[ If you thought it was bad, you were right...and here are the
facts to back it up.] [[link removed]]

WORLD GONE WRONG: AN ENVIRONMENTAL DIARY OF 2019  
[[link removed]]

 

Jeffrey St. Clair
January 3, 2020
Counterpunch
[[link removed]]


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_ If you thought it was bad, you were right...and here are the facts
to back it up. _

Northern Harrier, Columbia marshlands., Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

 

JANUARY, 2019

+ Ryan Zinke, under investigation for trying to enrich himself in
office, refused to step down from his post at the Interior Department
until he could have a Christmas party with lobbyists and take pictures
in front of a stuffed polar bear…

+ Zinke’s greed was largely personal. His likely replacement David
Bernahrdt, a former lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry
[[link removed]],
will dutifully feed the greed of the shareholders of big oil and coal.

+ The Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations all did a lot to
advance the interests of Big Coal and almost nothing to fight black
lung disease
[[link removed]].

+ There are fewer North Atlantic Right Whales
[[link removed]] left
in the world than sitting members of Congress. They may well go
extinct in our lifetimes.

+ According to a new study by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory, climate change has made the Western megadrought
[[link removed]] (the
worst in at least 500 years) 38 percent more severe
[[link removed]],
leading to record low flows in Colorado River and dwindling reservoirs
behind Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams. Is this what they mean when they
say “it’s a dry heat?”

+ Clichés we may have to rewrite: “You can lead a horse to water,
but you can’t make him drink…” “You can lead a horse to water,
but he’ll be dead before you find any…”

+ The Arctic is now warming so quickly that 14,000 tons of melted ice
[[link removed]]is
gushing into the oceans every second.

+ The Alaska statewide running temperate for the last year is the
highest in the last 100 years (ie., since records have been kept.)

+ “He’s a vampire, babe, sucking blood from the Earth
[[link removed]],
sell you twenty barrels worth….”

+ Since this new study on climatcide denialism
[[link removed]] was
undertaken by students from Brown, perhaps they could release a music
video version as well? It would get a lot of airplay on FoxNews
[[link removed]]…

+ Blood on the Tracks: Last week a female wolf, weighing only 70
pounds, was shot by a “hunter” on the plains of northeastern
Montana
[[link removed]] (nearly
300 miles from the Rocky Mountains), where wolves haven’t been seen
in many years.

+ After three years of decline, carbon emissions in the US rose by
3.4 percent
[[link removed]] in
2018.

+ After two weeks of mayhem, with off-roaders chopping down rare
Joshua Trees, palms and yuccas, the Park Service finally closed
Joshua Tree National Park
[[link removed]] to
public entry. They should close them all. And use the government
shutdown to Rest the West by ending logging on the National Forests
and getting the damn cows and oil derricks off of BLM lands.

+ Rest easy, this threat from south of the border is NOT a National
Emergency….”Antarctic Sea Ice is Astonishingly Low This Melt
Season
[[link removed]].”

+ Meet the Owl Man of Umatilla, who is reclaiming a chemical weapons
depot one burrow at a time
[[link removed]]…

+ Trump says he’d make a great general. It’s hard to disagree. He
continues to win the “War on Coal”–down 38% in the last decade.

+ The government isn’t the only thing shutting down. So is the
planet…Ecologist Scott Lister has found that over the last 35
years 98% of ground insect species
[[link removed]] in
Puerto Rico have been extirpated.

+ LA photographer Peter Bennett, who manages the Los Angeles River
blog, took a series of photos comparing the Los Angeles River before
and after
[[link removed]] it’s
channel was paved. Bennett writes:

The idea was to get as close to the original spot the older photos
were taken, and try to match up the lens and framing with the
original… There was a sense of time travel as I viewed the landscape
as it is today and… as it was back in the ’30s. The visual
contrast was quite striking, and the changes apparent in the 75 years
or so since the photos were taken was at times quite dramatic.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

+ On the climate front, Trump is doing his part to reduce Nancy
Pelosi’s carbon footprint by canceling her “fact-finding” trip
[[link removed]] to
Brussels, Egypt and Afghanistan…

+ The Rio Grande is s
[[link removed]]hriveling
[[link removed]]. It’s not a drought.
It’s the future…

+ A new report
[[link removed]] from
Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment
argues that Trump’s replacement for Obama’s climate is “worse
than doing nothing
[[link removed]].”
Of course, “doing nothing” _was_ the Obama Climate Plan.

+ Top 5 warmest annual global temperatures since at least 1891,
according to the Japan Meteorological Agency:

1. 2016
2. 2015
3. 2017
4. 2018
5. 2014

+ What will they call “permafrost” when it’s no longer
permanent
[[link removed]]?

+ Calculate the carbon footprint of your diet
[[link removed]],
assuming you’re on a diet.

+ How do you define sextupled?

Antarctic ice loss in 1979: 40 billion tons per year.
Antarctic ice loss in 2017: 252 billion tons per year.

+ Current body count in the War on Coal: More coal plants have
closed
[[link removed]] in
Trump’s first two years than in Obama’s entire first term.

+ The state of Idaho just put out a $200,000 bounty
[[link removed]] on
the state’s wolves. It’s time to put the wolf killers on permanent
furlough.

+ Barbara Ehrenreich: “If I had a gun and knew how to use it, my
first target would be the fiends who’ve been destroying Joshua Trees
in the eponymous park. The rest of you bastards can wait.”

+ Australia is sweltering under some of its hottest days ever
recorded
[[link removed]].
The death count is rising, especially among bats. During a November
blast of heat, flying fox bats started falling from the trees. In just
two days, more than a third
[[link removed]] of
the nation’s flying fox bat population perished. Mass die offs can
happen fast.

JANUARY 25, 2019

+ Climate of No Return?

+ When Seattle closed down the Alaska Way Viaduct (Highway 99), many
predicted the city would be paralyzed by traffic. Instead, 99,000 car
trips a day
[[link removed]] simply
vanished. Rip up the highways and people will find softer ways to
travel or just stay home…

+ A new study
[[link removed]] from
ecologists at the University of Wisconsin predicts that
Yellowstone’s forests may be replaced almost entirely by grasslands
within the next 30 years. Among other dire consequences for the
ecosystem, this climate-driven transition will mean the extinction of
the Yellowstone grizzly, which depends on white bark pine seeds as an
essential source of protein.

+ A record number of private jets landed in Davos
[[link removed]] this
week to attend the Climate Summit. Why? Because their carbon don’t
stink…

+ If Trump succeeds in shutting down airports coast-to-coast, even
for only a few days, he’ll have done more to combat Catastrophic
Climate Change than all other presidents combined.

+ The Himalayan glaciers are in rapid retreat
[[link removed]].
They are the principle water source for more than a billion people and
three nations armed with nuclear weapons.

+ Lake Foul became a “dead pool
[[link removed]]”
the moment they closed the floodgates at Glen Canyon Dam…

FEBRUARY 2019

+ A new study in _Nature_
[[link removed]] assess
the impact of major federal and state subsidies on US crude oil
producers. The study find that, at recent oil prices of $50 per
barrel, tax preferences and other subsidies push nearly half of new,
yet-to-be-developed oil investments into profitability, potentially
increasing US oil production by 17 billion barrels over the next few
decades. This oil is the equivalent  6 billion tons of CO2 and could
make up as much as 20% of US oil production through 2050.

+ MSDNC commentator Hugh Hewitt on AOC and the Green New Deal…

“It is despotic. That’s it. It is not socialism, it is communism,
it is fascism, it is despotism. It drains all freedom out of America
and if we had a media class that understood a lick about history, they
would know this…Those who are immodest about their ability to shape
humans end up murdering millions of them.”

+ The BLM announced that it will begin auctioning oil leases
[[link removed]] on
the outskirts of the Sistine Chapel of the American Southwest, Chaco
Canyon. Let me repeat: the BLM wants to drill for oil adjacent to
CHACO CANYON.

+ The initial reports of damage done to Joshua Tree National Park
during the government shutdown suggest that it may take 200 or more
years for the ecosystem to recover
[[link removed]].
They should build a wall around Joshua Tree and lock the gates for the
next 50 years.

+ Set aside that Zen koan you’ve been fixating on and meditate on
the metaphysical meaning of Rep. Louis Gohmert’s remarks during the
House Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday: “If the climate
change and the Green New Deal comes into law, it’s saying, we’re
giving up our freedom and putting all of our faith in the faith in the
government that caused the civil rights violations to begin with.”

+ Not a single word about climate change (except gloating over the
US’s status–thanks to Obama–as the world’s No. 1 oil & gas
producer) or Puerto Rico in Trump’s “unity” speech, which is, of
course, one way to unify the opposition.

+ This year sea ice in Antarctica has shrunk to record lows, at the
same time that giant cavities
[[link removed]] are
opening in the Antarctic Ice Sheet, a resulting of accelerated melting
from climate change…

+ It’s the middle of February and most of Oregon remains ensnarled
in a condition of extreme drought.

+ Temps on the North Slope of Alaska were 30-50 degrees above
“normal” last week…

+ Hot off the Doomed Planet News Wire: Oil production in Texas has
shattered records set in the 1970s
[[link removed]]…

+ At least 305 wolves were killed in Montana in 2017-18, nearly 36%
of the entire population. Now a pair of bills offering bounties to
encourage people to kill even more wolves
[[link removed]].

+ A trail camera in southern Arizona captured a photo of “Lil
Jefe,”
[[link removed]] a
rare ocelot, which will be seriously endangered by Trump’s planned
border wall. Roam safely, Little Man…

+ Predatory capitalism has been supplanted by sadistic capitalism
[[link removed]].

+ The Westminster Dog Show, where Nazi science is still celebrated
[[link removed]]…

+ The sheep rancher who killed this coyote and displayed her corpse
on a post, shouted profanities at me while shaking a rather
sharp-looking pitchfork in his hand, while I was taking this photo
last Sunday afternoon near his barn outside Scott Mills, Oregon.

MARCH 2019

+ Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) net worth:

2004: $61,768,616
2014: $94,202,571
Increase in 10 years: $32,433,955 (+52.58%)

No wonder she doesn’t want to leave office…

+ DiFi in action, versus 5th graders…

[[link removed]]

Waleed Shahid

✔@_waleedshahid

Everyone needs to watch this video of @SenFeinstein
[[link removed]] disparaging literal children
from @SunriseMvmt [[link removed]] calling on her
to support @AOC [[link removed]] and @SenMarkey
[[link removed]]’s Green New Deal.

[Embedded video]
[[link removed]]

25.7K [[link removed]]

2:39 PM – Feb 22, 2019
[[link removed]]

Twitter Ads info and privacy
[[link removed]]

15.9K people are talking about this

+ Those second-graders who confronted DiFi over climate change are
lucky they didn’t ask Kamala Harris
[[link removed]] a
tough question: “To date, I have prosecuted 20 parents of young
children for truancy. The penalty for truancy charged as a misdemeanor
is a fine of up to $2,500 or up to a year of jail. Our groundbreaking
strategy has worked.”

+ A new simulation finds that global warming could cause
stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which
would add 8°C (14°F) of extra warming. (But look on the bright side
of this otherwise distressing news: In a world without clouds, it will
be easier to track Bernie’s private jet when it flies over your
neighborhood…)

+ We are now witnessing the first Category 5 Typhoon
[[link removed]] ever
to develop in February…

+ The waters of the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee are draining
away
[[link removed]],
largely as a result of climate change. Soon, we’ll all be able to
walk across the lakebed Jesus walked on…(as long as you’re not a
Palestinian, that is.)

+ Meet William Happer, the climate change denier Trump just picked to
head his new panel on climate change. “The demonization of carbon
dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under
Hitler.”

+ If temperatures increase by 2 degrees Celsius, climate change could
cost U.S. infrastructure $500 billion by 2100. Don’t worry, Mexico
will pay for it…

+ Bering Sea ice remains critically low, only 53% of the average from
1983-2010…

+ Is this the hottest summer ever
[[link removed]] in
Australia?

+ Kill an orphaned kitten while jogging
[[link removed]] get
celebrated as a hero, save a bear cub
[[link removed]] get
thrown in jail….

+ Killing wolves won’t save caribou, according to a new report
[[link removed]]…but
that’s not why they really want to kill wolves.

+ This map depicts 20 years of migratory data from a single golden
eagle tagged with a GPS device…

+ Greenwashing, it’s for everyone, even dredge miners, who have
taken to describing themselves as “aquatic health technicians
[[link removed]]”
to secure money from the State of Oregon.

+ It’s now open season for wolves
[[link removed]] on
the Colville Rez, whose tribal council is dominated by anti-wildlife
ranchers….

+ We lived adjacent to the Yellowwood Forest in southern Indiana for
8 years. Yellowwoods are a rare tree in Indiana, a relic of the
glacial age. Most forest land in Indiana is private. There’s no
economic or social reason to log public forests. In Indiana, public
forests, even the crown jewels like Yellowwood, are logged for
political reasons, to stick it to environmentalists. We now know that
the State of Indiana recently sold trees logged in Yellowwood for $68
per tree. Cost: mangled wildlife habitat, increased soil erosion,
decreased biodiversity, appalled tourists…$68 PER TREE!

+ Snake River salmon runs before and after the completion of Lower
Granite Dam…

+ Mining companies dump 50 million gallons
[[link removed]] of
toxic wastewater into American streams every single day.

+ An Australian rodent called the Bramble Cay Melomys
[[link removed]] became
the first mammal known to go extinct due to climate change. And
we’re just getting warmed up!

+ SNL cut the parody of DiFi responding to those kids last week.
Luckily, we found it on the cutting room floor…

+ Trump’s rollback of clean air regulations (Codename:  “The
Affordable Clean Energy Rule”) could cause 1,630 more premature
deaths and 120,000 more asthma attacks by 2030, according to a new
study by the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center
[[link removed]].

+ Trump’s EPA blocked NASA from doing cancer research
[[link removed]] in
Texas after Hurricane Harvey unleashed a tide of toxic muck across the
Gulf Coast…Why? It’s better (for the chemical and oil companies)
not to know.

+ Trump: “FEMA has been told directly by me to give the A Plus
treatment to the Great State of Alabama and the wonderful people who
have been so devastated by the Tornadoes.” I hope someone files a
FOIA request to reveal what grade of service  Trump told FEMA to give
to Puerto Rico.

+ Not surprisingly, federal disaster relief has always favored the
rich
[[link removed]].

