[✔️] March 15, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*March 15, 2022*/

/[ Leaving the Grid -- a very significant trend - independent living  ]
/*Frustrated With Utilities, Some Californians Are Leaving the Grid*
Citing more blackouts, wildfires and higher electricity rates, a growing 
number of homeowners are choosing to build homes that run entirely on 
solar panels and batteries.
/- -/
There have long been free spirits and survivalists who have lived off 
the grid. But the decline in solar and battery costs and growing 
frustrations with utilities appear to be laying the groundwork for more 
people to consider doing so.

Nobody is quite sure how many off-grid homes there are but local 
officials and real estate agents said there were dozens here in Nevada 
County, a picturesque part of the Sierra Nevada range between Sacramento 
and Lake Tahoe. Some energy experts say that millions of people could 
eventually go off the grid as costs drop. A fully off-grid system in 
California can run from $35,000 to $100,000, according to installers. At 
the low end, such systems cost roughly as much as an entry-level 
Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck./
//- -/
One of those residents is Alan Savage, a real estate agent in Grass 
Valley, who bought an off-grid home six years ago and has sold hundreds 
of such properties. He said he never loses power, unlike PG&E customers. 
“I don’t think I’ll ever go back to being on the grid,” Mr. Savage said.

For people like him, it is not enough to take the approach favored by 
most homeowners with solar panels and batteries. Those homeowners use 
their systems to supplement the electricity they get from the grid, 
provide emergency backup power and sell excess energy to the grid./../
/- -
/The appeal of off-grid homes has grown in part because utilities have 
become less reliable. As natural disasters linked to climate change have 
increased, there have been more extended blackouts in California, Texas, 
Louisiana and other states./
/
Californians are also upset that electricity rates keep rising and state 
policymakers have proposed reducing incentives for installing solar 
panels on homes connected to the grid. Installing off-grid solar and 
battery systems is expensive, but once the systems are up and running, 
they typically require modest maintenance and homeowners no longer have 
an electric bill.

RMI, a research organization formerly known as the Rocky Mountain 
Institute, has projected that by 2031 most California homeowners will 
save money by going off the grid as solar and battery costs fall and 
utility rates increase. That phenomenon will increasingly play out in 
less sunny regions like the Northeast over the following decades, the 
group forecasts...
- -
Off-grid systems are particularly attractive to people building new 
homes. That’s because installing a 125- to 300-foot overhead power line 
to a new home costs about $20,000, according to the California Public 
Utilities Commission. In places where lines have to be buried, 
installation runs about $78,000 for 100 feet...
- -
He has never had to ration his use of appliances and has had no problems 
charging two Teslas. He has been producing so much electricity that he 
started mining Bitcoin.

His system cost a lot because he bought a very large battery to soak up 
energy from solar panels for use when the sun isn’t shining. But 
electric cars may soon play that role, making it cheaper to go off the 
grid./
/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/business/energy-environment/california-off-grid.html/
/

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/

/[ Funny and informative video.  -"Flopping" is a recent sports term 
meaning deliberately falling or stumbling in order to give the 
appearance of having been fouled by an opponent.   And another term 
"Rock Juice" is a new phrase meaning oil  - This 14 min video is one of 
the greatest counter-propaganda rants I have heard  - 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJOuyckvDGY ]/
*U.S. Oil & Gas Companies Trying To Profit From War In Ukraine | Climate 
Town*
Mar 9, 2022
Climate Town
sUbScRiBe ClimateTown  https://www.youtube.com/c/climatetown

SOURCES SOURCES SOURCES:
FIRST GO AND FOLLOW THE INCREDIBLE AMY WESTERVELT:
https://www.hottakepod.com/war-who-is-it-good-for-the-fossil-fuel-industry/
And follow Popular Information 
https://popular.info/p/fossil-fuel-companies-are-exploiting?s=r

Thanks to Ian MK Cessna for the intro animation
Written by Rollie Williams, Matt Nelsen, Ben Boult & Nicole Conlan

Renewable energy groups/advocacy:
American Council on Renewable Energy: https://acore.org/
Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI): https://www.eesi.org/
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI): http://www.rmi.org/
Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA): https://www.cesa.org/

LinkTree - https://linktr.ee/ClimateTown
Discord - https://discord.gg/A5Czqfgr4C
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/climatetown/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/ClimateTown
TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@climatetown

