[✔️] February 13, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*February  13, 2022*/

[ Greenhouse gas emissions ]
*US judge strikes down Biden climate damage cost estimate*
A federal judge on Friday blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to 
put greater emphasis on the potential damage from greenhouse gas 
emissions in the federal rulemaking process
- -
U.S. District Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana 
sided with Republican attorneys general from energy producing states who 
said the administration's action to raise the cost estimate of carbon 
emissions threatened to drive up energy costs while decreasing state 
revenues from energy production...
- -
Known as the social cost of carbon, the damage figure uses economic 
models to capture impacts from rising sea levels, recurring droughts and 
other consequences of climate change. The $51 estimate was first 
established in 2016 and used to justify major rules such as the Clean 
Power Plan — former President Barack Obama's signature effort to address 
climate change by tightening emissions standards from coal-fired power 
plants — and separate rules imposing tougher vehicle emission standards.

The Supreme Court blocked the Clean Power Plan before it ever took 
effect, and a more lenient rule imposed by the Trump administration was 
later thrown out by a federal appeals court.

The carbon cost estimate had not yet been used very much under Biden, 
but is being considered in a pending environmental review of oil and gas 
lease sales in western states.

In Friday's ruling, Cain wrote that using the climate damage figure in 
oil and gas lease reviews would “artificially increase the cost 
estimates of lease sales" and cause direct harm to energy producing states.

Economist Michael Greenstone, who helped establish the social cost of 
carbon while working in the Obama administration, said if the ruling 
stands, it would signal the U.S. is again unwilling to confront climate 
change.

“The social cost of carbon guides the stringency of climate policy,” 
said the University of Chicago professor. “Setting it to near-zero Trump 
administration levels effectively removes all the teeth from climate 
regulations.”...
- -
Republican attorneys general led by Louisiana's Jeff Landry said the 
Biden administration's revival of the higher estimate was illegal and 
exceeded its authority by basing the figure on global considerations. 
The other states whose officials sued are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, 
Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Landry's office issued a statement calling Cain’s ruling “a major win 
for nearly every aspect of Louisiana’s economy and culture.”

“Biden’s executive order was an attempt by the government to take over 
and tax the people based on winners and losers chosen by the 
government,” the statement said.

The White House referred questions to the Justice Department, which 
declined to comment.

Federal officials began developing climate damage cost estimates more 
than a decade ago after environmentalists successfully sued the 
government for not taking greenhouse gas emissions into account when 
setting vehicle mileage standards, said Max Sarinsky, a professor at the 
New York University School of Law.

Not fully accounting for carbon damages would skew any cost-benefit 
analysis of a proposed rule in favor of industry, he said, adding that 
the social cost of carbon had been “instrumental” in allowing agencies 
to accurately judge how their rules affect the climate.

“Without a proper valuation of climate impact, it would complicate 
agencies’ good faith efforts to make reasoned conclusions,” Sarinsky said.

A federal judge in Missouri last year had sided with the administration 
in a similar challenge from another group of Republican states. In that 
case, the judge said the Republicans lacked standing to bring their 
lawsuit because they had yet to suffer any harm under Biden’s order.

Friday's ruling by Cain, a Trump appointee, follows a ruling by another 
Louisiana judge last summer that struck down a separate Biden attempt to 
address greenhouse gas emissions by suspending new oil and gas leases on 
federal lands and water. The judge in that case, U.S. District Judge 
Terry Doughty, is also a Trump appointee.

In a sign of the shifting politics on the issue, a federal judge in 
Washington rejected a lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico conducted largely 
in response to Doughty's ruling.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee, threw out the 
lease sale, saying the administration did not adequately take into 
account its effect on greenhouse gas emissions...
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/us-judge-strikes-biden-climate-damage-cost-estimate-82833167


/[ Democracy Now - interviews  "Don't Look Up/" ]
*"Don't Look Up": David Sirota on His Oscar Nod for Writing Blockbuster 
Climate Crisis & Media *Satire
Feb 9, 2022
Democracy Now!
We speak to longtime progressive journalist and 2020 Bernie Sanders 
adviser David Sirota, who was just nominated for an Academy Award for 
co-writing the screenplay of the hit Netflix movie "Don't Look Up" along 
with the film's director, Adam McKay. The satire of the fight to have 
climate change acknowledged, let alone acted upon by global leaders, 
follows the plight of astronomy professor Dr. Randall Mindy (played by 
Leonardo DiCaprio) and his graduate student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer 
Lawrence) as they fail to warn the planet of an impending comet that 
threatens to wipe out human existence. The film shows audiences "how 
ridiculous and destructive our world has become when it comes to dealing 
constructively with science," says Sirota. If corporate media tends to 
make light of serious issues, the film raises the
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY9gRx-gVvQ



