All fossil fuel companies should be wound down immediately

[emordnilap]

As biospheric chaos increases, humans do more to contribute to it. It's way past the time to ration fossil fuel use, incorporating ever-decreasing rations.

We're heading for an overall 4°C increase (it's baked into the cake we're making) and quite possibly a mammalian extinction. So in response we do nothing except increase fossil fuel use. Homo sapiens me arse.

[emordnilap]

More reasons why.

…the oil industry is championing a plan that will use federal money to build a seawall along the Texas coast in order to protect—you guessed it—oil refineries, a large number of which are located near the water's edge.

It will protect a lot of other stuff as well. But the irony is not lost on the reporter of the linked piece who in droll understatement writes: "But the idea of taxpayers around the country paying to protect refineries worth billions, and in a state where top politicians still dispute climate change's validity, doesn't sit well with some."

[kenneal - lagger]

.. It's way past the time to ration fossil fuel use, incorporating ever-decreasing rations.....

You can't do that because of the Energy Charter Treaty. Any government trying that would have its arse sued as has happened to Germany when Vattenfall sued the government for nearly 6 billion Euros in two separate cases.

I have been fuming about this since I heard about it over the weekend. I have written to my MP to ask him to ask the relevant minister if this is why the government has been trashing the renewables industry of late and is also doing nothing about increasing the energy efficiency of our homes, both old and new as required by the Climate Change Act.

Another commentary on the Treaty is available here.

[emordnilap]

Ah, the dreaded ISDS. Sneaky bastids. So here we are then. No government, especially the ones we know so well, dares risk being sued.

We're well and truly fecked. We're being shafted over a barrel.

[emordnilap]

Ken, do you understand the treaty? It says it's an 'agreement' between 48 countries which "grants corporations in the energy sector enormous power to sue states". But who is it 'between' exactly?

Does it mean a country signed up to protect its home corporations against actions by another country? I'm trying to figure out where it came from exactly.

Also, the treaty (or threat of it) explains why the feckers in the Irish government are happy to face paying EU fines for breaking emissions limits - it's cheaper!

[emordnilap]

Sometimes George Monbiot talks shite. Occasionally he writes a highly pertinent article.

It doesn’t matter how many good things we do; preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things.

I've always maintained that it's pointless (say) building turbines or installing PV whilst not closing the equivalent output of fossil-fuelled generation.

No politician can act without support. If we want political parties to address these issues, we too must start addressing them. We cannot rely on the media to do it for us.

Easier said than done, especially in America.

[Potemkin Villager]

Most folk want to believe the answers are easy and painless and will not involve much change in how we live. This is why greenwash is such an easy sell but the truth is rather more problematic to swallow.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-limit ... apitalism/

"The rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions together with resource conservation requires that we radically reduce or close down large numbers of power plants, mines, factories, mills, processing and other industries around the world. It means drastically cutting back or closing down not only fossil fuel companies, but the industries that depend on them, including automobile, aircraft, airline, shipping, petrochemical, construction, agribusiness, lumber, pulp and paper, and wood product companies, industrial fishing operations, factory farming, junk food production, private water companies, packaging and plastic, disposable products of all sorts, and above all, the war industries. The Pentagon is the single largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy.

The loss of jobs from the de-industrialization required to save ourselves would not be just a few coal mining and oil drilling jobs but millions of jobs in the industrialized world."

[emordnilap]

Good article, puts things in perspective.

As to the war industry's 'jobs', the most pointless employment ever - make something, sell it, your customer destroys it and has to buy another! Brilliant.

Why has the US had continual war since the 1940s? They saw how 'good' it was for capitalism (and these so-called 'jobs'). This is why they don't really want to 'win' wars as such and encourage others to wage it, with western-supplied weaponry.

Violence would not end by closing down all fossil fuel supplies but the environment would benefit megafold.

[kenneal - lagger]

£5 says that more wars are fought with a Kalishnikov and RPG than with western weaponry. More wars means more people "employed" and bullets consumed than $1m a pop missiles fired.

[emordnilap]

The return to Middle Ages could be avoided, at least in part, if humankind were to invest some of the remaining resources into building an energy infrastructure based on renewable energy, but, right now, it seems that these resources will be squandered in a new series of resource wars.

[PS_RalphW]

£5 says that more wars are fought with a Kalishnikov and RPG than with western weaponry. More wars means more people "employed" and bullets consumed than $1m a pop missiles fired.

Agreed far more people are employed in asymmetric warfare on the Kalashnikov side, but for bullets, the US are hard to beat. US military are notoriously trigger happy, mostly firing machine guns at non-existent targets, whereas the peasant insurgents need to make every bullet count. Most Kalashnikov rifles are built in small scale cottage industries, because it is the simplest and most fault tolerant machine gun ever designed.

[kenneal - lagger]

....whereas the peasant insurgents need to make every bullet count. ...

A celebration burst of fire into the air must count for a lot then, Ralph. You see plenty of those on the TV.

Also the Kalashnikov is notoriously inaccurate. The bullets have a tendency to tumble which is why a hit from a Kalashnikov can be devastating.

[emordnilap]

Richard Branson says Virgin Galactic will be in space 'within weeks, not months’

Richard Branson may be clever but hardly intelligent.

Any encouragement of any kind of air travel needs to be kicked right into touch.

[kenneal - lagger]

Electric Galactic Spaceships?

[emordnilap]

“Climate models don’t take this kind of surge into account.�

Vavilov Ice Cap [...] is a polar desert where frigid temps and dry weather should keep ice firmly tethered to bedrock. But, not Vavilov; it’s like a wild horse. As September 26, 2018, it is slipping/sliding at 15-35 feet per day, much faster than its long-term average of 2 inches. The Vavilov is 1,000 to 2,000 feet or 1/3rd of a mile thick, covering over 700 square miles.

The Arctic sea north of Greenland has always, always, always been frozen rock solid, until now.

Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking.