( Tomdispatch.com ) – The depths of depravity into which unvarnished capitalism can plunge mortal souls is incalculable. It should come as no surprise then that oil company executives and the officials of petrostates like Saudi Arabia have so assiduously lied to us about the catastrophic effects of climate change. After all, the executives of tobacco firms have been perfectly content to sell consumers a product long known and virtually guaranteed to cut their lives short, while lying about its harmful effects for decades. Likewise, the courts have now made the pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility for and grasp of the opioid crisis that killed half a million people all too clear.

In both instances, state attorneys-general played an important role in seeking redress. Now, Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, has filed a 135-page lawsuit against five major oil companies — ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP — which could prove an inflection point in the battle against human-caused climate change.

On announcing the lawsuit, Bonta said, “Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change — but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment. Enough is enough.” 

Born in the Philippines to an American father and a Filipina mother, Bonta spent his early years near Keene, California, where the United Farm Workers had established its headquarters. There, both his father Warren and his mother Cynthia helped organize Filipino-American and Mexican-American laborers. Bonta went on to get a Yale law degree and ultimately entered politics, being elected to the California State Assembly in 2012.

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His background clearly impressed upon him the special vulnerability of working-class groups to climate change. “We will meet the moment and fight tirelessly on behalf of all Californians,” he pledged, “in particular those who live in environmental justice communities.”  As he explained in a footnote in his brief for that lawsuit: “’Frontline communities’ are those that are and will continue to be disproportionately impacted by climate change. In many cases, the most harmed are the same communities that have historically experienced racial, social, health, and economic inequities.” 

The destructive impact of human-caused climate change on California has, in fact, unfolded before our eyes. Eleven of the 20 largest California wildfires have taken place since 2018. Unusually frequent, wide-ranging, and ever fiercer wildfires have even chased from their homes some of the Golden State’s most famous celebrities, leaving behind just glowing cinders. The now-seemingly annual rampages of those increasingly massive conflagrations can cause us to forget how remarkable the damage has been in these years.

In 2018, pop singer Miley Cyrus announced that the Malibu home she shared with her then-fiancé Chris Hemsworth had been devoured by flames, writing on social media, “Completely devastated by the fires affecting my community. I am one of the lucky ones. My animals and LOVE OF MY LIFE made it out safely & that’s all that matters right now. My house no longer stands but the memories shared with family & friends stand strong . . . I love you more than ever, Miley.”  That year, Orlando Bloom, Bella Hadid, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, and Gerard Butler suffered similar losses.

Well-heeled celebrities, however, have the resources to get through such crises. Farm laborers who must harvest crops while breathing soot-filled air risk adverse health effects, including respiratory and heart disease. Others have lost their jobs and incomes entirely when wildfires encroached on fields and orchards. Not getting paychecks thanks to raging fires at their worksites can, in turn, cause such workers to miss mortgage payments and lose their homes. And sometimes, of course, their own homes, like those of the stars, have been torched.

Connecting the Dots

In 2021, wildfires almost entirely razed the town of Paradise, California. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg visited the aftermath. On hearing one man’s devastating account of how he and his family barely escaped their fiery, collapsing home, she said, “We see all of these things repeating themselves over and over again. People die, and people suffer from it. But we completely fail to connect the dots.”

Her evident frustration at the time should be considered significantly more consequential than it might seem. A team of Norwegian researchers has found that, of all the emotions provoked by human-caused climate change, the one most associated with activism against it is anger. Anger at politicians or CEOs who have played key roles in enabling the phenomenon that causes such destruction animates many climate protesters. As they suggested, Thunberg’s vivid speeches are but one example of the righteous anger provoked by those who could have but haven’t moved to mitigate the effects of global warming.

For his part, Attorney General Bonta isn’t in any doubt about where to lay the blame. As he put it, “With our lawsuit, California becomes the largest geographic area and the largest economy to take these giant oil companies to court. From extreme heat to drought and water shortages, the climate crisis they have caused is undeniable. It is time they pay to abate the harm they have caused.” By focusing on five major oil companies, he and California Governor Gavin Newsom have given the state’s environmentalists a target for their anger.  

Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island are already pursuing similar legal actions and small wonder why. When it comes to California, for instance, scientists have recorded a fivefold increase in the summer burned areas in forests stretching from the middle of the state north during the past two and a half decades. And that devastatingly large burn area is anything but just the result of cyclical droughts. In fact, researchers demonstrated this summer that almost all of it has been caused by the human production of carbon dioxide through the burning of gasoline, natural gas, and coal. Worse yet, their projections suggest that ever larger and more devastating burn areas will be part of our landscape in the decades to come as humanity pumps out yet more carbon pollution.

The heat and long-term drought that’s gone with it have transformed California’s northern forests into so much tinder.  After its wildfires of 2020, leading climate scientist Michael Mann observed, “These are known as compound drought and heat wave (CDHW) events and refer to situations wherein a region experiences both prolonged hot temperatures and a shortage of water.”  His team predicts that such events will more than double in number and in duration, while quadrupling in intensity, if carbon pollution continues to be produced at its current rate.

Atmospheric Rivers

Worse yet, California now faces a double whammy — not just vastly increased wildfires and drought in some regions but major flooding in others. And in drought-stricken areas, sudden, massive rainfall simply runs off desiccated soil, adding to the risk of overflowing waters.

As it happens, human-made global warming hasn’t just heated up lands across the planet, but the oceans, too. In fact, this summer, ocean water temperatures broke all previous heat records and that also puts more moisture into the atmosphere. Worse yet, climate change has heated the atmosphere itself and warmer air holds more moisture. That change has, in turn, made the “atmospheric rivers” carrying moisture from the tropics to the temperate zone far more destructive.

Not surprisingly, then, on the last day of 2022, 5.5 inches of rain deluged downtown San Francisco, while putting all six lanes of Highway 101 to its south under water. A week later, Governor Newsom watched as sheets of rainfall, driven by 70-mile-an-hour winds, knocked out power to 345,000 people in the state capital, Sacramento.

