CLIMATE

THE CLIMATE - Several major oil companies, including BP and Shell, periodically publish scenarios forecasting the future of the energy sector.

CLIMATE WATCH - The climate emergency intensifies daily as the planet warms.

CLIMATE POLITICS - Assuming that the Democratic majority in the House passes the massive climate bill this week, the next round for federal climate action will come when Congress returns after its August recess, and it will center on something euphemistically called ‘permitting reform.’

CLIMATE WATCH - Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead is dangerously close to dead pool status for the first time since construction in the mid 1930s.

CLIMATE WATCH - Our planet is burning up – at least that is what it seems.

OIL INDUSTRY WATCH - Oil giant Shell has just posted record profits for a second consecutive quarter, smashing its previous record from earlier this year.

GREENFLATION - Global policy and politics, particularly in the high-income world, have been obsessed with dreams of a green economy.

CLIMATE & WAR - It may seem hard to believe, but only 15 years ago many of us were talking confidently about “peak oil” — the moment of maximum global oil output after which, with world reserves dwindling, its use would begin an irreversible decline.

CLIMATE CRISIS - The last time prices rose this fast was 41 years ago.

CLIMATE WATCH - As the UK suffered its hottest-ever temperatures only recently, Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, interviewed Britain’s erudite environmental journalist George Monbiot July 21, 2022 about his most recent article in The Guardian: 

CA OIL PRODUCTION - A bill that has quietly slipped through the legislature purports to serve a sensible goal — increase transparency on emissions data for the transportation of oil imported to California.

CLIMATE WATCH - The Independent reported this week on a massive ice melt in Greenland, with on the order of 6 billion tons of ice lost in three days.

CLIMATE WATCH - Climate scientists have long warned of the impending crises as human pollutants create an ever-warming planet.

ENVIRONMENT - Devil Incarnate.  Certain things we can stipulate:

ECOSYSTEM - “With 35% loss globally since 1970, wetlands are our most threatened ecosystem, disappearing three times faster than forests.

FOSSIL FUEL ADDICTION - Civilization has benefited from more than 6,000 products made from the oil derivatives manufactured out of raw crude oil at refineries.

THE ENVIRONMENT - Do you want to develop the superpower of seeing decades, even centuries, into the future?

CLIMATE WATCH - Deadly fires, persistent drought, extreme floods and lost homes are part of the California Legislature’s stark forecast for the effects of climate change.

CLIMATE WATCH - The canary in the coal mine is dead. He died of heat prostration.

CLIMATE WATCH - It’s entirely possible that doomsayers of the world, though widely ridiculed, could be on target about the prospects for global societal collapse.

CLIMATE WATCH - California’s once-abundant salmon runs are on the verge of collapse.

EPA WATCH - This essay was written before I got word that:(a) hundreds of women and others were surrounded by Capital Police and facing arrest in militant protests on behalf of recently stripped abortion rights outside the illegitimate Christian Fascist United States Supreme Court on the morning of Thursday, June 30, 2022;

CLIMATE WATCH - America loves its military. It should, because it’s the most expensive defense force of all time.

CA SENATE BILL 54 - The legislative path to reducing plastic waste in California became significantly clearer on Tuesday when the Assembly Natural Resources Committee voted 9-0 to approve a bill that targets the production of single-use plastic packaging and foodware in the state over the next decade.

CLIMATE WATCH - Last year, worldwide energy-related CO2 topped 36B tons. That’s a new world record. 

FOSSIL FUELS - Mother Earth’s affair with coal goes back in time to when swampy forests predominated the planet 360 to 299 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period of the late Paleozoic Era.

THE ENVIRONMENT - Nothing so illustrates the mindset of green politics, particularly in California, as the word “natural,” which is taken to mean unspoiled, pure, and better than the workings of man.

CLIMATE WATCH - Humans have a tendency to believe everything will be pretty much the same in the future as it has been in the past.

CLIMATE WATCH - The United States is moving fast on climate change—in the wrong direction.

WILDFIRES - The Fresno Bee’s Editorial Board has gone on record opposing the lawsuit, by the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute, against a huge commercial logging project in Yosemite National Park.