+ When oceans burn
[[link removed]]…

+ Sea ice extent in the Bering & Chukchi Seas has decreased by 360,000
km² since Jan 25th, meaning an area the size of Montana has gone from
mostly ice to mostly all water in six weeks.

+ Greenland’s ice sheet is melting, even in winter
[[link removed]].

+ When Ketchikan, Alaska runs out of water
[[link removed]],
you know the planet is really screwed up…

+ Rising sea levels are ruining crops and poisoning farmland
[[link removed]] in
coastal North Carolina. “It’s all good, Honey Pie. If the crops
die, we can always raise hogs. The ham will come pre-salted.”

+ Under a new law, if you contribute money to anti-pipeline protests,
South Dakota might try to arrest you
[[link removed]]…(So
much for “money as speech.”

+ Free-market, anti-government conservatives in Wyoming push forward a
bill to mandate keeping aging coal plants running
[[link removed]]…

+ The Canadian uranium company that shrank the Bears Ears
[[link removed]] (with
the help of Ryan Zinke)…

+ First ketchup was reclassified as a vegetable. Now it appears
that lead has become an essential mineral
[[link removed]] in
school lunch programs.

+ Nearly half of all insect species on the planet could be driven to
extinction within the next several decades, largely poisoned to
oblivion by pesticides
[[link removed]].

+ As if the week hasn’t seen enough bloodshed, Trump’s Interior
Department moved this week to lift all federal protections for wolves
[[link removed]]in
the US.

+ The US may not have any of the best cities
[[link removed]] to
live in, but I know we have a few of the worst, starting with Page,
Arizona…

+ An evocative study from the British Academy suggests that neolithic
people (4,500 BCE) came from across Britain to Stonehenge-like sites
in Devonshire and Wiltshire for ceremonial feasts
[[link removed]].
A similar region-wide gathering took place in the Pacific Northwest,
where archaeological evidence indicates native people came all the way
from Yellowstone and northern Arizona for salmon feasts at Celilo
Falls in Oregon, a village that swelled to a seasonal population of
30,000 during the spring and fall runs.

+ In Alaska, indigenous people make up less than 20% of the
population, but Alaskan Natives account for 60% of the kids in foster
care.

+ Native Americans are already the most vulnerable population in the
US to wildfires and the Trump administration’s policies are putting
their communities at even greater risk
[[link removed]].

+ How Inuits teach their kids to control their anger
[[link removed]].

+ Proof labor strikes work: Nicolas Petit, a favorite to win the
Iditarod, dropped out of the race, less than 200 miles from the finish
line, when his team of dogs refused to run
[[link removed]] after
he yelled harshly at one of them.

+ By 12,000 BCE, dogs were being depicted on stone columns and buried
in the arms of humans
[[link removed]]…

+ They’re aerial gunning wolves
[[link removed]] again
in Alaska, using the specious rationale of “boosting” moose
populations…

+ Read Rick McIntyre’s gripping account of the life and death
of Yellowstone Wolf 926F
[[link removed]] and
try not to cry (or resist the urge to blow something up). I saw her at
least once, leading her pack, along Slough Creek. Her life story reads
like Anna Karina.

+ Bulldozers are carving up forests in the name of fire prevention.
They aren’t preventing any fires, but they sure are destroying a lot
forest.

+ A new report reveals that white people in the US generate much more
pollution
[[link removed]] than
blacks and Hispanics and yet suffer much less from the health
consequences of such pollutants.

+ According to the European Heart Journal, air pollution prematurely
kills 800,000 people a year
[[link removed]],
twice the previous estimates.

+ The pipes don’t work cause the vandals turned the handles
[[link removed]]…

+ People complaint that I’m a pessimist. But it’s hard to stay as
pessimistic as the science
[[link removed]]:
“Out of 5.2 million possible climate futures, carbon emissions must
reach zero by 2030 in every country in the world if we are to stay at
less than 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 of warming.”

+ According to the latest UN Report, it’s all over for the Arctic
[[link removed]]:
Even if the Paris Agreement is met, global temperatures will rise 3-5C
above preindustrial levels. Even if all carbon emissions stop, Arctic
temperatures rise will 5C above 2005 levels.

+ Oklahoma is constantly rocking
[[link removed]] because
of fracking and wastewater injection from oil drilling.. Antarctica is
now rattling with earthquakes
[[link removed]] from
climate change, driven by fracking and oil drilling…

+ In recent study published in Nature
[[link removed]], researchers
estimate that half of all coral in the Great Barrier Reef has died
since 2016! “On average, across the Great Barrier Reef, one in
three corals died in nine months,” said Terry Hughes, an author of
the paper and the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral
Reef Studies. “You could say the ecosystem has collapsed. You could
say it has degraded. I wouldn’t say that’s wrong. A more neutral
way of putting it is that it has transformed into a completely new
system that looks differently, and behaves differently, and functions
differently, than how it was three years ago.”

+ Teenage climate change striker: “I don’t really think it matters
if I have a Roth IRA because of climate change.”

+ The so-called Bomb Cyclone generated a barometric pressure reading
of 970 millibars, the lowest ever recorded in Colorado.

+ There’s $$$ in “adaptation
[[link removed]]”
to the wreckage of climate change–not so much in reducing
consumption of fossil fuels and products made by them…

+ Of course, Bill de Blasio’s plan to confront climate change is
to add more ground to Manhattan Island
[[link removed]],
in a last ditch move to stem rising sea levels. He’d probably have
more success making sacrifices to Poseidon.

+ True to form, AFL-CIO’s Energy Committee slams the Green New Deal
[[link removed]],
then leaks the letter to Wyoming’s oil patch Sen. John Barrasso.
This was enough to scare the bejeezus out of Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, who
warned that such a plan would represent a Final Solution for
“ethnics” (white Westerners) like him, a Green Genocide
[[link removed]].

+ Will the Green Genocide lead to the extinction of the MAGAfauna?

+ How CNN describes Gov. John Frackenlooper: “worked with oil
executives to fight climate change.”

[[link removed]]

Dan Merica

✔@merica

Hickenlooper, who worked w oil executives to fight climate change as
gov, tells @BuzzFeedBen [[link removed]] that his
critics on climate are off base.

“So I did stuff. They’re mad that I did stuff. And they are still
talking… And we actually did stuff. Alright, sue me,” he said.

107 [[link removed]]

10:31 AM – Mar 10, 2019
[[link removed]]

Twitter Ads info and privacy
[[link removed]]

87 people are talking about this

+ Yes, this is the same John Frackenlooper who threatened to sue
[[link removed]] any
Colorado communities that voted to ban fracking.

+ Sen. Fossil (Manchin) and Sen. Fuel (Murkowski) admonished lawmakers
to take “responsible action
[[link removed]]”
on climate change, which is like Coors telling football fans to
“drink responsibly” …

+ Lawmakers in Pennsylvania, the state that gave us Three Mile Island,
are considering a bill that would inject $500 million
[[link removed]] into
the region’s failing nuclear reactors, which is throwing good public
funds down a radioactive drain.

+ As Trump gears up to clearcut America’s public forests at a pace
not seen since the Reagan Administration, the rate of forest coverage
in China has increased by nearly 10 percent in the past four decades,
with the world’s largest planted forests and an 80 percent expansion
of forest areas across the country.

+ If we get really good photographs of all the world’s butterflies,
we can project life-life holograms of them when they’re gone
[[link removed]].
But we’ll have to charge you to see them. “Butterflies” won’t
be “free” anymore..

+ Emissions from air travel are going through the roof, while
emissions from other forms of travel are gradually declining.

+ It was a gorgeous Sunday in the Oregon Coast Range and I descended a
small river I’d long wanted to visit called Beaver Creek (one of
dozens), which tumbles through a lovely sequence of waterfalls before
emptying into the Columbia, near the old cannery town of Quincy. Just
a few hundred yards downstream from the falls is one of the most
savage clearcuts I’ve seen in decades. I couldn’t get close enough
to get good photographs (see below), but the logging went all the way
down to the stream (coho, steelhead, cutthroat, chinook) on a very
steep slope, already slumping and poised for a big slide that will
bury the creek. There are three waterfalls in less than a mile on
Beaver Creek, one of them 60 feet tall. In most states, this canyon
would be protected as a state park. In Oregon, it’s just another
free-fire zone.

At the mouth of Beaver Creek is a huge fenced off industrial site,
totally hidden from public view, unless you’re on the river. It’s
PGE’s big biomass plant, turning Oregon’s forests into “green
electricity.”

+ The transoceanic migration of the Blackpoll Warbler, from Amazonia
to the Boreal Forests
[[link removed]],
is a natural marvel (not to mention a shaming of Boeing) that is
inexorably being extinguished from the face of the Earth.

+ Douglas-fir, the dominant tree species west of the Cascade Ranges
 and Ponderosa pine, the dominant tree east of the Cascades, are both
struggling to regrow after wildfires and clearcuts in the West,
largely because of changing climate conditions
[[link removed]].

+ It was 68 in Oregon City on Sunday. While up in northern Alaska,
Fairbanks Airport 47F breaks previous record high temp for March 17 of
46F last set in 1981. Tanana 46F breaks the previous record of 39F set
in 1998. Bettles 44F breaks the previous record of 38F set in 1998.

+ Fairbanks hit 51F at 3:30 pm on Thursday, the warmest temperature in
the Alaskan city since October 24th. Normal high temp for March 21st
is 28F.

+ Poseidon is pissed and rogue waves are getting more extreme and
dangerous.
[[link removed]] This
kind of “dynamic flooding
[[link removed]]” is largely a
consequence of rising sea levels.

+ Climate change has now destroyed more US military equipment
[[link removed]]than
was lost in any war since Vietnam.

+ A young Cuvier’s Beaked Whale was spotted near a beach in the
Philippines last week in terrible condition, weak and coughing blood.
The whale soon died and a necropsy was performed on its body. The
whale had staved to death, its stomach completely crammed with oceanic
plastic debris. The whale had likely been suffering for months, if not
a year. It’s stomach was described as being “as hard as a baseball
[[link removed]].”

+ Steve King (Nazi – IA): “New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina
victims only asked for help, Iowans take care of each other.”

+ Eco-tourism was always one of the great oxymorons, right up there
with clean coal, humanitarian intervention and sustainable
development. Now one-percenters are carving carbon contrails into the
sky as they fly to the remotest parts of the world on “last chance
[[link removed]]”
tours…

+ Robert Macfarlane’s word of the day: “orming” – wandering
without intent, meandering, walking with pleasurable aimlessness
(English regional, esp. Lincolnshire; supposedly derived from the
Norse word for “worm”).  See also “stravaiging” (Scots),
“daundering”, “pootling”, etc…

+ The LCV, created with the best of intentions in 1970 by David Brower
and Marion Edey, has turned into little more than a wholly-owned
subsidiary of the most calcified elements in the DNC.

+ Trump is going to miss Mueller now that’s he’s gone. He needs a
Hellhound on his trail for his show to work, even if the dog doesn’t
bite. Otherwise, the man is left to indulge his own worst instincts,
like targeting disabled children
[[link removed]] and hurricane
refugees
[[link removed]].

+ If the Democrats had wanted to really nail Trump for collusion, they
should have pursued his entanglements with the oil and coal
industries
[[link removed]] and
his failure to faithfully execute (and repeatedly subvert) the laws of
the Republic on their behalf.

+ For example, over the course of the 35-day government shutdown, the
Bureau of Land Management approved 267 onshore drilling permits and 16
leases applied for by oil and gas companies. Two of Acting Interior
Secretary David Bernhardt’s former clients were among the companies
whose applications won approval from the BLM.

+ Bernhardt and his lobbying firm donated over $1 million
[[link removed]] to
Senators, the same ones who are now set to approve his nomination as
Interior Secretary. A million here, a million there. Next thing you
know they’re opening ANWR and the Oregon Coast to oil drilling.

+ Though at least there’s one entity in the gallery who is keeping a
close eye on Bernhardt.

+ The coral reefs off Lord Howe Island, the most southern reef in the
world, are now experiencing bleaching
[[link removed]] from
climate change, despite the cool waters of the Tasman Sea. This is
about as bad as it gets. Until next week…

+ March 2019 was the 100th consecutive month with above normal
temperatures in Svalbard, Norway. Since 1961, the rate of warming
there has been about six times the global average.

+ To illustrate his attacks on the Green New Deal during debate over
the show vote in the senate , Sen. Mike Lee used this photo of Reagan
riding a dinosaur…What does it represent? A fossil on fossil fuels?
(Beto will be appearing in a version of this painting on his
next _Vanity Fair_ cover
[[link removed]].)

According to Lee, the solution to climate change is for people to
have more babies
[[link removed]].

+ Climate change, taking out one Air Force base after another…
The Air Force says it “requires $1.2B in FY2019 & $3.7B in
FY2020/FY2021 of supplemental funding to rebuild Tyndall AFB, and
recover Offutt AFB.” Without it, the Air Force claims service
“must cut critical facility and readiness requirements”

+ One more thing to ad to the Endangered Species List: local
environmental reporting
[[link removed]].

+ The equivalent of 34 soccer fields of old-growth forest is clearcut
on Vancouver Island every day.

+ This model of Alaska’s melting permafrost should scare the bejesus
out of anyone who cares about what happens beyond the next fiscal
year…

[[link removed]]

Woods Hole Research Center@WoodsHoleResCtr

An alarming model of Alaskan #permafrost
[[link removed]]. Less yellow
indicates permafrost thaw. Permafrost thaw means the #greenhouse
[[link removed]] gases currently
stored inside will leak into the atmosphere. The problem? Permafrost
stores more #carbon
[[link removed]] than has ever been
released by humans. Map by @g_fiske [[link removed]].

[Embedded video]
[[link removed]]

76 [[link removed]]

1:10 PM – Mar 26, 2019
[[link removed]]

Twitter Ads info and privacy
[[link removed]]

84 people are talking about this

+ Nick Estes: “The same week Trump recognizes the illegal Israeli
annexation of the Golan Heights, he “re-permits” the illegal
trespass of the KXL pipeline through Lakota territory. One colonial
occupation is only possible because of another.”

+ Murray Energy, which basically writes the rules on coal mining for
Trump’s Interior Department, mines 1/3 of the coal in West Virginia
and 1/4 of the coal in Illinois…

+ 10 of the levees that failed during the flooding in the Middle West
were never inspected
[[link removed]] by
the federal government.

