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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 12:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, if we had listened to Jimmy Carter...Republicans would have had far less campaign contributions.

Quote:
The American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying group for the U.S. oil industry, intends to endorse setting a price on carbon emissions as "as the primary government climate policy instrument to reduce CO2 emissions," according to a draft statement reviewed by a media outlet. API's proposed statement, which is cued up for discussion by the firm's executive committee this week, does not endorse any specific plan but generally backs the policy as an option that would "lead to the most economic paths to achieve the ambitions of the Paris Agreement." (The Wall Street Journal)
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 12:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

2 down, 65,499,998 to go. Better pick faster.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 12:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sadly, some folks will never get the picture because willful ignorance gets in the way.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

isobars wrote:
2 down, 65,499,998 to go. Better pick faster.


Ignorance or dementia? What we have here is a failure to communicate.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Mar 07, 2021 11:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It has always been a mystery to me how people who recreate on the water can be absolutely blase about the damage done by ignoring climate change.

Quote:

Tara Duggan
March 5, 2021
Updated: March 6, 2021 2:36 p.m.

The kelp forest that only eight years ago formed a leafy ocean canopy along the Northern California coast has almost completely disappeared, and scientists who study kelp and the species that depend on it are worried about its inability to bounce back.

A new study from UC Santa Cruz found that the kelp forest on the Sonoma and Mendocino coast has declined by an average of 95% since 2013. It analyzed satellite imagery going back to 1985 to investigate how a series of factors led to the kelp forest’s abrupt decline, including an explosion in the population of purple sea urchin, which eats it, and two marine heat waves. The research shows the unprecedented destruction was related to unusual ocean warming and that the kelp forest likely won’t recover any time soon, partly because removing the urchins is so difficult.


“They can actually survive under starvation conditions,” said Meredith McPherson, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz’s Ocean Sciences department and coauthor of the study. “The impact has been that basically there is no kelp forest at all left, really.”

Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) usually thrives in the rocky coastal zones of Sonoma and Mendocino counties and creates a habitat for many types of fish and invertebrates, including abalone, sea urchin, jellyfish and sea snails. Its disappearance also has had impacts on local tourism and other businesses — the abalone fishery closed to recreational divers in 2018, and Mendocino County’s commercial red sea urchin fishery is almost completely shut down.

The two warm water events that helped cause the kelp forest’s decline include an El Niño and what was known as warm water “blob” that together lasted from 2014 to 2016. Around the same time, a wasting disease struck the sunflower sea star population, leaving the purple urchin without a predator.

Those urchins quickly took over, eating the remaining kelp and starving off two other species popular with divers and sushi lovers — red abalone and red urchin (purple urchin is not as commercially viable). What is left are called urchin barrens, rocky areas completely covered with the spiky purple invertebrates over hundreds of kilometers of the North Coast.

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boggsman1



Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9118
Location: at a computer

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2021 2:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mac wrote:
It has always been a mystery to me how people who recreate on the water can be absolutely blase about the damage done by ignoring climate change.

Quote:

Tara Duggan
March 5, 2021
Updated: March 6, 2021 2:36 p.m.

The kelp forest that only eight years ago formed a leafy ocean canopy along the Northern California coast has almost completely disappeared, and scientists who study kelp and the species that depend on it are worried about its inability to bounce back.

A new study from UC Santa Cruz found that the kelp forest on the Sonoma and Mendocino coast has declined by an average of 95% since 2013. It analyzed satellite imagery going back to 1985 to investigate how a series of factors led to the kelp forest’s abrupt decline, including an explosion in the population of purple sea urchin, which eats it, and two marine heat waves. The research shows the unprecedented destruction was related to unusual ocean warming and that the kelp forest likely won’t recover any time soon, partly because removing the urchins is so difficult.


“They can actually survive under starvation conditions,” said Meredith McPherson, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz’s Ocean Sciences department and coauthor of the study. “The impact has been that basically there is no kelp forest at all left, really.”

Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) usually thrives in the rocky coastal zones of Sonoma and Mendocino counties and creates a habitat for many types of fish and invertebrates, including abalone, sea urchin, jellyfish and sea snails. Its disappearance also has had impacts on local tourism and other businesses — the abalone fishery closed to recreational divers in 2018, and Mendocino County’s commercial red sea urchin fishery is almost completely shut down.

The two warm water events that helped cause the kelp forest’s decline include an El Niño and what was known as warm water “blob” that together lasted from 2014 to 2016. Around the same time, a wasting disease struck the sunflower sea star population, leaving the purple urchin without a predator.

Those urchins quickly took over, eating the remaining kelp and starving off two other species popular with divers and sushi lovers — red abalone and red urchin (purple urchin is not as commercially viable). What is left are called urchin barrens, rocky areas completely covered with the spiky purple invertebrates over hundreds of kilometers of the North Coast.



Sadly...crushing the abalone population. The Coast has become a much different place in the past 20 years. Upwelling, and brisk Spring winds have diminshed, kelp is disappearing and the un-edible purple urchin has moved in.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Mar 12, 2021 8:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The West Coast had a period where sea level was rising more slowly than most of the world. Water was clustered in the southwest Pacific. No longer. Since 2010 sea level has been rising more rapidly. Something you won’t read in a Murdoch paper, or in an Exxon newsletter, or hear on Fox. https://sealevel.nasa.gov/news/200/changing-pacific-conditions-raise-sea-level-along-us-west-coast
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Mon Mar 15, 2021 8:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

And big carbon cheats as well as lies.

