[✔️] March 6, 2024 Global Warming News | Texas aflame, Exxon finds fault, Monbiot waters, Deluge in Oman, Low hum, 2001 Christine Todd Whitman ignored

[Richard Pauli]

/*March*//*6, 2024*/

/[ What did you expect from a wildfire?]/
*Texas Panhandle Wildfires Wreak Havoc on the State’s Agriculture Industry*
Kiley Price for Inside Climate News
March 5, 2024
For the past week, the Texas Panhandle has been covered in flames. The 
ongoing inferno—the largest wildfire in the state’s history—has burned 
up nearly 1.3 million acres of land, and firefighters have only managed 
to contain 15 percent of it as of Sunday.

The state government is currently investigating the initial cause of the 
fire. But scientists say that a combination of abnormally high winter 
temperatures, low relative humidity and strong winds—conditions becoming 
more common with climate change—is what transformed the region into a 
tinderbox and enabled the flames to spread uncontrollably.
People and animals in the state’s agricultural industry have been among 
the hardest hit.
*“Dead Animals Everywhere”: *The Texas Panhandle is dominated by 
rangeland, where millions of beef cattle graze on dry shortgrass and 
other prairie plants. When temperatures and winds picked up in the final 
days of February, “all it took was a spark to start a wildfire,” writes 
Karen Hickman, a grassland ecologist at Oklahoma State University and 
president of the Society for Range Management, in the Conversation.

Livestock producers and ranchers scrambled to evacuate their cattle, but 
some were forced to cut their fences and let the cows run free to flee 
from rapidly approaching flames. Last Wednesday, Texas Rep. Ronny 
Jackson of the state’s 13th District posted a video after witnessing the 
destruction from the sky during a helicopter survey, remarking that 
there were “dead animals everywhere.” Though total losses have not yet 
been reported, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said on 
Thursday that he predicts 10,000 cattle will have died or will need to 
be euthanized since many will likely have had their hooves or udders 
burned off.

Compounding the problem, fires have also devastated agricultural 
infrastructure, the Texas Tribune reported...
- -
The Inside Scoop: I reached out to my colleague in Texas, Dylan Baddour, 
and asked him what he’s thinking about as the fire continues to burn out 
of control. Here’s what he wrote back to me:

    Last year the Texas Tribune reported a rapid rise in billion-dollar
    weather disasters was driving up Texas home insurance rates.

    Now, a million acres burnt in rural Texas will also mean big payouts
    from federal crop insurance, which covers farmers and ranchers. Data
    from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for 2022, the last year
    available, showed the highest insured losses in Texas in at least 15
    years—almost $3.7 billion.

    Whether through disaster recovery or crop insurance, weather damage
    in Texas means big costs to the federal budget and higher insurance
    rates for farmers, ranchers and homeowners in the state.

https://mailchi.mp/insideclimatenews/ranchers-face-cattle-crisis-amid-texas-wildfires?e=a5c7f20e91



/[  Exxon finds fault ]/
*Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures*
Darren Woods tells Fortune consumers not willing to pay for clean-energy 
transition, prompting backlash from climate experts
Dharna Noor and Oliver Milman
Mon 4 Mar 2024
The world is off track to meet its climate goals and the public is to 
blame, Darren Woods, chief executive of oil giant ExxonMobil, has 
claimed – prompting a backlash from climate experts.

As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon is among the 
top contributors to global planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. But 
in an interview, published on Tuesday, Woods argued that big oil is not 
primarily responsible for the climate crisis.
The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may 
prove too expensive for consumers’ liking.

“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to 
cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” he told Fortune last week. “The 
people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay 
the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you 
solve the problem.”

Woods said the world was “not on the path” to cut its planet-heating 
emissions to net zero by 2050, which scientists say is imperative to 
avoid catastrophic impacts of global heating. “When are people going to 
willing to pay for carbon reduction?” said Woods, who has been Exxon’s 
chief executive since 2017.

“We have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon in it, but people 
aren’t willing to spend the money to do that.”

