The oil and gas industries could help fix this!

Photo with Article — A flare burns at a well pad Aug. 26, 2021, near Watford City, N.D. American oil and natural gas wells, pipelines and compressors are spewing three times the amount of the potent heat-trapping gas methane as the government thinks, a new comprehensive study calculates.

American oil and natural gas wells, pipelines and compressors are spewing three times the amount of the potent heat-trapping gas methane as the government thinks, causing $9.3 billion in yearly climate damage, a new comprehensive study calculates.

But because more than half of these methane emissions are coming from a tiny number of oil and gas sites, 1% or less, this means the problem is both worse than the government thought but also fairly fixable, said the lead author of a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

The same issue is happening globally. Large methane emissions events around the world detected by satellites grew 50% in 2023 compared to 2022 with more than 5 million metric tons spotted in major fossil fuel leaks, the International Energy Agency reported Wednesday in their Global Methane Tracker 2024. World methane emissions rose slightly in 2023 to 120 million metric tons, the report said.

“This is really an opportunity to cut emissions quite rapidly with targeted efforts at these highest emitting sites,” said lead author Evan Sherwin, an energy and policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab who wrote the study while at Stanford University. “If we can get this roughly 1% of sites under control, then we’re halfway there because that’s about half of the emissions in most cases.”

Sherwin said the fugitive emissions come throughout the oil and gas production and delivery system, starting with gas flaring. That’s when firms release natural gas to the air or burn it instead of capturing the gas that comes out of energy extraction. There’s also substantial leaks throughout the rest of the system, including tanks, compressors and pipelines, he said.

“It’s actually straightforward to fix,” Sherwin said.

In general about 3% of the U.S. gas produced goes wasted into the air, compared to the Environmental Protection Agency figures of 1%, the study found. Sherwin said that’s a substantial amount, about 6.2 million tons per hour in leaks measured over the daytime. It could be lower at night, but they don’t have those measurements.

The study gets that figure using one million anonymized measurements from airplanes that flew over 52% of American oil wells and 29% of gas production and delivery system sites over a decade. Sherwin said the 3% leak figure is the average for the six regions they looked at and they did not calculate a national average.

Methane over a two-decade period traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, but only lasts in the atmosphere for about a decade instead of hundreds of years like carbon dioxide, according to the EPA.

About 30% of the world’s warming since pre-industrial times comes from methane emissions, said IEA energy supply unit head Christophe McGlade. The United States is the No. 1 oil and gas production methane emitter, with China polluting even more methane from coal, he said.

Last December, the Biden administration issued a new rule forcing the U.S. oil and natural gas industry to cut its methane emissions. At the same time at the United Nations climate negotiations in Dubai, 50 oil companies around the world pledged to reach near zero methane emissions and end routine flaring in operations by 2030. That Dubai agreement would trim about one-tenth of a degree Celsius, nearly two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit, from future warming, a prominent climate scientist told The Associated Press.

Monitoring methane from above, instead of at the sites or relying on company estimates, is a growing trend. Earlier this month the market-based Environmental Defense Fund and others launched MethaneSAT into orbit. For energy companies, the lost methane is valuable with Sherwin’s study estimate it is worth about $1 billion a year.

About 40% of the global methane emissions from oil, gas and coal could have been avoided at no extra cost, which is “a massive missed opportunity,” IEA’s McGlade said. The IEA report said if countries do what they promised in Dubai they could cut half of the global methane pollution by 2030, but actions put in place so far only would trim 20% instead, “a very large gap between emissions and actions,” McGlade said.

“It is critical to reduce methane emissions if the world is to meet climate targets,” said Cornell University methane researcher Robert Horwath, who wasn’t part of Sherwin’s study.

“Their analysis makes sense and is the most comprehensive study by far out there on the topic,” said Howarth, who is updating figures in a forthcoming study to incorporate the new data.

The overflight data shows the biggest leaks are in the Permian basin of Texas and New Mexico.

“It’s a region of rapid growth, primarily driven by oil production,” Sherwin said. “So when the drilling happens, both oil and gas comes out, but the main thing that the companies want to sell in most cases was the oil. And there wasn’t enough pipeline capacity to take the gas away” so it spewed into the air instead.

Contrast that with tiny leak rates found in drilling in the Denver region and the Pennsylvania area. Denver leaks are so low because of local strictly enforced regulations and Pennsylvania is more gas-oriented, Sherwin said.

This shows a real problem with what National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association methane-monitoring scientist Gabrielle Petron calls “super-emitters.”

“Reliably detecting and fixing super-emitters is a low hanging fruit to reduce real life greenhouse gas emissions,” Petron, who wasn’t part of Sherwin’s study, said. “This is very important because these super-emitter emissions are ignored by most ‘official’ accounting.”

Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who also wasn’t part of the study, said, “a few facilities are poisoning the air for everyone.”

“For more than a decade, we’ve been showing that the industry emits far more methane than they or government agencies admit,” Jackson said. “This study is capstone evidence. And yet nothing changes.”

___
Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

An actual warm spring could mean bad news for NY fruit crops

Apples orchards have becoming popular in upstate New York

Some warmer spring temperatures have already hit much of New York – and that could be bad for fruit crops.

With some 70 degree days already hitting much of the upstate region, an early spring may not be a good thing, according to Jason Londo, an associate professor of fruit crop physiology at Cornell University. He said with warmer weather, fruit crops may start dropping their defenses.

“We typically get plenty of cold weather in the month of March and even into April,” Londo said. “So the more heat we have now, the less defended our crops are to those types of freeze events that could happen,”

As temperatures increase, many fruit crops lose their resiliency to the cold, making them more susceptible to frost or cold damage. A late freeze last May caused damage to some apple and grape crops across the state. This year, Londo is remaining optimistic.