JOIN OUR DISCORD! We think it’d be pretty cool to harness our amazing 
community’s collective power and enthusiasm and make a gosh dang 
difference. We just created a channel called “#ukraine-war” 
(https://discord.gg/HCu7CRSn5t), where you can share info about how to 
help the citizens of Ukraine, or call out the organizations trying to 
profit from the tragedy, or even share a link that we missed to help 
other Climate Townies stay informed. (And in case you’re like me from a 
month ago and have no idea how to use Discord, here’s a helpful lil’ 
beginner’s guide - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJOuyckvDGY

- -

/[ total humorous distraction   ]/
*Most Hilariously Bad Flops & Dives in Sports*
Aug 26, 2019
Savage Brick Sports
Terrible flops and dives in sports. In order to be in this video, the 
flop has to be really bad itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTIuzGRkunQ

- -

/[ Popular Information ]/
*Fossil fuel companies are exploiting Russia's attack on Ukraine*
Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria
Mar 1...
- -
*How Big Oil props up Putin*
The fossil fuel industry has been "helping keep Russia's oil-dependent 
economy afloat." Exxon, for example, "has more than 1,000 employees in 
Russia." Through a subsidiary, Exxon owns "a 30% stake in Sakhalin-1 — a 
vast oil and natural gas project located off Sakhalin Island in the 
Russian Far East." It has operated the project for decades. Since the 
project's inception in 2005, the facilities have "exported more than 1 
billion barrels of oil and 1.03 billion cubic feet of natural gas," 
providing critical revenue for Putin's regime.

BP has pledged to sever its relationship with Rosneft, Russia's 
state-controlled oil company. Exxon, however, has not followed suit.

Exxon's decision, thus far, to continue to partner with the Russian 
government reflects its longstanding ties to Putin. Rex Tillerson, the 
former CEO of Exxon, was awarded the Order of Friendship, "one of the 
highest honors Russia gives to foreign citizens." Tillerson was reported 
selected to become CEO in 2006 in part because of "his close 
relationship with Russia." Putin attended a 2011 signing of a deal that 
gave "Exxon access to vast Arctic oil deposits." After the agreement was 
signed, "the valuation of Rosneft soared by $7 billion in just five days."

Exxon was forced to exit Russia's arctic after sanctions were imposed 
following Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014. Exxon argued the 
sanctions were unfair.

This year, as Russia threatened Ukraine, API has lobbied Congress and 
the federal government to limit the scope of U.S. sanctions. "Sanctions 
should be as targeted as possible to limit potential harm to the 
competitiveness of US companies," a spokesperson for API said in January.

The reality is that, as long as the world is dependent on fossil fuels, 
Putin will have control of a valuable resource that will assist in his 
efforts to retain and grow power.

*Why clean energy is Putin's kryptonite*
The reality is that “unleashing” America’s energy would take a long time 
before it made any meaningful impact in Europe. New fossil fuel projects 
take years to come online. A more effective way to weaken Russia’s 
geopolitical influence is to accelerate the transition to clean energy. 
This would not only help Europe achieve net-zero emissions — and stave 
off the most catastrophic impacts of climate change —  but would also 
subvert Russia’s attempts to use natural gas as a political weapon.

Russia is the largest natural gas and second-largest oil exporter in the 
world. The country currently supplies more than 25% of Europe’s oil and 
40% of its natural gas, according to the LA Times. Over the years, this 
dependency has only increased as more European countries move away from 
coal and to natural gas. By moving away from fossil-based fuels, Europe 
has the opportunity to reduce its dependence on Russia and minimize 
Putin’s political leverage.

As Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security, told 
the LA Times, “the more that countries can wean themselves off oil and 
gas and move toward renewables, the more independence they have in terms 
of action.”

Already, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has stated 
that Europe plans to “doubl[e] down on renewables.” This week, the EU is 
also planning to unveil a new energy strategy that calls for “40 percent 
reduction in fossil fuel use by 2030.”
https://popular.info/p/fossil-fuel-companies-are-exploiting?s=r

- -

[ Sing it out! ]
FEB 27, 2022  HOT TAKE
*War, Who Is It Good For? The Fossil Fuel Industry*
By Amy Westervelt

Hoo boy, the Debate-Me Bros really revved up the hot take machine (pun 
intended) this week. Matt Yglesias, Michael Shellenberger, and a whole 
lotta centrist pundits were out in force carrying water for the fossil 
fuel industry, proclaiming U.S. fracking as the solution to Russian 
aggression. Their argument? Europe is reliant on Russian gas, but if 
they were just reliant on U.S. gas instead, that would neutralize Putin. 
The complete lack of self-doubt is breathtaking. Fact check? Not me, I 
have opinions! Really showing their whole asses on this one, let’s count 
the ways:

