Category: Uncategorized

US Taxpayers provide more than twenty billion dollars ($20B) is direct subsidies to the Fossil Fuel Industry year in and year out. That does not include an estimated six trillion ($6T) in indirect subsidies that represent the externalized costs of our use of fossil fuel products. Damage to property, people’s health, and the environment is permitted explicitly or implicitly by our failure to hold the industry accountable.

We may have grown accoustomed to this and accepted it in service of cheap gas, and “disposable” plastic items, but the reality of the impact isn’t mitigated by acceptance.

Renewable energy is competitively handicapped by these direct and indirect subsidies to the detriment of the public good and the wellbeing of all. Shouldn’t they end?

Pennsylvania collects very little when it permits private companies to tap the commonwealth’s fossil fuels. If the well owner goes bankrupt, who pays to close the well?

It must be mighty tempting to those energy moguls to drain away all the liquid assets and then declare bankruptcy.

Nothing good comes of fracking.

There are serious consequences to climate change. Looks like they are finally getting the attention of the financial world.

Wildfires Could Signal Coming Climate Change Financial Crisis

California’s August Complex is now the biggest wildfire event in state history

Legislators are still serving private interests over public well-being. Spotlight PA is accountable high-integrity investigative reporting – I trust them to be honest and forthright. Our public servants, on the other hand, are too vulnerable to political winds, and the blandishments of the fossil energy lobby to be trusted, as these pages amply document. When your paycheck depends on not speaking with candor, nothing good happens.

“After all the evidence was heard … this was [the grand jury’s] conclusion — the giant fracking companies were given free passes by unprepared agencies, and the public was harmed,” said Jacklin Rhoads, a spokesperson for Shapiro.

– Spotlight PA

Damning report on Pa.’s failure to protect residents from fracking unlikely to result in major reform | Spotlight PA

State agencies implicated in the report dismissed it outright, calling the recommendations outdated and ill-informed.

Polluters have been attacking scientists and science for years in much the same ways the tobacco industry did. The adverse health impacts of fossil fuel use are well documented and it’s no surprise that they exacerbate the consequences of COVID-19 infections. Now comes a Harvard study that is further evidence.

Here’s the Harvard paper:

COVID-19 PM2.5

A national study on long-term exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 mortality in the United States

Solar

Solar panels in Germany smashed a record Monday, producing 32,227 megawatts of power and beating the previous record set March 23. Ample sun and a lack of human-created smog enabled solar generation to produce 40 percent of German power Monday compared to 22 percent produced by coal and nuclear facilities. Fully 78 percent of the electrical output in Germany on Monday was renewables.

William Wilkes and Rachel Morison, Bloomberg

In science, processes that feed themselves (are self-sustaining) may be called vicious cycles if there is a destructive result. In earlier posts, I reported on fears that the melting of Arctic ice and permafrost was a vicious cycle. Bad news: it’s happening faster than previously expected.

1,460 billion metric tons of organic carbon

A major new federal assessment of the Arctic region and climate change trends released on Tuesday says the world’s warming temperatures are causing permafrost to melt, which could result in the ground releasing the organic carbon it now stores — about 1,460 to 1,600 billion metric tons worth. Permafrost covers 24 percent of the land in the Northern Hemisphere, including huge swaths of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland. The Washington Post reports that “warming temperatures allow microbes within the soil to convert permafrost carbon into the greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide and methane — which can be released into the air and accelerate warming.” [The Washington Post via 538]

Including what you do…

With the climate crisis being protested internationally by our children and 10,000 wells already fracked, the commerce committee is considering making it easy to do more. HB1102 is intended to pave the way. Read more here:
https://www.delawareriverkeeper.org/node/6121