[✔️] June 5, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Fire watch N. America, S.African coal is falling apart, Adan McKay 6 step solution, Fake letters of support to FERC. fracking study from 2015
R.Pauli
Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Mon Jun 5 04:52:47 EDT 2023
/*June*//*5, 2023*/
/[ fire watch N.America ]/
*Canada ablaze: How wildfires are caused by climate change | World
Environment Day | WION*
WION
Jun 4, 2023 #wildfire #canada #wion
Wildfires have forced thousands in Canada's nova scotia province to
evacuate. the wildfires are now threatening communities on the outskirts
of Halifax and have resulted in poor air quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya7CiDTnm6g
/[ BBC in South Africa - the coal industry falling apart - acts of
criminality and treason - a failing state ]/
*South Africa: On the edge of darkness - BBC News*
BBC News
317,093 views Jun 1, 2023 #BBCNews #SouthAfrica
South Africa’s crumbling energy system is no longer able to keep the
lights on, as lengthy power cuts are experienced daily across the country.
The BBC’s Andrew Harding uncovers a story of corruption and vested
interest at the heart of South Africa’s power failure.
Please subscribe here: http://bit.ly/1rbfUog
#SouthAfrica #BBCNews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofwx-kyxHq4
- -
/More info -- once a nation starts to lose electric power, it begins
to fail So it started in 2007/
Why the lights are going out in South Africa - BBC News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh4yqhD98HU
SA Power Crisis | Role of politics in fueling Eskom crisis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL8AoD_WgWs
https://youtu.be/ua7ol82Zd9c What caused South Africa's energy
crisis? | Inside Story Al Jazeera English
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm1ipKJvaR8 Is South Africa a
failed state?
/[ Leave it to a famous movie director to compose such a succinct
message. Almost fits on a T-shirt. McKay directed the movie"Don't
Look Up" -- this article appears in jacobin.com. I wish he would
consider making another movie. ]/
*Adam McKay: It’s Not Too Late to Demand a Sane Government Response to
Climate Change*
BY ADAM MCKAY
The world will soon cross 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming beyond
preindustrial levels, meaning serious destabilization of the earth’s
ecosystem. But we can still mitigate climate change’s worst effects with
drastic government action.
*The hot, pissed off, oil-caked cat is now out of the bag.*
We will likely cross 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of
global warming beyond preindustrial levels in the next two to four
years. This is the temperature at which scientists have warned, for
quite some time, serious destabilization may occur. While global
temperatures are usually measured as the longer-term trend line rather
than a single year’s temperature, 1.5 degrees Celsius is a frightening
threshold to cross.
Rather than feeling powerless, frustrated, and terrified at this moment,
it’s vitally important we take a beat to remember one very important thing:
it’s not supposed to be like this.
Collectively, we’ve gotten very used to governments, media, and industry
across the world rarely, if ever, solving problems. It seems in 2023
they exist primarily to make sure the financial markets remain robust
and working people stay on mute.
And much how growing up with a gambling-addict dad makes a family
normalize last-second missed free throws meaning no lights or food for a
month, we have gotten comfortable with ridiculous levels of corruption
and incompetence from our elite institutions.
Word salads, incremental gestures, outright BS, and most of all,
pretending there is no problem, flood our day-in-day-out public discourse.
So just a reminder that no, you’re not crazy, there are really obvious
things we should and could be doing.
Here are six actual steps that any semifunctioning government would be
working on if it were not overrun by billions of dollars in dark and
soft money:
*1. Declare A Climate Emergency.*
Duh.
We’re in a climate emergency, so declare it. And unleash executive
powers, in the United States, that allow a government to start
problem solving rather than whatever it’s doing right now.
Joe Biden’s failure to declare an emergency and give a landmark
climate speech makes Neville Chamberlain look more decisive than the
Rock in San Andreas. Shame on him, and shame on a press corps that
rarely if ever asks him about it.
*2. Climate-Proof Our Infrastructure.*
We should cover every structure possible in solar, wind power,
battery storage, and reflective paint to protect power grids, reduce
carbon emissions, and mitigate extreme heat.
How would we pay for this?
Hmm. If only there was a nearly $800 billion annual budget out there
for wars that aren’t happening.
Oh yeah! The Pentagon budget!
Use a chunk of it. Now. We’ve changed plowshares to swords, but now
it’s time to change swords into solar arrays and wind farms. Our
military has been without a clear mission for years. And the climate
emergency is the mission of all missions.
*3. Nationalize and Transform Fossil Fuel Companies Into Renewable
Energy Companies.*
We did it during the 2007 housing market collapse with banks that
behaved horribly and collapsed. What the oil companies are doing not
only endangers the world economy, it will totally destroy it.
