Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Come on, man.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

The willow is too close to the house.

Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.

We still have time to mess this up!

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Republicans in disarray!

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

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Climate Change Solutions

Climate Solutions: The Inflation Reduction Act Bill Passage

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This is a Biden Big Fucking Deal. To understand it, I went to the experts I trust to tell it like it is:

Climate Solutions: The Inflation Reduction Act Bill Passage

David is having some health issues, so instead of blogging, he recorded his thoughts:

 

I hope this is somewhat helpful and at the very least, gets you started on understanding the pros and cons of this legislation. If you have anyone that is your go-to for understanding this bill, post it in the comments.

x-posted at LivingLightly

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Climate Solutions: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

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This interactive map will give you details on the number of jobs, traffic, electric savings, lives saved, along with types of jobs created.  Give it a look.

How were these numbers calculated?

All the numbers on this site are estimates. We can’t know exactly how many jobs will be created or deaths will be avoided thirty years in the future. But we do have good data on how many people it takes to install a solar panel, and how pollution affects human health. Using these data, it’s possible to make projections about how moving towards net zero will create benefits for Americans.

The estimates we use are all based on publicly available scientific projections. They’re not always available at a local level, however, so we use various techniques to sort out where in America the benefits are likely to end up. The description below explains how we do that. We’re continuing to improve our methods, so if you have ideas on how we could do a better job, be in touch!

Renewable Job Impacts

Stanford University’s 100% Wind, Water, and Solar (WWS) Project (Jacobson et al. 2022) studies how the U.S. can make the transition to fully renewable power by 2050. As part of their study, they project how many long-term jobs will be created by building and operating new renewable energy infrastructure in every state (a “long-term” job is one that creates 40 years of employment). They also project the total amount of compensation these new jobs will earn in each state. The Jacobson et al. data include separate estimates for different kinds of renewable infrastructure (residential rooftop solar and offshore wind, for example, are likely to generate jobs in different places).

Much more at the link. I’m off for the day.

Consider this an open thread.

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Earth Day Open Thread: Revisiting Killing My Lawn, Phase 1

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Since it’s Earth Day and we are facing an extreme high fire danger day here on the Front Range of the Rockies, with record heat and drought, I’ve been thinking a lot about my decision to kill 3/4 of my front lawn. Thought it was worth updating you on what will be its second summer. All of my low-water/butterfly/hummingbird plants survived the winter, minus one daisy plant.

As they are all perennials, this summer will probably be one of minimal growth, but still lots of showy flowers. Next year I expect it to quickly become a jungle. Which is why I did minimal planting, in pretty groupings.

Last fall and this spring has been the real payoff – minimal work to maintain. I trimmed up a few plants this spring, I let the leaves from fall just compost right into the mulch and I’ve pulled minimal weeds (damn you bindweed). And now that the plants are established, the weekly watering I did last summer will be reduced to an “as needed” basis.

I will update with photos as soon as things pop – usually mid-June here (I’m still waiting for lilacs, everything has been late this year. Although my pussy-willows were full of bees today, so yay!).

But for now, let’s revisit how I killed my lawn and revitalized my soil in ways I could have never anticipated. (The worms! The worms!)

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It began innocently enough with laying out an outline of what might be nice and a promise I’d think about it for a while. Two weeks later, phase 1 is complete.

This was the beginning, outlining with bricks to see how I’d lay out the new yard

My goal was to create an excellent soil base to replace what is now pretty much cement hard clay. The previous owners used a chemical lawn service for at least a decade, that left the soil depleted and hard as a rock. Over the past four years, I’ve been amending it with compost, manure and aeration. A record drought this summer proved that none of those measures were enough to reinvigorate the lawn and the soil was still like granite.

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Earth Day, and Other Good Choices

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Climate Crisis: Stop Burning Things

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A must-read. I pulled a few excellent sections of this very informative piece, hoping to intrigue you enough to read it all.

Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker’s newsletter on the environment.

On the last day of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most dire report yet. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, had, he said, “seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this.” Setting aside diplomatic language, he described the document as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” and added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.” Then, just a few hours later, at the opening of a rare emergency special session of the U.N. General Assembly, he catalogued the horrors of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and declared, “Enough is enough.” Citing Putin’s declaration of a nuclear alert, the war could, Guterres said, turn into an atomic conflict, “with potentially disastrous implications for us all.”

What unites these two crises is combustion. Burning fossil fuel has driven the temperature of the planet ever higher, melting most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic, bending the jet stream, and slowing the Gulf Stream. And selling fossil fuel has given Putin both the money to equip an army (oil and gas account for sixty per cent of Russia’s export earnings) and the power to intimidate Europe by threatening to turn off its supply. Fossil fuel has been the dominant factor on the planet for centuries, and so far nothing has been able to profoundly alter that. After Putin invaded, the American Petroleum Institute insisted that our best way out of the predicament was to pump more oil. The climate talks in Glasgow last fall, which John Kerry, the U.S. envoy, had called the “last best hope” for the Earth, provided mostly vague promises about going “net-zero by 2050”; it was a festival of obscurantism, euphemism, and greenwashing, which the young climate activist Greta Thunberg summed up as “blah, blah, blah.” Even people trying to pay attention can’t really keep track of what should be the most compelling battle in human history.