This summer, the giant State Farm and Allstate insurance companies, ever more aware of the toll climate change was taking on their bottom lines in California, announced that they would no longer accept new customers there. As an explanation, State Farm cited “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.” Take a moment to let that sink in. The situation humanity has created is now so calamitous that insurance companies are no longer willing to take on the once-safe bet that most houses will continue standing unharmed for decades.

If California were an independent country, it would have the fifth-largest economy in the world. As Attorney General Bonta notes, it has the deep pockets to take on the oil companies. And significantly, that state’s government is already among the world’s most forward-looking in combating climate change. In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order requiring that all cars sold in California by 2035 be battery-electric or hybrid vehicles. The plan has spurred similar actions by six other states.

In the past five years, electric vehicles as a percentage of new vehicle registrations in the Golden State have indeed skyrocketed from 2% to 22%. No less impressive, around 60% of the state’s electricity is now generated by low-carbon sources like wind and solar. To smooth out the transitions between solar and wind generation, California has put in 5 gigawatts of battery power, the most of any state, to forestall blackouts and avoid the necessity of using natural gas to fill the gap.

They Lied. They Deceived.

The attorney general’s filing against the oil companies asserts their culpability: “Oil and gas company executives have known for decades that reliance on fossil fuels would cause these catastrophic results, but they suppressed that information from the public and policymakers by actively pushing out disinformation on the topic.” This duplicity, the suit argues, was itself grounds for seeking redress.  “Their deception,” it continues, “caused a delayed societal response to global warming. And their misconduct has resulted in tremendous costs to people, property, and natural resources, which continue to unfold each day.” 

In an interview with KCAL television, Bonta pulled no punches: “They must pay for their own actions… They lied. They deceived. They falsely advertised. They undermined the science and made claims that were counter to the truth. We’re holding them accountable for that.” When challenged by the interviewer, who warned the attorney general that he would need a “smoking gun” showing that the corporations were deceitful, Bonta didn’t hesitate: “We have smoking guns. Multiple. We have one from the 1960s. We have others in the decades that have followed. It is a very clear trend.”

His complaint is, in fact, festooned with such damning pieces of internal evidence, including a 1982 memo by Exxon scientist Roger Cohen, which admitted “a clear scientific consensus” on the expected effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide on the climate and suggested that doubling greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere would result in roughly a 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) average global temperature rise, bringing about “significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere.”  

In 1800, as the industrial revolution began, there were just 282 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Today, in part because of energy industry foot-dragging, there are about 420 ppm of CO2 and we’re speeding toward the 564 ppm that Cohen predicted would radically change our very biosphere. Climate scientist Michael Mann has pointed out in his new book Our Fragile Planet that, during the Pliocene era, 3.5 million years ago, that kind of ramp-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced a tropical world with ocean waters 30 feet higher than they are now.

Despite the warnings of Cohen and others, in 1989, Exxon joined other oil companies in forming the Global Climate Coalition, which combated attempts to reduce fossil-fuel consumption, while assuring journalists and politicians that “the role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood.” Some of those companies like Exxon even funded climate denialism when they knew perfectly well that it was a lie. 

In the 1990s and thereafter, the oil companies, the California lawsuit alleges, went on to use organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council lobbying group to pressure Washington to do nothing about carbon pollution. At the same, they attempted to convince concerned Americans that climate change either wasn’t happening or, if it was, had nothing to do with burning fossil fuels.

In a distinctly overheating world, where heat records of all sorts are now regularly being broken, the denialism of Big Oil and its henchmen, including today most of the Republican Party, is already a crime of the first order.  The California suit is cleverly crafted.  If there is one thing you can’t do in societies like ours, where property rights are so central, it’s damage someone’s property knowingly and under the cover of deception.

The internal memos of scientists that have surfaced in such abundance from the very bowels of the petroleum corporations could be their biggest Achilles heel. They demonstrate that the injuries they have inflicted on the Earth are not simply an unforeseen side effect of their product but, at least in part, the result of a deliberate cover-up.

At last, Greta Thunberg’s hope that someone, especially someone with the power to do something, would finally get mad and connect the dots is being fulfilled. Let’s hope that California succeeds in both setting a meaningful precedent and making those companies pay in a big way, ending impunity for the most dangerous and deceitful assault on our environment in human history.

Copyright 2023 Juan Cole

Featured image: Photo by Ross Stone on Unsplash

Via Tomdispatch.com

He vows to make it easier for oil industry to drill, promises to replace references to “climate change” with “energy dominance”

 

Craig Pittman

 

( Florida Phoenix) – Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I was in high school, I was part of a singing group that traveled around to Panhandle churches and performed religious songs. No, really! I’m not making that up!

No one would have confused me with Andrae Crouch. You could accurately describe my singing style as “monotone baritone.” The director wisely gave me no solos.

Instead, I had a featured spot doing a spoken-word monologue as Judas Iscariot. I counted my 30 pieces of silver and slowly realized what a horrible betrayal I’d carried out. It was very dramatic. The audience usually looked relieved when it was over and the music started back up.

As a result, I have become something of a connoisseur of traitors, turncoats, and sellouts throughout history — Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling, and Robert Hanssen, to name a few. Heck, I even read “The Sellout” by Paul Beatty.

So trust my expertise on this traitorous topic when I tell you that our own governor, Ron “Why Is Trump Beating Me Like I’m a Cheap Rug?” DeSantis just betrayed every Floridian.

He traveled to Texas last week to stand in front of a couple of noisy oil wells and a friendly crowd of oil field workers who were unlikely to boo him like the people in Jacksonville did recently. He was there to issue a clarion call for coping with climate change by … burning more fossil fuels.

No, I am not making that up either.