+ More than one million private water wells
[[link removed]] across
the Midwest are at risk of contamination from livestock waste, oil and
pesticides, as a result of the record floods. How do you like that
Round-Up now?

+ There are only 42 mountain lions left in the Santa Ana and Santa
Monica mountains of southern California. These populations have a high
probability of going extinct within the next 50 years. Their only real
hope a network of wildlife corridors
[[link removed]] to
link islands of viable habitat amid the cancerous sprawl of the Los
Angeles Basin.

+ It’s been a brutal year for grizzlies in the Northern Rockies and
Greater Yellowstone.  A total 42 grizzlies were killed by so-called
“wildlife managers” last year, including 32 in Wyoming alone. That
was a record number of “lethal removals” in the state, up 45
percent from the previous record of 22.

+ Number of jobs at the EPA Trump’s budget would slash: 2,000.

+ I eagerly await the Million Wolves March
[[link removed]] on
Washington…

+ The Shasta Pack in northern California has disappeared
[[link removed]].
Where they poisoned by ranchers?

+ More than 300 bison have been “removed
[[link removed]]”
from Yellowstone National Park already this spring. In this
context, “removed” means killed. And those 300 dead bison
stripped from Yellowstone Park represent just the start of the killing
program. They plan to kill 900, all to protect a few herds of cattle
from a disease (brucellosis) that is more common and contagious from
elk.

+ Radioactive contaminants from Fukushima are now being found as far
north as the Bering Strait
[[link removed]]…

+ If there is a “shithole city” in the US, my vote would be
Phoenix, where 10 percent of the land area is now consumed by parking
lots
[[link removed]].

+ What kind of sick thrill does some pervert with a gun get out of
killing a sleeping lion
[[link removed]]?

+ Geography 101 with Trump: “I support the Great Lakes. Always have.
They are beautiful. They are big. Very deep. Record deepness,
right?”

APRIL 2019

+ Wyoming’s Powder River Basin (once the hunting grounds of the
Oglala Sioux) is running out of coal faster than expected
[[link removed]],
but probably not fast enough to save either the river or the
atmosphere.

+ Trump is taking another whack at “states’ rights” by limiting
their ability to permit and regulate natural gas and oil pipelines
[[link removed]].
Not a bleat from the Heritage Foundation about this assault on one of
their old shibboleths.

+ The March 2019 average temperature in Kotzebue, Alaska was far
warmer than any other March, with an average temperature of 23F. The
1981-2010 normal March temp is +1.1F, making last month 21.9F above
normal.

+ The winter snowpack at Denali National Park Headquarters melted out
March 31. This is, by two weeks, the earliest the winter snowpack has
melted out. The previous earliest was April 14, 2003. The average
snowpack meltout date is May 04.

+ Rep. Thomas Massie (Moron-KY) is empirical evidence of the
consequences for the human brain from drinking water contaminated with
coal waste for 20 years…

+ Trump said last week that Venezuela’s electricity problems are bad
because “they have a lot of electric cars.” They don’t. Gas is
basically free there. Caracas analyst Dimitris Pantoulas: “I really
doubt that you can find more than 10 electric cars in Venezuela.”

+ Meanwhile, back on Pine Ridge: They’ve declared a civil emergency.
Both interstates in South Dakota remain closed. +10,000 are without
power. The blizzard warning continues into tomorrow. There’s 50 mph
wind gusts.

+ I wandered into a patch of old-growth forest near the south fork of
Short Sands Creek in the Oregon Coast Range. There were 300 year old
Sitka Spruce standing next to ancient Western Red Cedars. The forest
floor was spongey and bursting with trillium, skunk cabbage, red
huckleberries just in bloom. There were standing dead trees and nurse
logs, crawling with millipede and salamanders. A couple hundred yards
away, however, the scene was a blast-zone, activeclearcutting that
spread from the crest of one mountain across the drainage, spawning
habitat for coho, chinook and sea-run cutthroat, to the crest of
another mountain. The difference in the dead trees was striking. In
the clearcuts, the trees, many 6 to 8 feet in diameter, were
desiccated, lifeless, bone-white. In the forest, the dead were
decaying into soft browns, their crumbling trunks moist and filled
with all kinds of plant, fungi and insect life. Two worlds. One living
and organic, one dead and sterile.

These clearcuts brought to you by Weyerhaeuser, the tree-killing
people.

+ A new study reports that spending 20 minutes in nature
[[link removed]] can
reduce your “stress hormones.” But good luck finding any near
you…

+ Hey kids, for a mere $75 (if you want to walk) and $250 (if you want
to ride something and really tear shit up) you can recreate in one
of Weyerhaeuser’s Denuded Landscapes
[[link removed]].
They’ll provide the roads, the trails (skid) and the firewood. But
don’t forget to Bring Your Own Trees!

+ Opposable thumbs and the proper use of spell-check are what
distinguish “humanity” from the rest of the animal kingdom.

+ I learned this useful bit information about the origins of the
progressive state of Oregon this morning at the Museum of the Oregon
Territory: The first Black Exclusion Law in Oregon, passed in 1844,
called for any black person, free or slave, who entered the state to
be publicly whipped every six months until they left (or died).

+ What if Rick Perry left the Energy Department
[[link removed]] and
no one missed him or even realized he was gone?

+ Yellowstone is a big place, but nearly not big enough. It’s an
island, surrounded by hostile forces: timber companies, mining
companies, oil companies, frackers, ranchers, ski developments, and
jerks with guns eager to kill anything that moves indifferent to
any collateral damage
[[link removed]].

+ The last time carbon dioxide levels were this high, Greenland was
mostly green, sea levels were 20 meters higher and trees grew on
Antarctica. That was 5.3 million years ago. But, by all means, let’s
see every last page of the unreacted Mueller Report…

+ Dave Willard, a researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural
History,  measured the morphology of more 70,000 birds over 40 years.
The analysis of this rich trove of data reveals that migratory birds
are _shrinking_ due to warming temps
[[link removed]], but their wings
are lengthening.

+ An extreme event like Hurricane Maria was 4.85 times more likely to
happen in the climate of 2017 than in 1956, according to a new report
[[link removed]] in
the journal of Geophysical Research Letters, and that change in
probability can’t be explained by natural climate cycles.

+ Humans won’t like what the zombie pigs were thinking
[[link removed]] the
moment they were slaughtered…

+ A new study finds that the diet of urban coyotes consists largely of
“pets,” 20 percent coming from cats alone. Yet cats that are
allowed outside shouldn’t be considered “pets” but “pests”
that kill BILLIONS of birds
[[link removed]] a
year and thus fair game for canis latrans…

+ If you want a litmus test for the moral character of a person, just
observe how they behave in the presence of wolves
[[link removed]],
a foolproof way of revealing the sadist within…

+ The Forest Service is waging chemical warfare in our national
forests in a toxic campaign against what it considers “noxious
weeds.” In Idaho’s Sawtooth National Forest alone,
[[link removed]] the
Forest Service is planning on drenching as much as 40,000 acres of
public land with highly poisonous Round-Up, Sulfometuron methyl and
Dicamba.

+ So I got an email accusing me of being “against everything, but
what are you for?” My answer: I’m for grizzlies and wolf packs,
I’m for tearing down dams & letting the salmon run, I’m for sea
ice in the Arctic and water in the Colorado River when it hits the Sea
of Cortez, I’m for black holes and northern lights, spotted owls and
marbled murrelets, cerulean warblers & gyrfalcons & everything they
need to thrive.

This answer yielded the predictable response that I was a misanthrope.
I plead guilty to having read an enjoyed Molière, but the charge
isn’t true. How could it be for a new grandfather? Still what the
hell do the homo-centrists have against gyrfalcons?

MAY 2019

+ The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council voted unanimously this week to ban
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem from the Pine Ridge Reservation after
she backed new “riot boosting” laws that target tribes and their
allies who oppose new oil infrastructure on treaty lands.

+ Decline in global populations over the past decade, according
to _Biological Conservation:_

Butterflies: 53%
Beetles: 49%
Bees: 46%
Dragonflies: 37%
Flies: 25%

+ The damage from the Bomb Cyclone that detonated on the Great Plains
may exceed $3 BILLION
[[link removed]]…

+ This loss comes on top of one of the worst quarters in decades for
American farmers, collapses by $11.8 billion
[[link removed]] in
the first three months of 2019.

+ The lifespan of a “biodegradable” plastic bag is three years
and counting
[[link removed]]…

+ Trump’s BLM just quietly opened the door to fracking on 1.1
million acres
[[link removed]] of
federal land in California…

+ 91 percent of U.S. coal-fired power plants with monitoring data
are contaminating groundwater
[[link removed]] with
unsafe levels of toxic pollutants.

+ The accelerating loss of forest cover (30 million acres last year in
the tropics alone
[[link removed]],
the fourth highest loss in 20 years) is yet another little noticed
factor driving the climate catastrophe. 92 in the Shade, 108 in the
Stumps…

+ The countries with the largest cumulative CO2 emissions since
1750…

1) US – 397Gt CO2
2) CHINA – 214
3) Russia / fmr USSR – 180
4) Germany – 90
5) United Kingdom – 77
6) Japan – 58
7) India – 51
8) France – 37
9) Canada – 32
10) Poland – 27

+ The melting permafrost in the Arctic is expected to inflict more
than $7 trillion
[[link removed]] (that’s
TRILLION) of economic damage. The ecological damage is inestimable.

+ Greenland, which on any rational planet would be considered a
continent, is falling apart, as its massive ice sheet is rapidly
melting, having lost 4,976 GIGATONS
[[link removed]]  of water
since 1972…and half of that loss has happened in the last 8 years.
More ominously, the bottom of the Greenland ice sheet is now melting
faster than the top, making the whole thing unstable and vulnerable to
a catastrophic collapse.

+ The Paris Accords, which Democrats are launching a futile, last
minute effort to salvage, were a giant placebo for the gullible and
the grant-dependent.

+ The Mississippi River at Rock Island in the Quad Cities of Iowa hit
a new all time record flood crest of 22.64′ at 11:50 AM on May 2nd.
 This breaks the 1993 Great Flood record of 22.63′. The river
continues to rise.

+ Here’s a link to that American Lung Association report on air
quality in American cities
[[link removed]].
I was surprised that San Diego, a city I always thought of bright,
clean and breezy, has the 6th worst ozone levels in the
country–ozone is invisible.

+ A society that can’t even protect its drinking water
[[link removed]] is
a failed state by any definition that really matters. The EPA’s
response to this growing crisis
[[link removed]] (and,
no, Flint still doesn’t have clean drinking water) is to slash its
core Safe Drinking Water programs
[[link removed]] by
8 percent and cut its aid to state clean drinking water programs by 33
percent.

+ After the northern California town of Paradise was destroyed by one
of the largest wildfires in history,
[[link removed]] the
city discovered that much of its water had been contaminated by a
“toxic cocktail” of gases released by the fire.  Most troubling
is the presence of Benzene—a compound linked to anemia, vomiting,
and leukemia—found in 30 percent of water samples taken in the town.
“It is jaw dropping,” said Dan Newton of California’s Water
Resources Control Board. “This is such a huge scale. None of us were
prepared for this.” It will take at least  two years and more than
$300 million clean and repair the cities water pipes. Meanwhile, the
estimated 1,500 residents who moved back have been warned not to
drink, cook, or bathe in the water.

+ We’ve lost another mountain lion in Southern California, this
one killed with rat poison
[[link removed]].
And it’s not just mountain lions that are dying, though we can’t
afford to lose any more of them in the Santa Monica Mountains, but
bobcats, hawks and owls, as well. What was the source the rat poison?
Unclear, but it’s often used at illicit grow operations…

+ The EPA is slashing funding
[[link removed]] for
studies of children’s health. Why? Because the kids only matter
while in the womb…

+ Interior Secretary David Bernhardt: “I haven’t lost sleep over
record CO2 levels.”

+ The temperature hit 29 celsius (85 F) on the coast of Arctic ocean
at Arkhangelsk, Russia on Monday.

+ CO2 levels have risen 50 ppm since the hockey stick curve showing
the rapid warming of the planet in the 20th century was published in
1998.

+ Our rulers are insane. Exhibit 1(a): Secretary of State Pompeo
Maximus: “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways
and new opportunities for trade, that can potentially slashing the
time it takes for ships to travel between Asia and the West by as much
as 20 days.”

+ The problem isn’t the people (largely Americans
[[link removed]])
who don’t “believe” in climate change. The problem resides with
those who know what’s going on and do nothing about it and/or
exploit it for profit.

+ Subsidies to the US fossil fuel industry
[[link removed]] now
exceed the Pentagon’s budget.

+ A quarter of Antarctica’s ice is now deemed “unstable,
[[link removed]]”
though likely not as unstable as our politicians.

+ Biden’s top climate advisor, Heather Zichal, left her White House
job in 2013. A year later, she landed on the board of Cheniere Energy,
a leading exporter of fracked gas, where she pocketed over a million
dollars. in 2018 became the Nature Conservancy’s Vice President for
“corporate engagement.”

+ Here’s Trump spraying some primo bullshit about Puerto Rico:

“Puerto Rico — just so you understand, we gave Puerto Rico $91
billion for the hurricane. That’s the largest amount of money ever
given to any state — talking about states and Puerto Rico, a little
different — $91 billion. Texas got $30. Florida got $12. Puerto Rico
got $91 billion. So I think the people of Puerto Rico should really
like President Trump. Now that money was given by Congress, but they
got $91 billion. Now you remember how big the hurricane was in Texas,
the largest water dump in the history of our country, they say. Three
times it went in, went out, went in. Texas got $30 billion. Florida
got actually anywhere between $9 and $12. Puerto Rico got $91 billion,
and now the Democrats are trying to hold up the money from Georgia,
from South Carolina, from Alabama, to Florida. They’re trying to
hold it up. They’re hurting Florida. They’re holding — I mean,
what they’re doing to North Carolina, to Louisiana, they’re trying
to hold relief aid because Puerto Rico, which got $91 billion, have to
love their president, they want to get Puerto Rico more money. So
they’re willing to sacrifice Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North
Carolina, Florida, Louisiana and other states. The Democrats are doing
that. They are very divisive people.”

+ A new study in Nature
[[link removed]] finds
that “free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife
mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest
source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.”

+ It’s looking more and more likely that Bengal tigers will be
driven to extinction by climate change
[[link removed]]…

Tiger, tiger burning out
in a blaze of climate doubt
what hateful scam or lie
could snuff your stunning symmetry?