/[  One example of a disinformation skirmish - George Mason University 
has a history of controversial interaction with fossil fuel industries 
and policy  --  Koch has funded Mercatus Center at George Mason 
University.]/
*You've Seen, Or Heard About, The Movie "Don't Look Up." Now Meet Our 
Region's Real-Life Superstar Climate Warrior: Edward Maibach.*
Edward Maibach has dedicated his life to constantly delivering urgently 
bad news.
- -
*Ed Maibach Studies How To Talk About Climate Change–And Gets Death 
Threats For His Work*
You’ve seen, or heard about, the movie “Don’t Look Up.” Now meet our 
region’s real-life superstar climate warrior: Edward Maibach.
By Kelly Kendall  - -Feb 11, 2022
Edward Maibach has dedicated his life to constantly delivering urgently 
bad news. As in, 
the-Earth-will-perish-if-we-don’t-change-our-ways-as-a-society kind of news.
Unfortunately for Maibach, 63, modern-day America hasn’t totally evolved 
beyond ancient Greece when it comes to killing the messenger. He’s 
gotten enough implied death threats from people who disagree with him 
that he doesn’t like to reveal where he lives. And the exact location of 
the institute he founded at George Mason University’s Fairfax campus, 
the Center for Climate Change Communication, is also generally kept mum.
But nasty online comments, emails, and the occasional vitriolic 
voicemail are all in a day’s work for the man who is arguably the 
world’s leading climate communications scientist. Maibach is not trained 
as a climate change expert himself—instead, he studies their work and 
then figures out the best way to translate it to the public. He’s a 
Stanford-educated social scientist with an academic background in public 
health. “And in my view,” he says, “climate change is the most important 
public health challenge that human civilization faces.”

Maibach’s efforts landed him in the No. 7 spot on the first-ever Reuters 
Hot List last year, a ranking of the 1,000 “top climate scientists” in 
the world. It’s a roster of the most influential names in the field, 
ranked partly by the number of academic papers they write and partly by 
how often those papers get mentioned in the press, social media, policy 
papers, and other outlets...
- -
Even Maibach has fallen prey, he says. While working at Porter Novelli 
on public health campaigns, he had colleagues who labored on behalf of 
the fossil fuel industry. “I know how effective their work was, because 
I still find the ideas that their marketing planted in my brain 20-some 
years later,” he says. “And it’s hard work for us to recognize beliefs 
that we hold are not true.”

But he’s heartened that most of us are paying attention to the data.

“We are blessed to live in a community that has so many assets, both 
natural and human,” says Maibach. “We went from a state that was sort of 
in, you know, the back of the pack, to being a state that has 
leapfrogged way up to the front of the pack. We’re right up there with 
Maryland and California and a couple of other states now as really 
recognizing the nature of the challenges of climate change and starting 
to take the actions that are necessary for us to really do our part and 
enjoy all of the benefits.”
If Maibach sounds unduly optimistic, well, that’s good for the cause.

“This notion of doom is definitely gaining traction, including among 
some people in the field, but it’s really unhelpful,” he says. “And I’ll 
tell you why: because research shows the more hopeful you are, the more 
likely you are to actually be taking action.”
https://northernvirginiamag.com/culture/culture-features/2022/02/11/edward-maibach/ 


- -

/[ DeSmogBlog has a respectable database of misinformation sources ] /
*How Charles Koch Is Buying Credibility With Academic Investments *
Sep 12, 2020
In 1996, Richard Fink, an executive at Koch Industries and a top advisor 
to Charles Koch, outlined a three-tiered strategy for getting the 
petrochemical industrialist’s free-market ideas out into the world: 
through academia, think tanks, and activists’ organizations. Fink 
described the first tier of this “structure of social change” strategy 
as “investment in intellectual raw materials” and the “exploration and 
production of abstract concepts and theories” that academia would develop.