He actually acknowledged “the climate has clearly changed,” which may mark a first for a politician who’s always insisted he’s “not a global warming person.”

But then he said the way we should deal with it is by burning more of the stuff that’s been making our climate change so radically.

Specifically, he called for power plants to place a greater reliance on natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal or oil but is still a source of bad stuff for the atmosphere.

“It’s … the most practical way to reduce global emissions,” he shouted over the racket of extractive machinery.

Endorsing natural gas as your prescription for climate change is like announcing that instead of driving off a cliff at 90 mph, you’re in favor of driving off that same cliff, but at 60 mph. Same destination, but we don’t get there quiiiite as fast.

This is, of course, contrary to what the climate scientists say.

“Gas is better than coal but we need to get off fossil fuels entirely,” said Harold Wanless, a scientist from the University of Miami who’s been sounding the alarm about sea level rise since 1981.

Natural gas is, at best, a stopgap measure as the world moves to cleaner fuels.

“Burning natural gas still does emit carbon dioxide,” said David Zierden, Florida’s state climatologist. “It’s not a permanent solution.”

But if you’ve watched DeSantis work, you know he pays little attention to what the people who know what they’re talking about might say.

It’s almost as if he believes he was chosen by God to buck the scientists. I keep waiting for him to tell the hurricane prediction folks that he knows more about where the next storm will make landfall than they do, because he’s done his own research.

Of course, by bucking the experts, he’s parroting exactly what the oil companies want him to say — instead of doing what’s best for Florida.

But wait, there’s more!

Maybe you’re thinking this was just a slip, like when another Florida-based presidential candidate said this week that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was president during the Iraq War.

Maybe you think that what DeSantis meant was “use natural gas for now and then move to renewable energy sources like solar and wind.”

I wish that were the case. Unfortunately, as they say in the infomercials: “But wait, there’s MORE!”

As  the Houston Chronicle reported, he promised that if he’s elected president, he would replace the words “climate change” in federal policy documents with the words “energy dominance.”

(Presumably he’d replace the verbs, too. Otherwise, the documents will call for us to try to stop or slow down “energy dominance,” which I think is the opposite of what he’s going for.)

The New York Times reported that our allegedly well-educated chief executive also vowed to “remove subsidies for electric vehicles, take the U.S. out of global climate agreements — including the Paris accords — and cancel net-zero emission promises.”

DeSantis was quick to remind his pro-drilling audience of how he’d pushed through a Florida law that says local and state agencies aren’t allowed to invest in funds that avoid businesses that fuel climate change.  (This in spite of the fact that responsible investing tends to bring higher financial returns over time.)

Ron DeSantis unveils his pro-fossil fuel energy policy in front of noisy oil equipment in Midland, Texas. Screen grab from the Ron DeSantis X account

So it’s clear he was completely serious about calling for more fossil fuel consumption as a way to battle climate change, despite how silly that sounds. It’s like saying you’ll fight a flood by pouring more water on it.

His argument is as paradoxical as the military regulation in “Catch-22.” The rules said the only way a World War II airman could prove he was mentally unfit to fly more bombing missions was to continue flying bombing missions.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” one disgruntled bombardier admitted.

We’re No. 1!

The lectern in front of DeSantis bore a sign that referred to his craziest promise of all: $2 gas by 2025.

“We know that Joe Biden has waged war on domestic energy production,” DeSantis yelled at the oilfield crew. “As president, I will restore America’s energy independence.”

He promised to cut the regulations that are supposed to constrain the oil companies from dangerous drilling practices. You know, the tougher rules that were passed after the BP oil spill smeared nasty globs of oil on the white sandy beaches of the Panhandle. The ones that a certain Palm Beach club owner rolled back when he occupied the Oval Office, and the current occupant recently reinstated.

Yep, DeSantis wants to let oil drilling be sloppy and dangerous again, like it was in 2010. He wants to return to the days when giant international corporations could get a federal permit to drill in the Gulf of Mexico despite submitting paperwork full of erroneous information as a result of playing cut-and-paste with their Alaska permits.

Why would he do such a thing? Because, he says, making it easier to get a permit to drill will immediately lower the price of a gallon of gas to just $2.

There are a couple of problems with DeSantis’ two-buck plan which render it worth less than 2 cents.

One is that the main reason our gas prices are so high right now is because the Russians and Saudis cut the supply, not because of overly strict federal regulations.

The other is that the oil companies WANT the prices high. They’ve been posting record profits. They could charge less if they wanted to, but they don’t.

Remember how Trump rolled back those safety regulations while he was president? The day he left office (unwillingly, of course), the average cost of a gallon of gas was $2.93. That’s nearly a dollar more than DeSantis claims he could achieve using the exact same tactic.

The Chronicle reporter who covered DeSantis’ Texas appearance said in an interview that DeSantis was … oh, let’s be kind and say “misinformed” … about the state of the American oil industry. He depicted it in dire straits when its straits are anything but.

“The number of rigs that are active right now in Texas is almost double what it was when Joe Biden came into office,” Jeremy Wallace, formerly of the Tampa Bay Times, explained to the Texas Standard.  “And the number of jobs and the wages for oil workers in Texas are both up, according to the Texas Oil and Gas Association.”

In fact, the top crude oil producer in the world is us — by which I mean, the United States.  We hit the top spot in 2018 and haven’t fallen from it yet. That’s a string of successes not even Taylor Swift can match. If we wanted to run around the United Nations building in New York chanting “We’re No. 1!” we totally could.

Sounds like we’ve already hit that “energy dominance” goal that DeSantis was promising to achieve in 2025, doesn’t it?

But DeSantis ignores all these facts to push a phony narrative that the poor, beleaguered oil and gas industry is in trouble from Big Bad Biden. That’s why we need hundreds of new wells to pump out a lot more petroleum to “help” us with our carbon emissions.

It’s almost as if he wants to force the climate to change even faster: “C’mon, you darn climate!  Crank up the temperature! We can take it! We’re just that tough! We drink sweat like it’s a fine French wine!”