“I’m nervous, but it just depends, if it calms down and it just kind of goes through the rest of spring very cool, we’re fine,” Londo said. “It’s really if we have more spikes of heat and any oscillations.”

But if a late freeze does come, there is little New York growers can do. New York lacks the infrastructure some southern climate growers have and technology hasn’t moved fast enough to develop a viable solution. Despite a limited number of options to help protect crops, Londo said New York growers are strong.

“We have a resilient industry,” Londo said. “We have to keep that investment going, we have to keep positive, optimistic thoughts about how to mitigate this and work together.”

Londo said this is something the industry may have to get used to. “This sort of weather is going to continue to be unpredictable and it can be scary but I also have a lot of faith in the agriculture industry of this state,” Londo said.

Londo said fruit crops will be stronger if cooler temperatures remain through April.

Abigail Connolly ~ Abigail is a temporary WRVO News Reporter/Producer working on regional and digital news stories. She graduated from SUNY Oswego in 2022 where she studied English and Public Relations. Abigail enjoys reading, writing, exploring CNY and spending time with family and friends. Abigail first joined the WRVO team as a student reporter in June 2022.

Our concern is the all lands, for example lot 7 here!

From Randi Pokladnik, Tappan Lake, OHIO, 44683, February 14, 2024

Have you ever noticed that every oil and gas drilling rig has an American flag anchored to the top? For most Americans, that flag represents a symbol of freedom. So, it’s ironic that Ohio’s pro fossil fuel Republicans cater to the oil and gas industry and usurp many of its rights and freedoms from Ohio’s citizens.

Have you ever noticed that every oil and gas drilling rig has an American flag anchored to the top? For most Americans, that flag represents a symbol of freedom. So, it’s ironic that Ohio’s pro fossil fuel Republicans cater to the oil and gas industry and usurp many of its rights and freedoms from Ohio’s citizens.

This industry, however, enjoys several freedoms and rights that many other industries do not. Because of the Haliburton laws, the oil and gas industry is exempt from most federal regulations, including the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and the Toxic Release Inventory under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act.

In 1980, the Federal EPA acknowledged that the billions and billions of barrels of produced water from fracking wells is hazardous, but it would be an economic burden for this industry to try to adhere to the laws. Therefore, “The Federal EPA exempted wastes from the federal laws written to protect the public from toxic waste.” In Ohio, these wastes are trucked up and down the roads of our rural communities to be injected into Class II injection wells.

Ohio’s Republican lawmakers have opened the state to fracking; allowing the industry to exploit every drop of oil and every molecule of gas that lies beneath southeast Ohio counties.

Countless laws have been passed to pave the way for fracking while thwarting renewable energy development (HB 52 HB6 and HB483). Additionally, pro fossil fuel laws have attacked our freedoms, limiting free speech and public protests. Ohio citizens, trying to protect their homes and rural communities from the horrendous externalities visited on them, have been essentially gaged by laws like SB 33, passed in 2021.

A prime example of the power that fossil fuels weld over Ohio’s citizens was obvious in 2023, when HB 507 opened up the state’s parks to fracking. The bill was passed during the 2022 General Assembly “lame duck” session, and was quickly signed into law by Governor Mike DeWine. The bill set in motion the ability of out-of-state oil and gas companies to propose leases under state parks.

A “puppet-like” public participation process was carried on throughout the year with public meetings in Columbus. Citizens were prohibited from asking questions or commenting. The public meeting on November 15, 2023 was a sad day for Ohio’s public lands. Democracy was fracked, and leasing was approved for several tracts of land, including all 20,000 acres of Salt Fork State Park.

The five-member Oil and Gas Land Management Commission ignored the nine criteria contained in the statue. They also ignored the vocal disagreement of over 100 informed, angry Ohio citizens and the peer-reviewed health and environmental studies in the over 5000 written comments submitted to them by Ohio citizens.

After that decision, many citizens were devastated and realized that ordinary freedoms we took for granted have been eroded away by an industry that controls the state legislature in Ohio. Southeast Ohio is just a mineral colony open for business, regardless of how that “business” ruins our communities.

Sadly, my family has learned that our precious forested property has been targeted by the industry for a forced pooling or mandatory unitization action. “Ohio Revised Code § 1509.27 provides a mechanism to force Ohio landowners to participate in oil and gas development without their consent.” Once again, this process favors industry profits over private property rights.

Forced pooling is defined as when a “person who has obtained the consent of the owners of at least sixty-five per cent of the land area overlying a pool or a part of a pool submits an application for the operation as a unit of the entire pool or part of the pool to the chief of the division of oil and gas resources management”. If approved, the application will force the remaining thirty-five percent of landowners to become part of the unit.

The best way to describe this is by using a puzzle. Pieces of the puzzle represent various parcels of lands owned by different people. A drilling unit is a long, horizontal tract of land (rectangle drawn on that puzzle). If sixty-five percent of the puzzle pieces in that tract are agreeable to lease their land, then the other thirty-five percent who do not want to lease their land are forced into the process.

There are only three criteria to satisfy in order for the Chief of the Division of Oil and Gas at ODNR to approve a mandatory pooling application (see OHIO REV. CODE ANN. § 1509.27). They are: protecting correlative rights (those who have leased); providing for effective development and use; and promoting conservation of oil and gas. Any concerns over environmental harms or health effects are not considered.