+ As I predicted, the “royal” baby and the Starbucks cup on GoT
would eclipse the dire UN report on extinction on cable news. Now we
know: “ABC, NBC, and MSNBC did not air a single prime-time mention
of the major new U.N. biodiversity report warning of ecosystem
collapse.”

+ Biden nearly flunked Greenpeace’s Climate Change quiz. Luckily,
for the former Veep, the environmental group grades on a soft curve.

+ What do you have to do to fail the test, eat coal and fart freedom
gas…?

+ Giant clams near the Marshall Islands are showing extremely high
levels of radiation
[[link removed]],
the latest evidence that the radioactive waste pit from US nuclear
testing is leaking into the Pacific. I’d avoid the Clam Monbiot at
Nobu’s for the next thousand years….

+ The action on the Weather Channel this week was far more thrilling
[[link removed]] than
any episode of Game of Thrones.

+ Toto, we’re not in the Holocene anymore
[[link removed]]…

+ Histrionic sheep ranchers on the Oregon Coast are blaming bald
eagles
[[link removed]] for
killing their livestock. This is typical rancher histrionics. Bald
eagles eat dead sheep, usually lambs that die soon after birth. They
don’t kill them…They usually don’t even kill fish, preferring to
steal them from osprey. (Golden eagles are a different story, but they
are rarely seen west of the Cascades.)

I’ve been doing winter raptor surveys in the lower Columbia for the
past 10 years and have never sign any signs of bald eagles killing
lambs. I know this area and these two sheep ranches there very well.
The concentration of eagles there is not very high, compared to some
nearby habitat. The most I’ve ever seen in either pasture is two at
a time. A few miles down the river, on Svensen Island, there are often
9 eagles in one tree with no sheep in sight, live or dead.

+ Coming to America’s largest temperate rainforest, the Tongass in
southeast Alaska, thousands of miles of roads to ruin
[[link removed]]…

+ Gray whales are starving to death
[[link removed]] off
the Pacific Coast…

+ Over the last two decades, more than half of Mexican wolf deaths,
and about one in four red wolf deaths, resulted from gunshots or other
illegal acts
[[link removed]].

+ It appears like more and more men are shooting plastic bullets
[[link removed]]…

+ The climate costs of plastics…

+ When Yosemite and Joshua Tree come with a “Hazardous to Your
Health
[[link removed]]”
travel advisory, you know the country has completely gone to shit…

+ In Illinois, as in several other states, cars and trucks now
outproduce coal when it comes to CO2 emissions
[[link removed]]…

+ Trump on California Gov. Gavin Newsome: “Clean up your forests.
You won’t have forest fires. He blames them on global warming. I
said, ‘No, try cleaning the floor of the forest a little bit.’”

+ If you’re intent on dying at 8,000 meters
[[link removed]],
why not do it with dignity on K2 or Annapurna?

JUNE 2019

+ This seems like a big deal to me, but then I don’t get out much:
The world’s seed-bearing plants have been disappearing at a rate of
nearly three species a year
[[link removed]] since
1900.

+ From 2001 to 2017, the Pentagon’s emissions totaled 766 million
metric tons, according to a new Brown University report
[[link removed]].
That makes the U.S. military by far the world’s largest single
source of CO2 emissions.

+ The planet’s carbon concentration jumped 3.5 parts per million
last year—more than twice as fast as it grew as recently as the
1980s and 50% faster than the average this decade.

+ The Greenland ice sheet is experiencing an unprecedented spasm of
melting this week, losing half of its surface cover (more than 2
billion tons) in a matter of days…It hasn’t happened before. But
almost certainly will again.

+ What happens in the Arctic
[[link removed]] doesn’t
stay in the Arctic…

+ 14 of the 15 cities with the worst air pollution in the world are in
India, where simply breathing is like smoking a 1/2 pack of cigarettes
per day. The toxic particles in India’s air ultimately end up in the
country’s lakes and rivers, — 70% of which are dangerously
contaminated. All of this is wrecking havoc on the health of India’s
human population, where the dirty air is reducing life expectancy
by at least 2.6 years
[[link removed]].
 Air pollution is now the third leading cause of death.

+ Climate change is fast-forwarding the development patterns
of sockeye salmon
[[link removed]]…

+ CO2 emissions from international flights leaving from California
have increased by 40% in the last five years. (Don’t worry the
airlines are compensating by investing in palm oil biomass plants as
“carbon neutral” offsets!)

+ To date, 195 countries have signed the Paris climate agreement, and
183 have submitted their own decarbonization targets. Even
if _all_ these countries were to meet their goals, global CO2
emissions would stay about the same or even increase slightly until at
least 2030.

+ Destined for Bartlett’s Book of Quotations. Trump: “China,
India, Russia, many other nations, they have not very good air, not
very good water, and the sense of pollution. If you go to certain
cities, you can’t even breathe, and now that air is going up. They
don’t do the responsibility.”

+ Joe Biden, who once plagiarized from Neil Kinnock and Martin Luther
King Jr, is now reduced to lifting innocuous passages on climate
change from Beto O’Rouke, who was one of the leading recipients of
oil & gas largesse in Congress…

+ More journalists have lost their jobs in the last 15 years than coal
miners….

+ A lot of people in Flint won’t get no justice tonight
[[link removed]]…

+ Flint ain’t got safe water and Whitey goin’ to Mars (of which
the Moon is a part
[[link removed]])

I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And Mars looks very different today
For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Mars has stolen the Moon
And there’s nothing I can do…

+ The cost of cleaning up Alberta’s tar sands zone: $260 billion.

Number of years it could take for the tar sands zone to be cleaned
up: 2,800
[[link removed]].

+ In 2002, Ireland became the first nation to regulate the
distribution of plastic bags…

1999: 328 bags per capita
2002: Government regulations enacted
2016: 12 bags per capita

+ Bison evolved as migratory animals. Now they’re slaughtered
[[link removed]] (by
our govt.) for crossing imaginary boundaries in search of forage…

+ The Trump administration secretly reversed its own policy and is now
permitting the body parts of slaughtered elephants
[[link removed]] to
be imported into the United States. Do you think Don Jr. & Stephen
Miller have brainstorming sessions over a tub of Chick-Fil-A and a
case of Coors to come up with the most disgusting things imaginable
the Trump administration could legalize? Or does it just come
naturally to them?

+ The Trump administration is also moving to expand hunting
[[link removed]] inside
National Wildlife Refuges. “Refuge” has always been a misnomer for
what most of these places actually are, which is shooting galleries…

+ A distressing note about grizzlies from Louisa Willcox:

“An astonishing 11 grizzlies are dead this year in the Northern
Continental Divide Ecosystem, one for killing “several” chickens.
Despite the availability of nearly free electric fencing from at least
3 nonprofits, the handful of chickens were not protected by electric
fence. And the involved subadult male appears not to have had a record
of prior conflicts with humans.

“Back to the lander” chicken farmers are exploding in the
remaining stronghold for the 900 grizzlies in the NCDE, that are part
of the 2% remnant of the grizzlies that we once had. Former Fish and
Wildlife Service Recovery Coordinator Chris Servheen has called
chickens “the new garbage.” About 410,000 chickens are raised in
Montana, very few as a commercial venture.

Meanwhile 3 grizzlies have been killed in the Selkirks in north Idaho
– a population of perhaps only 40 grizzlies – in retaliation for
depredation on domestic sheep, another bear food that is notoriously
incompatible with recovery of endangered grizzlies.”

+ In 2018, USDA’s Wildlife “Services,” mercenaries for Big Ag,
killed 22,000 beavers, 515,000 red-winged black birds, 19,000 mourning
doves, 17,000 black tailed prairie dogs, 552 great blue herons, 357
wolves, scores of owls and much more.

+ According to the Living Planet Index, more than half of all living
creatures have died out in the last 40 years.

+ Not content with harassing whales with sonar, explosions and ship
strikes
[[link removed]],
the Navy now wants to invade one of the quietest places in the
lower-48 with the screaming engines of its training flights: Olympic
National Park
[[link removed]].

+ Tables are turning: Cheyenne River Sioux tribal police stopped
workers on the Keystone XL pipeline
[[link removed]] and
transported them off the reservation…

+ Four of Alexander Cockburn’s old pals arrested on Rainbow Ridge
[[link removed]]blocking
logging operations in critical salmon habitat by Humboldt Redwoods:
David & Jane Simpson, Ellen Taylor and Michael Evenson…Respect!

+ Did any mad scientist ever brew up a more evil potion than Round-Up
[[link removed]]?

+ Richard Nixon: “The US Nixon must make _reparations_ for the
damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water.” Nixon
was our greatest environmental president by a long shot, even if his
environmentalism was largely motivated by a desire to split the
anti-war movement.

+ The climate is now warmer than at any time in last 5,000 years and
the Arctic permafrost is melting 70 years faster
[[link removed]] than
any climate models predicted with “huge blocks of ice solid for
thousands of years” suddenly destabilizing.

The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I’d something more to say.

+ Himalayan glaciers have lost a foot-and-a-half of ice
[[link removed]] every
year since 2000, about about eight billion tons of water a year.

+ It may cost as much as $400 billion
[[link removed]] to
protect US coastal cities from rising sea levels over the next 20
years.

+ It’s only the middle of June and the West is already burning…

+ When one of the largest wildfires ever seen in Siberia meets the
“Mouth of Hell
[[link removed]]“…

+ Tucson, like many other cities in the West, is losing trees faster
than it can replace them
[[link removed]]…

+ On a related note, the tree that inspired Dr. Seuss to write The
Lorax just toppled in San Diego
[[link removed]]…

+ At least 500,000 Texans live in communities with contaminated
ground water
[[link removed]].

+ A new study by Pew predicts that the global population will stop
growing by 2100
[[link removed]] (if
the planet survives that long). This may finally force the
neo-Malthusians to confront capitalism as the driving force behind
planetary annihilation…Nah.

+ The average resident of the United States consumes _40 times_ as
much as the average resident of sub-Saharan Africa.

+ Chennai, India, a city of about 8.5 million, ran out of water
[[link removed]] this
week.

+ 97% of the residents of Pine Ridge live below the poverty line. Many
of them also found their homes and fields flooded for much of the
spring. The reservation needs federal aid. Now
[[link removed]].

+ 24 years from now, when Miami is underwater, will the Democrats
return on pontoon boats for their first debate on climate change?

+ When asked whether he believed human-caused climate change,
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue replied:

“You know, I think it’s weather patterns, frankly. And you know,
and they change, as I said. It rained yesterday, it’s a nice pretty
day today. So the climate does change in short increments and in long
increments.”

+ Perdue’s paleolithic views are embraced by Anne Idsal
[[link removed]],
the new head of the EPA’s air quality / climate office:

“Climate has been changing since the dawn of time, well before
humans ever inhabited the Earth. I think it’s possible that humans
have some type of impact on climate change. I just don’t know the
extent of that.”

+ Remind yourself every morning that these morons are running a
country with 6,800 nuclear warheads and at night say thanks to Gaia
that the planet somehow survived another day.

+ Laurie Garrett (author of the The Coming Plague
[[link removed]]):
“When I warned that climate change is the greatest risk to human
health in Beijing 10 years ago a top US govt health official scolded
me backstage, ‘How dare you!’ the Obama official said. ‘Don’t
try to bring your climate change fear-mongering on this public health
stage!’”

+ The Hill reports that Biden is currently the top choice for
“climate-minded” voters in 2020. Biden literally got a D- on a
take-home climate test from Dem-friendly Greenpeace and plagiarized
his online climate policy from Beto O’Rouke, who pocketed more oil &
gas PAC money than any other Democrat…

+ The “free” market is wiping out Wyoming’s coal industry, even
though Obama’s toothless Clean Coal Plan, which never kicked into
gear, gets the blame.

+ Notes from the Weather Underground on this week’s European “heat
wave”…

* France may witness highest temperatures ever recorded, around 113
degrees
* Madrid may come close to hitting 105, its highest ever temp
* Intensity of the hot airmass smothering Europe is “totally unheard
of for June”

+ This d
[[link removed]]eath’s
head map
[[link removed]] resembles
one of those Cold War Era scare maps depicting Soviet designs on
Western Europe…

+ On June 25th, 51 weather stations in Germany reported temperatures
of 95F or higher. The average temp in Berlin on June 25 is 67F.

+ Michael Mann: “If we are to prevent burning through the carbon
budget – the amount of carbon we can afford to burn and still keep
below 1.5-2 degrees celsius – we have to lower our carbon emissions
by 5% a year for the next 12 years and beyond.”

+ A UN climate expert warned this week that we are entering a time of
“climate apartheid
[[link removed]],”
where human rights may no longer matter. When have “human rights”
ever mattered, except as an excuse for the US to launch wars against
oil rich regimes it doesn’t like?

+ The Agriculture Department is now burying studies
[[link removed]] showing
the risks of climate change to crop yields. Apparently, the Trump
Administration watched Chernobyl and picked up a lot of new ideas on
how to handle environmental catastrophes from the Soviet high
command…

+ It’s not yet July and Alaska is burning…

+ In the race toward planetary annihilation, one predator feeds the
other…A report by the IMF
[[link removed]] reveals
that annual fossil fuel subsidies now exceed Pentagon spending.

+ The US military generates more pollution
[[link removed]] than
140 countries.

+ Electric vehicles aren’t the solution
[[link removed]] to
the climate crisis. What’s generating the “electricity” that
powers them? In the Pacific Northwest, the cars are running on a
cocktail of coal and dead salmon (from hydro-dams).

+ Mike Roselle: “During the depression, the Soviets were surprised
to see Americans driving to the poor house in a Model T. Now we are
driving into an incinerator in a Prius.”

+ Monsanto doesn’t brew Roundup out of thin air. The key ingredient
in its toxic recipe is phosphate, mined from massive pits in Idaho
[[link removed]]…

+ Almost everything we think we know about pollution is dangerously
wrong. In fact, the planet may be 100 times more toxic
[[link removed]]we
think.

JULY 2019

+ Here’s an inconvenient truth to chew on over the Fourth of Me
Holiday: If Al Gore Sr. had gotten his way, the DMZ rendezvous between
Kim and Trump would likely never have taken place. As Alexander
Cockburn and I reported in our biography of Al Gore
[[link removed]],
the old man wanted to saturate the DMZ with radioactive waste as a
permanent deterrent to re-unification.