Nearly two and a half decades later, Koch influence in the academic 
sphere is far ranging. Koch money funds individual courses, 
professorships, fellowships, and even energy research and policy 
programs, like the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the 
Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University. These 
centers represent significant investments in the “intellectual raw 
materials” of free-market advocacy.

According to Samantha Parsons of UnKoch My Campus, a group working to 
remove the Koch influence in higher education, there are at least 40 
centers at prominent American colleges and universities that are funded 
directly by the Koch donor network. Three of the most prominent examples 
are described below.

*George Mason University: The Epicenter of Koch Academic Influence*
Billionaire Charles Koch has focused more resources on George Mason 
University (GMU) than any other school, and the relationship goes back 
decades. As far back as 1990, entities controlled by Charles and David 
Koch were given posts on a committee to choose candidates for a 
professorial position. An analysis of tax records by the Associated 
Press discovered that between 2011 and 2014, the Charles Koch Foundation 
gave $48 million to GMU, and then a subsequent $10 million donation in 
2016 to rename their law school after conservative Supreme Court justice 
Antonin Scalia...
https://www.desmog.com/2020/09/12/charles-koch-academic-george-mason-utah-state-university/


/[  How does one know what chemicals will do?  Fracking chemicals were 
suppose to be secret  ] //
/*A California Water Board Assures the Public that Oil Wastewater Is 
Safe for Irrigation, But Experts Say the Evidence Is Scant *
Studies in Kern County, performed by oil industry consultants, cannot 
answer fundamental safety questions about irrigating crops with 
“produced water,” the board’s own panel of experts concedes.
By Liza Gross - - Feb 6, 2022
After years of controversy, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality 
Control Board assured the public in the fall that eating California 
crops grown with oil field wastewater “creates no identifiable increased 
health risks,” based on studies commissioned as part of an extensive 
Food Safety Project.

Yet a review of the science and interviews with a public health 
scientist affiliated with the project and other experts show that there 
is scant evidence to support the board’s safety claims.

The “neutral, third-party consultant” the board retained to conduct the 
studies, GSI Environmental, has regularly worked for the oil industry. 
That work includes marshaling evidence to help Chevron, Kern County’s 
biggest provider of produced water, and other oil giants defend their 
interests in high-stakes lawsuits around the country and globe.

GSI did not tell water board officials about its ties to the oil 
industry, which shared the roughly $3.4 million in costs for the firm’s 
studies and related work with the water districts that benefit from the 
distribution of wastewater from oil extraction, known as “produced water.”

One member of the board’s Food Safety Expert Panel that reviewed GSI’s 
studies was nominated by Chevron and initially paid by the oil industry, 
and a second panel member worked as a consultant for an oil company 
selling produced water...
- -
Still, the expert panel’s own review concluded that GSI’s studies could 
not answer fundamental safety questions about irrigating crops with 
produced water.

Thomas Borch of Colorado State University, a leading expert on treating 
and reusing produced water for crop irrigation who was not involved in 
the project, said that based on the data GSI had and the way they 
designed the experiments, “they were not able to draw the conclusions 
they did. Period.”

Robert Scofield, who led the work for GSI, said in a statement via email 
that his firm agreed with the water board that the studies were 
performed in “the most technically sound manner.”

Clay Rodgers, the water board official who oversaw the Food Safety 
Project, said he promised the board that if any evidence were ever 
discovered that produced water was harming people consuming crops, “we 
would stop it immediately.”

Under the water board’s direction, GSI compiled a list of hundreds of 
chemicals used in oil operations, then focused on those that might pose 
health risks. But an absence of information to assess safety dogged the 
project from the start. Many of the chemicals had never been studied 
before, or lacked critical details about their use, the board’s panel of 
experts noted, because the oil companies said doing so would reveal 
trade secrets.

“Already there was a data gap there because some of those chemicals 
don’t have reliable toxicity information,” said John Fleming, senior 
scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.

The findings of the board and its expert panel found no food safety or 
public health concern, said David Ansolabehere, general manager of the 
Cawelo Water District, which has taken produced water from Chevron for 
decades. “Cawelo will continue to test the water based on the regional 
board’s permit requirements.”

Chevron tested for all additives used in the Kern River field for which 
a testing method approved by the Environmental Protection Agency exists, 
said Jonathan Harshman, communications advisor for Chevron’s San Joaquin 
Valley Business Unit.