Since 2014, we have been repeatedly contacted by oil and gas landmen trying to get us to sign a lease. We have refused for many reasons including health, environmental damage, and climate change. Now we are being forced to do something that goes against everything we believe.

We are learning about this process as we dig deeper into legal documentation. If we do not sign a lease agreement for our land, we are considered a non-consenting owner. There have been many amendments to the original laws written in 1965. In 2010, amendments were added to prevent liability from attaching to nonparticipant owners. “However, these amendments do not address one of the most critical aspects of the laws, the risk-penalty provision. Landowners subject to the order only have the choice between the following: (1) relent and become a participant in the drilling unit or (2) become a nonparticipating owner and pay a penalty of up to 200% of the reasonable costs and expenses of production.” This penalty is a way to encourage non-consenting owners to ultimately lease, and helps the well operators from undergoing additional application fees and paperwork.

In a conversation I had with another landowner who was also “force-pooled”, we discovered that by refusing to sign a lease, we may relinquish the ability to write legal protections for our land. If we sign a lease, we can at least list the various stipulations that limit the drilling company from surface access to our land. This would prohibit pipeline construction, the use of hydrocarbon storage tanks on our land, and the drilling of injection wells to inject waste fluids.
Basically, if we want to protect our property, we have no real options; we are forced to sign a lease. It is a horrible position. We built our eco-log home from salvaged forest-fire-killed trees; we have an 8.4kW solar system on our garage; and we have a new geothermal heating system. We have tried to reduce our carbon footprint as much as possible and now our land will be fracked.

In 2018, I was honored by being selected as the “Fractivist of the Year” by the West Virginia Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. In 2020, that same group gave me another award, the “Passion for Justice award”. Those plaques hang on my wall as a constant reminder of why I keep fighting fossil fuel expansion. Unfortunately, the fight to save our property will not be won. The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District leased 7300 acres around Tappan Lake to Encino Energy in June of 2022, which led to the mandatory pooling of our land. We recently received the notification that our land is no longer truly ours, but instead is now part of Encino’s Akers HN FRA East Unit.

Make no mistake, I am enraged by the fact that we, as property-owning citizens, have no rights to stop this heinous process. Encino’s monster horizontal laterals will snake under our land and steal our resources. But they cannot steal my resolve to continue speaking out against the harms of fossil fuels and the lack of democracy in Ohio’s government, which is not “of the people, by the people, or for the people.”

This industry, however, enjoys several freedoms and rights that many other industries do not.

Because of the Haliburton laws, the oil and gas industry is exempt from most federal regulations, including the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and the Toxic Release Inventory under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act.

In 1980, the Federal EPA acknowledged that the billions and billions of barrels of produced water from fracking wells is hazardous, but it would be an economic burden for this industry to try to adhere to the laws. Therefore, “The Federal EPA exempted wastes from the federal laws written to protect the public from toxic waste.” In Ohio, these wastes are trucked up and down the roads of our rural communities to be injected into Class II injection wells.

Ohio’s Republican lawmakers have opened the state to fracking; allowing the industry to exploit every drop of oil and every molecule of gas that lies beneath southeast Ohio counties.

Countless laws have been passed to pave the way for fracking while thwarting renewable energy development (HB 52 HB6 and HB483). Additionally, pro fossil fuel laws have attacked our freedoms, limiting free speech and public protests. Ohio citizens, trying to protect their homes and rural communities from the horrendous externalities visited on them, have been essentially gaged by laws like SB 33, passed in 2021.

A prime example of the power that fossil fuels weld over Ohio’s citizens was obvious in 2023, when HB 507 opened up the state’s parks to fracking. The bill was passed during the 2022 General Assembly “lame duck” session, and was quickly signed into law by Governor Mike DeWine. The bill set in motion the ability of out-of-state oil and gas companies to propose leases under state parks.

A “puppet-like” public participation process was carried on throughout the year with public meetings in Columbus. Citizens were prohibited from asking questions or commenting. The public meeting on November 15, 2023 was a sad day for Ohio’s public lands. Democracy was fracked, and leasing was approved for several tracts of land, including all 20,000 acres of Salt Fork State Park.

The five-member Oil and Gas Land Management Commission ignored the nine criteria contained in the statue. They also ignored the vocal disagreement of over 100 informed, angry Ohio citizens and the peer-reviewed health and environmental studies in the over 5000 written comments submitted to them by Ohio citizens.

After that decision, many citizens were devastated and realized that ordinary freedoms we took for granted have been eroded away by an industry that controls the state legislature in Ohio. Southeast Ohio is just a mineral colony open for business, regardless of how that “business” ruins our communities.

Sadly, my family has learned that our precious forested property has been targeted by the industry for a forced pooling or mandatory unitization action. “Ohio Revised Code § 1509.27 provides a mechanism to force Ohio landowners to participate in oil and gas development without their consent.” Once again, this process favors industry profits over private property rights.

Forced pooling is defined as when a “person who has obtained the consent of the owners of at least sixty-five per cent of the land area overlying a pool or a part of a pool submits an application for the operation as a unit of the entire pool or part of the pool to the chief of the division of oil and gas resources management”. If approved, the application will force the remaining thirty-five percent of landowners to become part of the unit.

The best way to describe this is by using a puzzle. Pieces of the puzzle represent various parcels of lands owned by different people. A drilling unit is a long, horizontal tract of land (rectangle drawn on that puzzle). If sixty-five percent of the puzzle pieces in that tract are agreeable to lease their land, then the other thirty-five percent who do not want to lease their land are forced into the process.