+ It turns out that the bottled water many of us are drinking may be
just as toxic as the water coming out of Flint’s poisonous pipes. A
new report reveals high levels of arsenic
[[link removed]] in
bottled water sold by Wal-Mart, Target and even Whole Paycheck.

+ I wrote many pieces back in the 90s and early 2000s on Minatom and
the post-Soviet nuclear industry
[[link removed]], which
was, if possible, an even more harrowing enterprise than what’s
depicted in Chernobyl. What could possibly go wrong with
Putin’s insane venture
[[link removed]] to
ship a nuclear reactor into the Arctic Ocean?

+ Is this the end of Frackenlooper
[[link removed]]?

+ Trump’s ambassador to Kenya, Kyle McCarter, lashed out
[[link removed]] at
the African nation after it announced plans to pull the plug on the
country’s first coal-fired power. Where’s America’s first
Kenyan-born president when you need him?

+ More than 150 MILLION trees died [[link removed]] in
California’s most recent drought. It’s just the beginning…

+ June 2019 was the hottest month ever recorded
[[link removed]] on
Earth. Just wait until August…

+ More importantly, June was also the hottest month at the airport in
Anchorage…

+ More than 100 wildfires were burning in the Arctic Circle in June,
releasing 50 megatons of CO2
[[link removed]] into
the atmosphere. They’ll likely burn until the rains come in
September…

+ The Opera Lady is singing the final aria…rising global C02
emissions
[[link removed]] make
it unlikely the Paris targets can be met.

+ 45 million gallons: the amount of water Nestle takes each from the
San Bernardino National Forest.

+ $0: the amount of money Nestle pays for taking 45 million gallons of
water each year from the San Bernardino National Forest.

+ China doesn’t want the US’s trash anymore
[[link removed]]. Will Americans finally be forced to deal
with their own garbage?

+ The smog in the LA basin is getting inexorably worse
[[link removed]] and
may cost another $14 billion to mitigate, if it can be mitigated. This
news prompted me to re-read Joan Didion’s essay on Los Angeles real
estate in the late 80s. Didion said two things in LA will always get
worse: the air and the price of housing. She cited a poll where 60
percent of the residents of LA wanted to move somewhere else, like San
Diego. But a Brentwood real estate agent warned, “They want to
leave. But they can’t afford to. They’d never be able to afford to
buy their way back in.”

+ Because of climate change, yellowjackets and wasps are living
through the winter, making massive nests the size of Volkswagens
[[link removed]]…

+ Enter Sandman…Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet is
creating massive deltas of sand
[[link removed]].

+ The Trump administration is planning to more than double
[[link removed]] the
land available for coal leasing in Colorado. This isn’t likely to
save the coal industry, which is being flattened by a wave of
bankruptcies
[[link removed]],
where the workers are taking the brunt of the pain and the executives
hijacking the loot. Here’s what happened when Westmoreland Coal Co.
[[link removed]] filed
for bankruptcy: the miners had their health care coverage voided,
while the company’s top executives, the people who ran the company
into he ground, took home more than $10 million in bonuses.

+ Chukchi Sea Ice lowest ever recorded in June…

+ Jimmy Carter is getting plaudits from Gang Green for turning a 10
acre field into a solar “farm.”
[[link removed]] Sorry,
Jimmy. Solar “farms” aren’t the solution. Solar power should
(and can easily) be democratized by putting panels on rooftops. No
need to sacrifice fields, forests or deserts.

+ There was a 6.4 earthquake in southern California near Death Valley
on Thursday morning, the largest SoCal quake in years. Because of
funding cuts to USGS (don’t want people checking out those
fracking-quakes), the agency’s website is snarled, so much of the
early seismic information came coming from European websites.
Meanwhile, Trump wants to privatize the National Weather Service (see
Michael Lewis’s book, The Fifth Risk
[[link removed]])…

+ Watch the aftershocks of the SoCal quake live on a site run by
the UC Berkeley Seismological Lab
[[link removed]].
Bound to be more exciting than Trump’s Fourth of Me show…

+ The earthquake in So Cal kicked up dust from Vegas to Bakersfield,
spreading widely the spores that cause valley fever. As
usual, farmworkers will pay the heaviest price
[[link removed]].

+ I had a very clear premonition of how I’m going to perish today.
The dude in front of me in the big F-150 pickup, which he bought only
to haul his American flag and never anything else, slams on his breaks
to avoid flattening the guy on the lime green e-scooter, flag and pole
dislodge, arc through the air in a lethal parabola, and pierce my
windshield and skull. My cenotaph will read: “Murdered by
patriotism.”

+ Sockeye salmon are once again on the brink
[[link removed]]…

+ You mess with the planet and the planet messes with you…a large
swath of India may soon become too hot for humans
[[link removed]].

+ Chris Cline, the “King of Coal,” is dead
[[link removed]].
Alexander Cockburn always said that people who have enough money to
fly in helicopters should be smart enough not to…

+ In a sane world, the fact that honeybee colonies suffered
their biggest losses on record
[[link removed]] this
winter would figure prominently in our political debates.

+ On this planet, it’s just too expensive for the Department of
Agriculture to collect data on honeybee collapse
[[link removed]]…

+ Meanwhile, the EPA just approved the use of sulfoxaflor, a
bee-killing pesticide
[[link removed]],
on 13.9 million acres of agricultural land.

+ Nearly 3,500 wolves have been killed for “trophy” hunting in
Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming since 2011.

+ Other wolves are killed to appease ranchers…

+ July 4th was the hottest day ever in Anchorage, Alaska (90F).

+ Then the temperatures dropped a bit over the weekend as the skies
filled with thick smoke from wildfires burning inside the Arctic
Circle.

+ Trump could claim he reversed Global Warming and his flock would
believe him. The problem is he’d first have to admit climate change
existed, which might cause them to be momentarily perplexed.

+ The nuclear hucksters are at it again, promoting 4th Generation
reactors as the safe, clean, and eternal energy source of the future.
This has been the false promise of the nuclear cabal since Edward
Teller proposed using H-bombs to excavate a harbor in Alaska and
A-bombs to frack for oil and gas (Project Gasbuggy) on the high plains
of Colorado as part of the “peaceful atom” program…

+ For much of the Obama administration and into Trumptime, the
Department of Energy has been secretly hauling highly radioactive
waste to Nevada
[[link removed]].

+ Nuclear Power: the grift that keeps on taking…the shutdown of the
Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plants, some 40 years in the making,
will cost at least $1.2 billion
[[link removed]].

+ After having screened all six episodes of Chernobyl and found it
benign, the members of Trump’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission are
considering a plan to reduce inspections
[[link removed]] at
aging nuclear plants in the United States.

+ You have to give the Trumpers this much. They’re not just willing
to sacrifice honeybees
[[link removed]] to
the chemical poison industry. They’ll willing to expose human
children
[[link removed]] to
these carcinogens as well.

+ A new study from the University of Arkansas details how climate
change has intensified the drought
[[link removed]] in
regions of the US: “Higher temperatures brought about by climate
change led to an increased ‘coupling’ of land and atmosphere,
which further increased the severity of heatwaves.” You’d think
that word “coupling” would catch Trump’s eye…

+ In 60 years over one-third of the Earth’s population
[[link removed]] could
be exposed to dangerous heat conditions of 127 degrees Fahrenheit
(53°C) or more.

+ Hottest Global Mean Temperature ever recorded for the month of
June…and July is sizzling
[[link removed]].

The average number of “heat waves” in American cities each year
has tripled since 1960. These extreme heat events happen more
frequently, they persist longer, they’re hotter and more deadly.

+ DC as Death Valley
[[link removed]] may
strike some of us who lived there as a little redundant but
still…OUCH!

+ By 2070, Joshua Tree National Park won’t have any Joshua trees
[[link removed]] and
Glacier National Park won’t have any glaciers. But there’ll still
be cannonballs and headstones at Gettysburg–if they don’t build
condos over them…

+ Russia’s permafrost is melting
[[link removed]],
to deploy one of Trump’s favorite phrases, like no one’s ever seen
before. The Alaskan permafrost may even be melting at a faster rate
[[link removed]].
The consequences for the planet will be dire. In fact, it could all
unravel in real, as opposed to geological, time.

+ Alaska’s not only melting, it’s also burning
[[link removed]],
with more 550,000 acres
[[link removed]]now
on fire and another 1.5 million acres already burned, the third
largest amount on record
[[link removed]].

+ Hurricane Barry set an all-time rainfall record in the state of
Arkansas for a single cyclone event: 16.56 inches
[[link removed]].

+ Half of all food-insecure countries are experiencing decreases in
crop production
[[link removed]] —
and so are some affluent industrialized countries in Western Europe.

+ Of the nine tiger species, three are already extinct, and
the remaining six
[[link removed]] remain
at risk of the same fate.

+ Charlie Hill, Oneida-Mohawk-Cree: “A Redneck told me to go back
where I came from, so I put a tipi in his backyard.”

+ Police in Alabama issued a warning that flushing drugs is
creating meth-fueled alligators
[[link removed]].

Sweet home Alabama
Your swamps are the best
Sweet home Alabama
Where all the gators are on meth

+ So it turns out that AOC was being optimistic when she said we only
have 12 years to save the planet. It may be closer to 18 months
[[link removed]]…

+ Mike Roselle: “I gave it twenty years, forty years ago.”

+ The history of life on Earth is melting away
[[link removed]].
Soon there will only be 6000 years of ice left and Biblical estimates
of the age of the Earth will be fulfilled…

+ The biggest cities in the US are leaking methane at twice the rate
[[link removed]]scientists
once thought: “When burned for heat or power, methane emits less
carbon dioxide than fossil fuels such as coal. But when leaked
directly into the atmosphere, its warming effect can be dozens of
times stronger than CO2.”

+ The current rate of ocean warming is equal to five Hiroshima-size
atomic bombs
[[link removed]] exploding
every second.

+ Speaking of atomic bombs, a few days ago there was a
wildfire sweeping across Hanford
[[link removed]],
where much of the soil and many of the trees, scrub and sagebrush
are contaminated with radioactive particles
[[link removed]].
Then a few days later, one broke out at the equally leaky nuclear
“lab” in Idaho, burning 90,000 acres in a single day
[[link removed]].
Climate change as WMD…

+ Dozens of all-time and monthly records broken on Tuesday in cities
across France as temperatures soared to 108.6ºF amid an intense
European heat wave. I thought of what a day like today might have been
like for Marcel Proust, confined in his cork-lined room on the
Boulevard Hausmann, all his tasty Madelienes baking on the
nightstand….

+ Both Netherlands and Belgium each recorded the highest temperatures
[[link removed]] in
their history this week.

+ The hottest summers in Europe over the past 500 years have ALL
occurred in the past 17 years
[[link removed]].

+ James Kilgore: “Heat Wave. My last day in prison in Tracy, CA it
was 114 degrees. We smashed out every window to get some air. Then the
water went out and the toilets wouldn’t flush. Silicon Valley was 50
miles away. I wonder if their water went out too?”

+ You don’t have to go to the beach, the beach is coming to you
[[link removed]]…_“Sous
la plage, les pavés!”_

+ During her acceptance speech for the Freedom Prize, Greta Thornberg,
the Malala of the climate movement, demanded that “adults be held
accountable” for the climate crisis. How about holding corporations,
private equity, hedge funds and the military industrial complex
accountable for climate change, Greta?

+ For the first 205 days of the year, the average temperatures on the
Arctic Coast of Alaska have been 9°F above normal.

Do you realize, Greta, that thousands of activists, ecologists and
scientists around the world have been fighting the coal companies, oil
and gas companies and the military on the ground, in the courts and in
congress for decades now and that they have a pretty clear idea of
where the political and economic pressure points are, don’t you?
Greta is a novelty act, supported by foundations that have been
hostile the very kind of radical change that is needed to confront the
thing she warns about it.

+ In 2016, US farms used 1.2 billion lbs of pesticides
[[link removed]].
More than one-fourth — 322 million lbs — were pesticides banned in
the EU. 26 million lbs were banned in Brazil. 40 million lbs were
outlawed by China.

+ Permian Basin water use grew nearly ninefold from 2011-2016
[[link removed]] as
drillers added more than 10,000 wells. An average Permian well in 2018
used more than 15 million gallons, compared with 7 million in 2013.
Water = 54% of fracking costs in Permian.

+ Air pollution kills more than 30,000 people
[[link removed]] in
the US every year.

+ Air pollution is a bigger threat to your life
[[link removed]] than
smoking.

+ According to a study from NIH
[[link removed]],
“infants born to women exposed to high levels of air pollution in
the week before delivery are more likely to be admitted to NICU.
Depending on the type of pollution, chances for NICU admission
increased between 4% and 147%.”

+ Mining companies have rarely been held accountable for the ruins
they’ve made in the past. Now they won’t even have to pretend to
make an effort
[[link removed]].

+ A Day at the Beach: If it ain’t covered in oil, plastic or dead
whales, it’s awash in human shit
[[link removed]]…

+ Michael Colby: “There were 2400 Vermont family dairy farmers when
Bernie first went to Congress to “fix the problem.” There are now
675 left, and he’s done nothing to stop the downward spiral.”

+ Robin Silver, MD: “Say we’re driving from Texas and just go
through these rivers: Rio Grande is dead, and then you start moving
into Arizona. The Gila, dead. Santa Cruz, dead. Salt, dead. You cross
the San Pedro at Benson, it’s pretty dead, but the river flows from
Mexico as you go south and it’s still alive. Same thing with the
Verde.”

+ Last week, Bernie Sanders posted a tweet supporting Native
Hawai’ians in their fight against the Thirty Meter Telescope on the
sacred summit of Mauna Kea
[[link removed]],
then mysteriously deleted it. Sanders still hasn’t explained why.
C’mon, Bernie, say something.

+ Oregon State University’s School of Forestry, recently embarrassed
for cutting down ancient trees
[[link removed]], has
been training people to log 400-year old trees for 100 years. They
probably trained the people who logged the 800-year old trees in
Millennium Grove…

+ If you were to ask me what’s the most effective and fearless
environmental group in the US is, I wouldn’t hesitate to answer: the
Alliance for the Wild Rockies. I’ve followed their work for 30
years. They operate on a shoestring budget. They spend their money
where it matters: appeals, lawsuits, and in developing the most
visionary wildland protection bill ever introduced into Congress: the
Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection. They’ve hit a financial
crisis this summer and the future of this grassroots, no compromise
group is very much in doubt at the worst possible moment. I urge you
to pitch in what you can
[[link removed]] and
know that it will all be used to help protect wolves & grizzlies, lynx
& bull trout, wild rivers and roadless forests.

