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<font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>March</b></i></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 6, 2024</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font><br>
<i>[ What did you expect from a wildfire?]</i><br>
<b>Texas Panhandle Wildfires Wreak Havoc on the State’s Agriculture
Industry</b><br>
Kiley Price for Inside Climate News<br>
March 5, 2024<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
People and animals in the state’s agricultural industry have been
among the hardest hit. <br>
<b>“Dead Animals Everywhere”: </b>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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
Compounding the problem, fires have also devastated agricultural
infrastructure, the Texas Tribune reported...<br>
- -<br>
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: <br>
<blockquote>Last year the Texas Tribune reported a rapid rise in
billion-dollar weather disasters was driving up Texas home
insurance rates. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://mailchi.mp/insideclimatenews/ranchers-face-cattle-crisis-amid-texas-wildfires?e=a5c7f20e91">https://mailchi.mp/insideclimatenews/ranchers-face-cattle-crisis-amid-texas-wildfires?e=a5c7f20e91</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<i>[ Exxon finds fault ]</i><br>
<b>Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures</b><br>
Darren Woods tells Fortune consumers not willing to pay for
clean-energy transition, prompting backlash from climate experts<br>
Dharna Noor and Oliver Milman<br>
Mon 4 Mar 2024<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may
prove too expensive for consumers’ liking.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“We have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon in it, but
people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
“It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug
problems,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia
business school.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.<br>
<br>
A 2021 analysis also demonstrated that Exxon had downplayed its own
role in the climate crisis for decades in public-facing messaging.<br>
<br>
“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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“We recognize a need for that. We just don’t see that as an
appropriate use of ExxonMobil’s capabilities,” he added.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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”.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
But the vast majority of Exxon’s own investments are still being put
toward fossil fuel expansion, said Brulle.<br>
<br>
“This is what they do: they’re going to basically blame the victim,
the American public,” he said.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[</i><i> 'Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink' ]</i><br>
<b>We need to talk about water – and the fact that the world is
running out of it</b><br>
George Monbiot<br>
Mon 4 Mar 2024<br>
On a planet getting hotter and drier by the year, governments are
wilfully ignoring a looming crisis<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/04/water-world-run-out-planet-hotter-looming-crisis">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/04/water-world-run-out-planet-hotter-looming-crisis</a><br>
<p>- -</p>
<i>[ 60 Minutes report on water - 14 min video ]</i><br>
<b>Not enough water to go around: Colorado River Basin, ravaged by
drought, plans for a drier future<br>
</b>60 Minutes<br>
Jul 31, 2023 #coloradoriver #news #drought<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmeWydWm2MU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmeWydWm2MU</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Meanwhile, a deluge in Oman ]</i><br>
<b>A sudden floodwater rushed into the city like a tsunami wave!
Flood in Al Batinah, Oman</b><br>
Vulnerability<br>
Mar 5, 2024 ЭЛЬ-БАТИНА<br>
A sudden floodwater rushed into the city like a tsunami wave! Flood
in Al Batinah, Oman<br>
<br>
The wilayats of North Al Batinah governorate experienced varying
intensities of rain accompanied by strong winds and hailstones,
creating tumultuous weather conditions.<br>
Residents in the affected areas reported heavy rainfall that
inundated streets and caused temporary disruptions to daily life.<br>
Agricultural regions welcomed the precipitation as a boon for crops.<br>
Authorities issued advisories urging caution on roads and advising
farmers to take necessary precautions to protect their crops.<br>
Despite the challenges posed by the inclement weather, communities
banded together to assist those in need.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
- -<br>
The channel lists such natural disasters as:<br>
1) Geological emergencies: Earthquake, Volcanic eruption, Mud,
Landslide, Landslide, Avalanche;<br>
2) Hydrological emergencies: Flood, Tsunami, Limnological disaster,
Flood, Flood;<br>
3) Fires: Forest fire, Peat fire;<br>
4) Meteorological emergencies: Tornado, Cyclone, Blizzard, Hail,
Drought, Tornado, Hail, Hurricane, Tsunami, Storm, Thunderstorm,
Tempest.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOaFTClpok4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOaFTClpok4</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Do you hear the deep hum? - maybe or maybe not related to
pipelines ]</i><br>
<b>The Controversial Sound Only 2% Of People Hear</b><br>
Benn Jordan<br>
Mar 3, 2024 ATLANTA<br>
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. <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"> <i>[The news archive - ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>March 6, 2001 </b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> 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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/whitmanmemo032601.htm">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/whitmanmemo032601.htm</a><br>
<br>
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