There are only three criteria to satisfy in order for the Chief of the Division of Oil and Gas at ODNR to approve a mandatory pooling application (see OHIO REV. CODE ANN. § 1509.27). They are: protecting correlative rights (those who have leased); providing for effective development and use; and promoting conservation of oil and gas. Any concerns over environmental harms or health effects are not considered.

Since 2014, we have been repeatedly contacted by oil and gas landmen trying to get us to sign a lease. We have refused for many reasons including health, environmental damage, and climate change. Now we are being forced to do something that goes against everything we believe.

We are learning about this process as we dig deeper into legal documentation. If we do not sign a lease agreement for our land, we are considered a non-consenting owner. There have been many amendments to the original laws written in 1965. In 2010, amendments were added to prevent liability from attaching to nonparticipant owners. “However, these amendments do not address one of the most critical aspects of the laws, the risk-penalty provision. Landowners subject to the order only have the choice between the following: (1) relent and become a participant in the drilling unit or (2) become a nonparticipating owner and pay a penalty of up to 200% of the reasonable costs and expenses of production.” This penalty is a way to encourage non-consenting owners to ultimately lease, and helps the well operators from undergoing additional application fees and paperwork.

In a conversation I had with another landowner who was also “force-pooled”, we discovered that by refusing to sign a lease, we may relinquish the ability to write legal protections for our land. If we sign a lease, we can at least list the various stipulations that limit the drilling company from surface access to our land. This would prohibit pipeline construction, the use of hydrocarbon storage tanks on our land, and the drilling of injection wells to inject waste fluids.
Basically, if we want to protect our property, we have no real options; we are forced to sign a lease. It is a horrible position. We built our eco-log home from salvaged forest-fire-killed trees; we have an 8.4kW solar system on our garage; and we have a new geothermal heating system. We have tried to reduce our carbon footprint as much as possible and now our land will be fracked.

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10 dramatic discoveries about Earth from 2023

Hottest summer on record.

Devastating Maui wildfire.

Return of El Niño.

Possible shutdown of key ocean current system.

Record-low sea ice extent in Antarctica.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires.

Changes to the tilt of Earth’s axis.

A brand-new island.

Source ~ https://www.space.com/planet-earth-from-space-in-2023

The time has come to take this warning seriously!

From an Article by Jessica Corbett for Common Dreams on January 23, 2024

“Ominous trends continue to point the world toward global catastrophe,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned Tuesday, explaining why the Doomsday Clock remains at 90 seconds to midnight.

Since its 1947 debut, the Doomsday Clock has represented how close humanity is to destroying the world. While it was initially created in response to nuclear arms risks, in 2024, the climate emergency, biological threats, and disruptive technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) also factor into the clock’s position.

The Bulletin’s new statement says that “the members of the Science and Security Board have been deeply worried about the deteriorating state of the world. That is why we set the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight in 2019 and at 100 seconds to midnight in 2022.”

“Last year, we expressed our heightened concern by moving the clock to 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been—in large part because of Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine,” the publication continues. “Today, we once again set the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight because humanity continues to face an unprecedented level of danger.”

“Our decision should not be taken as a sign that the international security situation has eased,” the statement stresses. “Instead, leaders and citizens around the world should take this statement as a stark warning and respond urgently, as if today were the most dangerous moment in modern history. Because it may well be.”

Nearly two years since the invasion, “a durable end to Russia’s war in Ukraine seems distant, and the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in that conflict remains a serious possibility,” the document states. However, Russia is just one of the world’s nine nuclear-armed nations.

“Spending programs in the three largest nuclear powers — China, Russia, and the United States—threaten to trigger a three-way nuclear arms race as the world’s arms control architecture collapses,” the statement notes. “And the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has the potential to escalate into a wider Middle Eastern conflict that could pose unpredictable threats, regionally and globally.”

On the climate front, “the world in 2023 entered uncharted territory as it suffered its hottest year on record and global greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise,” the publication highlights. “Current efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are grossly insufficient to avoid dangerous human and economic impacts from climate change, which disproportionately affect the poorest people in the world.”

The statement also points out that “the revolution in life sciences and associated technologies continued to expand in scope last year,” and “the convergence of emerging artificial intelligence tools and biological technologies may radically empower individuals to misuse biology.”

Other AI-related concerns include the “great potential to magnify disinformation” as well as military uses. The statement says that “decisions to put AI in control of important physical systems—in particular, nuclear weapons—could indeed pose a direct existential threat to humanity.”

While sounding the alarm about the world’s top threats on Tuesday, the Bulletin also emphasized that it’s possible to turn back the clock.

“For decades, scientists have been warning us of the dangers facing humankind,” said science communicator Bill Nye, who participated in the 2024 Doomsday Clock announcement. “We could be facing catastrophe unless we better manage the technologies we’ve created. It’s time to act.”

The Bulletin’s executive chair, former Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown, asserted that “only the big powers like China, America, and Russia can pull us back. Despite deep antagonisms, they must cooperate—or we are doomed.”

Outside organizations, including the U.K.-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), also issued calls to action.

“The Doomsday Clock remaining at 90 seconds to midnight must be a wake-up call for the entire world,” said the group’s general secretary, Kate Hudson. “We’re fast approaching the point of no return. CND calls on all those who want peace to prevail to join us in doing everything we can to turn back the clock.”

Oil Companies & Coal Companies were part of the Deception!

DOERING: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Jenni Doering

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran. The burning of fossil fuels is the primary source of climate-warming greenhouse gases worldwide. And the science tells us that if we don’t drastically reduce those emissions as soon as possible, we’re headed for even more catastrophic climate disruption. But by 2030 the UN reports that global fossil fuel production is set to be more than double the level consistent with meeting the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. The dominance of the fossil fuel industry even as we face the climate emergency isn’t all that surprising, says Naomi Oreskes. She’s a professor of the history of science at Harvard and says the fossil fuel industry has stalled climate progress around the globe for decades. Professor Oreskes recently joined Living on Earth’s Steve Curwood to describe the industry’s campaign of disinformation.