Biden hasn’t really done shit to curb fracking. The fossil fuel industry 
keeps pushing the idea that he has, but the only thing he’s done is halt 
new leases for oil and gas drilling on federal land (more on that 
next)—and even then the courts had to force the issue.
They don’t need more federal land—they’re using less than half of what 
they’ve already leased. Oil and gas companies have been stockpiling 
public land leases for years. They currently hold leases for more than 
26 million acres, and according to the Bureau of Land Management are 
only drilling on 12.8 million of those acres. The Center for American 
Progress estimates the industry is currently sitting on 10 years’ worth 
of unused leases. The idea that adding more to that stockpile would have 
any effect at all on Russia’s current aggression is laughable.
New leases or pipeline permits have nothing to do with the 
Russia-Ukraine situation. It takes a long time to put up a new wellpad 
or build a pipeline or LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminal to export 
oil and gas. Nothing that gets permitted today will have any impact at 
all on the Russia-Ukraine situation.
Fracking companies aren’t necessarily interested in changing their 
production plans. I’ve written about this a bunch, but the fracking 
industry never really made money during the shale boom—it was the 
ultimate Ponzi scheme, with early investors making money off of later 
investors and that’s about it. But they’ve learned from those mistakes 
and so are not necessarily jumping at the chance to increase production 
right now. Fracking industry leaders Pioneer Natural Resources Co., 
Devon Energy Corp. and Continental Resources Inc. just pledged to limit 
2022 production increases to no more than 5 percent, a fraction of the 
20 percent or higher annual growth rates of the pre-pandemic years. They 
want to make back money lost in the pandemic and maybe even finally turn 
a profit. So while, of course, some folks are ramping up production, the 
narrative that the American Petroleum Industry is pushing hard—that the 
industry is just dying to drill more and Biden is holding them back—is 
simply untrue.
The world’s reliance on fossil fuels is what put Russia in the position 
to pull this shit in the first place. Putin is invading Ukraine because 
he knows he can, at the moment. Why? Because Europe is heavily dependent 
on Russian gas and he knew its leaders would be hesitant to risk 
skyrocketing prices for their citizens. As Bill McKibben wrote in The 
Guardian, “This is not a ‘war for oil and gas’ in the sense that too 
many of America’s Middle East misadventures might plausibly be 
described. But it is a war underwritten by oil and gas, a war whose most 
crucial weapon may be oil and gas, a war we can’t fully engage because 
we remain dependent on oil and gas. If you want to stand with the brave 
people of Ukraine, you need to find a way to stand against oil and gas.”
Fossil fuels are a threat, not a boon, to national security. As of 
2021,10 percent of global deaths were attributable to abnormally cold or 
hot temperatures. That’s 5 million deaths a year, far more than any war 
being fought over oil and gas, ever. Also guess what, solar, wind, and 
wave energy are all domestic energy sources too, so please explain how 
the national security argument works for oil and gas but not those 
energy sources.
U.S. oil companies’ relationships with Russia are also a threat to 
national security. Back in 2013, ExxonMobil’s Russia holdings were by 
far its largest—5x more than its holdings in the U.S. Then Russia 
annexed Crimea in 2014 and the U.S. government responded with strict 
sanctions that not only halted a lot of the projects Exxon had planned 
with Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft, but also made it 
impossible for Exxon to include the projected oil from those projects on 
its books. Bad news for Exxon! That’s why as soon as Putin started 
lining up tanks at Ukraine’s border, the API started lobbying for weak 
sanctions. How exactly is it good for U.S. national security to pander 
to Putin? (Make sure you’re following journalist Antonia Juhasz 
throughout the Russian invasion, she’s got all the receipts on U.S. oil 
companies and Russia!)
Clean energy generation would actually increase national security Forget 
the fossil fuel talking points. For nearly a decade now, the U.S. 
military—not exactly known for being a bunch of hippies—has listed 
climate change as a threat multiplier in its quadrennial reviews. A 
decade ago when I was reporting on efforts to “green” the military, 
generals were very pragmatic about it: soldiers routinely die on 
refueling missions, wars are often fought over or fueled by oil, getting 
off of oil means a reduction in casualties, which makes it worth doing. 
And the thing is, it’s not impossibly out of reach. We’re already on a 
path to replace fossil fuels—renewable energy is set to account for 95 
percent of the increase in global power capacity through 2026. In fact, 
I suspect this has quite a bit to do with both Putin and the U.S. oil 
industry’s current posturing. The end is near, and they know it, but 
they won’t go quietly, they’ll use this decade to retain as much power 
as possible, and get as much oil and gas out of the ground for as much 
money as possible. That’s inevitable. The question is how much we’ll let 
them get away with.
https://www.hottakepod.com/war-who-is-it-good-for-the-fossil-fuel-industry/