So let’s reframe the fight. Along with discussing carbon fees and green-energy tax credits, amid the momentary focus on disabling Russian banks and flattening the ruble, there’s a basic, underlying reality: the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration official put it,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency on oil.” As we are one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the world, that is a remarkable statement. It’s a call for an end of fire.

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The constant price drops mean, Farmer said, that we might still be able to move quickly enough to meet the target set in the 2016 Paris climate agreement of trying to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “One point five is going to suck,” he said. “But it sure beats three. We just need to put our money down and do it. So many people are pessimistic and despairing, and we need to turn that around.”

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Harder to solve may be the human-rights challenges that come with new mining efforts, such as the use of so-called “artisanal” cobalt mining, in which impoverished workers pry the metal from the ground with spades, or the plan to build a lithium mine on a site in Nevada that is sacred to Indigenous peoples. But, as we work to tackle those problems, it’s worth remembering that a transition to renewable energy would, by some estimates, reduce the total global mining burden by as much as eighty per cent, because so much of what we dig up today is burned (and then we have to go dig up some more). You dig up lithium once, and put it to use for decades in a solar panel or battery. In fact, a switch to renewable energy will reduce the load on all kinds of systems. At the moment, roughly forty per cent of the cargo carried by ocean-going ships is coal, gas, oil, and wood pellets—a never-ending stream of vessels crammed full of stuff to burn. You need a ship to carry a wind turbine blade, too, if it’s coming from across the sea, but you only need it once. A solar panel or a windmill, once erected, stands for a quarter of a century or longer. The U.S. military is the world’s largest single consumer of fossil fuels, but seventy per cent of its logistical “lift capacity” is devoted solely to transporting the fossil fuels used to keep the military machine running.

The entire article is worth your time.

I like the vlogbrothers. Hank and John create videos for each other, every morning-ish. And Hank here is my energy whenever anyone tells me they must, must, must, have a gas stovetop. And knowing that utilities are charging hefty fees to disconnect (not remove) a gas line to your home and convert stoves and furnaces to electricity, gives you an insight into their fear of renewable energy.

Let the arguments commence (but I do urge you to read the article before condemning it).

(x-posted at Living Lightly)

 

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Thursday Evening Open Thread: The Work Goes On

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This is more significant in the long term, even if it does mean President Biden will never get another invitation from the millionaires on Martha’s Vineyard:

… Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said her department hopes to hold lease sales by 2025 off the coasts of Maine, New York and the mid-Atlantic, as well as the Carolinas, California, Oregon and the Gulf of Mexico. The projects are part of Biden’s plan to address global warming and could avoid about 78 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, while creating up to 77,000 jobs, officials said.

“The Interior Department is laying out an ambitious road map as we advance the administration’s plans to confront climate change, create good-paying jobs and accelerate the nation’s transition to a cleaner energy future,” Haaland said. “We have big goals to achieve a clean energy economy and Interior is meeting the moment.”

In addition to offshore wind, the Interior Department is working with other federal agencies to increase renewable energy production on public lands, Haaland said, with a goal of at least 25 gigawatts of onshore renewable energy from wind and solar power by 2025.

Haaland and Amanda Lefton, director of department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said officials hope to reduce potential conflicts with fishing groups and other ocean users as much as possible. “This means we will engage early and often with all stakeholders prior to identifying any new wind energy areas,” Lefton said in a statement…

The bureau completed its review of a construction and operations plan for the Vineyard Wind project 15 miles off the Massachusetts coast earlier this year. The agency is reviewing nine additional projects, including the South Fork wind farm near New York’s Long Island and the Ocean Wind project off New Jersey.

Vineyard Wind is expected to produce about 800 megawatts of power and South Fork about 132 megawatts. Ocean Wind, the largest project, has a total capacity of 1,100 megawatts, enough energy to power 500,000 homes across New Jersey…

In a related announcement, the Energy Department said it is spending $11.5 million to study risks that offshore wind development may pose to birds, bats and marine mammals, and survey changes in commercial fish and marine invertebrate populations at an offshore wind site on the East Coast.

The department will spend $2 million on visual surveys and acoustic monitoring of marine mammals and seabirds at potential wind sites on the West Coast.

“In order for Americans living in coastal areas to see the benefits of offshore wind, we must ensure that it’s done with care for the surrounding ecosystem by coexisting with fisheries and marine life – and that’s exactly what this investment will do,″ Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a news release.

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Climate Solutions: Sustainable Cactus Leather

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Not a lot makes me smile these days. These guys make me smile:

Leather production is a very toxic process. It uses an amazing amount of water that is contaminated with toxic chemicals for processing and tanning. And of course, cattle take a lot of water – in growing feed and growing cows.

And the final insult to the environment, tanned leather can take decades to biodegrade, becoming just another burden on landfills.

And what of “vegan” leathers – most are made of petroleum products, with all the issues around plastic production and disposal.

Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez offer an alternative:

Desserto®  is a highly sustainable plant based material as an alternative to leather made from cactus, often distinguished by its great softness at touch while offering a great performance for a wide variety of applications and complying with the most rigorous quality and environmental standards. The aim is to offer cruelty free, sustainable alternatives, without any toxic chemicals, phthalates and PVC. The result, Desserto® , the cactus material, is partially biodegradable and has the technical specifications required by the fashion, leather goods, luxury packaging and furniture industries.

That’s why I find Desserto leather alternative products so inspiring and I hope their process proves successful over time. For now, I am going to search out products made from their cactus leather and give it a try for myself.

cross-posted at LivingLightly

 

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