CURWOOD: So how far back did big oil companies know about the potentially catastrophic effects their products could have on the climate and the planet?

ORESKES: We know from our research and the research of others that as early as the 1960s, the oil industry was quite well aware that burning fossil fuels put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And those gases were almost certain to warm the planet. And they also knew that the effects would likely be very serious. We begin to see really serious sustained work on the issue in the 1970s. And by the mid to late 70s, some companies like ExxonMobil actually had their own in-house scientists doing this research. And so we’ve shown, in our work, we’ve gone back and we’ve looked at those reports, we’ve looked at the scientific papers that were published, either by industry scientists or co-authored by them with academics. And they show very clearly that by the late 70s, early 80s, the oil industry had a very clear picture of what this problem was, understood that it was serious, that it would have large social, economic and political consequences, that it could include very substantive sea level rise, and that it might make their product unsellable.

CURWOOD: Go back to the very beginning. What was the first sort of shot across the bow, so to speak, inside industry? Who spoke up and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we really could have a problem here.

ORESKES: Well, there’s a few different shots across the bow. One of my favorite early examples is the physicist Gilbert Plass, who worked for Ford Motor Company. So we have reports from the 50s and 60s where the car industry is beginning to recognize that this could have significance for their long term business model. But also, Plass worked for Ford Aerospace. And they were interested in heat seeking missiles, and the impact of CO2 heat absorption on heat seeking missiles. So Plass did some of the most important early work that proved that climate change would result from increased CO2 in the atmosphere. So that was in the mid 1950s. We also know that in the early 60s, there were a number of studies and reports done, including one by Edward Teller, the famous physicist who spoke to the American Petroleum Institute about this issue. We have a number of reports that my students actually tracked down of air pollution conferences in the early to mid 1960s, where scientists were talking about CO2 as a form of air pollution. And we know that auto industry executives, oil industry executives, chemical industry executives, were present at these meetings and heard these conversations and in some cases participated in them.

CURWOOD: So what did big oil companies do with that information?

ORESKES: Well, at first, they didn’t actually do much of anything. And one of the things that’s been interesting to us and the research we’ve done on the 1960s, is that in the 1960s, there’s this conversation going on, that the oil industry doesn’t seem to be particularly worried about. And my interpretation of that is that so long as climate change seemed far off in the future, they didn’t really think it was something that they had to worry about terribly much. Now, a couple of companies did, and ExxonMobil is the most famous because they actually created a research group to better understand the problem. And they did that in the 1970s. So we know that they were taking it seriously. And we know that their own scientists wrote a number of reports that said, yes, this actually is significant. It is something that companies should be paying attention to. But even then, most scientists in the 1970s still thought that change was pretty far away. And a lot of the reports don’t actually specify when they think discernable effects would occur. But when they do use a number, they sometimes use the year 2000. And sometimes when scientists talked about the issue, they talked to the year 2100. So you can imagine if you were a corporate executive in 1975, and someone comes along talking about climate change as something that would happen in the year 2100, you might reasonably think, hmm, that’s not something I really need to worry about. But what we’ve seen in our work is that it begins to change very dramatically. And in a very specific year: 1989. 1989 is when we first begin to see climate change denial begin to be a thing. So we begin to see reports, advertisements, OpEds, to say, well, hold on, slow down, we don’t really know, we’re not really sure. And so one obvious question is why then? And I think we know the answer, because 1988 is the year that Jim Hansen testifies for the first time in the US Congress, that manmade climate change is underway. And he testifies to the effect that he and his team at NASA are 99% sure that this is the case. And you know, as well as I do, scientists hardly ever say they’re 99% sure about anything. So it’s this very strong, very clear, quite unequivocated statement. And 1988 is also the year that the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is created. So you have these two big things happening to say, okay, we’ve been talking about this as something that’s far off in the future but actually, this is happening faster than we thought and if Hansen is right, it’s actually already happening now. And I think that scares the pants off the oil industry. And I think that helps to explain why we then see this big pivot.

CURWOOD: Yeah, I mean, what did they do with that information, that climate change is here and now, as of 1988?

Prof. Naomi Oreskes is expert on History of Science

CURWOOD: Specifically, talk to me about the strategies that these companies used to mislead consumers and the public about the dangers of fossil fuel. What was the message that was put out there about this, to support this approach?

ORESKES: There was a wide diversity of messaging that was used. But my Research Associate, Geoffrey Supran, and I have identified four big themes that we see repeated over and over again, and we summarize them as follows. It’s not real, it’s not us, it will wreck the economy, it’s too expensive to fix. So the first one, it’s not real, was a strategy to deny that climate change was even happening, to say the science was too unsettled, there were too many uncertainties, to blame it on natural variability, to say the climate has always changed, to blame it on volcanoes. So basically, to deny the scientific evidence. Second one, it’s not us, which is a variation on the theme of the first. Well, maybe there is warming, but it’s not caused by our activities. So it’s actually just natural variability, it’s actually caused by CO2 from volcanoes. Two B is, it’s not us, it’s China. So deflect attention from what we, here in the United States, or what we, ExxonMobil, have done to try to deflect the blame and put it on someone else. Then the second two, the third and fourth, were about the economy. So to claim that if we were to stop using fossil fuels, it would completely wreck the economy, the economy cannot survive without fossil fuels. This is an argument that we’re seeing revived again, even as we speak today. And then the fourth is that it would be too expensive to fix. So yeah, we could do solar, we could do wind, but they’re too expensive. And also, they’re too intermittent, right? I call this the, “renewables are for sissies” argument, that renewables aren’t tough enough, they’re not reliable enough, that only oil, gas and coal are reliable. So there’s this sort of gender laden element about, you know, real men drill for coal. And so we’ve seen all four of these arguments being used at different times in different ways. I always like to say, some people think that the industry doesn’t believe in recycling, but they do, they recycle their refuted arguments.