Yet more than a fifth of the chemicals GSI identified—and 60 percent of 
those deemed most likely to pose a health risk—lacked both toxicity 
information and approved testing methods. The water board conceded that 
the data gaps left “potentially significant unknowns” about the 
chemicals’ safety.

“When they say this is safe,” Fleming said, “it’s based on what 
chemicals they were able to test.”

That means the “no identifiable increased health risks” assertion 
applies to just a fraction of potential chemicals in produced water 
applied to crops.

*Oil’s Profligate Water Use*
In early August, during one of the driest summers on record, Wasco 
farmer Nate Siemens received a troubling notice from his irrigation 
district, which is regulated by the Central Valley water board. “Please 
be aware that this water includes some amount of reclaimed oilfield 
production water,” it said.

Siemens, an organic agriculture consultant with the Rodale Institute, 
was shocked. Siemens needed that water. But he’s transitioning his 
family’s Fat Uncle Farms to organic and wasn’t keen on using the oil 
industry’s wastewater to irrigate his almonds.

Nate Siemens, an organic agriculture consultant for the Rodale 
Institute, is moving his family’s Fat Uncle Farms away from thirsty 
crops like almonds and has no interest in taking the oil industry’s 
wastewater. Credit: Liza Gross
Siemens’ farming roots in the region predate the rise of Kern County’s 
oil industry, which produces more than 70 percent of the state’s oil. He 
was well aware that climate-polluting pump jacks operate among corporate 
farms growing miles of water-intensive almonds and pistachios, 
California’s most valuable export crops. But he had no idea just how 
entrenched oil operations had become in the county’s $7.6 billion 
agricultural industry until he received that notice.

About 30 miles southeast of Siemens’ farm, thousands of densely packed 
pump jacks stretch as far as the eye can see toward the horizon, bobbing 
robotically as they suck oil and water from wells carved into the 
denuded landscape of the Kern River Oil Field.

Pump jacks have pried more than 2 billion barrels from the field since 
oil was discovered here in 1899. But wresting Kern’s notoriously viscous 
crude from receding oil reserves requires injecting ever increasing 
amounts of water and hot steam underground.

That water returns to the surface along with groundwater. The mixture 
contains arsenic, uranium and other naturally occurring toxic elements, 
along with potentially hundreds of chemicals used in the extraction 
process. Since 1985, the ratio of water to oil recovered has more than 
doubled, from seven barrels of water per barrel of oil to 18 barrels today.

In a region with less than nine inches of rain in a normal year—the 
definition of a desert—getting enough water is a perennial concern. 
Nearly 30 years ago, Chevron struck what a former Cawelo Water District 
manager called a “win-win” deal to deliver some of the massive amounts 
of wastewater produced every day to farmers’ fields.

*Oil's Unquenchable Thirst*
Every year, more than 38,000 acre-feet of produced water from Chevron 
and other oil companies hydrates California farmland, including roughly 
11 percent of Kern County’s irrigated farmland. That’s enough to cover 
about 38,000 football fields with a foot of water, or more than 12.4 
billion gallons.

Chevron treats produced water from its Kern River Oil Field by removing 
oil from water through gravity separation, then skimming off solids and 
residual oil before filtering it through walnut hulls. The water then 
travels several miles by pipeline to a Cawelo holding pond, where it’s 
blended with surface and groundwater and sent to irrigation canals.

The first time Seth Shonkoff, a public health scientist with the 
nonprofit Physicians, Scientists and Engineers (PSE) for Healthy Energy 
and a member of the expert panel, visited the Cawelo holding pond 
several years ago, he smelled an “extraordinarily strong” whiff of 
asphalt and crude oil. The same odors were much less offensive when he 
visited the pond with the panel a few years later.

Either there’s natural variability in the water, Shonkoff said, or 
someone did something different before experts came to evaluate the 
operation.

Chevron claims that recycling produced water for irrigation allows the 
company to operate in a “sustainable manner,” by minimizing reliance on 
fresh water. Yet the massive energy requirements of the extraction 
process make Kern’s oil one of the world’s most climate-polluting fossil 
fuels, and Chevron one of California’s top greenhouse gas emitters.

“California has this green reputation, but if you scratch the surface on 
the oil industry in the state, you quickly discover that that’s not the 
case at all,” said Hollin Kretzmann, senior attorney with the Center for 
Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute.