Except, of course, we don’t.

Soaking in irony

This is why I say DeSantis has betrayed his native state: Florida has been leading the nation in suffering the immediate effects of our alteration of the climate. We need real relief, not this phony baloney that DeSantis has been peddling.

Instead of talking only to oil industry executives and Fox News hosts, he should be talking with scientists like Wanless and Zierden. Then he’d know the sad and scary truth.

We just recorded the hottest January to July ever, followed by the hottest August in our state’s history.

How hot was it? “This year, July was our hottest month ever,” Zierden told me. “The previous record was in June 1998 when we had all those wildfires. Then August came along and crushed the July record.”

The heat’s been hardest on people who work outside — farmworkers, commercial fisherfolk, construction workers, roofers, those kids at Chick-Fil-A who take your order. And it’s been tough on all the poor people who can’t afford air conditioning. I’m assuming DeSantis merely cranked the mansion thermostat down a couple of notches.

But the bad news is where a lot of that heat wound up.

“Ninety percent of the heat is transferred to the oceans, which is what’s causing sea level rise,” Wanless told me, pointing out that heat makes water expand. Within the next two decades, “it’s going to be pretty dramatic. Miami’s already had a foot of sea level rise.”

Our peninsula is so flat that these rising seas lead to greater storm surge and sunny-day flooding. Meanwhile, the hot oceans are fueling more intense hurricanes even as they’re cooking our coral reefs.

Warmer air holds more moisture, leading to “rain-bombs” that inundate cities. Those stinky toxic algae blooms we’ve seen are stoked by warmer temperatures. And mosquito-borne diseases spread by the hordes of skeeters born in all the standing water are becoming more widespread.

In Florida, irony is always around us like the humidity. It’s like you’re soaking in it. Here’s an irony about DeSantis’ promise to lower gas prices: One reason the prices are so high right now is the extreme heat.

“Extreme temperatures along the Gulf Coast have kept refineries from operating at full capacity,” a spokesman for the American Automobile Association told WTVT-TV last month

“Refineries already generate incredible heat while operating,” the station’s report explained. “When outside temperatures exceed 100 degrees, that can cause breakdowns and equipment failures.”

Wow, if only we had a chief executive who cared about Florida more than he cared about racking up an unlikely victory in the Iowa caucuses. Maybe then we’d see some progress toward weaning our state off these atmosphere-damaging fossil fuels.

At one point, in the late 2000s, we did have a governor like that. Charlie Crist, a Republican at the time, signed executive orders requiring more energy-efficient building codes and setting a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2025.

He even persuaded the Legislature to pass a law setting up a cap-and-trade system to limit emissions from power companies and other polluters. It also created a marketplace through which they could buy or trade credits to go over the limit.

Then, in 2011, Rick “I Wear My Navy Hat to Remind You How I Sunk This State” Scott took office as governor. He junked all those far-sighted climate initiatives.

Scott made it clear he didn’t want to hear the words “climate change,” much less do anything about it. For 12 years, we’ve been stuck in this same mode, even as the feds and other states try to fix the problem.

And now all our inaction has caught up to us.

Thirty pieces

Look, let’s be real for a second here.  Right now, DeSantis has as much chance of being elected our next president as I do of winning the next season of “The Voice.”

He’s spent the past five years sucking up to the donors who could finance his dreams of winning reelection and then the White House. That’s what he was really doing when he went to Texas. He was meeting with the money men who could hand over a few dollars to keep his presidential campaign chugging along a little while longer.

As a result, he’s spent all this time repeatedly parroting exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants to hear.

Maybe those pro-drilling talking points have been drilled into him so much that it’s become something he repeats even when he’s alone. Maybe he mutters about fossil fuels like Nick Nolte at the end of “The Prince of Tides” murmuring “Lowenstein, Lowenstein … .”

But in a few months, when he finally pulls the plug on his presidential campaign, he’ll have to return to our hot, sweaty, mosquito-infested state full of flooded streets and toxic algae blooms. He’ll have to face up to his betrayal of the people who looked to him for leadership.

I hope he realizes then that those 30 pieces of silver he collected in Texas for his campaign were far too cheap a price for his integrity.

 

 

 

Craig Pittman

Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of six books. In 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Craig is co-host of the “Welcome to Florida” podcast. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.

 

 

Republished under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 

Via Florida Phoenix

It would take a multi-volume book to detail all the horrible and catastrophic things Murdoch has done to the world. In Informed Comment, which is a sort of sprawling Great American Blog, Murdoch has appeared again and again as a villain, as Ernst Stavro Blofeld repeatedly showed up in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.

Observers have been puzzled over why climate denialism has been particularly virulent in English-speaking countries. Murdoch’s media organizations are a part of the answer. In Australia, where Murdoch has a virtual monopoly on the news industry, he has backed climate denialists for elective office and swayed voters to consider human-made climate change a hoax. Only from about 2021 have the Murdoch outlets backed off complete denialism, choosing instead to encourage a “go-slow” approach (which can be just as bad as denialism). By influencing elites in the UK, Canada, Australia, the US and New Zealand to combat efforts to reduce carbon pollution for the past three decades, Murdoch has helped spew nearly a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is now coming back to haunt us in the form of megastorms, mega-floods, and mega-droughts that do billions of dollars of damage a year. In that regard alone Murdoch is one of the most significant mass murderers in human history.

Murdoch’s response to the dangers of sea level rise, which could amount to six feet in this century? “We should all move a little inland.” (Reported in Informed Comment 2014.) Some 240 million to 400 million people now living along sea coasts will be displaced over the next 80 years, and Murdoch made a little joke of it. You can almost hear him say, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

Murdoch’s billions have been used not just to push climate denialism but to push reality denialism in general. He backed the Iraq War and that backing may help explain why Tony Blair joined in Bush’s quixotic misadventure in Mesopotamia. Murdoch told an Australian outlet as the Iraq War was building, “Bush is acting very morally, very correctly… The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.” He observed at a business conference, like the sociopath he is, ”There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months.”