CURWOOD: From your perspective, what were some of their most effective techniques of disinformation?

ORESKES: I think they were very smart about something that, you know, social media has exploited in recent years, but they already knew this 40 or 50 years ago, which was targeted messaging. And so in a place like Kentucky, they would push a message about losing jobs. If coal is wiped out, you’ll lose your jobs. In a place like, I don’t know, California, they would have a message about government overreach or increases to your taxes. They also had different arguments or different messages for male and female audiences. So the incredibly effective thing they did was to recognize that there wasn’t one thing, and to do a whole lot of different things, also different media: radio, television, print media, and then now we’re seeing tremendous amounts of growth of disinformation on social media.

CURWOOD: Naomi, I understand that there was some really ridiculous, maybe even outlandish advertisements back in the 1960s in magazines. Could you describe one of those spreads for me, please?

ORESKES: There’s a very famous advertisement that was put out by Humble Oil, which was part of this Standard Oil, The John D. Rockefeller network, where they showed a giant glacier and they talked about how much energy it would take to melt the glaciers if that were a good thing. And I think that’s a very nice telling example for us of how our mentalities have changed. Right around the time that scientists were starting to understand how climate change could melt glaciers, and that would be a bad thing, we have people advertising that being able to melt a glacier was a good thing. So part of this story is that it has required us to rethink how we think about nature, the environment, living on earth. And so the difficulty of this story is, it’s not just about disinformation from the fossil fuel industry, but the way in which that disinformation has worked in conjunction with our own fears, anxieties, beliefs, attitudes, to get us to this place where we are today.

CURWOOD: So, this may seem obvious, but what convinces you that this whole process of misinformation was deliberate? That these weren’t sort of people who mistakenly didn’t quite get what was going on?

ORESKES: Well, that’s an easy question to answer, because they said so. I mean, as a historian, I work with documentary evidence. We’ve spent a lot of time in the archives, we’ve visited archives in I don’t know, at least 20 states, I think, as well as looked at lots of documentary material that is available online. And we see how this was planned. We see how it was organized, we see the documents that say, you know, we’re going to say there’s no consensus on climate change, we’re going to design this advertising campaign, and we’re going to run it in these places. And we came across documents that even had focus group studies. They did market research to try to figure out what kinds of messaging would be most effective in persuading the American people not to support meaningful climate action. So we don’t have to interpret, we don’t have to read between the lines. This is all things that they said, they wrote down. And of course, the other big piece of this puzzle, and this is the work that Eric Conway and I did in our book, “Merchants of Doubt,” some of the key players in climate change disinformation came out of the tobacco story. So we showed in our book how two of the original four Merchants of Doubt had worked directly with the tobacco industry, had worked on these strategies for tobacco, and then carried those strategies and tactics into the climate space.

CURWOOD: So talk to me about how these disinformation strategies have changed over time. You mentioned that climate disinformation has moved to social media. So what does the fossil fuel climate denial marketing campaign look like today?

ORESKES: Well, it’s a little hard to answer that question, because one of the things about social media is that it’s so segmented, but one message we are definitely seeing today is a revival of the anti government message, to say that this is all a liberal conspiracy to take away your rights, to take away your hamburgers to take away your right to drive a big car. And this particularly came up in the recent debates about gas indoors. So in New York State, when the state proposed a regulation that would not allow gas in new homes, the fossil fuel industry saturated the state with a set of advertisements saying that this was government overreach, this was government control. If you allow the government to regulate gas stoves, it’s only a matter of time before they regulate everything. And this is an argument we have seen repeatedly used throughout this whole history. And so now we’re seeing it, again, being used to defend gas stoves.

CURWOOD: Naomi, how can environmental advocates, scientists, citizens, push back against these very expensive and sophisticated climate denial marketing campaigns?

ORESKES: It’s not easy, because as you just said, they are sophisticated, and they’re extremely well funded. But the good news is, there are more of us than there are of them. So I think this is why it’s so important for everyone to be mobilized on this issue. If we just rely on a few scientists, we will not win. But if we all become organized, if we speak in our communities, in our churches, in our synagogues, in our mosques, in our schools, at our places of work, if we have the conversation about what’s happening, and particularly the conversation about disinformation, which is an awkward conversation to have, but an essential one, because one of the things that I found is that you can’t really counter disinformation with information because now people just don’t know who to believe. But if you expose it as disinformation, well, nobody wants to be at the losing end of a con. So having that conversation, talking about the disinformation, as we have been doing here today, is extremely important. And then, as much as possible, mobilizing everyone to be engaged in this conversation to the extent that they are able to be.

DOERING: That’s Harvard Professor of the History of Science, Naomi Oreskes, speaking with Living on Earth Host and Executive Producer Steve Curwood. They’ll talk next time about the political history of climate disinformation.

TO BE CONTINUED… the deception continues …. Life on earth depends on us getting this stopped.

Our political officials are ignoring our environment at all levels!

From the Article by Michael M. Barrick, The Appalachian Chronicle, December 31, 2023

BIG ISSAC, W.Va. – Our top story from 2023 is the brutal abuse of eminent domain to complete the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP).

