Running, running, running
"this is just not a safe event for anybody"
PRESENTED BY MOLLIE MATCHES
The oil and gas industry has delivered an average of $2.8 billion a day in pure profit for the last 50 years, a new report from Aviel āthe Milkmanā Verbruggen finds. He tells the Guardian:
āYou can buy every politician, every system with all this money, and I think this happened. It protects [producers] from political interference that may limit their activities.ā
At noon today the Climate Clock in New York City ticked down to six years and counting. Speaking of which, the Boston triathlon scheduled for this weekend has been canceled and the NYC triathlon halved due to extreme heat. Running out of time indeed.
TICK TICK BOOM: A drought in Italyās risotto heartland is killing the rice. The amount of Greenland ice that melted last weekend could cover West Virginia in a foot of water. The taps have run dry in Monterrey, Mexico. Chinese paddlefish and wild Yangtze sturgeon are extinct. Across Australia, dead frogs are turning up in the thousands. The current heat wave has killed more than 2,000 people in Spain and Portugal.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature has declared the monarch butterfly endangered, a collapse caused primarily by fossil-fueled global warming, habitat loss, and Monsantoās wildly profitable pesticide glysophate, brand-name Roundup.
In 2020, the Trump administration was forced by a lawsuit to admit the butterfly should be placed on the endangered species list, but Trumpās U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Aurelia āPoison Jennyā Skipwith refused to add it and many other disappearing birds and butterflies. Skipwith previously worked for Monsanto and is now on the board of coal company Ramaco Resources.
The monarch butterfly has been placed on the FWS Domestic Listing Workplan for review in fiscal year 2024, behind 110 other species being driven to extinction. The Foreign Species Workplan is similarly grim.
The current director, Martha āGrizzlyā Williams, was only confirmed this February after Biden dawdled on her nomination until October. She requested an increase of $326 million for her agencyās budget to help deal with the backlog. The Democrat-run House felt the need to pinch pennies after voting to give the Department of Defense $839,300 millionāabout $37,000 million more than Biden requestedāand authorized only a $230 million increase. The funding bill now goes to the U.S. Senate with a September 30 deadline for passage.
Big Oil is very worried that the Biden administration might crack down on their out-of-control pollution of the Permian Basin in Texas, saying that limits on the deadly smog their fracking operations are generating might hamper production.
Familias Unidas del Chamizal, the Sierra Club, and the City of Sunland Park have been suing for years to compel the EPA to regulate El Pasoās smog, caused by āa dramatic increase in emissions from oil and gas operations in the Permian Basin.ā
The oil industryās complaints are so weird, because Iāve been reading in the Axios and Politico daily climate newsletters PRESENTED BY Enbridge and the American Petroleum Institute that the industry is āintegrating sustainability across our businesses.ā Is it weirder than a tardigrade frolicking with a dachsund? You decide.
While upending climate legislation, Joe āMaserati Lucyā Manchin and his wife Gayle directed over $15 million in federal funding to protected wetlands where the couple owns property, Daniel āPoodle Danā Boguslaw reports.
Yesterday, Manchin finally held a confirmation vote in his committee for Laura āSir Danielā Daniel-Davis, Bidenās nominee to be assistant secretary of the Interior for land and minerals management. The vote split 10-10 on partisan lines, which allows the full Senate to take up the nomination.
āIMPACT YOU CAN SEEā: Achieving greater heights of satire than Bruce āSilverā Sterling could ever hope to reach, LandLife, a tech-buzzword-based carbon-offset company, keeps setting devastating wildfires in its efforts to plant trees.
In other tech news, Pat āDiamond Patā Garofalo reports that the New York Power Authority is refusing to reveal how big a discount it handed to Amazon for installing a distribution center in Niagara, New Yorkāand is even refusing to admit the existence of such a deal.
NOW THATāS WHAT I CALL ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE: āThe city of Chicago is violating the civil rights of its residents by relocating polluting businesses from white communities into Black and Latino areas that already are overwhelmed with environmental and health issues, federal officials have found after a nearly two-year investigation.ā
Congraulations are in order for Jeff āRock & Rollā Marootian. The White House has nominated this sustainable transportation expert to be Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Marootian has been working in the White House in charge of hiring climate personnel.
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