don't like VP Mike Pence and his theocratic nonsense being in charge, any more than I like the idea of Rep. Paul "Granny-Starver" Ryan in the WH.

Liberals, there are no do-overs. You fucking lose track of the ball, and we get Trumped. We either sort out how to consistently win down-ticket--get control of state governments that run elections, and kick the can upwards, or just accept that Russia made us a bear's bitch.

If It Was About a Pipeline *You* Didn't Want?

I guess the thing that strikes me as ridiculous about the conflict with the water-protectors who protested against the Dakota Pipeline which was just denied access is that these people were basically talking about what should be allowed in their own backyards. Maybe Speaker of the House Paul Ryan thinks it is a shame that they wanted to keep access to clean water and not to have the pipeline run through land their ancestors were buried in. Maybe, even after his share in the pipeline is sold, Donald Trump still feels that way, too.

But for now, the rights of local people are being respected. And that is, I would think, a good thing. And I don't really think government should muscle in and override their rights, any more than they should take away their right to protest or physically abuse them while they exercise that right. Some people think differently. But I would want them to think about how they would feel about the water their kids drink, or how they would feel about a pipeline running through their parents' graveyard.

It just isn't that more complicated than that. It's about a time and a place, and how these people said this isn't the time and place for this pipeline, right here. It isn't about weirdly hating on energy or business or wanting some special right. It was about their location. Energy companies don't have more of a right to a place because of money. People have rights and among them, the right to petition their government for redress of grievances. And if you find that problematic, you go consult with the founding fathers. See where they are buried, and consider whether a pipeline needs to run through their graves and how you would feel about that.

Climate Sunday: The Big Freaking Deal

I couldn't address a Climate Sunday post this weekend without taking a look at the COP21 Paris agreement, considered the best chance at saving the planet. You can consider me, personally, on board with the idea of all nations being responsible for reducing their carbon emissions and for any assistance wealthier nations can provide to get, and keep, a working array of renewable resources for the energy needs of poorer nations. I'm well-persuaded that the science of anthropogenic climate change is sound, and I recognize that good change does not come about for free. If anything of value is to be achieved, it will have costs. And everyone ought to recognize that not understanding the importance of climate change and the necessity of paying those costs, now, will mean having a higher price to pay in the future.

I like to look long-term. This is because, in temperament if not politics, I am basically conservative. I don't believe in letting bad bets ride. So when someone like Karl Rove scoffs at the COP21 deal, because in 2080 we'll all be dead--I don't know who he is trying to persuade. Rove might be dead by then, but I'll only be 108 years old, and still quite interested in seeing a healthy planet for those babies born in 2016, and their children born in the 2040's and 50's, and their grandkids of the 2070's and so on. Who in the world thinks nothing will matter after 2080?

But then again, we have a lot of short-term thinkers around, and this isn't new. Sen. Jim Inhofe, whose grandbabies once laughed at Al Gore while building igloos (and are probably wearing shorts this fine December weekend), made a statement that reminds us that the US Senate never ratified Kyoto. And even if all other participatory nations to that agreement signed on, besides the US, the emissions of the top economies cancelled out any of the benefits of an other nation's goodwill carbon-sparing.

Climate Sunday: 50th Anniversary Edition

 

 

 

This past week marked the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson receiving an important letter detailing an urgent problem that scientists had been worrying about for some time--global warming.

 

Yes. In 1965, global warming was already a thing. By the '70's, those climate scientists had built some pretty good predictive models.  Why, by the '70's, as I've mentioned before, scientists working for Exxon already understood what their product was likely to do to the environment. (That seems to causing the company a bit of a tiff in NY. As it should, because purposefully misinforming the public to maintain profits when it is a matter of life and death down the line is dastardly.) Even President Nixon, despite his other faults, took the environment seriously. I mark the decline in seriousness regarding the environment from the political right as beginning with Reagan's order to take Carter's solar panels down. From thence, it became a mixed bag leading to a downright environment antipathy by the last Bush Administration--they may have set progress on acting on remediating climate change back in the worst way.

 

Now, it looks like we might be teetering on the threshold of, well, paying a little bit of attention and getting started on talking back to the companies that have been trying to sell us fossils fuel for low prices and at high costs. (Not a bit too soon, I'll add.) Some people have slammed the activism that led to President Obama rejecting Keystone XL pipeline, I think missing the point that that pipeline was just one piece of a broader problem people have with not just climate change, but a sense that they are being screwed over by big companies. How many mine cave-ins, oil rig fires, oils spills, drinking water contaminations, and global climate change-fueled epic weather events do you need before you get mad as hell? Why would folks want this thing potentially oozing into their backyards?