/[ Mostly the rash acts are counter productive ] /
*Tree Planting Is Booming. Here’s How That Could Help, or Harm, the Planet.*
Reforestation can fight climate change, uplift communities and restore 
biodiversity. When done badly, though, it can speed extinctions and make 
nature less resilient.
Catrin Einhorn - - March 14, 2022,...
- -
There is not enough land on Earth to tackle climate change with trees 
alone, but if paired with drastic cuts in fossil fuels, trees can be an 
important natural solution. They absorb carbon dioxide through pores in 
their leaves and stash it away in their branches and trunks (though 
trees also release carbon when they burn or rot). That ability to 
collect CO2 is why forests are often called carbon sinks...
- -
Nonprofit tree planting groups often say they plant nonnative species 
because local communities ask for them. But deeper engagement can yield 
a different story, said Susan Chomba, who oversees forest restoration 
and conservation in Africa for the World Resources Institute, a global 
research nonprofit group. When given the chance to consider what they 
want to accomplish on their land, farmers will recall, for instance, 
that when they had more trees, they also had streams, she said. They 
want the water back.

“Then you say, ‘In your traditional, local knowledge, what kind of tree 
species are suitable for returning water into the ecosystem?’” Dr. 
Chomba continued. “They will give you a whole range of indigenous tree 
species.”..
- -
A major hurdle is lack of supply at local seed banks, which tend to be 
dominated by popular commercial species. Some groups overcome this 
problem by paying people to collect seeds from nearby forests.

Another solution, experts say, is to let forests come back on their own. 
If the area is only lightly degraded or sits near existing forest, a 
method called natural regeneration can be cheaper and more effective. 
Simply fencing off certain areas from grazing will often allow trees to 
return, with both carbon sequestration and biodiversity built in.

“Nature knows much more than we do,” Dr. Chazdon said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/14/climate/tree-planting-reforestation-climate.html

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[ Monga Bay shows how the hardwoods market destroys our environment ]
*Luxury wood market driving extinction of rare ipê trees, report warns*
by Maxwell Radwin on 14 March 2022
Demand for wood from ipê trees in the Amazon Basin could lead to their 
extinction if better international trade regulations aren’t implemented 
soon, according to a new report from Forest Trends.
Ipê hardwood is in high demand in the luxury timber market, especially 
for outdoor boardwalks, decks and furniture, as well as hardwood floors.
The Forest Trends report urges officials to list the rare species under 
CITES, the international convention regulating the trade of threatened 
species.
Whether walking along a beach boardwalk, installing new hardwood floors 
or sitting out on a friend’s deck, there’s a good chance you’ve already 
come across the wood of the rare ipê trees. These are among the most 
popular species supplying a global luxury wood market, an increasing 
driver of deforestation in the Amazon Basin.

Demand for the wood, combined with a lack of environmental trade 
protections, has pushed ipê trees close to extinction, according to a 
new report from Forest Trends. The report warns that if international 
regulations aren’t implemented soon, ipê may disappear from the Amazon 
altogether.

“Ipê populations have severely declined over the last 30 years,” the 
report said, “with growing concerns about their future.”

The name “ipê” refers to several remarkably similar tree genera, 
including Handroanthus, Tabebuia and Roseodendron, all of which have 
extremely hard woods that are resistant to rot, making them perfect for 
outdoor use. Around 96% of them are found in Brazil, with others spread 
throughout Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.

Two of the ipê species, Handroanthus serratifolius and Handroanthus 
impetiginosus, are listed respectively as threatened and near threatened 
with extinction on the IUCN Red List.

At least 525 million kilograms (1.16 billion pounds) of wood from ipê 
trees was exported from the region between 2017 and 2021, the report 
said. Most of it went to the United States, Canada and Europe. Other 
exports went to Israel, China, South Korea, Japan and India.