If this sounds drastic, remember that during World War II, there
were no factories making Panzer tanks for the Nazis in the United
States or the UK, even though I’m sure it would have been good “for
the markets.”
*4. Invest in Carbon Removal Technology.*
We should create a dozen multibillion-dollar research labs to scale
up and perfect carbon removal.
We are already at half the carbon load of the Permian extinction,
and we’ve done it in a small fraction of the time.
There’s no question we’re going to need to remove carbon from the
atmosphere. And there are promising new technologies being developed
that are only lacking funding and scale.
Is this the answer?
No. But it may help, and we have to try.
*5. Ruggedize the Hell Out Of Everything.*
Fires, floods, mega-droughts, tornadoes, food shortages, power
outages, and dangerous heat events are shifting into a new gear
across the globe.
Let’s get ready with cooling centers, new weather alert systems, sea
walls, expanded firefighting capabilities, evacuation plans, etc.
This preparation will save countless lives.
*6. Transform How We Cultivate Food and Meat to Reduce Methane
Emissions.*
The second biggest producer of greenhouse gases behind the burning
of oil and gas?
Methane from the hundreds of millions of animals we cultivate for
food on an industrial scale.
There are alternatives. Very tasty alternatives.
Transition farmers away from methane-producing animals and toward
carbon-free proteins with huge subsidies and support from the
government agencies offering engineering and infrastructure
emergency support.
“But I like a good steak!”
So do I. But I like not having my house burn down just a hair more.
This is just my list and just a start. If you think it’s terrible,
please, please make a better one.
If lots of people start talking about “the plan,” maybe Washington DC
will stop looking at poll numbers and collecting checks at cocktail
parties and work on one too.
Many will say, “You have to be realistic. Work with the system as it is.”
I would remind them we’ve been doing that for forty years. And the
results couldn’t be any worse.
It’s time to challenge the system to do something really radical:
actually start solving problems.
https://jacobin.com/2023/05/adam-mckay-climate-change-fossil-fuels-government
/[ letters of deliberate deceit is fraud ]/
*Rio Grande LNG’s Developer Led Ghostwriting Campaign to Get Federal
Approval*
NextDecade, a company hoping to build an $11 billion LNG project in
south Texas, submitted letters to FERC on behalf of nearly two dozen
public officials.
ByNick Cunninghamon
Jun 1, 2023
In March, a man named David Irizarry wrote a letter to the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in support of a liquefied natural
gas (LNG) project to be built in Brownsville, Texas. The Rio Grande LNG
project (RGLNG), estimated to cost more than $11 billion, would be the
largest private sector investment in Texas’ history. But it was awaiting
a key decision from FERC.
“As you know, the US appeals court of the DC circuit rejected all but
two of the claims put forward by opponents of RGLNG related to RGLNG’s
FERC order,” Irizarry wrote. Irizarry is not in the gas business, nor
does he deal with energy policy. As the chief executive of the Valley
Regional Medical Center, a medical system serving Brownsville and the
Rio Grande Valley, his letter displayed an unusually fluent
understanding of the ins and outs of the federal gas permitting process.
“The project is currently facing regulatory uncertainty that is related
to the court remand, which is hindering its progress,” he wrote.
A 2021 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
required FERC to revisit an earlier authorization for the LNG project,
but by early 2023, the agency had yet to take action, leaving the
project in limbo.
A few weeks after Irizarry filed comments to FERC, the Brownsville Fire
Chief voiced similar concerns. In fact, the language was nearly
identical. “The project is currently facing regulatory uncertainty that
is related to the court remand, which is hindering its progress,” Chief
Jarrett V. Sheldon wrote in a submission to FERC. “However, after 19
months, the court and RGLNG are still waiting for the Commission to
respond; this seems unusually long,” he added.
Nearly two dozen other official comments were formally submitted to the
FERC docket in March and April, all with similar language. In most
cases, they were near copies of each other, only differing in their
letterheads. Comments also came from top officials in Cameron County,
Texas, where Rio Grande LNG would be built, including a Cameron County
judge, a county commissioner, a Texas state representative, a small town
mayor, an executive from the Portuguese gas company Galp, and a half
dozen commissioners at the Port of Brownsville.
As it turns out, the letters appear to have all been ghostwritten and
submitted by NextDecade, the sponsor of the Rio Grande LNG project.
According to emails obtained through a public records request by DeSmog,
NextDecade approached these officials with a draft letter to FERC,
asking for their support.
“I’m writing to ask if you would be willing to send a letter of support
for the RGLNG project to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
Chairman,” Andrea Figueroa Benton, the head of community relations at
NextDecade, wrote in a March 14 email to Cledia Hernandez, the acting
vice chancellor for the Texas State Technical College. “Please let me
know if you would be willing to send a letter. Attached is a draft that
you may edit as necessary.”...