 

This is not to say that retrograde people who don't quite get it aren't going to try to apply their failure to understand the climate change issue to intimidate the people who do in service of the industry that still has money to...donate to political campaigns, I guess? But as people continue to experience weather that reflects the change of actual climate, perhaps this sort of thing will get less popular.

 

Over the last 50 years, certainty regarding what's happening has only increased. That's not a hoax. That's history. And history is what we'll be if we don't catch on.

 



The Keystone Pipeline Has Been Rejected

When TransCanada requested a suspension of the XL pipeline application, I think they forced the White House to go ahead and reject that sonovagun, to environmentalist acclaim.

For some reason, even though this never would have produced many jobs (probably about 35, about the same as a Denny's) or even appreciably affected prices at the gas pump and even though pipelines can be a mess and why in the hell should helping Canada sell their tar sands oil to China be our problem?

Maybe this tiresome anti-environmental GOP fetish is totally dead, now. I dunno. Just, tiny little note to people who think Obama caved to "special interests" in rejecting the pipeline bid--people who care about the planet that they live on are not a "special interest". Oil companies are. If you think people who care about who care about the planet on which they live have a special interest, and don't get that oil companies' interests in getting their way over sooooo much protest is "special", then I am tempted to believe you don't think that much about regular folks, who are interested in clean air, water, and having a livable climate, and believe corps are the only people whose "interests" are important to you.

 And also you probably suck.  Because you, too, need clean air and water and a livable planet, as do your loved ones. But for some reason, you think caring for the planet is "special"--not "essential".

Raif Badawi Has Received the Sakharan Prize

Raif Badawi, the Saudi Arabian blogger who still faces serious injury for the kind of speech I take for granted every day, has been awarded the Sakharan Prize, named for the Russian nuclear physicist who became a human rights activist. If Saudi Arabia, a petrostate on the brink because of lowered oil prices that might not economically be able to survive the next ten years because they can not produce wheat in their climate and they can not eat oil, wanted to show goodwill to the outside world, the kind they don't get from killing Yemeni civilians, why, I think it might be very nice of them to consider pardoning Raif Badawi.

It would be only a start. But it would be a noble start. Continuing to punish Badawi is not a proof of the strength of Saudi Arabia, but of its weakness. They punish bloggers because they are not strong enough to deal with what questions are raised, or what activists might be aroused. Reacting to the individual who points this out and not the questions he raises, is a sure sign of a failure to be communicated to. This should hand SA its Royal Ass eventually. But for now, were they just to let Badawi go, they might at least earn a little good will from one of their sometime allies?

How do they not see this gesture as a positive one? Free Raif! You have nothing to lose but some of your horrible human rights reputation!

Climate Sunday: Don Blankenship Edition

Greetings and Happy Sunday to you all, and thanks for tuning in to my semi-regular environmental musings. This week's round-up is brought to us by Don Blankenship, who was recently told by a judge to shut his flapping yap up about how politically persecuted he was. It might very well be true that under the Obama Administration, investigators spent more time inspecting his mines and pointing out the very tragically wrong things that led to the deaths of miners at his mines. But this might have been for a lot of reasons, such as, the pattern emerging that Blankenship was awful, the Obama Administration being less likely to ignore these kinds of abuses, and, I don't know--the deaths of 29 miners in a preventable accident due to Blankenship's pathological management? (Not a big fan of Blankenship, this blogger right here.)

But this individual's beef with the government over what he considers to have been job-killing regulations versus what appear to have been employee-killing violations, sets the tone for this week's rumination on--what about the fossil fuel industries, anyway? For example, it looks like Exxon, who apparently knew enough about global warming science in the 1970s and 1980s to have considerable private information on it, basically "gamed" the Bush Administration to sow doubt and confusion. (Although don't let the big bad oil company take the total blame for that--the Bush Administration was very willing to be had. I mean, leave it to these pricks to have a "Safe Water Drinking Act" that lets frackers screw up drinking water however they want.)

But this conflict in knowing full well climate change was real, and also working to sow doubt, is pretty unnerving. They could only act like that if profits entirely outweighed any sense that they should be responsible corporate and global citizens, and exposes a real weakness of the capitalist system.

Climate Sunday: Partisan Witch Hunt Edition

 

The GOP-lead (well, kind of, anymore) House of Representatives has been on a bit of a depressing trend that's come to light regarding basically using a branch of the federal government to grind political axes, so, call it "serendipity", but it looks like they're doing that regarding climate change science as well. Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist, is going to get a House going-over for...well...writing a letter.