Experts say Woods’s rhetoric is part of a larger attempt to skirt 
climate accountability. No new major oil and gas infrastructure can be 
built if the world is to avoid breaching agreed temperature limits but 
Exxon, along with other major oil companies currently basking in record 
profits, is pushing ahead with aggressive fossil-fuel expansion plans.
“It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug problems,” 
said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia business school.

“I hate to tell you, but you’re the chief executive of the largest 
publicly traded oil company, you have influence, you make decisions that 
matter. Exxon are at the mercy of markets but they are also shaping 
them, they are shaping policy. So no, you can’t blame the public for the 
failure to fix climate change.”

Troves of internal documents and analyses have over the past decade 
established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating as far back 
as the 1970s, but forcefully and successfully worked to sow doubt about 
the climate crisis and stymie action to clamp down on fossil fuel usage. 
The revelations have inspired litigation against Exxon across the US.

“What they’re really trying to do is to whitewash their own history, to 
make it invisible,” said Robert Brulle, an environment policy expert at 
Brown University who has researched climate disinformation spread by the 
fossil-fuel industry.

A 2021 analysis also demonstrated that Exxon had downplayed its own role 
in the climate crisis for decades in public-facing messaging.

“The playbook is this: sell consumers a product that you know is 
dangerous, while publicly denying or downplaying those dangers. Then, 
when the dangers are no longer deniable, deny responsibility and blame 
the consumer,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian of science and 
co-author of the 2021 paper.
Last year, another study co-authored by Oreskes found that Exxon’s own 
scientists “correctly and skillfully” predicted the trajectory of global 
warming, then spent decades sowing doubt about climate science and 
policies in order to protect its business model.

In the Tuesday interview, however, Woods says the world “waited too 
long” to develop carbon-free technologies. He said Exxon “recognized the 
need to decarbonize” and that a carbon tax would help achieve this, 
while also defending the oil giant’s comparatively meager investment in 
renewable energy, pointing to focus upon more nascent technologies, such 
as carbon capture and hydrogen fuels.

Exxon does not “see the ability to generate above-average returns for 
investors” from established clean energy generation such as wind and 
solar, Woods said.

“We recognize a need for that. We just don’t see that as an appropriate 
use of ExxonMobil’s capabilities,” he added.

Woods does not mention that his company lobbied to fend off provisions 
in an earlier version of the legislation that would have levied heavy 
taxes on polluting companies to pay for climate efforts, or that a top 
Exxon lobbyist was filmed saying that the firm’s support for a carbon 
tax was a public relations strategy meant to stall more serious climate 
policies.

“For decades, they told us that the science was too uncertain to justify 
action, that it was premature to act, and that we could and should wait 
and see how things developed,” said Oreskes. “Now the CEO says: oh dear, 
we’ve waited too long. If this isn’t gaslighting, I don’t know what is.”

Wagner said that Exxon was touting its ambition to slash the emissions 
of its own operations while also betting that the rest of the world 
won’t do the same, in order to continue selling oil.

“He can’t have it both ways in saying ‘we are an energy company’ but 
then basically ignoring the cheapest source of electricity in history as 
something Exxon should be investing in,” he said.

The video interview comes as Exxon is pursuing a lawsuit against 
activist shareholders who are aiming to push Exxon to take up stricter 
environmental standards. Those shareholders, Woods said, were trying to 
stop Exxon’s central business model of selling oil and gas, which it 
won’t accede to.

“We want to cater to the shareholders who are real investors, who have 
an interest in seeing this company succeed in generating return on their 
investments,” he said. “We don’t feel a responsibility to activists that 
hijack that process … and frankly, abuse it to advance an ideology.”

Exxon has received subsidies to build out its clean energy business from 
the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, Fortune chief executive Alan Murray 
pointed out in the interview. But Woods argued that “building a business 
on government subsidy is not a long-term sustainable strategy”.

“The way that the government is incentivized and trying to catalyze 
investments in this space is through subsidies,” he said. “Driving 
significant investments at a scale that even gets close to moving the 
needle is going to cost a lot of money.”