“This is an industry from top to bottom that’s used to getting its way, 
whether that’s drilling in neighborhoods, or disposing of the wastewater 
in unlined pits, or using that wastewater for unsafe purposes,” 
Kretzmann said.

*Unfit for Purpose *
The Central Valley water board said it focused on crops grown in oil 
wastewater to address public concerns, which included petitions with 
hundreds of thousands of signatures, protests outside the state Capitol 
and a bill to label food grown with the water.

Then-Assemblyman Mike Gatto (D-Los Angeles) introduced the bill in 2015, 
after learning that farmers could get organic certification for shunning 
pesticides while using produced water, and consumers would never know. 
“I thought that was a real problem,” said Gatto.

The same year, legislators called hearings to increase scrutiny of oil 
companies after learning their practices posed risks to protected 
groundwater, including potential drinking water and irrigation supplies.

“The commitment I made to our board was that if we ever discovered that 
there was an effect on people consuming crops grown with this, we would 
stop it immediately,” said Clay Rodgers, assistant executive officer of 
the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, who oversaw the 
Food Safety Project.

Testing crops for harmful chemicals to figure out if they’re safe to eat 
may seem logical, but techniques to analyze food for oil-related 
chemicals are “light years” behind those for detecting the compounds in 
water and soil, Shonkoff said. He raised the problem repeatedly at panel 
meetings.

In the end, the panel agreed. Its first recommendation to the board was 
to discontinue crop sampling. It would be far more productive to focus 
on produced water and irrigated soil, the panel said, using approaches 
that can reveal the toxicity of the water and soil itself.

Instead, Shonkoff said, “most of the work that was done to test things 
for chemicals was done in food. Unfortunately, that was, in my 
professional opinion, a pretty big waste of time and resources.”

The data GSI compiled—including the list of chemicals and their hazard 
profiles—was “way too limited” to draw conclusions about lack of 
toxicity, said Borch, the Colorado State University professor and 
produced water expert.

“That doesn’t mean it’s toxic,” said Borch. But there was no way they 
could conclude that produced water posed no identifiable health risks 
based on the data they had and their experimental approach, he said.

That leaves Siemens, who’s transitioning to organic, in a tough spot. 
Although produced water isn’t specifically defined under organic 
standards, organic farmers can’t use water that contains arsenic, a 
constituent of Kern’s produced water, and most synthetic compounds, like 
those used in oil and gas operations.

Siemens stopped watering his orchard for a few weeks after his district 
notified him about the produced water. “And the trees suffered,” he said.

But as the almond harvest approached, Siemens couldn’t risk losing the 
trees. He used just enough of the water to keep them alive.

“We didn’t know what we were getting into,” he said. “We just didn’t 
have time to do the research.”

Even if Siemens had done the research, it might not have mattered.

“We could have done some much more impressive and well-designed studies 
to either conclude that we can continue to use this water or that we 
should maybe improve the way we treat the water before we reuse it,” 
said Borch. “We certainly don’t know enough to evaluate whether we need 
to be worried or not.”

*A Failure to Disclose*
One of the biggest hurdles to evaluating the safety of produced water 
has been oil companies’ unwillingness to reveal key details about the 
chemicals they put down wells.

Before joining the panel, Shonkoff was working on an independent study 
of fracking for the California Council on Science and Technology, or 
CCST, when he discovered a dataset he’d never seen before: a list of 
chemicals used in conventional oil development, from fields in Southern 
California. At the time, no other location in the country, and maybe the 
world, required chemical disclosure for conventional operations. The 
CCST assessment, commissioned by the state, revealed that testing and 
treatment of produced water used for irrigation might not remove or even 
detect chemicals used in fracking.

During fracking, operators inject a high-pressure mixture of water, 
chemicals and sand deep underground to break and then prop open 
surrounding rock to extract oil or gas. Conventional operations, by 
contrast, inject high-pressure steam to loosen gooey oil. Wastewater 
from both conventional and fracking operations falls under the heading 
of “produced water.”

When Shonkoff dug into the newfound data, and read the permits and 
regulations for Kern County’s produced water, he realized Chevron and 
other oil companies could put nearly any additives they wanted down wells.