This power grab of private property along a 300-mile stretch through West Virginia and Virginia for the benefit of one for-profit company is the most audacious land grab since the landmark Supreme Court decision, Kelo v. New London. That is when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the city of New London, Conn. to take the land of Susette Kelo and then sell it to private developers.

“Kelo broadened the scope of what could be defined as public use under eminent domain. In simpler terms, the supreme court decision created a legal precedent by which land seized can be deemed as public use even if it is not directly beneficial to the public.”

As Chloe Kauffman wrote for the James Madison Institute, “Kelo broadened the scope of what could be defined as public use under eminent domain. In simpler terms, the supreme court decision created a legal precedent by which land seized can be deemed as public use even if it is not directly beneficial to the public.”

Kauffman predicted, “In a post-Kelo world, the phrase ‘public use’ in the fifth amendment can be applied to anything deemed as economic development.’” The MVP is the poster child of her chilling warning.

It is quite a story. It includes a back-room deal at the highest levels of government. U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) and President Joe Biden colluded to slip in fast track construction of the MVP in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. It short-circuited the often effective efforts by MVP opponents in state and federal courts.

It is also a story about Authorities Having Jurisdiction turning a blind eye to MVP violations and damages, despite independent evidence pointing to the MVP as the primary cause of a destructive flood here in September. Families have lost their homes or had them rendered uninhabitable because of the dangers associated with being 500 feet downslope from the MVP Right-of-Way (ROW), within just hundreds of yards from 42” pipelines and with cancer-causing benzene hanging in the air of low-lying valleys.

PHOTO IN ARTICLE ~ Flooding in Big Isaac earlier this year; water is coming from direction of the MVP! This means the destruction of home places. This brutal abuse of eminent domain is beyond concerning; it is a warning that no inalienable, natural right is safe in the United States. If the liberty of keeping your home from being seized by the government is no longer applicable, what other authoritarian practices shall we be forced to tolerate? As you consider that question, take a few minutes to watch “Who Will Watch the Home Place” by Laurie Lewis.

Kelo, as proven by the MVP, has removed one of our most fundamental Constitutional protections; we know voting rights are under assault. What else is next?

It is betrayal at every level of government in multiple jurisdictions. It has impacted thousands, cost billions, violated our rights and impacted vulnerable people and watersheds such as the Karst Topography of Monroe County, W.Va. The MVP is hardly a good neighbor, as it claims.

It is an ecological disaster waiting to happen. That is as predictable as Kauffman’s warning about Kelo – anything goes – with the blessings of the Powers-that-Be.

(NOTE: Sarah and I spent much of the year traveling West Virginia to share stories from my book, “Fractured Sanctuary: A Chronicle of Grassroots Activists Fighting Pipelines of Destruction in Appalachia.” Michael & Sarah Barrick, of West Virginia & North Carolina.)

COP28 was very important to our state of WV, our nation & world!

From the Article by David Beard, Morgantown Dominion Post, December 16, 2023

MORGANTOWN — Delegate Evan Hansen is back from his trip to the United Nations Climate

“On the one hand, it was inspiring to see so many people trying to find ways to work together to solve the climate crisis, ” said Hansen, D-Monongalia. “On the other hand, it also was a pretty stark reminder of how far we are from reducing emissions enough to keep climate change in check.”

Hansen left for the conference — held at Expo City Dubai — on Dec. 4 and participated in panel discussions on Dec. 6 and 8. His hotel was situated on one of the islands off Dubai’s shore and he could see Iran across the Persian Gulf. “It was definitely far from home.”

Occupied with conference business most of his time, he said, he had little time for tourism, but his group did get to ride to the top of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. He’s been participating for a couple of years in a series of meetings organized by the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs and attended COP28 with some of its leaders.

Delegate Evan Hansen Recounts his Trip to the COP28 Climate Conference in Dubai
The venue at Expo City Dubai was divided into two zones: the Blue Zone where official negotiations occurred, and the Green Zone surrounding it, where everything else went on.

The negotiations, among nearly 200 parties, resulted in the “world’s first ‘global stocktake’ to ratchet up climate action before the end of the decade — with the overarching aim to keep the global temperature limit of 1.5 °C within reach, ” the official conference release said The stocktake, the release said, “calls on parties to take actions toward achieving, at a global scale, a tripling of renewable energy capacity and doubling energy efficiency improvements by 2030. The list also includes accelerating efforts towards the phase-down of unabated coal power, phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, and other measures that drive the transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, with developed countries continuing to take the lead.”

The Green Zone, Hansen said, was a blend of displays, entertainment, trade shows, events and panel discussions organized by different parties. “It’s a little bit like climate change Disneyland.” The trade shows featured companies working on renewable and nuclear energy, banks that would be funding the work and non-governmental organizations, among others.

Along with his two panels, Hansen said he sat in on several other discussions focused on China — to learn more about what’s going on there and its efforts for a just transition as it goes greener His first panel was titled, “The Elephant in the Room: Just and Inclusive Transitions in Fossil Fuel Regions.”

Hansen said the U.S., China, other parts of the world face similar issues: how the transition will affect fossil fuel communities and how to take care of them. “While it has everybody’s attention, there’s no cookie-cutter solutions. It’s a big challenge and especially for countries like the United States that are kind of the first movers, ” he said.

Various countries have different dates for peaking their coal consumption and production, and peaking their carbon emissions to hit net zero, he said China is still mining but aims to peak coal production by 2025.