The war Bush launched against Iraq in 2003 was not really over until at least 2018, and it went on creating collateral damage all that time, i.e., hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed. As for petroleum prices, they were about $36 a barrel when Murdoch made his prediction and they went on up to $140 a barrel in 2008, fluctuating after that.

Hat tip Trading Economics

What brought oil prices down was the 2008 financial crash (to $40 a barrel) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when they really did briefly hit $20 a barrel. Two years later, and despite Iraq’s production of 4.23 million barrels a day, prices were back up to $112 a barrel, and they’re hovering around $90 now.

Murdoch, despite his undeniably mastery of dirty tricks and sharp practices, whereby he has built semi-monopolies, seems actually to know very little about how the world works, being blind to the dangers of climate change and over-estimating the role one country like Iraq could play in a world that produces about 100 million barrels of oil a day globally and in which countries of the global south are increasingly adopting automobile transportation in the place of bicycles and donkey carts.

So maybe Iraq’s oil wasn’t worth all that collateral damage after all.

I pointed in 2011 to News Corp’s involvement in illegally tapping into people’s phone messages and wondered whether Rupert’s media conglomerate is a cult, working by blackmail and intimidation.

I don’t have space to go into Fox’s promotion of white grievance and its racism toward minorities, including Muslims, or its promotion of toxic masculinity and its backlash against gains in women’s rights. I once observed of Roger Ailes’s molestation of his bevy of blonde anchors that they appear to have been not so much hired as trafficked.

Nor can I treat at length here the way Murdoch held his nose and built up Trump, or how his organization is partly to blame for the big lie and the insurrection of January 6. I wish a special counsel would look into that.

The only sliver of good news is that Murdoch’s Fox News has largely discredited itself with anyone under about 70 years old, and its brand has become so toxic that one wonders if it can survive.

News Corp owns Dow Jones & Company, the latter’s Wall Street Journal, News UK (publisher of the Times of London and a raft of scurrilous tabloids), News Corp Australia, Realtor.com and publisher HarperCollins. Most of Murdoch’s film and television properties were spun off in 2013 and purchased by Disney in 2019. The exception was the television news channel, owned by Fox News, of which Murdoch retained control. His plan to merge News Corp and Fox News was foiled by the opposition of News Corp executives who viewed Fox News as a toxic brand that would sully their name.

That’s right, when Murdoch’s media empire was broken up into three in 2013, one of the three successor companies was the skunk at the party. Fox Cable News had become known as a dirty rotten liar of a television channel, with which even Murdoch’s own colleagues feared to be associated.

Their good judgment was borne out last April, when Fox News agreed to pay nearly $800 million to Dominion Voting Systems to avoid a damaging public libel trial. The anchors of Fox Cable News, which is owned by Fox News and ultimately by Murdoch, had repeatedly alleged that Dominion voting machines delivered inaccurate ballot counts, allowing Joe Biden to claim the presidency even though Donald J. Trump had actually won. This rank falsehood did plausible damage to Dominion’s business, and it seems likely that the company would have won at trial and been awarded even greater damages. Smartmatic, another voting machine manufacturer, has launched a similar suit, and Fox turned over thousands of pages of discovery in April.

Murdoch allegedly believed that he could plead the First Amendment, which attests to a dismal level of knowledge about US law. The First Amendment protects individuals from the US government, it doesn’t give people carte blanche to destroy the reputations of others with malicious lies. And while courts seek a high bar for libel cases in the US because of the First Amendment pledge of free speech, unlike in the UK, they haven’t set them aside entirely, and there have been recent landmark libel cases. I’m only hoping that Dominion opened a floodgate, and that further suits against Fox are forthcoming. It is a cancer in the body politic, of deliberate lies, hatemongering and warmongering on behalf of big capital, and we desperately need to be cured of it as a nation.

To quote Bond, “Welcome to hell, Blofeld.”

Reuters says 3 officials told it that there was also a proposal to cut carbon dioxide pollution by 60% by 2035, but that it was shot down by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and India. These are among the four dirtiest countries in the world with regard to carbon pollution, and two of them, Russia and Saudi Arabia, depend on hydrocarbons for much of their gross domestic product.

General goals such as cutting back on coal are useless without specifics.

China, the world’s largest user of coal, says it won’t even stop building new coal plants until 2030 and it isn’t trying to become carbon neutral until 2060. Some 55% of all the coal consumed in the world is consumed by China. The only good thing you can say is that coal use has somewhat leveled off since 2010, as gigawatts of solar and wind were added to the Chinese grid:

H/t Statista.

India’s coal use was up 4% in 2022 over 2021, and its use tripled from 1998 to 2022. That’s not really what you would call, like, cutting back. But if coal use grew more slowly in 2022 than some previous years, that would be enough to let India say it was cutting back.

So the summit statement is meaningless.

As for tripling renewables, that is a low bar for some of these countries. Saudi Arabia appears only to have about 2 gigawatts of renewable energy, though its goal was 25 gigs by 2023. It has done almost nothing compared to a poor country like Morocco, which now gets some 40% of its electricity from renewables. So having 6 gigawatts of renewables by 2030 would be relatively easy for the Kingdom to accomplish, though it isn’t clear that they will do even that.

Russia likewise has almost no renewable energy and only hopes that wind and solar make up 10% of its grid by 2040. So it is easy for Moscow to pledge to do more, since it has done so little, as with Riyadh.

In contrast, China seems on track to produce 1,200 gigawatts of wind and solar by 2025, a year and a half from now, and it will likely reach this milestone 5 years early, since that was the original goal for 2030. Already this year, renewable sources of energy are supplying 50.9% of the country’s electricity, i.e. more than half. It clearly doesn’t need to build any new coal plants at all, but seems dedicated to drawing out coal use as long as possible. It has been suggested to me that President Xi Jinping is afraid of the workers in the coal industry — some 3 million of them.