But the vast majority of Exxon’s own investments are still being put 
toward fossil fuel expansion, said Brulle.

“This is what they do: they’re going to basically blame the victim, the 
American public,” he said.

“They spend on fossil fuels and they spend billions trying to influence 
public opinion, but we’re supposed to foot the bill for the damage.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures



/[//  'Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink' ]/
*We need to talk about water – and the fact that the world is running 
out of it*
George Monbiot
Mon 4 Mar 2024
On a planet getting hotter and drier by the year, governments are 
wilfully ignoring a looming crisis
There’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not a small one: it is an Earth-sized 
hole in our calculations. To keep pace with the global demand for food, 
crop production needs to grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if 
nothing else changes, this is feasible, thanks mostly to improvements in 
crop breeding and farming techniques. But everything else is going to 
change.

Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts, soil degradation, 
epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – 
there is one which, without help from any other cause, could prevent the 
world’s people from being fed. Water.

A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match crop production to 
expected demand, water use for irrigation would have to increase by 146% 
by the middle of this century. One minor problem. Water is already maxed 
out.

In general, the dry parts of the world are becoming drier, partly 
through reduced rainfall; partly through declining river flow as 
mountain ice and snow retreats; and partly through rising temperatures 
causing increased evaporation and increased transpiration by plants. 
Many of the world’s major growing regions are now threatened by “flash 
droughts”, in which hot and dry weather sucks moisture from the soil at 
frightening speed. Some places, such as the southwest of the US, now in 
its 24th year of drought, may have switched permanently to a drier 
state. Rivers fail to reach the sea, lakes and aquifers are shrinking, 
species living in freshwater are becoming extinct at roughly five times 
the rate of species that live on land and major cities are threatened by 
extreme water stress.

Already, agriculture accounts for 90% of the world’s freshwater use. We 
have pumped so much out of the ground that we’ve changed the Earth’s 
spin. The water required to meet growing food demand simply does not exist.

That 2017 paper should have sent everyone scrambling. But as usual, it 
was ignored by policymakers and the media. Only when the problem arrives 
in Europe do we acknowledge that there’s a crisis. But while there is 
understandable panic about the drought in Catalonia and Andalusia, 
there’s an almost total failure among powerful interests to acknowledge 
that this is just one instance of a global problem, a problem that 
should feature at the top of the political agenda.
Though drought measures have triggered protests in Spain, this is far 
from the most dangerous flashpoint. The catchment of the Indus river is 
shared by three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and several 
highly unstable and divided regions already afflicted by hunger and 
extreme poverty. Today, 95% of the river’s dry season flow is extracted, 
mostly for irrigation. But water demand in both Pakistan and India is 
growing rapidly. Supply – temporarily boosted by the melting of glaciers 
in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush – will, before long, peak and then 
go into decline.
Even under the most optimistic climate scenario, runoff from Asian 
glaciers is expected to peak before mid-century, and glacier mass will 
shrink by about 46% by 2100. Some analysts see water competition between 
India and Pakistan as a major cause of the repeated conflicts in 
Kashmir. But unless a new Indus waters treaty is struck, taking falling 
supplies into account, this fighting could be a mere prelude for 
something much worse.
There’s a widespread belief that these problems can be solved simply by 
enhancing the efficiency of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted 
in agriculture. So let me introduce you to the irrigation efficiency 
paradox. As better techniques ensure that less water is required to grow 
a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, it 
attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more 
profitable plants, and expands across a wider area. This is what 
happened, for instance, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a 
€600m investment to reduce water use by improving the efficiency of 
irrigation has instead increased it.

You can overcome the paradox through regulation: laws to limit both 
total and individual water consumption. But governments prefer to rely 
on technology alone. Without political and economic measures, it doesn’t 
work.

Nor are other technofixes likely to solve the problem. Governments are 
planning massive engineering schemes to pipe water from one place to 
another. But climate breakdown and rising demand ensure that many of the 
donor regions are also likely to run dry. Water from desalination plants 
typically costs five or 10 times as much as water from the ground or the 
sky, while the process requires masses of energy and generates great 
volumes of toxic brine.

Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with dietary choice 
(in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek 
to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping 
on about it, this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free 
diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water 
use. The water demand of certain plant products, especially almonds and 
pistachios in California, has become a major theme in the culture wars, 
as rightwing influencers attack plant-based diets. But, excessive as the 
watering of these crops is, more than twice as much irrigation water is 
used in California to grow forage plants to feed livestock, especially 
dairy cows. Dairy milk has much higher water demand even than the worst 
alternative (almond milk), and is astronomically higher than the best 
alternatives, such as oat or soya milk.
This is not to give all plant products a free pass: horticulture can 
make massive demands on water supplies. Even within a plant-based diet, 
we should be switching from some grains, vegetables and fruit to others. 
Governments and retailers should help us through a combination of 
stronger rules and informative labelling.

Instead, they do the opposite. Last month, at the behest of the EU’s 
agricultural commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, the European Commission 
deleted from its new climate plan the call to incentivise “diversified” 
(animal-free) protein sources. Regulatory capture is never stronger than 
in the food and farming sector.

I hate to pile yet more on to you, but some of us have to try to counter 
the endless bias against relevance in politics and most of the media. 
This is yet another of those massive neglected issues, any one of which 
could be fatal to peace and prosperity on a habitable planet. Somehow, 
we need to recover our focus.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/04/water-world-run-out-planet-hotter-looming-crisis

- -

/[  60 Minutes report on water - 14 min video ]/
*Not enough water to go around: Colorado River Basin, ravaged by 
drought, plans for a drier future
*60 Minutes
Jul 31, 2023  #coloradoriver #news #drought
Seven states and 30 Native American tribes lying in the Colorado River 
Basin prepare to make hard choices as water levels plummet due to a 
23-year drought. Bill Whitaker reports.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmeWydWm2MU


/[ Meanwhile, a deluge in Oman ]/
*A sudden floodwater rushed into the city like a tsunami wave! Flood in 
Al Batinah, Oman*
Vulnerability
Mar 5, 2024  ЭЛЬ-БАТИНА
A sudden floodwater rushed into the city like a tsunami wave! Flood in 
Al Batinah, Oman

The wilayats of North Al Batinah governorate experienced varying 
intensities of rain accompanied by strong winds and hailstones, creating 
tumultuous weather conditions.
Residents in the affected areas reported heavy rainfall that inundated 
streets and caused temporary disruptions to daily life.
Agricultural regions welcomed the precipitation as a boon for crops.
Authorities issued advisories urging caution on roads and advising 
farmers to take necessary precautions to protect their crops.
Despite the challenges posed by the inclement weather, communities 
banded together to assist those in need.

Naturals hazards in 2023 have become more frequent. We do not know what 
awaits us in 2025. How global warming and climate change will affect our 
Earth. Watch the most current news about natural disasters on our channel.
- -
The channel lists such natural disasters as:
1) Geological emergencies: Earthquake, Volcanic eruption, Mud, 
Landslide, Landslide, Avalanche;
2) Hydrological emergencies: Flood, Tsunami, Limnological disaster, 
Flood, Flood;
3) Fires: Forest fire, Peat fire;
4) Meteorological emergencies: Tornado, Cyclone, Blizzard, Hail, 
Drought, Tornado, Hail, Hurricane, Tsunami, Storm, Thunderstorm, Tempest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOaFTClpok4


/[ Do you hear the deep hum? -  maybe or maybe not related to pipelines ]/
*The Controversial Sound Only 2% Of People Hear*
Benn Jordan
  Mar 3, 2024  ATLANTA
Since the early 1960's, an increasing number of people have been hearing 
(and feeling) a sound causing everything from annoyance to psychosis to 
death. We have a deeply objective look at what could be causing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8



/[The news archive -  ]/
/*March 6, 2001 */
March 6, 2001: EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman sends a memo to 
President George W. Bush urging him to demonstrate leadership on climate 
change. The memo is summarily ignored.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/whitmanmemo032601.htm


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