Although the water board prohibits using water from fracked wells for 
irrigation, fracking and conventional operations employ many of the same 
chemicals, Shonkoff told the board at the panel’s first public meeting. 
And most compounds used in conventional extraction processes in Kern 
County, he said, lack the information needed to assess safety.

It’s imperative that oil companies disclose not just which chemicals 
they use in oil and gas production but also the volume and frequency of 
their use, Shonkoff said. Until then, he said, “I’m not quite sure that 
we can say with any real level of certainty that this is safe or unsafe.”

Rodgers of the water board said he’d obtained a list of all the chemical 
compounds oil companies use. But to avoid trade secret information, he 
said, the board could not get the recipe, which details how often a 
chemical is used and how much goes down wells.

Rodgers said he felt the highest priority was to get a list he could 
share with the panel members and the public and compensated for not 
getting the recipe by assuming all the chemicals were used.

But knowing the hazard associated with a chemical depends on knowing 
that recipe, the panel concluded. It also requires knowing chemicals’ 
breakdown products.

Chemicals are injected under intense heat and pressure into oil 
reservoirs, where they interact with scores of other compounds, before 
they’re pulled back to the surface and exposed to air. All these 
conditions can affect a chemical’s toxicity. And scientists have no good 
tools to understand how chemical interactions increase toxicity.

“This assumption that we should be looking for the chemicals that were 
added to oil and gas operations, and the assumption that they will 
continue to be those same chemicals after all the processes that they go 
through, is too big of a leap to make,” Shonkoff said. “Of course, 
you’re not going to find them, because they most certainly have 
transformed into other types of chemical constituents by the time things 
are being monitored and tested for.”
--
Some chemical additives might degrade into harmless substances, but 
others can prove more toxic. Shonkoff pointed to glutaraldehyde, a 
chemical widely used to kill microorganisms that gum up oil and gas 
extraction.

Glutaraldehyde is toxic to people, he said. Some of its breakdown 
products are even more toxic, some are less toxic and others are 
completely unknown because they haven’t been studied.

“When we’re talking about hundreds of chemicals, many of which we don’t 
have good toxicological information on,” Shonkoff said, “the idea that 
you can really understand the toxicological dimensions of their daughter 
products, and their transformation products in the presence of other 
chemicals, is outstripping what we know scientifically.”

Even a plant’s own metabolism can affect a chemical’s toxicity.

Plants could take up chemicals in one form and turn them into something 
else that’s more harmful, said Fleming of the Center for Biological 
Diversity. But if you’re just testing for a list of chemicals added to 
the well, he said, you’re testing for the wrong thing.

Robert Scofield, who led the work for GSI, agreed to answer questions 
only by email. Asked about the focus on testing crops, Scofield offered 
a carefully worded statement that ended: “We agree with the Water Board 
and their scientific advisor that this direct testing was the most 
technically sound manner to address the questions posed in the study.”

When asked about the failure to address chemicals’ breakdown products, 
he responded with the exact same statement.

“There’s a really big assumption baked into the GSI work,” said 
Shonkoff. The studies assume that the chemicals remain in the same form 
from the oil field to a consumer’s plate and that it’s sufficient to 
monitor those particular chemicals, he said. “And that’s obviously 
incorrect.”

*Still Waiting for Answers*
California supplies 99 percent of the world’s almonds and pistachios, 
mostly from Kern County.

Water board regulators say nothing has received more scrutiny than the 
oil field water that irrigates those crops. “We know more about that 
produced water than probably any other produced water in the world,” 
said Rodgers.

But the evidence is still so scarce, said Colorado State’s Borch, “you 
can argue both sides.”

There are no established tools to do a “real toxicity analysis,” Borch 
said, and there’s “not a good framework” to evaluate risk.

In a study of treated produced water released into a stream for 
irrigation in Wyoming, Borch and his colleagues found that most of the 
chemicals they detected had no health safety standard. There were likely 
other chemicals and breakdown products “with unknown impacts” that had 
escaped detection, they noted in the 2020 study, published in Science of 
the Total Environment. In a related study published later that year, 
Borch’s team assessed the potential of treated produced water to cause 
cancer. Several different tests showed that the water caused increased 
mutation rates—an indication of cancer risk—even though most chemicals 
were present in low concentrations.

Many stakeholders stand to benefit if produced water can be reused 
safely, the scientists wrote. But if the practice is expanded 
prematurely, they warned, it could harm water quality as well as the 
health of soil, livestock, crops and people who eat them.