- -
Hernandez edited the draft letter to discuss the benefits to the
technical college from an LNG project and sent it back to NextDecade.
“The skills learned in these programs can be applied to the construction
and operation of the RGLNG project creating job opportunities for our
students,” she wrote.
In an email to DeSmog, Hernandez noted her changes. “With the exception
of the introductory paragraph stating my title and the purpose of the
letter, the two letters have no other common language,” she said.
But unlike Hernandez, nearly all of the twenty other prominent
supporters identified by DeSmog made minimal changes to NextDecade’s
draft, and simply slapped their letterhead onto it. They include Cameron
County Commissioner Sofia Benavides, Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño,
Texas State Representative Erin Elizabeth Gámez, the Mayor of Los
Fresnos Alejandro Flores, and six officials at the Port of Brownsville,
where the LNG project is located.
DeSmog reached out to the more than dozen public officials who submitted
comments that closely mirrored NextDecade’s draft, and none of them
responded...
- -
“There’s been a lot of public resistance to this project. A lot of vocal
opposition to it,” Jennifer Richards, a staff attorney at Texas
RioGrande Legal Aid, who has been involved with litigation against the
project, told DeSmog. “This is likely an attempt for Rio Grande LNG to
bolster the public record to show that people support it, or that
someone supports it. I don’t think that’s the same thing as community
feedback.”
An “Imbalance of Power”
In early 2023, after suffering repeated delays due to market uncertainty
and legal setbacks, NextDecade seemed to be growing impatient. The
company was conducting some limited site preparation at the Port of
Brownsville, but was awaiting the final go-ahead from FERC. In 2021, a
federal court said that FERC violated the National Environmental Policy
Act when it had authorized the Rio Grande LNG project, and it ordered
the commission to redo its analysis of environmental justice and climate
impacts of the project. The result was a lengthy delay for the gas
export terminal.
By February 2023, with Rio Grande LNG several years behind schedule,
NextDecade fired off an angry letter to FERC. “[I]t is patently clear
that an ongoing, 18-month process to address two questions remanded to
the Commission is inexcusable,” NextDecade wrote. “We respectfully
request that you rectify this immediately.”
In the following weeks, a flurry of comments in support of Rio Grande
LNG began to appear in the FERC docket. They came from notable officials
in Brownsville, all citing “regulatory uncertainty” and calling for
swift approval of the project. The letters also said that “most people”
in the community supported the project.
But they were all filed by NextDecade, using language written by the
company. NextDecade did not respond to questions from DeSmog...
- -
The comments came at a sensitive time, as FERC was wrapping up its
environmental analysis. On April 21, FERC announced its decision,
reapproving the project. The decision was essentially the same as its
first approval four years ago, only with a bit more homework to back up
its decision.
FERC expanded the radius in which it assessed impacts, and discovered
367 additional “environmental justice” communities that would be
impacted by Rio Grande LNG and its associated Rio Bravo gas pipeline, a
proposed 137-mile pipeline that would carry gas from an energy storage
hub near Corpus Christi to the proposed terminal in Brownsville. It also
found that emissions of particulate matter — tied to asthma, decreased
lung function, and cardiovascular ailments — could potentially exceed
federal standards.
But despite these additional impacts, and the fact that impacts would
disproportionately fall on low-income communities and communities of
color, FERC Chairman Willie Phillips nonetheless said that the
environmental impacts would be “less than significant.”
Project opponents were aghast. “I’m not sure how a federal agency can
openly acknowledge that all of the impacts of these terminals will be
borne by environmental justice communities and then also conclude that
that’s in the public interest,” Richards said. She added that
NextDecade’s apparent ghostwriting on behalf of public officials
demonstrates “the imbalance of power” between the gas industry and local
communities where polluting facilities will be built.
“The LNG companies have access to public officials in a way that other
folks don’t,” she said. “And there was really no attempt by FERC to try
to go out and see what people living on the ground, how they might
respond to this application.”
One FERC Commissioner, Allison Clements, dissented with the reapproval
decision, stating that the failure of FERC to do a supplemental
environmental impact statement — a more thorough analysis than the one
that FERC did — leaves the Commission with “a fundamentally flawed
record that cannot support a public interest determination.” She also
suggested that the abbreviated analysis could once again open up the LNG
project to litigation.
Opponents of the project saw it in similar terms. On May 22, a coalition
including the Sierra Club, City of Port Isabel, the Carrizo/Comecrudo
Tribe of Texas, and a local community group called Vecinos para el
Bienestar de la Comunidad Costera (Neighbors for the Wellness of the
Coastal Community), filed a request with FERC for a rehearing of the
commission’s recent approval of the LNG project. Noting multiple
deficiencies and the lack of a supplemental environmental impact
statement, the filing called FERC’s approval a “procedural shortcut.”