India is another coal disaster, with some 66 percent of its electricity now being generated that way. It could cut back to “only” 65% and still meet the terms of the vague summit communique. Still, India has increased its non-fossil fuel power capacity by 400% in the past 8 years (counting big hydro and nuclear) and in some recent years (not this one) they have provided over 40% of the country’s electricity. I suppose it isn’t impossible that India could triple its non-fossil fuel power by a factor of 3 in the rest of this decade, given what it did the past 8 years. I mean, if India has a lot of anything, it is sunshine and wind.

So this is why the G20 shouldn’t be a thing. What could be more arbitrary than for countries to claim global influence based merely on their gross domestic product? It should be the United Nations taking these decisions, not the countries in thrall to or identical with Big Oil and Big Coal.

Tampa Democrat Kathy Castor calls the governor ‘a disaster’ on clean energy

( Florida Phoenix ) – Tampa Bay area Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Castor remains livid that Gov. Ron DeSantis turned down $354 million for energy-efficient measures provided through federal legislation signed into law by President Joe Biden.

Among the $511 million in projects that DeSantis vetoed at the end of June was a $5 million line-item provided through the Inflation Reduction Act that would have allowed the state to train staff to administer federal funds totaling $354 million to address energy efficiency in the Sunshine State.

The effect, Castor says, was to deprive Florida of that $354 million.

“I call it a pickpocket,” she said in an interview on WMNF Radio in Tampa on Friday. “Pickpocketing Floridians, making the cost of living more expensive. We’re already paying higher property insurance than anywhere else in the country, higher electric bills. He has been a disaster for clean energy and environment in Florida.”

Environmentalists and climate change activists hailed the Biden administration after the passage of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, specifically for the $369 billion designated for all 50 states to deal with the climate crisis by expanding tax credits for clean energy and electric vehicles, boosting energy efficiency, and reducing air pollution at ports, among its many provisions.

Castor, who from 2019 to earlier this year chaired the first U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, said “the beauty” in the federal legislation was that it provided significant cost savings for consumers and local communities through rebates on purchasing electric appliances, weatherizing their homes, and providing tax credits for people to use rooftop solar.

According to Castor, DeSantis rejected funding that would have allocated $174 million in rebates for energy-efficiency, $173 million for rebates to purchase energy-efficient home appliances, and $7 million for a training program for electrical contractors.

Image by Mircea Ploscar from Pixabay

But those funds won’t be coming to Florida now. Or ever.

“He has been the most dangerous and destructive governor when it comes to clean energy,” she said. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Teddy Roosevelt

DeSantis campaigned as a “Teddy Roosevelt-style Republican” in his bid for the governor’s mansion in 2018, but environmentalists have said that he has not come close to living up to that standard.

The governor has dismissed the danger of climate change even while investing in efforts to address flooding and sea-level rise. Last month he announced $300 million in state funding from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for 71 new resilience and adaptation projects. And he allocated $640 million in last year’s budget for local governments to deal with sea-level rise, storms, and flooding.

On another energy-related front, Castor announced this week that she is co-sponsoring federal legislation to prohibit utility companies from using ratepayer dollars to fund political activities. The bill comes a year after the Tampa Democrat called on the Department of Justice to investigate Florida Power & Light (FPL), the state’s largest utility, over its use of “dark money” in an attempt to sway elections in Florida.

The Orlando Sentinel reported in 2022 that FPL had given more than $10 million to a consulting firm that paid for ads promoting independent “ghost candidates” in three political races in 2020 to help Republicans win those races. One was in Miami-Dade County, where then-Democratic incumbent Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez lost his reelection bid to Republican Ileana Garcia by just 34 votes. The ballot included an independent candidate with the same last name – Alex Rodriguez – who was previously registered as a Republican.

“It was such dirty politics here in Florida for FPL to take money to fund ghost candidates,” Castor said Friday, referring to what happened to Javier Rodriguez. “His flaw, according to FPL, was promoting clean energy and to try to tackle the climate crisis, so they funded a candidate with a similar name to go on the ballot who siphoned off enough votes to defeat JJR,” she said, referring to the former Democrat’s nickname.

The Phoenix reached out to Florida Power & Light for comment but did not get an immediate response.

Similar proposals have been having success at the state level. In June, the Maine Legislature passed a bill prohibiting utilities from recovering contributions or gifts to political candidates, political parties, political or legislative committees, or any committee or organization working to influence referendum petitions or elections. Colorado and Connecticut have passed similar bills this year, according to the Energy and Policy Institute.

Castor has represented most of Hillsborough County in the House of Representatives for the past 17 years. She won her last election by 14 points over Republican James Judge. After redistricting last year, her district now includes much of St. Petersburg in Pinellas County as well.

 

Mitch Perry

Mitch Perry has covered politics and government in Florida for more than two decades. Most recently he is the former politics reporter for Bay News 9. He has also worked at Florida Politics, Creative Loafing and WMNF Radio in Tampa. He was also part of the original staff when the Florida Phoenix was created in 2018.

 

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Florida Phoenix

Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of The Day After about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)

The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.

Nolan’s impetus was rooted in his early exposure to the nuclear disarmament movement in Europe. As he said recently:

“It’s something that’s been on my radar for a number of years. I was a teenager in the ‘80s, the early ‘80s in England. It was the peak of CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Greenham Common [protest]; the threat of nuclear war was when I was 12, 13, 14 — it was the biggest fear we all had. I think I first encountered Oppenheimer in… Sting’s song about the Russians that came out then and talks about Oppenheimer’s ‘deadly toys.’”