People are still using benchmarks for water quality that were not 
developed with oil field wastewater in mind, Borch said, even though the 
complexity and chemical makeup of produced water is very different.

And simply looking to see whether chemicals are present, as the GSI 
studies did, doesn’t say anything about toxicity. Many compounds in the 
wastewater may be present in concentrations low enough to escape 
detection, said Borch. But that doesn’t mean they’re not toxic, he said. 
“It just means you don’t have the method that allows for extraction and 
analysis of the compounds.”

In a paper published in December, Borch and his colleagues presented a 
model for taking a holistic approach that exposes cells and lab 
organisms to produced water to detect harmful responses, along the lines 
Shonkoff had recommended.

Borch’s “adverse outcome” approach is also likely to catch the breakdown 
products the Food Safety Panel identified as a major testing inadequacy.

The Environmental Protection Agency is taking a similar approach, led by 
its Region 8 office in Colorado, as part of a national program to study 
the safety of produced water, said Tricia Pfeiffer, an environmental 
engineer in Region 8’s Technical Assistance Branch.

The effort is addressing the need to harness cutting-edge approaches for 
evaluating oil-related contaminants, and their byproducts, in produced 
water intended for reuse. That includes enlisting tools to analyze human 
cells to identify any worrisome changes caused by chemicals in produced 
water while applying complementary approaches to detect toxic 
constituents in the water.

“This is actual research,” Pfeiffer said. “It’s way more complicated 
than doing something that already has an analytical method.”

As we grapple with climate change issues, she said, “we’re looking for 
alternative water sources. And as a researcher, my biggest goal with 
this project is to help fill data gaps and make sure that we’re 
protective of human health and the environment.”

Borch said the technology exists to remove all sorts of contaminants 
from water, but it’s far more expensive than the low-cost methods used 
by Kern County oil companies. If people aren’t willing to pay the real 
costs of growing crops in a water-scarce region, he said, “maybe we 
shouldn’t even produce almonds because they use so much water.”

Choosing less water-intensive crops is critical to keeping land 
productive, said Siemens, the Wasco farmer who was shocked to learn that 
his water district was sending him oil field wastewater.

Siemens is moving away from thirsty almonds to dry-farming olives, 
mulberries and figs, focusing on farming in ways that suit the region. 
Like raising goats.

“Goats would be happy to eat all these weeds out there,” Siemens said, 
pointing to the field behind his house. And lots of people in the valley 
would be happy to eat goat meat, he said. “You can go to any taqueria in 
the area and buy carne de cabra.”

Siemens’ vision of sustainable farming does not include taking the 
wastewater of an industry whose greenhouse gas emissions have helped 
fuel California’s relentless droughts and contaminated its precious 
groundwater supplies.

“We’re not just trying to meet a USDA organic standard,” Siemens said. 
“We’re trying to increase the vitality of this land for the future. Our 
kids live here, and I hope my grandkids will live here.”

That means protecting the soil and aquifers that helped turn Kern County 
into one of the richest agricultural regions in the world.

Meanwhile, the results of a truly independent analysis of whether oil 
field produced water is fit to irrigate crops sent around the world, 
Pfeiffer said, is still years away.

Anne Marshall-Chalmers, an Inside Climate News fellow, contributed to 
this report.
By Marianne Lavelle
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06022022/a-california-water-board-assures-the-public-that-oil-wastewater-is-safe-for-irrigation-but-experts-say-the-evidence-is-scant/



/[  So hard to correct that a law is invented  ] /
*Brandolini's law, *also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is 
an internet adage that emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, 
facetious, or otherwise misleading information: "The amount of energy 
needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to 
produce it."
https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/brandolini-s-law/g11ddz0b12h?hl=en

- -

/[ fascinating - seems that correction takes 10 times the energy level 
to correct ]/
*Brandolini's law*
 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an 
internet adage that emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, 
facetious, or otherwise misleading information:[1] It states that "The 
amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude 
larger than is needed to produce it."

It was publicly formulated the first time in January 2013[4] by Alberto 
Brandolini, an Italian programmer. Brandolini stated that he was 
inspired by reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow right 
before watching an Italian political talk show with journalist Marco 
Travaglio and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi attacking each other.