An ipê tree in Brazil. (Photo via Leticia Momesso/Pixabay.) 
https://imgs.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2022/03/14043453/Body1.jpg
Ipê trees grow extremely slowly, needing between 80 and 100 years to 
reach maturity. They also grow in low densities, meaning it’s difficult 
to grow them on plantations or through other restoration means.

“This species isn’t that abundant in the forest,” said WWF Peru policy 
director Miguel Pacheco. “So an already not-the-abundant species is 
being overexploited, harvested and exported across Central America, and 
then to the United States and Europe.”

A 2018 Greenpeace report found that timber traffickers were 
intentionally mislabeling wood shipments and overestimating their 
weights in order to move greater quantities of ipê.

The timing of the Forest Trends report’s publication lined up with the 
start of the 74th meeting of the standing committee of CITES, the 
international convention regulating the trade of threatened species. In 
November, CITES members will meet in Panama to finalize which new 
species should be added to the list.

In 2017, a proposal to list ipê in CITES Appendix II was co-sponsored by 
Brazil and Ecuador, but was withdrawn in 2019.

Appendix I allows trade of species threatened with extinction only under 
the most extraordinary of circumstances. Appendix II includes species 
that aren’t always threatened but still require increased trade controls 
to ensure their survival.

“We feel that ipê should already be under protections from CITES,” 
report co-author Marigold Norman told Mongabay, “and that really this 
should have happened back in 2019. There’s been so much discussion 
academically, with studies from 2006 and onward calling for increased 
national and international protections of the species.”

A close-up of the flowers on a pink ipê tree. (Photo via Wikimedia). 
https://imgs.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2022/03/14044045/Body2a-1.jpg
She added, “Exporters and importing countries will be able to work 
together on verifying information. CITES will provide a better framework 
for both sides to work together to protect the species.”

The report argues that domestic timber trade regulations, such as the 
Lacey Act in the U.S. and European Union Timber Regulation in the EU, 
are not doing enough to protect the species. It recommends that 
exporting countries like Brazil as well as importing countries beef up 
their domestic regulations.

It also encourages the World Customs Organization, which regulates 
international trade procedures, to update its coding system to better 
identify species-specific export and import data for wood.

“Identifying the species of wood in international trade is vitally 
important to efforts to capture and track the volume of certain 
species,” the report said. “This can help conserve species biodiversity, 
and tackle timber trafficking.”

Should ipê be included in CITES Appendix II and receive increased 
attention from customs authorities, Norman said, the next challenge will 
be to track the trade of other tree species that could be targeted as a 
substitute.

“The concern is that even if we list ipê, that will just encourage 
greater volumes of trade in other species that might not be quite as 
endangered as ipê right now, but could become more endangered in the 
future,” she said. “There are a number of Amazon species that fit the bill.”
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/03/luxury-wood-market-driving-extinction-of-rare-ipe-trees-report-warns/




/[  Animations help visualize - Nate Hagen explanation ]/


*The Human Superorganism | Part 02 of 05 | The Great Simplification 
Animated Series*
Mar 9, 2022
Nate Hagens
In this next installment of the animated series, "The Human 
Superorganism", is an 8 minute film that outlines the centrality of 
energy to our economies, how energy has costs in energy terms, how 
energy relates to technology, money and growth and how the aggregate 
human endeavor self-organizes to seek energy with growing impacts on 
natural systems/species.

For show notes and references:
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com.

The remaining 3 videos in the series will be released simultaneously 
around the end of March, and will provide more context for where we are 
headed and why, and a framework for how to think about our future and 
what to do to best prepare/contribute to it.  We hope you enjoy -and 
share - this animation that continues the story of The Great Simplification.

EnergyandOurFuture.org
Executive Producer: Nate Hagens
Creative Director: Leslie Batt-Lutz
Editor & Creative Consultant: Elizabeth Sirianni

Jumbo
Producer: Justin Ritchie
Lead Animator & Art Director: Elliot Wilks
Illustrator: Joseph Navarra

Thanks to many others on help with script, sound, and various 
suggestions including: DJ White, Rex Weyler, Kyle Saunders, Joan 
Diamond, Travis Hall, Todd Hagens, and Chuck Watson. Also to Mike 
Kriefski and Eric Borchardt as voice coaches!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNewKEOby80



/[  try a little guidance //story //] /
*The Impatience of Job*
The Torah story is perfect for our harrowing times. But we’ve been 
reading it all wrong.
BY ABRAHAM RIESMAN - MARCH 13, 2022

No one has ever known quite what to make of Job.