A feature film on the genesis of nuclear weapons may not strike you as an obvious candidate for box-office blockbuster status. As Nolan’s teenage son said when his father told him he was thinking about making such a film, “Well, nobody really worries about nuclear weapons anymore. Are people going to be interested in that?” Nolan responded that, given what’s at stake, he worries about complacency and even denial when it comes to the global risks posed by the nuclear arsenals on this planet. “You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict… [and so] accepting, normalizing… the danger.”

These days, unfortunately, you’re talking about anything but just tens of thousands of people dying in a nuclear face-off. A 2022 report by Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan that used roughly 3% of the world’s 12,000-plus nuclear warheads would kill “hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions” of us. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, the study suggests, could kill up to five (yes, five!) billion people within two years, essentially ending life as we know it on this planet in a “nuclear winter.”

Obviously, all too many of us don’t grasp the stakes involved in a nuclear conflict, thanks in part to “psychic numbing,” a concept regularly invoked by Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima in America: A History of Denial (co-authored with Greg Mitchell), among many other books. Lifton describes psychic numbing as “a diminished capacity or inclination to feel” prompted by “the completely unprecedented dimension of this revolution in technological destructiveness.”

Given the Nolan film’s focus on Oppenheimer’s story, some crucial issues related to the world’s nuclear dilemma are either dealt with only briefly or omitted altogether.

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The staggering devastation caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is suggested only indirectly without any striking visual evidence of the devastating human consequences of the use of those two weapons. Also largely ignored are the critical voices who then argued that there was no need to drop a bomb, no less two of them, on a Japan most of whose cities had already been devastated by U.S. fire-bombing to end the war. General (and later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote that when he was told by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the plan to drop atomic bombs on populated areas in Japan, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

The film also fails to address the health impacts of the research, testing, and production of such weaponry, which to this day is still causing disease and death, even without another nuclear weapon ever being used in war. Victims of nuclear weapons development include people who were impacted by the fallout from U.S. nuclear testing in the Western United States and the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific, uranium miners on Navajo lands, and many others. Speaking of the first nuclear test in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which represents that state’s residents who suffered widespread cancers and high rates of infant mortality caused by radiation from that explosion, said “It’s an inconvenient truth… People just don’t want to reflect on the fact that American citizens were bombed at Trinity.”

Another crucially important issue has received almost no attention. Neither the film nor the discussion sparked by it has explored one of the most important reasons for the continued existence of nuclear weapons — the profits it yields the participants in America’s massive nuclear-industrial complex.

Once Oppenheimer and other concerned scientists and policymakers failed to convince the Truman administration to simply close Los Alamos and place nuclear weapons and the materials needed to develop them under international control — the only way, as they saw it, to head off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union — the drive to expand the nuclear weapons complex was on. Research and production of nuclear warheads and nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines quickly became a big business, whose beneficiaries have worked doggedly to limit any efforts at the reduction or elimination of nuclear arms.

The Manhattan Project and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex

The Manhattan Project Oppenheimer directed was one of the largest public works efforts ever undertaken in American history. Though the Oppenheimer film focuses on Los Alamos, it quickly came to include far-flung facilities across the United States. At its peak, the project would employ 130,000 workers — as many as in the entire U.S. auto industry at the time.

According to nuclear expert Stephen Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit, the seminal work on the financing of U.S. nuclear weapons programs, through the end of 1945 the Manhattan Project cost nearly $38 billion in today’s dollars, while helping spawn an enterprise that has since cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable $12 trillion for nuclear weapons and related programs. And the costs never end. The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reports that the U.S. spent $43.7 billion on nuclear weapons last year alone, and a new Congressional Budget Office report suggests that another $756 billion will go into those deadly armaments in the next decade.

Private contractors now run the nuclear warhead complex and build nuclear delivery vehicles. They range from Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known firms like BWX Technologies and Jacobs Engineering, all of which split billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon (for the production of nuclear delivery vehicles) and the Department of Energy (for nuclear warheads). To keep the gravy train running — ideally, in perpetuity — those contractors also spend millions lobbying decision-makers. Even universities have gotten into the act. Both the University of California and Texas A&M are part of the consortium that runs the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.

The American warhead complex is a vast enterprise with major facilities in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. And nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and missiles are produced or based in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota, Montana, Virginia, Washington state, and Wyoming. Add in nuclear subcontractors and most states host at least some nuclear-weapons-related activities.

And such beneficiaries of the nuclear weapons industry are far from silent when it comes to debating the future of nuclear spending and policy-making.

Profiteers of Armageddon: The Nuclear Weapons Lobby

The institutions and companies that build nuclear bombs, missiles, aircraft, and submarines, along with their allies in Congress, have played a disproportionate role in shaping U.S. nuclear policy and spending. They have typically opposed the U.S. ratification of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty; put strict limits on the ability of Congress to reduce either funding for or the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); and pushed for weaponry like a proposed nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile that even the Pentagon hasn’t requested, while funding think tanks that promote an ever more robust nuclear weapons force.

A case in point is the Senate ICBM Coalition (dubbed part of the “Dr. Strangelove Caucus” by Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball and other critics of nuclear arms). The ICBM Coalition consists of senators from states with major ICBM bases or ICBM research, maintenance, and production sites: Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. The sole Democrat in the group, Jon Tester (D-MT), is the chair of the powerful appropriations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he can keep an eye on ICBM spending and advocate for it as needed.

The Senate ICBM Coalition is responsible for numerous measures aimed at protecting both the funding and deployment of such deadly missiles. According to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, they are among “the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president, if warned of a possible nuclear attack on this country, would have just minutes to decide to launch them, risking a nuclear conflict based on a false alarm. That Coalition’s efforts are supplemented by persistent lobbying from a series of local coalitions of business and political leaders in those ICBM states. Most of them work closely with Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the new ICBM, dubbed the Sentinel and expected to cost at least $264 billion to develop, build, and maintain over its life span that is expected to exceed 60 years.