*Similar concepts*
Other notable thinkers and philosophers have noted similar truths 
throughout history. In his 1786 Letters on Infidelity, George Horne 
writes that:
Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will 
cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, 
the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if 
nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in 
general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than 
long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the 
odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our 
friends who have honesty and erudition, candor and patience, to study 
both sides of the question.

Mark Twain is sometimes erroneously quoted as saying that:

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been 
fooled.[8]

His actual quote, dictated for his 1906 autobiography, is:

The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant 
incumbrance… How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard 
it is to undo that work again![8]

A similar concept was formulated by economist Roy Radner in 1993. Radner 
considered the performance of an organization that processes information 
in terms of both the number of processors required to review data items, 
and the time delays associated with processing data items.[9][further 
explanation needed]

In 2005, Russian physicist Sergey Lopatnikov anonymously published an 
essay in which he introduced the following definition:

If the text of each phrase requires a paragraph (to disprove), each 
paragraph – a section, each section – a chapter, and each chapter – a 
book, the whole text becomes effectively irrefutable and, therefore, 
acquires features of truthfulness. I define such truthfulness as 
transcendental.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

- -

/[ a see also ]/
*Gish gallop*
The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate 
attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of 
arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those 
arguments. The term was coined in 1994 by American anthropologist 
Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish and 
argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the 
scientific fact of evolution.[1][2] It is similar to another debating 
method called spreading, in which one person speaks extremely fast in an 
attempt to cause their opponent to fail to respond to all the arguments 
that have been raised.

During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid 
series of many specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and 
outright lies in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for 
the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal 
debate.[3][4] Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably 
more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first 
place, which is known online as Brandolini's law.[5] The technique 
wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating 
ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no 
independent fact-checking is involved or if the audience has limited 
knowledge of the topics.[6]

Generally, it is more difficult to use the Gish gallop in a structured 
debate than a free-form one.[7] If a debater is familiar with an 
opponent who is known to use the Gish gallop, the technique may be 
countered by pre-empting and refuting the opponent's commonly used 
arguments before the opponent has an opportunity to launch into a Gish 
gallop.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

- -

/[ my favorite saying, was coined by Nobel Physicist Wolfgang Pauli]/
*"Not even wrong"*
 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Not even wrong" is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad 
science.[1] It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be 
scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can 
be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously 
and scientifically.[1]

For a meaningful discussion on whether a certain statement is true or 
false, the statement must satisfy the criterion of falsifiability, the 
inherent possibility for the statement to be tested and found false. In 
this sense, the phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous with 
"unfalsifiable."[1]

History of the expression
The phrase is generally attributed to the theoretical physicist Wolfgang 
Pauli, who was known for his colorful objections to incorrect or 
careless thinking.[2][3] Rudolf Peierls documents an instance in which 
"a friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected 
was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli's views. Pauli 
remarked sadly, 'It is not even wrong'."[4][5] This is also often quoted 
as "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong", or in Pauli's 
native German, "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal 
falsch!" Peierls remarks that quite a few apocryphal stories of this 
kind have been circulated and mentions that he listed only the ones 
personally vouched for by him. He also quotes another example when Pauli 
replied to Lev Landau, "What you said was so confused that one could not 
tell whether it was nonsense or not."[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong



/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming February 13 ,*

February 13, 2014:
In the New York Times, physicist Michael Riordan warns of the risks of 
coal exports to Asia:

"The billions of tons of coal burned in Asia every year contribute 
markedly to global warming. Should the United States be selling them 
subsidized coal and encouraging this impending disaster?

"Our nation needs a new, transparent, clean-energy policy that no longer 
turns a blind eye to the many negative impacts of coal burning — or to 
companies trying to sell coal to other nations playing catch-up in the 
global economy. A cornerstone of this policy must be the rational use of 
our vast reserves of Western coal as we ramp down the overuse of what 
is, by far, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

"Is our economy to become a resource economy like Australia’s, exporting 
mineral wealth to Asia in return for mining and shipping jobs, plus 
cheap consumer goods? Should we support this Faustian bargain by selling 
our coal so inexpensively? What kinds of jobs and living conditions do 
we really want to foster, and where? These are questions a rational and 
much-needed, 21st-century energy policy would address."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/opinion/dont-sell-cheap-us-coal-to-asia.html 



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