The title character of the Book of Job is a confounding figure for 
Christians, Muslims, Jews, and those of any faith who have tried to 
incorporate the story over millennia. The tale goes like this: Job is a 
perfectly righteous and God-fearing man whose good deeds have brought 
him prosperity—children, an estate, good health. But then God enters a 
wager with a member of the Heavenly Host, haSatan (“the Adversary”), who 
claims he can make even goodly Job curse the deity. Soon, Job’s servants 
are killed. His children are killed. He is afflicted with painful boils, 
finding only mild relief when he gouges them with a potsherd. His life 
is a waking nightmare. But he refuses to curse God for what has befallen 
him.
That is, until he debates three of his pious friends, telling them that 
the logic of religion no longer makes sense to him. If God rewards good 
and punishes evil, how can one explain what’s happened to him, and to 
the countless others in creation who suffer for no discernible reason?

The friends say over and over that there must be some sin that Job or 
his family committed, for God is both morally good and fully omnipotent. 
With each passive-aggressive accusation from one of his ostensible 
comrades, Job inches closer and closer to outright blasphemy.

Then the story takes a strange and mysterious turn that consumes 
religious scholars still.

These days, countless people are experiencing agony on par with that of 
the biblical Job: An awful war is carrying with it a terrifying nuclear 
threat; a plague rages; liberal democracy seems to barely cling to life; 
and, as we corrupt the climate on which our species depends, legions die 
drowning, burning, or running. If there is a God who loves humanity, 
He’s showing it in the most mysterious of ways.

Religious people who wait for a messiah may soothe themselves by 
believing that divine intervention can bring about an end to mortal 
horrors, and that the pious will eventually ascend to a state of eternal 
existence. But for secular types—including agnostic Jews like me—who 
find themselves concerned about the state of the world, both reform and 
revolt seem impossible routes out of all of humanity’s messes. If it all 
keeps getting worse, what’s the point of anything? It’s hard to measure 
pessimism, but there are indications that it’s on the rise, at least in 
America: Polls suggest pessimistic views have exploded in the past 20 
years, and, even before COVID, nearly a third of Americans believed an 
apocalyptic event would occur in their lifetime.

Lucky for us, there’s an ancient text that offers guidance on how to 
navigate the pain that lies before us, and how to start rebuilding in 
the ruins. It’s called the Book of Job. We just haven’t been reading it 
right.

The most vexing part of Job’s story—after his servants and children die, 
after the boils, after the debates—comes when Job challenges God to 
explain Himself in the mode of an ancient Near Eastern lawsuit. The 
deity appears and, though He declines to explain why He does anything 
(He prefers to boast of His vast power and inscrutable planning), He 
praises Job for speaking “in honesty” and condemns the Scripture-quoting 
pals for not doing the same.

Job then utters a few enigmatic lines of Hebrew that scholars have 
struggled to translate for millennia: “al kayn em’as / v’nikham’ti al 
afar v’eyfer.”

The King James Version gives those lines as “Wherefore I abhor myself / 
and repent in dust and ashes.” Historically, most other versions stab at 
something similar—though, as we will see, modern scholarship suggests 
some very different alternatives.

Whatever Job says, it seems to work: In an abrupt epilogue, we see Job 
restored to his former comfort and glory. Many analysts think the happy 
ending was added to an initial core text that lacked such comfort. But 
even if you accept it as part of the story, it’s unsettlingly cryptic. 
We are not told why Job is rewarded, whether his reward was divinely 
given, or what scars the episode has left upon him. We are merely told 
that he’s materially back to something resembling what he had before.
If no one ever knew what to make of Job, Jews were first among them. 
Rabbis of the Talmud wrung their hands and tugged their beards over his 
story. They feuded over who he was, where he fit in the biblical 
narrative, and what lessons we were to derive from his tale. Though Jews 
have suffered throughout our history, our traditional texts emphasize 
that suffering is a punishment from God, not an invigorating step toward 
spiritual clarity in the Christian mode. As documented in Mark 
Larrimore’s The Book of Job: A Biography, the rabbis who wrote the 
Talmud and started formalizing the liturgy in the early part of the 
first millennium C.E. threw up their hands in defeat to an extent, not 
knowing what to do with this alarming character, fascinating though he 
may be.

Early Christians, on the other hand, embraced the Job story as a tale 
about the redemptive and edifying power of pain in the struggle to 
cleanse oneself of sin—a core tenet of the Christian faith. Telling 
someone they had the “patience of Job” was high praise.