Of course, Northrop Grumman and its 12 major ICBM subcontractors have been busy pushing the Sentinel as well. They spend tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying annually, while employing former members of the government’s nuclear establishment to make their case to Congress and the executive branch. And those are hardly the only organizations or networks devoted to sustaining the nuclear arms race. You would have to include the Air Force Association and the obscurely named Submarine Industrial Base Council, among others.

The biggest point of leverage the nuclear weapons industry and the arms sector more broadly have over Congress is jobs. How strange then that the arms industry has generated diminishing job returns since the end of the Cold War. According to the National Defense Industrial Association, direct employment in the weapons industry has dropped from 3.2 million in the mid-1980s to about 1.1 million today.

Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public health – anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent. Given that the climate crisis is already well underway, such a shift would not only make this country more prosperous but the world safer by slowing the pace of climate-driven catastrophes and offering at least some protection against its worst manifestations.

A New Nuclear Reckoning?

Count on one thing: by itself, a movie focused on the origin of nuclear weapons, no matter how powerful, won’t force a new reckoning with the costs and consequences of America’s continued addiction to them. But a wide variety of peace, arms-control, health, and public-policy-focused groups are already building on the attention garnered by the film to engage in a public education campaign aimed at reviving a movement to control and eventually eliminate the nuclear danger.

Past experience — from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that helped persuade Christopher Nolan to make Oppenheimer to the “Ban the Bomb” and Nuclear Freeze campaigns that stopped above-ground nuclear testing and helped turn President Ronald Reagan around on the nuclear issue — suggests that, given concerted public pressure, progress can be made on reining in the nuclear threat. The public education effort surrounding the Oppenheimer film is being taken up by groups like The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Council for a Livable World that were founded, at least in part, by Manhattan Project scientists who devoted their lives to trying to roll back the nuclear arms race; professional groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility; anti-war groups like Peace Action and Win Without War; the Nobel Peace prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons; nuclear policy groups like Global Zero and the Arms Control Association; advocates for Marshall Islanders, “downwinders,” and other victims of the nuclear complex; and faith-based groups like the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The Native American–led organization Tewa Women United has even created a website, “Oppenheimer — and the Other Side of the Story,” that focuses on “the Indigenous and land-based peoples who were displaced from our homelands, the poisoning and contamination of sacred lands and waters that continues to this day, and the ongoing devastating impact of nuclear colonization on our lives and livelihoods.”

On the global level, the 2021 entry into force of a nuclear ban treaty — officially known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — is a sign of hope, even if the nuclear weapons states have yet to join. The very existence of such a treaty does at least help delegitimize nuclear weaponry. It has even prompted dozens of major financial institutions to stop investing in the nuclear weapons industry, under pressure from campaigns like Don’t Bank on the Bomb.

In truth, the situation couldn’t be simpler: we need to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. Hopefully, Oppenheimer will help prepare the ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning with a frank discussion of what’s now at stake.

Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung

Via Tomdispatch.com

The heat index numbers, which combine the temperature with the humidity reading, are truly horrific, with some towns along the Gulf of Mexico seeing a heat index of 125 F. Scientists have discovered that a temperature of 122°F along with 80% humidity, i.e. a heat index of 160 F is fatal to human beings. A heat index of 125 F. is only very, very dangerous and militates against doing much work outside. Humans cool down by sweating, but that doesn’t work in high heat and humidity, so they can’t get cool and get heat stroke.

A study by Climate Central found that climate change increased the likelihood of the Texas heat wave by a factor of five.

J. David Goodman at the New York Times points out that solar power installations have doubled in Texas since the beginning of the year, and are set to double again by the end of 2023.

(Juan says that this development comes in part from the incentives in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act for renewables and in part from Biden’s decision to lift the bar on importing panels from places like Vietnam that had been put in place under Trump.)

At the moment, solar is generating 15% of the electricity used by Texans. For the year, that percentage is 7% so far, with 31% from wind. Given the heat dome, they are running their air conditioners heavily. But the legacy power plants have sometimes gone off line. A nuclear plant was inoperable for a few days, and then a coal plant went out.

Solar power wanes, of course, in the evening. But luckily, by around 9 pm the wind typically picks up, so wind turbines provide power at night. Even Texas’ energy company, ERCOT admits that battery power is among the means they have to keep the grid stable during this transition.

Tigue also pointed out that much of the slack was immediately made up with battery storage. And what filled up the batteries? Texas’s renewables. Wind/ Water/ Solar/ Battery can provide 100% of our electricity needs now. The problem is that most states haven’t installed enough battery back-up. The Republican refrain that renewables are unreliable is a typical Big Lie. With batteries, they can be quite reliable.

Gov. Greg Abbot, an inveterate liar in the back pocket of Big Carbon, blamed the 2021 energy outages during a cold spell on wind turbines freezing up. Investigations showed that the wind turbines did fine. It was the fossil gas plants that froze up.

Luke Metzger at Environment Texas explains that Republicans in the Texas legislature introduced a raft of bills this spring aiming to slap high extra fees and disincentives on wind and solar energy in the state. Luckily, he says, the worst measures did not get enough votes to pass. This time. One bill centered on building $10 billion worth of new fossil gas plants, which would be much more expensive than solar/ wind/ battery and would also contribute to the global heating that caused the heat dome in the first place.

Burning fossil gas puts carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, into the atmosphere. It prevents the heat of sun rays that strike the earth from easily radiating back out into space at the rate they did before the Industrial Revolution. Unless humanity stops producing CO2 by 2050, there is a danger we will make our climate chaotic and present people in places like Texas with severe challenges.

So the Texas Republicans now want to kill off the only thing that is helping Texans survive this heat dome– renewable energy and battery storage. One question, though, is whether the federal subsidies and the constant fall in price per kilowatt hour of wind and solar will outweigh any advantages the corrupt GOP tries to give fossil gas. Another question is how long Texans will go on putting these clowns into the state legislature, who want to kill us all with their CO2?