+ Thanks to the warming climate, we’re living on a more
tick-friendly planet, where you can be infected with a tick-borne
disease (tularemia, anaplasmosis, Colorado tick fever, Powassin
encephalitis, relapsing fever, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme
Disease, et al.) in as little as 15 minutes
[[link removed]] after
a tick attaches itself to your scalp, long before you return home from
your hike with your Labradoodle and begin extracting the tiny
arachnids. One of my favorite rock art images is of an engorged tick
in a small cave high above the Columbia Gorge. It was probably some
kind of shamanic symbol near a vision quest site. I was once told by
an elder of the Yakima Nation that ticks have mystical power because
they are shape-shifters who sustain themselves on human blood.

_Tick pictograph, Columbia Gorge. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair._

+ The new acting director the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is an
old Sagebrush Rebel by the name of William Perry Pendley
[[link removed]],
a man who, like Rick Perry, doesn’t believe the agency he’s now
charged with running should even exist. Most BLM directors, Democrat
and Republican, have viewed their job as cut-rate salesmen, offering
up public forests, minerals, oil, gas, coal and rangeland at bargain
basement prices. Pendley sees his mission as that of a real estate
agent, selling off the public lands themselves. Pendley adheres to the
antiquated notion that the Constitution doesn’t authorized the US
government to own land.  As George Wuerthner points out in today’s
edition of CounterPunch, a blitzkreig is coming, a multi-pronged
attack on our most cherished environmental laws and the very concept
of public land itself, like nothing we’ve seen before, even under
James Watt. There are few signs that the national environmental
movement is prepared to confront what is bearing down on us.

+ The loss of the reflective cover provided by Arctic Sea will
accelerate the pace of global warming by at least 25 years
[[link removed]]:
“Losing the remaining Arctic sea ice and its ability to reflect
incoming solar energy back to space would be equivalent to adding one
trillion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, on top of the 2.4 trillion
tons emitted since the Industrial Age.”

+ The German Institute for Economic Research estimates that the
average 1000MW nuclear power station built since 1951 has resulted
in average economic loss of $7.7 BILLION
[[link removed]].

+ The low temperature on Weds. at Fairbanks Airport was 50F , making
this the 49th consecutive day with a low of 50F or higher, easily
breaks the previous record of 41 days from 2016. Prior to 2016, there
was no streak longer than 32 days.

+ Back in the early 1960s, the CIA experimented with using Dengue
Fever as a biological weapon
[[link removed]] against
disobedient countries like Cuba, not knowing that with climate change
it would eventually be  coming for everyone
[[link removed]]…

+ Last week I several fans of Greta Thornberg bristled at my tweaking
the young climate campaigner for associating with some rather dubious
characters and foundations. This week, however, we find Greta palling
around with the World Wildlife Fund
[[link removed]],
whose human rights violations
[[link removed]] are becoming more
and more grotesque.

+ Build here before its gone
[[link removed]]!
“In many coastal states, flood-prone areas have seen the highest
rates of home construction since 2010, a study found, suggesting that
the risks of climate change have yet to fundamentally change
people’s behavior.” Or even marginally change behavior, which is
precisely why climate education and “shaming” campaigns will fail
and only firm laws, treaties and regulations will have any chance of
working.

+ The average temperature (not average high) this July in Utqiaġvik
(Barrow), Alaska of 48.3F (9.1C) is the warmest month on record and
7.4F (4.1C) above normal.

+ Greenland is melting so fast
[[link removed]] that
scientists are having a hard time measuring how fast the ice sheets
are disappearing. People are right to be skeptical of climate models.
The climatologists didn’t expect Greenland to melt this fast
until…2070.

+ Our new UN Ambassador, Kelly Knight Craft (coal baroness), on
climate change: “I believe there are scientists on both sides that
are accurate. I think that both sides have their own results from
their studies, and I appreciate and respect both sides of the
science.” (Kelly Knight Craft is a name worthy of Nabokov.)

+ Master Blaster: the Department of the Interior is junking its pledge
to regulate the toxic clouds of dust
[[link removed]] generated
by open-air blasting for coal.

+ Mothers living near oil and gas development have 70 percent
increased chance
[[link removed]] for
birth defects in their babies…Sacrifices must be made.

+ You really couldn’t make this up: Trump aides submitted a draft of
this “America First” energy policy speech to officials in
the United Arab Emirates
[[link removed]] (UAE)
for editing.

+ The Malaysian tiger will likely be driven to extinction within
the next three years
[[link removed]].

+ Peru is moving to rescind protections for over 100,000 hectares
[[link removed]] of
forest and indigenous land.

AUGUST 2019

+ When the explosive power (megatonnage) of the U.S. nuclear arsenal
peaked in 1960, it was equivalent to 1,366,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.
Today’s operational stockpile contains the equivalent of more
than 91,500 Hiroshimas
[[link removed]].

+ When Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Akira Kurosawa sat down to talk
about the meaning of Hiroshima
[[link removed]]…

Kurosawa: “The atomic bomb constituted the starting point of the
Cold War and of the arms race, and it marked the beginning of the
process of creation and utilization of nuclear energy. Happiness will
never be possible given such origins.”

+ White supremacists aren’t much of a threat to the things that
corporations and their government policing agencies care about. People
who shut down pipelines, on the other hand
[[link removed]]…

+ The forests of the Pacific Northwest  have never been “too wet
[[link removed]]”
to burn. Douglas-fir, the dominant tree species of the region, is a
“fire-dependent” species. What’s changed is the intensity and
duration of the fires.

+ Ocean heatwaves that WIPE OUT marine life are now occurring
at double the rate
[[link removed]] experts
had expected.

+ Alaska’s waters now completely clear of sea ice, as last ice in
the Beaufort Sea offshore Prudhoe Bay melted away. The closest ice to
Alaska is now about 150 miles (240km) northeast of Kaktovik. Chukchi
Sea maintaining lowest ice ever recorded in NSIDC data.

+ Early summer (May-July) average sea surface temperatures in the
northern Bering Sea were the highest on record in the NOAA climate
data. Each of the past six years is among the warmest on record.

+ Wildlands in America are being shredded at the rate of two football
fields per minute. While “development
[[link removed]]”
is not the word I’d use, nevertheless, the rate of destruction of
the few fragmented patches of ecosystems that remain is staggering
(and probably understated)…

+ Climate change is a likely factor  in the dramatic increase in
blooms of cyanobacteria — single-cell organisms that, when they grow
densely, can produce toxic substances–that are closing many of
American’s most popular lakes
[[link removed]].

+ More than 400 people probably died as a consequence of a late July
heatwave in the Netherlands, a 15% increase
[[link removed]] from
the normal death rate.

+ The EPA concluded in late 2016 that ethylene oxide is at least 30
times more carcinogenic
[[link removed]] than
previously understood. 12 of the top 20 highest-emitting facilities
are in Louisiana and Texas and they’ve told people almost nothing
about the risks of living near these cancer factories.

+ There’s nothing in the Constitution that says you’ve got a right
to water, is there? That’s fortunate, because we’re running out
of it fast
[[link removed]].

+ How many damn cows is a grizzly bear’s life worth? 10? 100? 1,000?
Nope. A couple of calves according to the Fish & Wildlife Service,
which dispatched its hired killers in Wildlife Services to the Rocky
Mountain Front to shoot a 24-year old, 550-pound female
[[link removed]],
one of the oldest bears in the lower-48.

+ Trump greenlights the use of M-44 explosives (“cyanide bomblets
[[link removed]]“) to kill wildlife
(along with your dog, kid and any other living thing that happens to
stumble across one)…

+ The tundra isn’t the only thing going up in flames in Siberia.
More than 100,000 people were evacuated from towns in the Krasnoyarsk
region, after a string of explosions
[[link removed]] at
a Russian military weapons depot. No word on whether the burning
stockpiles contain depleted uranium. Trust, but bring your own
dosimeter.

+ Novelist Kevin Barry’s dispatch from Chernobyl
[[link removed]] is
worth re-reading, especially by George Monbiot and his fellow nuclear
power hucksters…

SEPTEMBER 2019

+ Tricolored blackbirds have declined by nearly 90 percent
[[link removed]] since
the 1930s. Not enough, apparently, to warrant them protection under
what’s left of the Endangered Species Act.

+ They’re clearcutting the Grand Staircase-Escalante for the benefit
of … COWS
[[link removed]].

+ From 2001 to 2018, Cambodia lost 2.17 million hectares of tree
cover, equivalent to a 25% decrease, according to data analysis by
Global Forest Watch.

+ Women in Africa are having, on average, three fewer children than
African women were in 1980.

+ Heat deaths are soaring across the Southwest
[[link removed]].
“There’s only so much our bodies can take,” Rupa Basu, chief of
the air and climate epidemiological section for the Office of
Environmental Health Hazard Assessment in California, where the number
of heat-related deaths doubled between 2015 and 2017. “I think
we’re going beyond that temperature threshold.”

+ I stopped at Bonneville Dam last week hoping to get a view of the
migrating salmon and steelhead making their way up the giant fish
ladders. The dam now resembles an armed camp. A guard stopped me at
the gate: “Are you carrying a firearm or a drone?” “No,” I
said, chuckling. He looked at me and pointed, “Pull over there,
please, and step out of the vehicle.” Yes, he said “vehicle.”
Then he strip-searched my car, even opening the hood, an unlikely
hiding place for a drone, taking out the spare tire. By the time he
was done, it was 4:45 and the dam site closed to public at 5. I
thanked him for his service in protecting such a monument to industry
and extinction and left. Was it the Hayduke Lives! sticker that
aroused his suspicions?

+ It’s literally raining plastic
[[link removed]] in
Colorado…

+ Important new study on logging & climate change by my old
friend John Talberth, which concludes that logging in the hardwood
forests of North Carolina emits 44 million tons of carbon
[[link removed]] dioxide
a year. That makes it the third largest source of CO2 in the state,
just behind electricity generation and transportation, and far ahead
of farming and other industries.

+ Bolsonaro’s war on the Amazon and its inhabitants draws blood
[[link removed]]. Maxciel
Pereira dos Santos, who worked at FUNAI protecting the interests of
indigenous tribes in the Amazon, was shot twice in the head in front
of his family in an execution-style hit last week.

+ Japanese officials announced this week plans to dump more than 1
million tons of radioactive water
[[link removed]] from
the Fukushima nuclear complex into the Pacific Ocean. Can’t they
just pour it into George Monbiot’s swimming pool?

+ The US is gutting regulations that had successfully slowed
the decline of Atlantic bluefin tuna
[[link removed]].
Why? Because whatever succeeds must be undone…

+ Screw the tribes, screw the San Juans, screw everything
[[link removed]]…

+ Through the first six months of 2019, more than 7 million people
[[link removed]]have
been displaced by extreme weather events. A million here, a million
there…

+ It’s a distinct honor and rare privilege to be part of the one
human generation out of the thousands that preceded us that gets to
watch the Great Extinction
[[link removed]] unfold
in real-time…

+ Trump’s repeated boast that he made the US the world’s top
energy producer is false. It happened in 2012 under Obama, the
Fracker-in-Chief.

+ Obama, the man who approved Deepwater Horizon, was palling around
with climate heroine Greta Thuneberg this week before her testimony
before the House of Representatives. Obama proclaimed the teenager
“one of our planet’s greatest advocates
[[link removed]],”
saying she was “unafraid to push for real action.” Too bad Obama
wasn’t, when he was in a position to do something about it.

+ Global fossil fuel consumption soared throughout the 2000s, spiking
to ominous new heights during the Obama years.

+ Here’s a map of all of the oil and gas leases on public lands
[[link removed]] that
have sold for less than $2 an acre.

+ The Earth’s Northern Hemisphere just experienced its hottest
summer on record
[[link removed]].
The five hottest summers have all occurred in the last five years…

+ Global carbon emissions have grown 18-fold since 1900
[[link removed]].

+ Silent spring, summer, fall and winter: “The number of birds in
the United States and Canada has declined by 3 billion, or 29 percent
[[link removed]],
over the past half-century.”

+ It’s been said that the Pacific Northwest is defined by where the
salmon go. How will we know where we live 20 YEARS from now
[[link removed]]when
the chinook are gone?

+ A few weeks ago, the Portland Police shut down the Hawthorne Bridge
to allow the neo-Nazi Proud Boys to goose-step through town
unmolested. No such courtesy was extended to the kids marching in the
Climate Strike today. As many as 20,000 of them passed over the bridge
anyway…Go kids!

+ 34 inches of rain along the Gulf Coast of Texas in last 72 hours.
Meanwhile, Trump is gleefully gutting California’s clean air and
fuel efficiency standards…

+ Trump in New Mexico: “Cars have so much junk on them to save a
tiny faction of gasoline. Energy-efficient cars are made out of papier
mache and weigh about three pounds. That’s bad for crashes, because
heavier is better. When somebody hits me, I want to be in as close to
an army tank as possible.” (Over to you, Ralph Nader.)

+ Nearly 500,000 lightning strikes hit the Houston area during TS
Imelda…

+ Dr. Jeff Masters, meteorologist: “This near-record global warmth
in 2019 is all the more remarkable since it is occurring during the
minimum of the weakest solar cycle in 100+ years, and during a year
when a strong El Niño has not been present”

+ The entire geophysical nature of Greenland’s ice sheets
[[link removed]] are
changing in ways that geologists have never seen before. First comes
the melt off, then comes the hardening of the ice, which accelerates
the flooding, which increases the melt off…

+ Alex Wild (curator of Entomology at the University of Texas,
Austin): “Imagine being an art aficionado watching corrupt
governments pay fascist gangs to burn museums to the ground. Day after
day, city after city, accelerating until all that remains is
smoldering rubble. That is what it feels like to be a biologist in the
Trump era.”

+ Good news from ACLU: “A federal court just blocked South
Dakota’s laws suppressing protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Let
this be a lesson to other states – if you try to criminalize
protest, we will sue.”

+ Marianne Williamson: “Climate change is the product of an amoral
economic system
[[link removed]].” Let
Marianne debate!

+ My favorite sign from the climate strike in Portland: “Leonardo
DiCaprio’s girlfriends need a future!”

+ According to a wide-ranging report
[[link removed]] from
the United Nations, climate change is warming the oceans and changing
their chemistry so profoundly that it is threatening seafood supplies,
fueling hurricane, super-storms and coastal flooding that puts
hundreds of millions of people at risk.