Yep. Writing a letter. He signed on to a letter requesting that the government investigate, it turns out, fossil fuel companies, to find out what they knew about man-made climate change, and when they knew it. It's come to light that Exxon, for one, has known about man-made climate change for thirty years. It's probably more than just them. (BP, for one, did a weird thing where they dropped denialism as being their bag and took up greenwashing their image, while still be dirty as hell.) So it should seem like a reasonable inquiry. They knew something that impacted billions of people (all the people on this planet) and kept a very tight lid on it to maintain their profits. That's some seriously horrible stuff, right?

Well, if you are a hard-core climate change doubter (which I think is becoming the new standard, since the poor dears fret so at being called denialists--my choice of calling them "feckless gas-holes" was, alas, ignored), like Rep. Lamar Smith, the Republican who chairs the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, what is really awful is being a climate change scientist who also has a political opinion regarding what to do about science change based on one's research. Where in the world would a scientist get the idea that he should have a political opinion--or challenge those precious fossil fuel companies who fund denialism propaganda and political campaigns, like, for example, Lamar Smith's?  Can we think of a better reason than that why Lamar Smith thinks scientists' business is his business?

But let me not beat up on the House GOP denialists--or is that doubters?--alone. The GOP Senate is not without their oddball hearings and ridiculous misinformation. Sen. Ted Cruz, 2016 presidential candidate and possible Speaker of the House contender, is such a showoff of his own ignorance he berated the Sierra Club president in a show hearing with denialism that wasn't even new, un-debunked, high-quality denialism. We already know you aren't Galileo, Senator, your mis-information doesn't need to be as old as him!

This politicization of climate science is so needless though. What if we could come to an agreement that accepting climate change doesn't give you liberal cooties? What a wonderful--and healthier--world that would be!

(UPDATE: Sorry, I had meant to explain my use of the above graph--the Hockey Stick graph--in the context of this post. Well, remember that thing when Climategate happened and all climate science was debunked because there was such a scandal and conservative blogs and publications were spiking the ball left and right like "We got you! We scored the political point, so now the science isn't true!" Right. Well, eight investigations later exonerating the scientists, and climate change is still a thing, that was apparently a monster waste of breath. Because, it turns out, science does not care about your politics.  It's about data. You can't lawsuit and FOIA request it away.)

Climate Sunday: Climate is a Moral Issue

The Pope visited the US, and particularly my own city this weekend, so I am going to frame this post in light of the Pope's visit, and his urgent message, downplayed to the US Congress, but stated a bit more forcefully to the UN--We have got to do something about this climate change.

Marco Rubio, presidential candidate and Catholic, reminds us that the Pope "is not a politician". Bless his heart.

Jeb Bush, presidential candidate and Catholic, advises us that the Pope "is not a scientist".

The Pope is the head of the state called "Vatican City" (can you say that Marco Rubio?--Knew you could!) and represents a religion whose adherents number over a billion. You tell me that guy isn't any kind of  politician, I will laugh at you for a long damn time. The Pope also is qualified to understand science. Actually, notwithstanding the Galileo stuff, the Catholic Church is pretty reality-based regarding science. Teilhard de Chardin and Gregor Mendel were notable religious who advanced the cause of human scientific knowledge. It's not unheard of for the Church to be ahead of the curve--look at all the educational facilities and hospitals the Church has created. They aren't anti-knowledge (says the Catholic-adjacent militant agnostic).

Climate Sunday Bobby Jindal Edition

The Governor of Louisiana, a state which experienced a devastating hurricane ten years ago, rather prefers that climate change not be a feature of how President Barack Obama commemorates the recovery from this event.

I don't invest a lot in whether I'm doing anything Bobby Jindal finds appropriate, so I am going to not only talk about climate change, but name this post in his honor. I'm funny that way. Because, among other wild things, the state of Louisiana is kind of disappearing because of sea level rise.  The state loses as much as 50 square miles a year.

That's something former FEMA Director Michael Brown certainly doesn't think is necessarily real science.  Or rather he prefers not to believe that human activity is exacerbating the effect. But real science finds that sea levels are definitely rising. As for the folks who think global warming isn't happening or that human activity isn't causing it, it turns out they are sciencing badly, and real scientists can't reproduce their stupid data. (Reproducibility is totally a real science metric about whether results of a test are valid. This demonstrates that climate denialism isn't appropriately "skepticism" as much as it is "total fail". )

Just this Friday, Bill Maher hosted Rick Santorum on his HBO show, Real Time.  There was a "he said/he said" moment regarding whether 97% of scientists really did support climate change. Well, some would call it more than 97%.

Climate change is real. We need to ensure our infrastructure can support the worst case scenario (in 2005, for a minute, some observers thought New Orleans dodged a bullet, until the levees burst). We need to mitigate our carbon output. And we need to think about how climate change impacts especially the poor and less-mobile among us. We are foolish not to see this as a problem.