Quote:
The U.S. Government Accountability Office has launched an investigation into the refined coal tax credit program that generates at least $1 billion per year for the industry amid evidence that the program meant to reduce smokestack pollution has actually resulted in more smog at power plants using the fuel, according to GAO analysts. The probe could inform whether lawmakers vote to renew the subsidy, which is set to expire at the end of 2021. (Reuters)
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Tue Mar 16, 2021 1:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

More cheating from big coal:

Quote:


By Ken Ward Jr.,
ProPublica

MARCH 15, 2021
The richest person in West Virginia, who is also the state’s governor, owns coal companies that routinely violate environmental laws. Latest filings say the companies owe over $3 million for not complying with a major water pollution settlement.

This story was co-published with Mountain State Spotlight, a new nonprofit newsroom covering West Virginia.

The federal government is seeking to collect nearly $3.2 million in fines from coal companies owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice after the firms violated the terms of a major water pollution settlement, according to documents filed Thursday in federal court.

U.S. Department of Justice attorneys said in their filing that Southern Coal Corp. and two related companies failed to renew required water pollution permits, leading to unauthorized discharges at three mining sites in Tennessee and one in Alabama. Those permits are required so regulators can limit the runoff of everything from mud to toxic metals from coal operations.

The companies’ actions triggered fines under the terms of a 2016 settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency. As part of the deal, the governor’s companies had agreed to resolve more than 23,000 water pollution violations by paying a $900,000 fine, spending millions of dollars on new pollution controls, and covering automatic penalty amounts — known as “stipulated penalties” — for any future violations.

The DOJ’s new court filing indicated Justice’s companies have so far paid nearly $2.9 million in stipulated penalties, but the firms have repeatedly failed to honor the other terms of the settlement, either delivering late or not at all on site improvements and fines, continuing what federal attorneys called a “long history” of environmental violations.

A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment beyond the Thursday court filing.

Representatives for Justice’s companies and the governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The new court filing, in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, comes three months after another one of Justice’s companies reached a separate pollution settlement with environmental groups, which sued over excess discharges of selenium, a mining byproduct that can be toxic to fish, at a strip mine in southern West Virginia.

In that deal, Bluestone Coal Corp. paid a federal fine of $30,000 and contributed $270,000 to a conservation group, settling a case brought by the Sierra Club and other citizen groups. The maximum federal penalty for Bluestone Coal could have been nearly $170 million.

Justice, a billionaire listed by Forbes as the richest person in the state, owns a vast empire of businesses, including coal mines, resort hotels and agricultural interests, many of them regulated by the state agencies that report to him. While Justice’s adult children have day-to-day control over the family’s business operations, the governor has continued to guide the empire.

Last year, an investigation by ProPublica found that, over the last three decades, the governor’s companies have accumulated more than $140 million in judgments and settlements in cases brought by vendors and other businesses and government entities over unpaid bills. (The governor and his representatives say that his companies always eventually pay their bills.) Many of the cases involve Justice’s mining companies.


Last spring, about two dozen of those mining companies reached a deal with the DOJ to pay more than $5 million in delinquent mine safety penalties, some of them dating back more than five years.

The 2016 water pollution settlement at issue in this week’s filing was announced just weeks before that year’s general election, in which Justice, then a Democrat, won the governor’s race. Last year, Justice, now a Republican, was reelected to another four-year term.

On Thursday, the federal government asked U.S. District Judge Glen Conrad to order Justice’s companies to stop the unpermitted discharges and to pay the outstanding fines. Attorneys said they have been seeking compliance since September 2020.

As part of the 2016 settlement, the federal government took the unusual step of requiring Justice’s companies to put up $4.5 million, in the form of a bank line of credit, that the DOJ could access so it could pay to have mine cleanup work done if the governor’s companies failed to complete it. In December 2020, with promised work at mine sites in Tennessee unfinished, the U.S. withdrew $1.5 million from that account.

A lawyer for the companies objected to the amount of the government’s withdrawal and asked that the matter be taken up through a dispute resolution process spelled out in the settlement.

Ken Ward, Jr. is a reporter for ProPublica.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17742
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Wed Mar 17, 2021 5:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

More energy company corruption:

Quote:
FirstEnergy Corp.’s board of directors has terminated CEO Charles Jones and two other senior executives, saying in a Thursday statement that an internal review committee determined the three “violated certain FirstEnergy policies and its code of conduct.”

The move comes as the Ohio utility continues to face intense scrutiny over its links to a federal corruption and racketeering investigation tied to last year’s passage of House Bill 6. The law directs more than $1 billion in state subsidies to nuclear power plants owned by former FirstEnergy subsidiary FirstEnergy Solutions.

HB 6, passed last year by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature, provides ratepayer subsidies to support Energy Harbor’s Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear power plants
, which the company had threatened to close if state support for their continued operation failed to materialize. FirstEnergy Solutions filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2018 and emerged from bankruptcy this February under the new name Energy Harbor.

In July, Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and four associates were arrested on federal charges of conspiring to direct $61 million toward efforts first to pass the law and then to defend it against a popular referendum to overturn it. Earlier this week, two of those associates pleaded guilty to a single count of racketeering conspiracy charges in exchange for an agreement to cooperate with federal prosecutors in the case.
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