+ Western Antarctica’s crumbling ice shelf will reshape coastlines
across the globe
[[link removed]]:
“Today, all the ice sheet models lose ice at a significant rate. The
continent’s ice sheet has shed about 150 billion tonnes of mass
every year since 2005, virtually all of it in West Antarctica. Ice
loss in both Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating.”

+ A paper in Nature
[[link removed]] reports
that Earth’s vegetation may not be able to continue to absorb human
carbon dioxide emissions at current rates, which could accelerate
climate change and exacerbate its effects.

+ Will Mike Pence start calling Hurricane Karen
[[link removed]],
the “Mother” of all storms?

+ “Honey, first we lost the beach house and now it’s the chalet!
[[link removed]]”

+ Washington State wants gun down more wolves
[[link removed]] to
protect cows and sheep. Since 2012, the state’s Department of Fish
and Wildlife has killed an estimated thirty endangered wolves and
pups, has obliterated entire wolf families  and has caused countless
packs to fragment as a result of targeting individual wolves.

+ Josh Frank and I covered the FBI’s targeting of environmental
activists thoroughly in our recent book The Big Heat
[[link removed]], but
here’s another reminder
[[link removed]] of
why giving the FBI more powers to investigate domestic “terrorism”
is a bad idea…

+ More than 91,000 dams
[[link removed]] across
the US have earned a “D” for human safety. All of them earned an
“F” for fish safety.

+ Big win for enviros striving to keep an open pit copper mine from
intruding on the Boundary Waters
[[link removed]]…

OCTOBER 2019

+ The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is deciding whether to perform
fewer comprehensive engineering inspections at U.S. nuclear power
plants. Since the year 2000, these vital safety inspections have
resulted in over 2,000 inspection findings. They helped identify many
defective components before they failed.

+ Two and a half years after Hurricane Harvey, Tropical Storm Imelda
dropped 30 inches of rain, killed five people and inflicted $8 billion
in damage in the area around Houston. This means that Houston has now
been hit with one 500-year rainfall event and two 100-year events
since 2016
[[link removed]].

+ According to research published in the journal Elements
[[link removed]]_, _authored by several teams of
researchers from the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) — a global
collective of more than 1,000 scientists studying the movement of all
Earth’s carbon
[[link removed]] from
the core of the planet to the edge of space, since 1750 human activity
has had a more disruptive impact on the Earth’s carbon cycle than
the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years
ago. According to the report, the total amount of CO2 being released
into the atmosphere every year by fossil fuel burning surpasses the
cumulative amount of CO2 released by every volcano on Earth by at
least 80 times.

+ Global temperatures have increased by 1C since 1960. But the Arctic
is heating up much more rapidly, with some areas warming by more than
4C. Here’s a map by Berkeley Earth showing how the planet has warmed
from 1960 to 2019.

+ According to a study in Nature
[[link removed]], underground
aquifers are being drained at the rate of trillions of gallons a year
with disastrous consequences streams and rivers that are fueled by
these water sources. Already, somewhere between 15 and 21 percent of
watersheds that experience groundwater extraction have slipped past a
critical ecological threshold. By 2050, that number could soar to
somewhere between 40 and 79 percent.

+ Ahoy! An iceberg bigger than Los Angeles
[[link removed]] broke
off the Amery Ice Shelf on the eastern coast of Antarctic ice shelf
this week and is now cruising north…

+ Autumn Peltier addressing the UN General Assembly on behalf of
Canada’s First Nations: “We can’t eat money or drink oil
[[link removed]].”

+ The new Permian Extinction? Those shale oil jobs
[[link removed]] are
drying up faster than the oil itself.

+ The loss of sea ice in the Arctic is a travesty for polar bears
[[link removed]],
who aren’t able to get to their normal feeding grounds. Apparently,
the abundant population of oil company workers just didn’t prove
nutritious enough to sustain the Arctic bears…

+ While new research
[[link removed]] shows
that wild coyotes and wolves experience sadness and mourning like
humans, there’s no sign that spend too much time expressing their
personal grievances…

+ Roundup is still finding new ways to kill. A new study, published
in Frontiers in Genetics
[[link removed]],
shows that a very low concentration of the herbicide glyphosate (in
the parts per trillion range and thus environmentally relevant for
everyone) can trigger breast cancer when combined with another risk
factor.

+ I’m very glad Jay Inslee finally came out against the killing of
wolves in Washington state. Let’s kill the euphemisms for the
slaughter of wildlife, like “lethal removal,
[[link removed]]”
instead…

+ It’s a rather sobering sign of our times that the Federal
Reserve
[[link removed]]may
be the last federal institution doing any serious analysis of the
consequences of climate change….

1: Floods gets worse
2: Banks stop issuing mortgages
3: Property values tumble
4: Tax revenue falls
5: Cities can’t fund flood control measures
6: Floods gets worse…

+ Are there any other environmentalists out there who are outraged
that the vice president’s son would exploit his DNA for a $50K a
month do-nothing gig at a natural gas co. at the very time when his
dad was supposed to be pursuing an aggressive global policy to fight
climate change? Of course, we know that’s not what Biden and Obama
were actually doing. Instead, they were promoting fracking and natural
gas development as a “bridge” fuel. Bridge to where, you ask? A
bridge to big campaign donations from the oil & gas industry.

+ Nearly a quarter of Navajo women and some infants who were part of a
federally funded study on uranium exposure had high levels of the
radioactive metal
[[link removed]] in
their systems, decades after mining for Cold War-era nuclear weapons
ended on their reservation.

+ All those stories warning about Russian hackers trying to knock down
the power grid and the culprit turned out to be PG&E.

+ Obama’s fracking legacy hits home in Colorado
[[link removed]]:
“There has been a fivefold increase in oil and gas production since
2008 in Colorado. 40,000 active and inactive wells are in the Denver
basin; every month, there’s more. They are built close to schools,
playgrounds, and clusters of family homes.”

+ Forget climate change. Forest fires. Deforestation. Toxic mine
waste. Invasive species.  Desertification. According to the BLM’s
Acting Direct, William Perry Pendley, the greatest threat to public
lands in the west is…wild horses
[[link removed]].

+ Two-thirds of North America’s bird species are at risk of
extinction
[[link removed]]from
climate change…and that’s not counting the one’s imperiled by
logging, grazing, mining, subdivisions, pesticides and fracking.

+ The shale oil “boom” Obama unleashed is finally dribbling to an
end
[[link removed]].
It will take 10,000 years for the planet to recover (if then)…

+ Good riddance to coal, the demand for which has slumped to a
43-year low
[[link removed]].
But what they’re replacing it with isn’t any better…

+ You can’t make the Sequoias Giant Again. You just have to leave
them the hell alone.
[[link removed]]..

+ U.S. agriculture is now 48 times as deadly to insects
[[link removed]] as
it was a quarter-century ago, before neonicotinoid pesticides were
introduced.

+ One the first day of its weeklong annual bear killing spree, hunters
in New Jersey slaughtered 94 black bears
[[link removed]],
including mother bears with cubs. A bear of any age can be killed. I
repeat this is going down in Jersey not Wyoming.

+ The warming Clinch River in Tennessee is causing a massive die-off
[[link removed]] of
freshwater mussels, leaving a “smell will knock you off your feet.
You see what was a healthy looking river, but now there’s just dead
bodies scattered everywhere.” Similar mass extirpations are
happening across the rivers of the South.

+ A 2012 study found that a 10% reduction in work hours
[[link removed]] may
lead to declines in ecological footprint, carbon footprint, and CO₂
emissions by 12.1%, 14.6% and 4.2% respectively.”

+ Robert Dudley, who helmed BP during the Deepwater Horizon ecological
war crime, is leaving the company
[[link removed]].
Shouldn’t Dudley at least be wearing an ankle bracelet or be
required to register if he moves into a watershed near you?

+ The carbon bootprint of empire…the US military generates more
pollution than 140 countries
[[link removed]].

+ After more than a decade of decline, a spike in air pollution may
have taken the lives of almost 10,000 additional Americans
[[link removed]] over
two years.

+ PG&E should be seized by the state of California and turned into a
publicly-owned utility before it kills any more people
[[link removed]]…

+ In the first five months of the administration of California’s
hipster Governor Gavin Newsom, fracking permits have increased 103
percent and new oil well permits have increased by 35.3% and that was
before Newsom appointed two oil and gas lobbyists
[[link removed]] to serve
as regulators in his administration, one of them, Uduak-Joe Ntuk, a
former Chevron executive. Before he’s finished, Newsom’s
environmental record will make Arnold look like Rachel Carson…

+ At the beginning of his administration, Trump promised to cut two
regulations for every new one put into effective. But he’s truly
outdone himself. Over the first 2.5 years, Trump has slashed  8.5
regulations
[[link removed]] for
every new one, most of them environmental and food safety rules.

+ Speaking of rolling back regulations, a nationwide test of baby
food found that 95% of the samples contained lead, arsenic and other
heavy metals in varying proportion. Most of these contaminated
products have slipped right past the inspectors at Trump’s FDA.

+ Wood-burning power plants emit far more CO2 per megawatt-hour
[[link removed]]than
coal plants. Yet the biomass lobby has successfully deemed them a
“green fuel” enabling biomass companies to enjoy billions in
subsidies intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses.

+ Just another October with F-3 tornadoes
[[link removed]]…

+ The planned extinction of the Delta Smelt
[[link removed]] by
the Trump Administration will probably also spell the end of imperiled
Sacramento River salmon…

+ Leaving trees standing sequesters more carbon
[[link removed]] than
planting new trees. It’s vital to do both. But not as part of some
crazy carbon offset scheme.

+ Planet of Climate Mutants…the inexorably warming oceans are
turning most baby sea turtles into females
[[link removed]].

+ Kill Fee: Oil companies got an $18 billion incentive
[[link removed]] from
the Feds for killing the Gulf of Mexico.

+ What a smart wolf to get the hell out of Wyoming
[[link removed]],
where every wolf is fair game, and into Colorado. (Except, every other
wolf that has made it to Colorado has been killed by a human.)

+ Rick McIntyre
[[link removed]] on
his fascinating new book on the social dynamics of Yellowstone wolf
packs, The Rise of Wolf 8
[[link removed]]:

“From watching 8 and his adopted son, 21, I learned how multiple
adult wolves in a family cooperate to raise young and protect them
from threats such as grizzlies and rival wolf packs. I saw that alpha
females are the true leaders of the pack, not the big alpha males.
Wolves have a matriarchal society and males seem to totally accept
that. Maybe that is a sign of the intelligence level of wolves. I also
witnessed how male wolves accept rejection from females in the
breeding season, give preference to pregnant females at kills they
made, and work tirelessly to feed and protect pups.”

+ Just think about this for a moment: Seventy-five percent of the mass
volume of Arctic ice has melted in the past 30 years
[[link removed]].

+Bears don’t need “training.” They are born knowing what to do,
how to do it and who to do it to
[[link removed]]…

NOVEMBER 2019

+ The rise of the Pew Brothers, who not only brought us the modern
GOP
[[link removed]],
but also managed, through the Pew Charitable Trusts, the leveraged
buyout of the environmental movement along the way….

+  Chase Iron Eyes, lead counsel for the Lakota People’s Law
Project. “This is what pipelines do: They spill.” The latest
“spill” for the Keystone XL pipeline occurred last week in Walsh
County, North Dakota, with 383,040 gallons of oil
[[link removed]] seeping
out on the prairie.

+ Gina McCarthy, the woman who as head of Obama’s EPA turned her
back on Flint is the new CEO and board president of the neoliberal
“eco” group NRDC…

+ The CEO of NRDC was making well over $100K 20 years ago, when I
profiled them for CounterPunch. One of NRDC’s founders, John Bryson,
went on to become the CEO of So Cal Edison and spearheaded the energy
deregulation bill that has now turned PG&E into nation’s most
notorious arsonist.

+ Meanwhile, the kids of Flint still doesn’t have safe water
[[link removed]]…

+ In a report published in Nature, scientists using NASA imagery
estimated that 10% of the places in California releasing methane —
including landfills, natural gas facilities and dairy farms — are
responsible for more than half of the state’s total emissions. And a
fraction of the 272,000 sources surveyed — just 0.2%, so-called
super-emitters
[[link removed]] —
account for as much as 46%.

+ The always engaging John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review:
“Solving climate change will require huge shifts in the economy,
moving away from fossil fuels & restructuring whole energy systems.…
[raising] fundamental questions about production & consumption & along
with it the rule of capital.”

+ Trump officially pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords.
Good riddance. The Paris Climate Accords aren’t worth saving. The
more enlightened nation’s on the planet (like, well, let’s see…
Bhutan, maybe?) should use Trump’s petulant pullout as an excuse to
trash that deal and forge a global policy strong enough that it might
actually work.

+ Sea levels will continue to rise for CENTURIES
[[link removed]] even
if emissions targets are met. As Suetonius quoted Caesar, “Iacta
alea est”…

+ 248 locations recorded one of their top 10 warmest Octobers on
record. Of those, 30 locations had (or tied) their warmest October
EVER, including-

Vero Beach
Tampa
Sarasota/Bradenton
West Palm Beach
Miami
Orlando
Fort Myers
Daytona Beach

+ Nome, Alaska’s 5-year running average temperatures are now 5F
above the 20th century average and are much higher than any time in
the past century.

+ The air in the West has been this toxic since 2009
[[link removed]]: “Between
2016 and 2018, the levels of fine particulate matter — inhalable
specks of liquids and solids that make up air pollution — increased
by 11.5%.”

+ Roxanne Amico: “Making America Gag Again.”

+ Toxic smog
[[link removed]] is
choking Delhi. What a fine job we’ve done with this place we live
on…

+ I think all trapping should be illegal, but this interactive map
[[link removed]]published
by the Albuquerque Journal is a useful reminder that traps don’t
discriminate between rare species, protected species your dog or your
kid…

+ $20 billion
[[link removed]]:
the amount of deferred maintenance that has accrued in federal land
management agencies.

+ One more lane will fix it!

[[link removed]]

Urban Planning & Mobility[🚲][🚶‍♂️][🚆]@urbanthoughts11

1970: One more lane will fix it.
1980: One more lane will fix it.
1990: One more lane will fix it.
2000: One more lane will fix it.
2010: One more lane will fix it.
2020: ?pic.twitter.com/NjS1IPORG2 [[link removed]]
via @avelezig [[link removed]]

[Embedded video]
[[link removed]]

257K [[link removed]]

2:04 AM – Nov 4, 2019
[[link removed]]

Twitter Ads info and privacy
[[link removed]]

97K people are talking about this

+ Fuck cars, up with Good Samaritan bears
[[link removed]]!