But early Christians also connected the Book of Job to another pillar of 
their system: the apocalypse. The most influential pre-modern Christian 
writer on Job, the sixth century’s Pope Gregory I, argued that the 
character’s lamentations should make us excited about the end of days. 
Won’t it be lovely when this awful, fallen world will finally be 
destroyed and Jesus can bring about an age of delight for the deserving?

With all due respect to the rabbis and popes of old, I think they were 
all wrong about Job. And I’m not alone.

I didn’t know about any of this stuff until half a decade ago. When it 
came to God, I was—and remain—agnostic, and I also had virtually no 
background with the Bible. Opening up a copy of the Good Book never 
brought anything but confusion and boredom. I had a vague notion that 
Job was a story about a guy who suffered (my introduction to him came 
from his mention in the Smashing Pumpkins’ ’90s hit “Bullet With 
Butterfly Wings”), but that was about it.
Atheism is, as it turns out, no impediment to the power of the Joban 
text. It’s a work of ancient poetry as beautiful and enlightening to a 
secular reader as The Odyssey or Journey to the West.

If you’re skeptical, believe me—I was with you. I was raised as a Jew in 
the Reform movement, the biggest Jewish religious tendency in America 
and one attractively lax in doctrine. I went to a Sunday school program 
at my local synagogue, where I learned some basic Hebrew and had a bar 
mitzvah ceremony at age 13. I dropped out of organized Jewish life as a 
teenager. With the exception of a free 18-day trip to Israel in college, 
I spent nearly 20 years of my life hardly ever thinking about being Jewish.

But a weird thing happened to me, and many Jewish Americans, after 
Donald Trump’s election. The siren that sounded most clearly in my head 
was a warning about bigotry against Muslims. Trump’s clear-cut advocacy 
for official action against them on the basis of religion and ethnicity 
weighed on me most heavily among his campaign’s evils. How could I not 
fight against ethno-religious hatred? Wasn’t I a Jew?

I resolved to understand who Jews were to Muslims now. In 2017, I took a 
two-week solo trip to Israel and the West Bank, sometimes traveling with 
guides (mostly Palestinian, a few Israelis), sometimes on my own. I’ve 
written elsewhere about the details of that voyage, but suffice it to 
say that it was one of the major turning points in my life. The building 
and maintenance of Israel had been central to every Jewish institution 
I’d been a part of, as well as to my own family’s history. Abruptly and 
painfully, I got a glimpse of the moral cost. Nothing is quite the same 
for a Jew who speaks frankly with a Palestinian about the death and 
displacement of the region’s Arab population that made—and make—the 
Zionist movement’s goals realizable. What remained of my old Jewish 
identity was burned down. Rather than wallow in its ashes, I felt 
compelled to build a new one.
I realize I am far from the only Jewish millennial who has seen truths 
about Israel and decided to run headlong into making political 
statements with the prefix “as a Jew.” Indeed, this has become a 
tendency so common in recent years as to become a cliché. And, as it 
turned out, newfound identification, education, and outrage still didn’t 
make me feel empowered to meaningfully improve any lives, let alone my 
own. Though I learned everything I could about Israel and the 
Palestinians, I found neither solace nor a path to justice. On the 
contrary, I mostly found reasons to lose faith in the future: All the 
wisest experts could offer was an admission that there were no good 
options—and that the worst of them were the most likely to come true.

By the end of 2017, what felt like an ongoing societal collapse 
compounded various personal problems and led to the most abysmal 
depression of my life. Despair called; it was quite hard to find a 
reason to keep going. Screw it, I thought. Let’s see if God has anything 
to offer.

I started going to synagogue. I started studying the Hebrew Bible—the 
Torah—first in English and then in halting Hebrew.

I started reading Job.

The first time I read it all the way through in English, I could barely 
make out what was happening in the plot. That’s not surprising. If 
modern scholarship is right, the ancient scribes may have accidentally 
placed sections of the text out of order in the canonical version; even 
they, it seems, were thrown off by Job’s notoriously obscure verbiage. 
But as anyone who’s read it in any tongue can tell you, that doesn’t 
stop you from being awed by its imagery and immediacy.

These lines from the 28th chapter struck me in particular, as they had 
many before me:

    /But whence does wisdom come//
    //And what is the site of understanding?//
    //It is hidden from the eyes of the living//
    //Concealed from the birds of the sky/

Even though I’d later learn the passage was likely put in the wrong 
place, the words stirred me. I knew that, many centuries ago, there was 
a poet who understood what it was like to feel completely lost.