“I think that will help to address some of the concerns that other legislators have expressed: Why should we be suffering the impacts here if China’s just burning more and more coal.” China aims to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2060.

China and the U.S., he said, are both exploring ways to use coal as a manufacturing input for products, to keep the industry working while not burning it. “I think that’s something that shows some promise and I think there’s some potential additional sharing and information cooperation between the U.S. and China on that.

The second panel concerned the China-U.S. Track II Dialogue on Climate Finance, and followed on the heels of the mid-November announcement that the United States and China reached new agreements to work together on greenhouse gas emission reductions and the rollout of renewable sources of energy.

Hansen talked with The Dominion Post about ensuring domestic renewable energy projects and domestic manufacturing jobs come to the state. “To the extent that we can capture as many of those as possible in West Virginia and benefit communities that are hit the hardest by the decline of coal, that would be great.”

In Dubai, he said, that China is the world leader in solar and wind installations. While it gets a bad rap for its ongoing building of coal-fired plants, it has three times more wind and solar installations than the U.S. And that will help provide some jobs in other coal regions across the globe.

Here in West Virginia, WVU’s Water Research Institute has been leading the way in extracting rare earth minerals from coal mine runoff. Hansen commented, “I’m excited by some of the prospects of bringing some of the mining and processing of the rare earth elements to the United States. It’s also a national security issue. We don’t want to be dependent on other countries, especially countries that might be hostile to us.

“But we have to do it in a way that’s clean, so we’re not trading one environmental problem for another, ” he said. “The reality though, is that there’s a lot of unknowns.” The transition must be rapid, he said, to address climate change. But it will move in fits and starts, with successes and failures.

And there’s a race going on to see who will dominate the technological fields of the energy future. “And that’s another reason why we have such an incentive to move quickly, because the markets for these types of industries are gigantic — they’ve just begun.”

§ ~ We asked if he brought any take-homes to share with his community and legislative colleagues.

1. One, he said, “It makes me more convinced than ever that we need to be attracting green manufacturing jobs to West Virginia, and state leaders have done a good job at that over the last couple of years.” It’s important to continue that.

2. And two, there are ongoing concerns about a growing proportion of renewables disrupting grid stability. Other countries have far more renewables than our PJM grid, he said, and have remained stable. “I plan to bring that fact up when the debate comes up.”

Now is the time severely limit the emissions of CO2 and CH4

From an Article by Suzanne Mattei, Dennis Wamsted, & Seth Feaster of the Institute for Energy, Economics and Financial Analysis, December 19, 2023

The small and shrinking market potential for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is a reality.

Key Takeaways:

The U.S. Department of Energy is negotiating with several selected companies to establish regional hydrogen hubs that derive hydrogen from methane. They will be costly, and DOE must ask hard questions before it commits the funding.

DOE is under pressure to put the cart before the horse—to build hydrogen projects based on unproven technologies and undemonstrated markets.

By the time DOE’s selected applications are processed and the surviving projects are built, EV market trends will have expanded the already strong role of BEVs substantially, weighing against most vehicular uses of hydrogen.

If DOE fails to exercise discretion in reviewing and finalizing the hydrogen project proposals the result is likely to be a substantial waste of taxpayer dollars for an outsized hydrogen-based economy that will never arrive.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is negotiating with several companies to build costly hydrogen hubs that derive hydrogen from natural gas (methane), but the agency must ask hard questions before committing any more public funds for the “blue hydrogen” projects, according to the latest Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) report.

Public dollars should not be sunk into projects that are likely to fail to achieve financial viability due to a weak market, IEEFA warns, and the market scenario for hydrogen in vehicular transportation is particularly troubling.

The scale of the hydrogen push does not make sense from an economic perspective. Despite the influx of federal funding, the long-term viability of the proposed hydrogen hubs (H2Hubs) will likely still be ruled by actual market forces.

In a 2022 report, IEEFA found hydrogen had an extremely limited future in the market, including vehicular transportation, warning that the H2Hubs may be obsolete before they launch. With the rapid advances in battery electric technology and sustained growth in its market share, the market scenario for hydrogen in vehicular transportation is even more dubious today.

“DOE is under pressure to put the cart before the horse—to build hydrogen projects based on unproven technologies and undemonstrated markets,” said Suzanne Mattei, IEEFA energy policy analyst and author of the report. “But the agency has statutory authority to use good judgment to avoid sinking tax dollars into white elephants.”

Six of the seven hydrogen hubs selected by DOE to receive federal funding intend to market some portion of the hydrogen gas for use in transportation. The infrastructure required will take some years to develop. Given market trends, time is not on hydrogen’s side. This IEEFA report, part of a series, examines the dwindling market for hydrogen in vehicular transportation.

The report finds:

DOE makes unrealistic assumptions about the vehicle market for hydrogen. In 2020, it projected hydrogen could power 18% of cars and 26% of light-duty trucks. Now, just three years later, the agency recognizes hydrogen technology has lost to battery electric technology in the light-duty vehicle market.

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) will dominate the U.S. market for zero-emission passenger cars, pickup trucks and other light vehicles because car manufacturers and customers have overwhelmingly moved in that direction.

Battery technology is making significant inroads into bus and medium-duty truck sales, and is already predicted to dominate the zero-emission medium-duty truck market. Projections indicate battery technology also is likely to capture most of the short-haul heavy-duty truck market.

BEVs also may well encroach on the regional long-haul market. Only 9% of U.S. trucks are engaged in long-haul service, defined by DOE as trucking more than 250 miles, and within that segment, an even smaller portion accounts for trips of a distance of 1,000 miles or more.

US Department of Energy Investments in Hydrogen Production Should Scale to Market Realities