+ In April, a bankruptcy court approved bonuses for arsonists
[[link removed]].
Then six months later PG&E struck again…

+ PG&E: Pacific Gaslighting & Evasion.

+ The risk of wildfires in California is predicted to be extreme into
December
[[link removed]].

+ Should they call them “wildfires,” when PG&E is starting most of
them? At latest count, PG&E has been responsible for starting more
than 1,500 fires
[[link removed]] in
the last 6 years alone.

+ The sudden relocation of the Conference of Parties (COP) from Chile
to Madrid has left hundreds of activists in the Global South stranded
and unable to attend
[[link removed]]. There
need to be climate conferences that activists don’t have to
“attend” by flying halfway around the world to get there, burning
carbon all the way there and back. That’s what video-conferencing is
for…

+ A new billboard sprouted along I-5 in Oregon this week shaming PNW
“environmental” groups for failing to protect endangered species
such as the spotted owl…

+ Care about endangered species in the ancient forests of the
Northwest? Donate money to Eco-Advocates NW
[[link removed]] instead.

+ From Canada to the US, Brazil to India, Bolivia to Russia
[[link removed]],
indigenous people are under attack…

+ Never forget what happened at Acoma
[[link removed]]:
“After a small battle with soldiers sent to negotiate, the
conquistador Don Juan Oñate attacked the mesa and killed hundreds of
men, women and children. He took 500 prisoners and sentenced those
over 25 to 20 years of servitude. He ordered the right feet and hands
of some two dozen captives amputated.”

+ Verna Teller of Isleta Pueblo, the first woman to lead a Pueblo in
the Southwest, just became the first Native American woman to
deliver an opening prayer
[[link removed]] in
the US congress.

+ Nearly 400,000 coyotes
[[link removed]] are
killed in the US every year, an average of 1,100 a day.

+ Monday marked the first day in recorded history when not a drop of
rain
[[link removed]] fell
on continental Australia. The fire danger warnings across the country
were raised to “catastrophic” level.

+ Klimate Karma Strikes Venice
[[link removed]]:
“The Veneto regional council, which is located on Venice’s Grand
Canal, was flooded for the first time in its history on Tuesday night
— just after it rejected measures to combat climate change.”

+ “‘We have no idea what four degrees of warming looks like from a
public health perspective, but we know it is catastrophic,’ says
Nick Watts, author of a new report
[[link removed](19)32596-6/fulltext] on
climate change and children’s health published by the Lancet.

+ “The public doesn’t fully see this as a human health crisis.
Maybe polar bears were our early indicator — the proverbial canary
in the coal mine. But when you talk about this crisis, the bear images
should be replaced with pictures of children,” said Dr. Jonathan
Patz, a professor and director of the Global Health Institute at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.

+ According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the number of
days per year when the Beaufort Sea is more than 30% open water has
gone from “usually none” in 1980s to now more than 3 months. 2019
had 107 days, the third highest total.

+ It’s the middle of November and Our Little Mountain (elev. 11,245
feet) remains largely snow free…

Mt Hood from Oregon City, November 12, 2019. Photos: Jeffrey St.
Clair.

+ Stop making sense! A group of California mayors is calling on state
regulators to seize control of PG&E and turn into into a cooperative
[[link removed]].

+ Onshore wind and solar power are now less expensive than any
fossil-fuel-based energy option, even without subsidies. Don’t
believe me? Well, try Forbes
[[link removed]].

+ Air conditioning the outdoors
[[link removed]].
First Qatar, soon Antarctica?
[[link removed]]

+ Key West shatters record with 232 straight days
[[link removed]] with
temps of 80 and above…

+ Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt accused the “coastal states” of
harboring a “hatred of fossil fuels.
[[link removed]]”
Guilty as charged…

+ The leak in the Keystone pipeline contamination 10 times as much
land
[[link removed]] in
North Dakota as originally reported…

+ By 2040, global carbon emissions will be more be more than twice as
much as would be compatible with two degrees of warming and more
than four times as much
[[link removed]] as
would get us to 1.5 degrees.

+ The problem with the Paris Accords is that the alleged “limits”
[[link removed]] on
carbon emissions were more like New Year’s resolutions or dietary
aspirations, easily broken with no consequences …. except for the
planet.

+ The EPA has asked the Anaconda Chamber of Commerce to stop
selling $2 souvenir baggies of slag mining waste
[[link removed]] contaminated
with arsenic and lead. Now, if only they would stop green lighting
mines that create such waste…

+ Credit where credit is due. As demand for coal hits a new low
[[link removed]],
it seems that Trump is winning the war on coal much more decisively
than Obama, whose skirmishes tended to advance and retreat.

+ Australia is on fire and the smoke plumes are crossing the Pacific
[[link removed]]…

+ The deforestation rate in Brazil is the highest
[[link removed]] its
been in more than a decade. But it still trails Russia
[[link removed]]…

+ The climate consequence of deforestation are 626% worse
[[link removed]] than
previously thought…

+ A new report by the Wildlife Trusts suggests half of all insects
[[link removed]] may
have been extirpated since 1970 as a result of the destruction of
habitat, climate change and heavy use of pesticides. The report said
40% of the 1 million known species of insect are now facing
extinction.

+ Wild bison are shedding their genetic diversity
[[link removed]] across
many of the isolated herds overseen by the U.S. government, weakening
future resilience against disease and climate events in the shadow of
human encroachment.

+ A rhino is killed every 10 hours
[[link removed]] in
Africa.

+ If all hunters thought of deer as their brothers and sisters
[[link removed]] would
they kill more or less?

+ Elk researchers in Hells Canyon began poking through wolf excrement
and discovered the digested remains of 181…grasshoppers
[[link removed]].
What, no sheep? I’m disappointed, gang. We sent you out there for
livestock control. Get busy!

+ Meanwhile, two packs of wolves
[[link removed]] have
now shown up right here on Our Little Mountain (AKA, Mount Hood)…

Photo: Defenders of Wildlife.

+ Instead of shipping it to Indian Country
[[link removed]],
nuclear waste should be stored in casks in the backyards of the
corporate executives and government officials who created it…

DECEMBER 2019

+ The thumb-sucking sadist Donald Trump, Jr. shot a rare Argali sheep
in Mongolia. He killed the endangered species on a night hunt, using a
laser-guided sight, while guarded by a US security team. Trump was
retroactively given a “special permit
[[link removed]]”
for the illegal kill after meeting with Mongolian president,
Khaltmaagiin Battulga. Special permits pretty much describe the
lifestyle of the Trump brood.

+ The State of Colorado has signed a contracted with Wildlife
Services to slaughter black bears and mountain lions in the name of
restoring mule deer populations. There’s just one problem: it’s
widespread fracking that’s depleting mule deer populations, not
predation by bears and cougars.

+ There’s so much oil and gas on the market and in the pipeline that
Chevron was forced to take a $10 billion charge
[[link removed]] against
its assets.

+ Natural gas is now driving a new spike in global emissions
[[link removed]] of
greenhouse gases. Thank the Sierra Club, which kept urging natural gas
as “bridge fuel.” I guess we finally know where the bridge led
us…

+ Carbon off-sets were always more of a feel-good scam than any kind
of solution. Now they don’t even feel good.
[[link removed]]..

+ Remember how much sport the FoxNews crowd made over the bankruptcy
of Solyndra, the solar company that got a measly subsidy (compared to
coal & oil firms) in Obama time? They obsessed over it for months and
months. Now you have the nation’s biggest coal companies
[[link removed]],
which have reaped in trillions in subsidies and tax breaks, and left
behind trillions in damages: ruined landscapes,poisoned rivers,
ravaged lungs and a climate gone haywire, going bankrupt week after
week and not a word….

+ They’re converting the Swamp into an Oil Patch. High ranking
Department of Interior official Douglas Domenech
[[link removed]] has
been caught repeatedly used his government office to provide access to
his former employer, the Koch-backed Texas Public Policy Foundation.

+ Brazil’s neo-fascist strongman Jair Bolsonaro lashed out at
climate activist Greta Thunburg this week, calling her “a brat.
[[link removed]]”
My money’s on the Kid against this creep…

+ It’s amazing how easily Trump can be owned. The question is are
any of the Democrats as supple at sticking the knife in as the Kid
[[link removed]]?

+ According to data from NASA imagery, 75 percent of the fires in the
Amazon originated inside beef ranching allotments
[[link removed]].

+ Sometimes your wildest dreams come true…The Arctic is melting as
much as 7-times faster
[[link removed]] than
previously anticipated because of climate change. As the Arctic melts,
it releases enormous bursts of methane, exacerbating climate change,
which causes the Arctic to melt faster causing…fatal feedback loops
[[link removed]].

+ Biden erupted again this week, telling environmental activists that
if they wanted someone who was going to “ban fracking immediately”
then they should vote for someone else
[[link removed]].
From your lips, Joe, to their ballots…

+ Can’t wait to hear Biden’s intemperate malarky when some bright
young activist throws this in his face: the Paris Accords climate
targets need to be 5 times stronger
[[link removed]] than
they are to actually have any chance of working.

+ Victoria Falls has dried to a mere trickle
[[link removed]]…

+ The fires sweeping across New South Wales and Queensland in
Australia have already emitted 250 million tons of CO2
[[link removed]],
almost half of country’s annual emissions.

+ New research suggests that a similar fate may befall Antarctic ice,
which will begin rapidly melting
[[link removed]] as
the Southern Ocean warms. “Our work shows that very mild ocean
warming, like what is happening right now,” warned the
study’s lead author Dr. Catherine Beltran, “was the precursor of
past ice retreat and that we should really worry about it today,”

+ At a climate change forum with high school students this
week, Andrew Yang pledged to tax carbon at $40 a ton and have it
escalate over time.

+ In the petrochemical belt of Houston, Beaumont and Port Arthur,
Texas, one-in-three children
[[link removed]] attend
school near high-risk facilities that store or use potentially
dangerous chemicals.

+ After looking at 14 years of data from Nevada, scientists found
thatlivestock grazing
[[link removed]] doesn’t
help get rid of cheatgrass, a highly flammable invasive weed that is a
prime fuel of Western range fires.

+ A white dude named Brett James Stimac
[[link removed]] got
in his truck and drove three hours to the Red Lake Chippewa
Reservation in Minnesota, trespassed his way to the dump and shot a
700-lb black bear as it was feeding. Stimac cut off the head, the
paws, and left the rest of the corpse to rot. Bears are sacred to
Ojibwe, nearly half the reservation is bear clan.

+ In a disposable society, even the most precious living things
become trash receptacles
[[link removed]].

+ Gavin Newsom and Madame Prosecutor both partied at Sean (Napster)
Parker’s redwood-wrecking wedding party
[[link removed]]….

+ ExxonMobil’s 2019 Outlook for Energy undercuts their claim to be
“fighting climate change” by predicting that “no reductions in
carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector through 2040—and no
date at which emissions reach net zero”…

+ Speaking of ExxonMobil one of their natural gas wells in Ohio
released more methane
[[link removed]] into
the atmosphere during a blowout in 2018 than some COUNTRIES do in a
year…

+ And on the 7th day God rested, instead of fixing the fucking
glitches in the operating software of the species he picked to run the
place : “More than 3 in 4 U.S. adults and teenagers alike agree that
humans are influencing the climate. But 43 percent of adults and 57
percent of teens cited ‘plastic bottles and bags’ as a ‘major’
contributor to climate change.”

+ This just in from the Gen. Westmoreland School of Forestry: We must
burn and log the Redwoods to save them
[[link removed]]!

+ TVA, a federally owned utility that serves 10 million customers in
seven southeastern states, is pressuring its power providers to sign
longer contracts, locking them in for decades of coal and nuclear
power with little flexibility use renewables such as wind or solar.

+ The Trump administration just pulled the plug on ToxMap
[[link removed]],
an online database allowed users to pull up detailed EPA data for each
toxic release site, and to overlay other information, such as
mortality statistics, onto those maps. They really don’t want you to
know if you’re being poisoned, with what or by whom…

+ The groundwater in eastern Oregon’s Harney County is dropping
by 8 feet a YEAR
[[link removed]] in
some places…

+ The situation is just as bad, if not worse, in Arizona, where deep
wells drilled by mega-farms
[[link removed]] are
draining the desert state’s irreplaceable aquifers.

+ Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s former firm, Brownstein
Hyatt Farber Schreck, has raked in $12 million
[[link removed]] from
clients lobbying the Interior Department since his nomination—a 310%
increase from the year before. And the investment is paying off, from
oil leases to coal mine permits to water diversions.

+ Former SeaWorld dolphin trainer turned whistleblower Jeffrey Ventre
on the moment the scales dropping from his eyes: “It’s like going
through a one-way door. Once you see them in the wild—swimming in
straight lines with straight dorsal fins—there’s really no going
back.”

+ The Brazilian Cerrado loses an area the size of London
[[link removed]] in
vegetative cover every three months…

+ The new acid test: the waters off the California coast seems to
be acidifying at twice the rate
[[link removed]] of
the global average. Has the word “acidification” ever been used in
a presidential debate?

+ As his company, Murray Energy, sank into bankruptcy, Bob
Murray paid himself $14 million
[[link removed]] for
one year’s wages while his then-president, Robert D. Moore, who has
since become chairman, earned $9 million a year, on top of his
retention bonus. Meanwhile, Murray still had enough money left over to
his climate denial campaigns.

+ Murray Energy may be seeking protection from its creditors, but
coal’s death has been greatly exaggerated. The world burns 65
percent more coal today than it did in 2000, much of it in Asia
[[link removed]],
according to a new report by the International Energy Association.

+ Under pressure from the world’s biggest polluters, the UN climate
talks in Madrid (COP25) fell apart
[[link removed]] without
any deal. The conference couldn’t even manage to ‘accept’ the
U.N.’s own IPCC report.

+ A single rancher in eastern Washington state has killed 26 wolves
[[link removed]].

_JEFFREY ST. CLAIR is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent books
are Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution
[[link removed]] and The
Big Heat: Earth on the Brink
[[link removed]] (with Joshua
Frank) _He can be reached at: [email protected] or on Twitter
 @JSCCounterPunch [[link removed]] . 

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