Edward L. Greenstein’s astounding recent translation taught me that 
Job’s suffering is only half the story. It’s not even the most important 
half. Greenstein’s version does not rob readers of the comfort that 
comes from sympathizing with Job. But it also exhorts us to rebellion 
against power and received wisdom.

Greenstein points out that a huge portion of what looks like Job 
praising God throughout the text may be meant as the opposite: Job 
sarcastically riffing on existing Bible passages, using God’s words to 
point out how much He has to answer for. Most importantly, Greenstein 
argues, there’s something revolutionary in the mysterious final words 
Job lobs at God, something that was buried in mistranslation.

In the professor’s eyes, various words were misunderstood, and the “dust 
and ashes” phrase was intended as a direct quote from a source no less 
venerable than Abraham, in the Genesis story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In 
that one, Abraham has the audacity to argue with God on behalf of the 
people whom He will smite; however, Abraham is deferential, referring to 
himself, a mortal human, as afar v’eyfer—dust and ashes. It is the only 
other time the phrase appears in the Hebrew Bible.

So, Greenstein says, Job’s final words to God should be read as follows:

    /That is why I am fed up://
    //I take pity on “dust and ashes” [humanity]!/

Remember, for this statement, God praises Job’s honesty.

The deity does not give any logic for mortal suffering. Indeed, He 
denounces Job’s friends who say there is any logic that a human could 
understand. God is not praising Job’s ability to suffer and repent. He’s 
praising him for speaking the truth about how awful life is.

Maybe the moral of Job is this: If God won’t create just circumstances, 
then we have to. As we do, Job’s honesty—in the face of both a harsh, 
collapsing world and the kinds of ignorant devotion that worsen it—must 
be our guiding force.

The Talmudic rabbis offered a dizzying array of guesses about when Job 
took place. Maybe the titular figure was a contemporary of Abraham? Or 
Moses? Or King David? Some post-Talmudic interpreters have even said we 
should read the story as the final part of the biblical narrative—the 
exclamation point ending the age of humanity in which God spoke to us. I 
love this notion. Perhaps Job made an argument so airtight that God, 
embarrassed, ceased talking to humans altogether.

Be that as it may, when God rebukes Job, He speaks at length about the 
horrifying majesty of the natural world He created. He says that 
humanity lives in fear of the beasts and the seasons—a relatable 
sentiment today, to be sure. But it is also a privilege to witness it at 
all, the text implies: We have been given life and consciousness. We can 
experience creation. Even if our joys are few, we get to have them. Even 
if our pains are many, well, we get to have them, too.
That’s the other lesson of Job, the implicit one: This is all we’ve got, 
and it has to be worth it. Crucially, Job doesn’t kill himself. He 
curses the day he was born, but he doesn’t bring about the day of his 
death. He chooses to believe that continued existence is preferable to 
its opposite.
In the face of all that appears to be in front of the world today, amid 
all the calamities we are hurtling toward or already enduring, I’ve 
found no choice but to share Job’s outraged honesty. Job provides a 
framework for why it’s worth it to keep going.

Absent the book’s likely tacked-on epilogue, the Book of Job teaches 
that there is no final victory, no ultimate divine deliverance. As I 
think about how to respond to the concurrent cataclysms threatening the 
nation and the globe, I at least want to be Job—not a person with divine 
patience, but one who cares so much for his fellow mortals that he will 
spit acidic truth into the face of the Lord to the very end.

What’s the alternative? Giving up? Waiting for oblivion? Such an 
attitude is its own kind of submissive patience. It’s understandable—but 
when things inevitably get even darker than they are today, it will be 
about as useful as waiting for God to save the day. What Job has given 
me is not exactly hope. But it’s something.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/03/job-torah-story-despair-alternative-war-democracy-climate-apocalypse.html//



/[ My how times change - looking back at the key moment in Senator James 
Inhofe's career ]/
*March 15, 2012*
*March 15, 2012: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviews Senator James Inhofe 
about his bizarre insistence that climate change is some sort of hoax.*

http://youtu.be/Nrwem8waEx8  (Part 1) Rachel Maddow actually got to 
interview a big name Republican on her show.

http://youtu.be/TdaZ5zIWB-M  (Part 2)

http://youtu.be/9kbxIa4LGUs  (Part 3)


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