“[R]ather than exercise its independent judgment, FERC has simply
uncritically accepted the representations of the industry FERC is
supposed to regulate,” the filing states...
- -
Meanwhile, Rio Grande LNG has faced scrutiny from some of its overseas
customers regarding its climate impact. The project aims to ship gas
fracked from the Eagle Ford and Permian basin in Texas’ shale fields,
where the unchecked flaring of gas and rampant methane leaks have
trashed the industry’s reputation. In 2020, French gas trading firm
Engie backed out of a deal to buy cargoes from Rio Grande LNG.
In response, NextDecade promised to implement carbon capture and
sequestration (CCS) at the facility, claiming that it would be the
“greenest LNG project in the world.” It’s not clear that the technology
will work — CCS has failed or underperformed at many other oil and gas
sites around the world — but even if it did, it would only capture a
small fraction of the facility’s emissions, ignoring methane leaked
upstream and the burning of the gas overseas.
In any event, NextDecade hasn’t made much progress. The company has thus
far not even selected a location for the CCS project. In fact, FERC
suspended its review of the CCS portion of the project in April, noting
that NextDecade has failed to submit enough information.
But that might not matter to NextDecade. In an August 2022 filing to
FERC, the company characterized its CCS project as a “voluntary
undertaking,” and stated: “[I]t is possible that the CCS System Project
may not operate at all times. It is also possible that RGLNG may not be
able to move forward with the CCS System Project for any number of
reasons.”
In other words, NextDecade intends to go forward with the LNG terminal
with or without CCS.
The CCS claims, even if thin on details, serve a purpose. By wrapping
the project in climate-friendly language, NextDecade appears to be
succeeding in assuaging the concerns of buyers. By May 2022, Engie was
back on board, agreeing to a 15-year deal to buy LNG from the export
terminal.
The last piece of the puzzle is securing one more big buyer for its LNG.
In January, gas brokerage firm Poten & Partners suggested that
TotalEnergies was in talks for a deal with Rio Grande LNG, one big
enough to push the project over the finish line and into active
construction. That has yet to happen, however.
For NextDecade, time is of the essence. The company said it would
announce a final investment decision by the end of June. But it has
issued such deadlines before, only to push off the decision. Every delay
costs money. The company is burning through $15 million per month,
according to Evercore ISI, an equity analysis firm. If the final
investment decision is not made by the end of the second quarter,
NextDecade will need some sort of “liquidity injection,” Evercore said.
But unless FERC decides to rehear the matter, NextDecade has all the
federal permitting it needs to move forward. Opponents are hoping the
commission reconsiders, but it’s not clear if their request for a
rehearing has good odds. Given FERC’s track record, it could be a
longshot. FERC did not respond to questions from DeSmog...
- -
“Our local economy relies on fishing and environmental tourism. If we
damage these vital natural resources, then we stand to lose thousands
and thousands of good paying jobs that sustain our local workforce,”
Jared Hockema, city manager for the City of Port Isabel, a town that
sits very close to the proposed sites, said in a press conference on May
24.
“For what? For 150 workers that may work at these plants that aren’t
even from these areas?” he said. “This decision reflects FERC’s lack of
diligence and lack of examination of this development, and we are
calling upon them to reconsider their actions and consider the extreme
danger of these facilities.”
https://www.desmog.com/2023/06/01/rio-grande-lng-nextdecade-ghostwriting-ferc/
/[The news archive - looking back at common sense danger of fracking ]/
/*June 5, 2015*/
June 5, 2015:
• The New York Times reports:
"A landmark Environmental Protection Agency report on the impact of
hydraulic fracturing has found no evidence that the contentious
technique of oil and gas extraction has had a widespread effect on
the nation’s water supply, the agency said Thursday.
"Nevertheless, the long-awaited draft report found that the
techniques used in hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, do have
the potential to contaminate drinking water.
"It notes several specific instances in which the chemicals used in
fracking led to contamination of water, including drinking water
wells, but it emphasized that the number of cases was small compared
with the number of fracked wells.
"The agency has been working on the study since 2010, when it was
requested by Congress.
"The study 'greatly advances our scientific understanding of
fracking’s impacts, and it serves as a foundation for future study,'
said Thomas A. Burke, deputy assistant administrator of the agency’s
Office of Research and Development.
"Both supporters and opponents of fracking seized on the results.
Oil and gas companies cheered the report as a vindication of the
technique, while environmental advocates pointed to the findings as
evidence that the practice is a threat to safe water supplies."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/us/epa-hydraulic-fracking-water-supply-contamination.html
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